EV Charging and the Evolving Transmission Network: An Interview with Grid Strategies LLC
By Smart Grid Observer
In a recent episode of SGO’s podcast, Energy Insight, Julia Selker, Director of Policy and Strategy at Grid Strategies, LLC, and Executive Director of the Watt Coalition, shared her perspectives on EV charging, the challenges facing the energy sector, and how underused grid technologies could help address these issues. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
SGO: Can you tell us a little bit about Grid Strategies and your work specifically as it relates to EV charging?
Julia: Grid Strategies is a consulting firm. We’re focused on research and policy strategy. Some of my colleagues evaluate utility programs, resource planning, that kind of work. Most of our stuff is related to the transmission grid and power markets, but EVs do come into play on the transmission side. I think we’re mostly known for our reports on load growth, competition in markets, resource adequacy, transmission planning. We did do a report a few years ago now on whether EV charging should be competitive or whether utilities should be allowed to have a monopoly on that service. We are curious people and like to dig into these problems.
SGO: You recently co-authored a report on transmission for the Connected Grid Initiative -- for the past decade or so, consumer rates have increased and grid reliability has decreased due to slow transmission expansion and higher demand. Do you see this as a primary obstacle to the rollout of EV charging?
Julia: Congestion costs are really an indicator that much of the available grid capacity has been taken up in the last two decades. So that means plugging in anything new to the grid, whether it’s a generator or a load, could potentially require more construction, more time, more money than it did last decade. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to luck out sometimes and find a really good site that’s ready to go. But in general, across the country, that’s what we’re seeing.
The EV chargers that connect at the transmission level will probably be for fleets or highway fast chargers. You can’t necessarily be very strategic with your siting there. So whatever the conditions are locally is what you have to deal with. Grid Strategies works a lot on building a large inter-regional transmission grid so that we can share resources across regions and also make more room on the grid for more load and more generation.
SGO: Another report you did in 2023, Serving Customers Best, recommended moving away from utility ownership of charging ports in favor of a more competitive landscape. Has your thinking on this changed in the last couple of years since that report was released?
Julia: No, I mean that’s really just based on fundamental economics, asking ourselves, is EV charging a natural monopoly the way that the poles and wires are, right? You don’t necessarily want two sets of poles and wires running across or under your town, that’s not efficient. So in that situation a regulated monopoly makes a lot of sense. With EV chargers, some of the benefits of competition are pretty likely to emerge -- You can get better service, lower rates, better locations for charging based on companies trying to best serve their customers and make money off of the electricity that’s sold.
If a utility is building charging stations, a lot of times that means that every customer in the utility’s footprint is paying for that charging station on some level. That’s not necessarily how it should be, right? If a charging company can make money selling to customers, that’s more efficient and fair. And if a community wanted to proactively build chargers where it’s maybe not economical today, something like a request for proposals could make sense. In order to make sure you’re getting the best deal and ensuring the level of service you’re looking for. So generally we found in that paper a lot of natural benefits from competition in EV charging and letting the market decide where chargers are sited and how much it costs to charge outside the home.
Most of my work is on transmission technologies. So my goal is to get more capacity out of the existing grid to get past that congestion challenge while building larger infrastructure. My view is that that paper is based on fundamental economics and I don’t think any of that has changed.
SGO: Can you tell us a little more about what you do specifically with transmission?
Julia: There’s an exciting class of technologies that have emerged over the last 20 plus years -- so not that new, but the way they make you think about the grid is new. They’re called grid enhancing technologies.
I lead the Watt Coalition, which is the trade association for grid enhancing technologies. There are three technologies that let you get more capacity out of the existing grid, mostly by tapping into its dynamic capabilities. The first one is dynamic line ratings: you put sensors or use weather forecasts to determine the real time capacity of transmission lines. When it’s hot out, your transmission lines heat up faster when you run power through them and when it’s cold or windy they cool down. Also, it’s not just related to the kind of daily weather, but also to the landscape. So if you have a transmission line up on a ridge it will have a lot more capacity than your transmission line through a wooded valley. This is something that utilities really haven’t had the technology to make use of. But today, you put these sensors up and can find out if one of your lines has more capacity than you thought it did. That can be a game changer, right? That’s a lot of capacity.
Another technology is advanced power flow control. This sits at substations and reroutes power off of overloaded lines and onto other elements of the grid. This sounds simple and maybe small, but when you actually put these into play, we’re talking about 100 megawatts or 2 gigawatts of capacity on the grid, based on examples in California and the UK respectively. That’s a large data center, that’s a lot of EV charging, what have you.
The last technology is topology optimization, which is software that looks at grid reconfigurations. So when utilities take a line out of service, they have to make sure nothing is going to break, for instance. This technology allows them to study the situation before acting: if we took this line out of service, how would power rebalance over the grid to potentially let us make more economic dispatch or cheaper power available? It’s a bit unintuitive that sometimes turning things off makes everything cheaper. But when you’re dealing with a lot of curtailment, this is a really powerful technology. For example, in one implementation they found about 50 % congestion cost savings by using topology optimization. Congestion costs over $10 billion for the last four years in the United States. Cutting that in half is worth a lot. So those are the three technologies I work on to get more capacity out of the grid.
SGO: Do you have other recent examples or case studies that highlight these kinds of savings?
Julia: Don’t get me started. Working backwards, the example I was thinking about for topology optimization is in Alliant Energy’s service territory. They are a transmission-dependent utility and worked with their transmission owner, ATC, to implement these topology changes. They saved 49% in congestion costs, which is over $20 million in their footprint. it adds up to billion-dollar levels of savings.
Some other examples with topology optimization in extreme weather are really interesting. There’s one reconfiguration during winter storm Elliott where Southwest Power Pool found approximately 840 megawatts of transfer capacity during winter storm conditions through a grid reconfiguration. So that is getting close to a gigawatt of transfer capacity at a time when there was inadequate supply. People had blackouts because of the inability to get them power. That is a time when -- for free essentially, since this is just software -- you could get significant levels of additional transfer capacity. It’s something I think we really need to do. So that’s topology optimization and advanced power flow control -- two really good, very new examples in the United States.
PG&E in the San Jose area, which is in a very densely populated area with lots of transmission lines down, is installing advanced power flow control to get that 100 MW level of capacity for new data centers. They are looking at additional upgrades and could potentially realize about 500 MW of capacity out of this installation. Half a gigawatt is very significant.
And then Georgia Power in the Atlanta area is doing a similar project on a similar scale where again for load growth they’re able to control flows and get that huge additional capacity. Another example is the first fully operational dynamic line rating project in the United States in Pennsylvania with PPL Electric Utilities, which they installed on two different lines. In the first year of operation, they had again winter storm conditions and the congestion cost savings were expected to be around $20 million a year, which is a lot just from two lines. Because of the winter storm conditions, they analyzed what would have happened without the DLR and it was on the order of $60 million of avoided congestion. Even the grid operator said that having DLR in place helped avoid redispatch over the grid that would have made a challenging situation more challenging. So the combination of cost savings day to day and then benefits in extreme conditions -- that’s a sweet spot for grid enhancing technologies and transmission generally.
SGO: What should policymakers and utilities and providers expect over the next few years? Will limited grid capacity continue to slow growth or do you think there’s a realistic way to get ahead of the situation?
Julia: I am an eternal optimist, so I hope I don’t sound too sunny, but I think if there is a bipartisan policy priority in the United States today, it’s the drive to make more room on the grid for economic development. The boom in load growth projections are a struggle for everyone, but also a big opportunity where we can have planning improvements implemented quickly and effectively. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission already put out a few orders over the last few years where we’re going to get more long-term transmission planning, more use of grid enhancing technologies, and improved interconnection processes. Some of those things are in process right now. So we have a little head start on some of that, which takes years to figure out.
I think there is momentum behind reducing bills and enabling economic development. There are a lot of eyes on the grid, but I think that means we have a big opportunity to do things right and do them well in the near term. So that’s my very sunny take. Obviously there are real challenges to getting there and multiple priorities. The big issue that I didn’t talk about is the aging grid. We are in an era of reinvestment where our grid is old and we have to rebuild poles and wires, so transmission investment was going to go up even if there wasn’t a load growth boom. But that means we have more rate payers to pay for the investment and we can do it strategically. Being aware that electricity demand is going up, we can make better choices. So again, an eternal optimist, but I’m excited for what’s coming.
Julia Selker will be speaking in a session on “Grid Expansion 2.0: What FERC Order 1920 Means for EV Charging” at SGO’s 8th EV Charging Infrastructure Summit - North America: West in San Francisco, February 24 – 25. For information and to register, visit www.ev-charging-summit-na.com