NERC Outlines Grid Reliability Challenges

According to the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), maintaining grid reliability will become increasingly challenging over the next 10 years.  The findings were outlined in NERC’s 2021 Long-Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) and should put electric utilities in certain parts of the country on alert.

How Will Grid Reliability be Challenged?

According to NERC, the biggest hurdle for electric utilities going forward will be “managing the transformation of the grid and the rapid change to the resource mix.”

The solution?  Enhancing coordination between electric utilities, natural gas companies, and policy makers to balance the impact of increasingly severe weather on grid reliability while also developing policies designed to mitigate climate change.  In other words, reliability must be prioritized when developing climate change mitigation policies.

And, despite the 10-year timeframe in the LTRA, capacity might be challenged as early as the summer 2022 in parts of the western U.S.  This is because demand continues to rise while supply will be impacted by more frequent severe weather as well as the integration of renewable energy sources into the grid.  Interestingly, the report highlights the role of natural gas as a balancing resource.

Looking farther out, within 10 years the LTRA predicts capacity shortfalls across Texas, California and the northwestern tip of the U.S.  Therefore, regional coordination and proactive resource / capacity planning are highly recommended within these areas.

Here are the other key recommendations from the assessment for maintaining grid reliability:

• Add flexible resources to mitigate increased variable generation uncertainty.
• Assess the regulatory structure and oversight of natural gas supply for electric generation.
• Focus on energy sufficiency – capacity alone does not provide for reliability unless the fuel behind it is assured.
• Ensure distributed energy resources are sufficiently incorporated into bulk power system planning and operations.
• Ensure planning studies and operating models account for new inverter-based resources.

In the final analysis, I think it’s common knowledge in our industry that grid reliability will become more of a challenge in the future, so it’s great that NERC has offered some clear, realistic recommendations for weathering this storm (no pun intended…).