Tech Outlook: WATT Coalition’s Julia Selker talks about grid-enhancing technology

Energy demands are only increasing, and the nation’s transmission power grid needs to get in better shape to meet the demand.

Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a significant and long-awaited rule overhauling how electric grids are planned and paid for to address the nation’s transmission grid issues.

New Mexico officials are also concerned about what can be done. The New Mexico Public Regulation Commission last week invited an expert to talk about some solutions to the problem, specifically something called “grid-enhancing technologies.”

These are technologies that expand the capacity of the existing grid.

Julia Selker is the executive director of the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies Coalition, or the WATT Coalition. The organization focuses on tackling economic and policy obstacles through grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs, on the U.S. transmission grid.

Adding to Selker’s presentation to the PRC last week, Selker sat down with the Journal on the Tech Outlook podcast to break down grid-enhancing technologies.

Here’s a preview of the podcast episode, which comes out Monday afternoon on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes and SoundCloud.

What are grid-enhancing technologies, and how do they work?

These are technologies that go on the existing transmission system and get more value and capacity out of the grid we already have, and then also the grid that we’ll build.

So you can think of them with some traffic metaphors. … So generally, if you’re a renewable energy developer and you’re looking at the grid, you might basically assume that there’s another lane open on the grid that you’re not allowed to drive on — there’s a row of bollards is how I visualize it. And what we’re trying to do is unlock that extra capacity. ...

They go in addition to existing facilities. It costs a lot of money to build a new transmission line, and takes a lot of time to get the siting done and buy the land rights, etc. But with these technologies, you don’t have any of that delay, and they are really low cost. So these technologies cost one-fifth at the most, but often, like one-two hundredth of a traditional transmission investment, and they pay for themselves often in the space of months. So yeah, it’s exciting to work on.

Can you speak to the cost savings that consumers could see with GETs?

There’s a few different ways that these technologies save money.

One of the easiest ways to calculate cost in regions with electricity markets is called congestion costs. And so that’s the difference between the lowest cost generation that’s available — usually renewables because there’s no fuel cost — versus the generation you had to deploy because there was a transmission constraint blocking the low-cost power.

So in 2022, across the country, we estimate that those costs were about $20 billion, and GETs can often resolve 40% or more of congestion costs. So that could have saved $8 billion in just one year.

Now, in New Mexico, there isn’t a power market, so those costs are not as transparent. But if you enable more capacity on the existing grid, then you get access to lower cost power if you can build new renewable generators. That’s called production cost savings when we model it and calculate it. In one study in the PJM region, which is the mid-Atlantic and five states, they found that the production cost savings from using GETs to integrate new renewables could be a billion dollars a year within the next five years …

And then also avoided upgrades — sometimes you don’t need to rebuild a line if you can unlock a lot more capacity with dynamic line rating. So there’s a lot of transmission that needs to be built, but we might be able to reduce the amount we have to build by using GETs.

Why aren’t we seeing this more in the U.S.?

There are two main obstacles.

The first is inertia, like I mentioned. So the transmission grid has been planned and operated in the same way for almost 100 years, and getting people to think about the grid as a dynamic flexible asset instead of a static asset takes time to convince people that this is worthwhile.

But for dealing with the same issue on the generation side, right? We used to just use fuel-based generation, and you knew it was always going to be there. Now we have variable renewable generation, and you have to think about generation differently. Well, you also have to think about the grid differently. So inertia is one issue.

And then the other is incentives. Investor-owned utilities in the United States make their money based on the amount of money they spend building the grid. So if you ask them to use a really low-cost technology that might have more operational costs, more staff time, more training time, some software costs associated with it, they don’t make money on those things so they have no incentive to deploy these technologies.