The Future of Energy: Grid Innovations

hello everyone and welcome to the future of energy a monthly series presented by the denver museum of nature and science and the institute for science and policy i'm trenton auss managing editor at the institute and we're so glad to have you with us today we love to hear everywhere you're watching from and it's so great to see so many different cities and uh represented from around the state and even internationally tonight so thank you for for tuning in we're going to be talking about the grid today and specifically some of the latest innovations around optimization that are pointing the way toward a more efficient and more resilient electricity infrastructure historically and really throughout much the last century the grid was mostly set up to be a one-way distribution with the big regional power plants generating energy and sending it to the customers and that was pretty much that your bill came in the mail at the end of the month but obviously that architecture is changing dramatically homes and businesses are increasingly integrating their own renewable energy sources and storage whether that's rooftop solar or plug-in electric vehicles and that's creating more of a two-way street more of a dynamic energy market so this newer more distributed model comes with some challenges for utilities who now have to manage that back and forth energy flow at scale and that requires some creativity and some innovation the grid is adapting as well and this drive toward optimization is spurring research into things like machine learning autonomous systems and advanced algorithms that can move more efficiently match energy supply and demand throughout these complex networks and this is happening at the state and federal level as well as in the private sector so we're going to get into all that and we'll hear about what's known as the duck curve we'll talk about smart grids micro grids and everything in between with our two outstanding guests tonight uh we're delighted to be joined by brian hannikin he's the president and ceo of holy cross energy which is a not-for-profit member-owned electric cooperative utility providing energy services to more than 42 000 customers in western colorado prior to joining holy cross brian was an associate laboratory director at the national renewable energy laboratory where he co-founded the u.s department of energy's grid modernization initiative and started up the energy systems integration facility which is a unique distribution grid in a box enabling utilities entrepreneurs and consumers to work together on cleaner more affordable and more reliable energy systems and earlier in his career brian held senior leadership roles at the electric power research institute the white house council on environmental quality and the us senate committee on energy and natural resources brian welcome thank you trent and uh welcome to now i see 136 participants on with us this afternoon so great welcome to everybody yeah terrific should be a great discussion we're also happy to be joined by kyrie baker an assistant professor in the department of civil environmental and architectural engineering at the university of colorado boulder and she also holds a joint appointment at nrel through the renewable and sustainable energy institute previously dr baker was a research engineer in the power systems engineering center at nro and received a phd in electrical and computer engineering from carnegie mellon university her work focuses on advanced controls and optimization methods that can help integrate renewables facilitate building to grid interactions and foster efficient operation of smart grids and smart cities kyrie welcome thank you trent um happy to be here and looking forward to any questions audience might have great yes thank you that's a great reminder this this discussion is intended to be interactive so please do keep those questions coming in through the chat and we'll have some moderated discussion at the end and we'll try to get to as many as we're able to um kyrie is going to kick off our discussion today with an overview of her group's research into grid optimization so uh kyrie take it away all right thank you so i just wanted to give a brief overview trent already did a good job of introducing me so i won't do that anymore but my background is in renewable energy integration from the perspective of grid optimization so for those of you who aren't familiar with the grid i thought i'd give a couple minutes introduction so the grid is comprised of a lot of components it's a very very complex system um in fact it's so complex that the national academy of engineers ranks electric power is the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century so this is a bigger achievement than you know cars airplanes internet all these things require electricity so if we take a look at the way the grid traditionally operated we have these large-scale power plants that trent was talking about we have transformers which are devices that change the voltage levels we have long power lines we have transmission towers we have distribution towers and ultimately eventually the electricity reaches you so how is this changing with what's called the smart grid so smart grid is a term that people throw around and even people in my field can't agree on a standard definition for smart grid but you can think of it just as a basic more intelligent more clean electric power grid so one distinguishing feature is distributed energy resources so these are things like solar batteries potentially small wind turbines electric vehicles and we have generation now that's close to or co-located with demand so this is a lot different than the way the grid used to work with this downstream effect flowing from transmission to load we now have generation on the buildings themselves so this is not how the grid was built the grid was not designed for generation to be here so we're struggling to accommodate all this solar in many areas another key feature of smart grids are that there's generally cleaner we want to have more sustainable energy systems we want them to be more modular you might have heard of micro grids or nano grids or even pico grids if you want to be fancy and these are just really small self enclosed portions of the grid and then the last part and what traditionally makes this smart rather than just you know a renewable grid is there's more communication there's more visibility into what's going on there's more sensors so here's an outage map of excel that i got this morning of the denver boulder area and you can see that there's a bunch of outages that either people have manually reported to excel or that excel has automatically determined based on smart electricity meters so in some areas of the country it's now being required that buildings need to have what's called smart meters so your electricity meter remotely communicates with the utility about your energy consumption prior to that it was somebody who physically came out in a truck and then looked at your electricity meter every month and wrote down the consumption so that's the previous grid smart grid is automatic outage detection and this can really help pinpoint where outages are and prevent you from going hours and hours or maybe even days with outages helping the utility know where to look so the reason the grid is such a hot topic these days is because some of you especially if you're in california are very familiar with forced power outages power outages due to wildfires power outages due to increased demand perhaps due to uncertainty and renewable energy and there's a lot of different threats that center around natural disasters hazards increase temperatures causing people to use more electricity equipment aging our grid is just getting really really old some of the transformers and transmission lines are extremely old they need to be replaced and this is making it even more challenging to deliver electricity to consumers there's also effects that we haven't really considered before when designing the grid we thought about oh yeah there's we there might be a heat wave there might be a wind storm there might be a hurricane but the pandemic was something that nobody foresaw especially in this in the ways that it's impacted the grid so this was just three days i pulled from new york city and you can see in 2019 the general demand in new york city electricity demand looks something like this we have this peak people get up in the morning they go to work they come home then they go to sleep in 2019 it looked like this in 2020 the demand has gone down because all these businesses shut down people aren't working in office buildings everybody's at home and this drop is about equivalent to about 20 which is a thousand megawatts and to give you a rough idea of how much a thousand megawatts is that's all of the solar power installed in colorado so that's a significant demand change so you might be thinking oh this is a positive thing um you know people are using less electricity but it also goes both ways and this was in april but in august new york city also experienced some spikes in electricity demand because everybody was staying home blasting their air conditioners during a heat wave and it was really really hard for the grid to keep up okay as trent promised you and if any of my students are listening to this are going to be like oh dr baker is talking about the duck curve again but this is a really illustrative example of how renewable energy can actually make it more difficult for the grid so here's california this is not all of california it's within a certain region called kaiso california independent system operator we have this is a day in february we have this general shape again people get up there's a peak when people are turning on electric kettles they're turning on tvs they're doing all this stuff in the morning taking showers they go to work they go to more efficient commercial buildings there's more people packed into smaller spaces so we get this dip in the middle of the day and then they come home and we have another peak when people are cooking turning on lights all this stuff if we subtract the amount of solar generation and wind generation in californ in the cal caiso region we get this curve that sort of looks like this purple line this is the net demand at night there's very little solar or there's very little wind there's no solar and then during the middle of the day as the sun rises we get this um drop in net demand and as the sun sets we get this uh spike in net demand and so these ramps and spikes are due to um are what the conventional power plants like hydro fossil fuel plants have to make up so why is this bad this is the duck curve this is bad because it's really really challenging for these traditional thermoelectric power plants to ramp down really quickly for a few hours and then rent back up some of them because this is such a dramatic amount of solar in california may have to even shut off for a few hours and a power plant like let's take nuclear as an extreme example takes multiple days to shut down or turn back on can't just turn off entire power plants for a few hours and turn them back on so it's really challenging for grids to take into account the renewable variability but also the amount of renewables because of the ramps because of the uncertainty and because there's a sudden dip in the middle of the day with what these power plants have to make up under coved what does this look like so this was in april you can generally see that it's much flatter the demand is flattening you may have heard the term um weekdays now look more like weekends if we subtract the solar from this to determine the wind from this to determine what the conventional power plants now have to make up we see a smaller ramp we see a flatter duck belly in the middle of the day so it's a little bit easier for the conventional power plants to deal with so looking at both of these this is before stay at home orders this was after generally decreased load not as much solar curtailment which is wasting more utilization of solar less ramping okay what is this doing to electricity prices so the way that pricing works depends on where you live in the u.s but in areas with competitive wholesale electricity markets this means that there's less power plants being on because people are consuming less electricity so there's a lot of these generating companies making less money so this is kind of suppressing the prices and looking at this in new york city for example so the way you can read these plots is this axis is just five minute intervals the z-axis here is the cost of electricity and then here is what day we're looking at so in 2019 here's the cost of electricity in new york city and again this is at the wholesale level not the retail price that you as a residential consumer would pay but what the big guys are making and paying for and we see that it has a lot of spikes the electricity price price gets up to 374 dollars which is very expensive when we move into the stay-at-home orders when there's less gas peaker plants on when there's less expensive power plants on that need to account for those huge electricity peaks the biggest spike we see is 186 dollars per megawatt hour so about half or less than half of what we see in normal times in new york and in fact there's so much energy from renewable energy the electricity prices are going negative this is one of the few markets where you'll actually see people pay you to use more electricity and that's because it's more expensive to shut off those power plants than it is to keep them on we want to keep on that gas power plant we want to keep on that coal plant because shutting them down and then starting it back up is expensive it's challenging and sometimes technically not possible in a few hours so generally we're seeing much much lower prices and in some cases negative prices okay so there's a lot to unpack here and the takeaway i want to focus on which is what my lab focuses on is how can we change the way the grid operates how can we use our existing sources and our existing assets to help integrate renewable sources help avoid some of these problems like the duct curve and so one big aspect of that is the duct curve happens because of the way we use electricity we're used to coming home turning on all of the things and doing whatever we want not thinking about how when i run my dishwasher it's impacting something upstream and so one thing my my lab does is we work on techniques such as um load shifting and peak shaving to change when people use their appliances so an excel which is the utility that services a lot of the areas where probably a lot of you are from two to six pm really expensive to run appliances because that's when all those peaker plants are running that's when it's hard for excel to deliver electricity to you the losses in the grid are high the the power plants are struggling so they incentivize you to shift when you use electricity to off hours so this is in the middle of the night now most people aren't going to completely change their behavior and start taking showers running dishwashers washing clothes in the middle of the night so what my lab tries to do is create algorithms that automatically choose when to heat or cool your house in and try to do so such that you as a homeowner don't even notice what's going on as long as your house is cool you don't really care and so we try to shift that cooling energy to the middle of the day to overlap with solar for example and there's a lot of things in here that we can optimize i'm not going to go over everything so i'm probably already over my 12 minutes of time but my group focuses on operational techniques specifically with regards to how buildings in the grid can interact okay and that's all i had great well thank you kyrie i appreciate that uh overview there and i'm sure there's a lot more to dive into in q a um brian you're going to tell us about some of the innovative work that holy cross has done yeah thanks trent and good afternoon everybody thanks for joining again i think kyrie's done an excellent job of laying down the foundation for uh how the grid is changing from an engineering standpoint i want to share a little bit of perspective on how we see the grid changing from a business and a consumer standpoint in other words what is all this technology that's coming under the grid what does that really mean for you the consumer and and how is that likely to change some of the ways in which we as utilities interact with you uh going forward so a little bit about holy cross energy we're one of 22 rural electric cooperatives here in the state of colorado holy cross is actually based in glenwood springs so we're a couple hours west of denver on the i-70 corridor we serve the roaring fork valley the eaglevale valley a little bit of the colorado river valley on the way to grand junction so if you get out west of the divide chances are you're in our service territory last year in 2019 uh we served 44 of our power supply from renewable and non-carbon emitting energy resources um when you add in the voluntary renewable and clean power purchases from our members that number came up to 47 so we're well on the way to as our vision statement here states leading the responsible transition to a clean energy future in fact in the middle of 2000 let me get over to the screen here there we go in the middle of 2018 we announced something called our 70-70-30 plan we were one of the first utilities in the state to make a commitment to substantially increase the amount of clean energy we were going to be putting on our system reducing our dependence on coal-fired generation which has traditionally been one of the mainstays of the colorado energy supply increasing our purchase of renewables wind and solar energy from the eastern plains as well as investing in new local renewable energy resources here in our own community in the next couple of years you'll see a solar energy farm on final approach to the aspen airport it's really hard to cite and permit new things in aspen land is not cheap but we made a commitment on behalf of our community to bring clean energy into the neighborhood with a project that's directly connected to our pro to our system and most importantly we're going to improve the energy efficiency of our network and also the buildings and the vehicles and the businesses that are connected to it so we're well on a path to take that 44 number up to 70 percent or even more and to do it in a way which doesn't increase the cost of our power supply which is about half of what you pay on an electric bill so getting the electricity from the markets that kyrie pointed out from the generation resources that's about half of your bill for a typical utility the other half of your bill comes in the delivery charges how do we get it from the power plant through the high voltage transmission network which you can think of as kind of the interstate highway system of the electric grid and then through the distribution network which is a medium to low voltage network think county roads think the side streets all the way to the primary wire that goes from the pole outside your house to the to the panel on your home or your business that's your driveway right and so we think of the electric grid in kind of that same way that we think of the the road infrastructure and that's the other half of what goes on to your bill in fact as we see the architecture of the grid changing over time more and more that interstate highway system that transmission system is going to be governed and operated by what we call regional transmission operators or independent system operators that exist in various states around the country they don't exist in colorado yet but they'll be a big debate this year in the legislature and at the public utility commission about whether that kind of independent transmission operator should function for the benefit of the state to provide equal access to that highway system for all utilities holy cross and other electric cooperatives as well as an xl energy or a black hills they provide distribution services so again those side roads those county roads and we typically are moving more towards what we call a distribution system operator role where we have basically one job and that's to keep your lights on right to deliver the power from the high voltage network directly to your home and increasingly as kyrie pointed out we're accommodating not only power flow coming from this transmission system as you see here on the slide but also directly from our consumers themselves through your rooftop solar systems or the batteries that are in your garage or the backup generators that provide you with resilient power supply if our grid supply goes out as i mentioned we're also connecting wind and solar projects directly into the distribution system so to the side roads to the county roads and not always to the interstate highway and then when you have collections of these resources that can function as their own islands we see communities investing in things called microgrids that can help that community stay afloat even when the broader grid isn't available to them so we've began to experiment a couple of years ago with this concept of a microgrid in something called our basalt vista affordable housing project this is in the town of basalt which is in the roaring fork valley an area that we serve it started as an affordable housing project to provide affordable places to live for teachers and service economy workers and others in our community that frankly couldn't afford to live in the places where they work so the school district donated the land the county donated the improvements habitat for humanity our local chapter donated the labor in the materials and those stakeholders turned to us and said hey can you help us pioneer affordable housing that is not only affordable but it's also sustainable it's entirely powered by renewable energy resources it doesn't have a natural gas hookup and so we provided a number of resources that are on each of the first four homes at this project a rooftop solar system a battery storage uh one in each basement if you will a level two electric vehicle charger so that we could bring clean electricity into mobility and offset some of the gasoline demand for these families as well a heat pump water heater and an air source heat pump to provide comfort and clean hot water so basically all the resources that you would need to live in these homes and you can you can see the picture here these resources were individually controllable so when kyrie talks about investing in demand flexibility and being able to absorb extra power during times of surplus or being able to actually contribute power during times of shortage we put these devices from the lab where she was working at the time into the field in these four homes where these teachers and their families were living and we put them through their paces right we operated the houses on their own we operated the houses in providing power mode as a power plant would to our system we operated the houses in absorbing extra wind and solar when we had it and would have had to have paid to curtail it and send it away to someplace else so it really allowed us to look at these consumer-owned resources as ways to build resilience and actually operate our grid more efficiently what that allows us to do is rethink the way that we interact with our consumer when trent opened up with his remarks he said you know look the the grid used to be very passive one-way power from big power plant to passive consumer and you got told what you had to pay at the end of the month with your bill we see the electric grid of the future as being much more dynamic and interactive than that in fact we have consumers now that are signed up to a peak time rebate program where we send them a note on their text message or on their email and we say hey this afternoon we'll pay you not to consume during the time where we're at that peak part of our duck curve that kyrie showed and it'll actually save us more money than we'll pay you but everybody wins in this scenario because we're using the grid more efficiently conversely if we have too much wind or too much solar here's a great opportunity to charge up your vehicle or power your battery or run that dishwasher or load up your hot water at an extremely affordable if not free rate that helps you help us again run the system more efficiently we can also help finance and install and pay for the costs of installing these distributed energy resources provided that you allow us to use them to offset other investments we might have to make in bigger poles bigger wires bigger distribution equipment that frankly we don't need to make except for a couple of hours a day or a couple of hours out of the year you know in the utility space there's an adage that we try to say we don't want to build the church only for the sunday crowd right we don't want to build and overbuild the capacity when it's never used we want to try to use that capacity consistently throughout the year and we see these distributed energy resources as a a way to help us do that provided that we can use the data the machine learning the artificial intelligence we can actually predict when we're going to have too much or too little energy because we're now predicting the wind and the sun that drive those generation resources so it's a very exciting future and one that is i think just rife with a lot of value for you as consumers ways that we can empower you to actually manage your energy costs because for many of us energy costs are the biggest uh part of our disposable income and wouldn't it be great to just flatten those out put them on autopay forget about it so that we can go ahead and live the rest of our lives and get out recreating or take care of our families and our loved ones because after all those are the really important things and the reason why we live in this great place like colorado so i just thank everybody for being involved get excited and if you're not hearing about these things from your utility start asking for it because it'll be your consumer demand that drives their innovation and unless you do it it's not going to happen great well thank you brian that's a just an incredible web of innovation and thank you for your work on this on this program it's certainly an exciting future as you say um we've got a lot of great questions coming in through the chat i'm going to try to work through some of these and one of the first ones that i wanted to pose to both of you maybe maybe kyrie you can start is the question of retrofitting existing or particularly older structures with some of these innovations uh maybe you've got a building that is really not uh up to snuff and and doesn't have any of these features or maybe it's an entire neighborhood and the the thought might be it's going to be too costly it's going to be too complicated um can you speak to the some of the challenges and opportunities about integrating some of these new technologies yeah so when you hear the term smart house you probably think of you know if you've gone to best buy they now have ovens that are somehow wi-fi connected and you don't need to have a wi-fi connected oven to participate in a lot of these programs in fact probably a lot of your utilities might actually incentivize you some offer discounted nest thermostats or even freeness thermostats some offer programs to upgrade or to help you upgrade devices in your house to be more energy efficient so i'd say the simplest and the easiest way you can make your house grid interactive is through a smart thermostat so if you have electric heating or cooling central heating or cooling and you buy a nest or you buy an ecobee or something that has communication capabilities that can generally interface with your utility directly in something like nests rush hour rewards program automatically shifts when you heat or cool your house based on prices um so you don't need to have a lot of fancy devices but something just like a thermostat could change your bill and help the grid brian how about you well i think one of the biggest challenges that we face is integrating all of these new resources in a way that allows us to communicate with them as utility operators but it also allows the devices to communicate amongst themselves one of the innovative features of our basalt vista project and some work that kyrie and her collaborators at the at the lab actually helped us with was the use of a controller for each of these devices that that sensed what was going on with the grid and actually instructed the distributed energy resource to behave in a way that was compatible not only with what the grid needed but what all the other devices at that same home were doing i liken it a little bit too when you go to an orchestra and you listen to all the instruments the music that you hear is the sum total of the coordination the orchestration of all those instruments if you could imagine that same orchestra where each one of them were playing off a different song sheet it wouldn't sound very good and all of these devices if they're just behaving on their own construct instructions they actually can start to compete against one another and create more problems for themselves and for the grid so this ability to have what we call interoperability for these devices to to interoperate with one another and to be orchestrated by either a utility or a third party that can do that on behalf of the utility or the consumer i think that's the the linchpin and we're just really excited to have demonstrated it at least once with our basalt vista project and we're now actively thinking okay how do we take it from four houses to 44 000 in our entire service territory let's stick with a question of scale for a moment uh in terms of the interplay between energy policy that's set at a state level or a federal level versus the innovation that's bubbling up from the labs um can you speak to the best meshing of those two things is it is it the technology comes first and then the policy sort of adapts or the policy comes in and sets the marker and then technology catches up what do you think you know that's a super great question trent because i've worked on both sides of that divide as you you mentioned in my my background i started with policy and then i migrated to technology and now or work at the interface of both i think policy can definitely pull technology along but only if the policy is focused on the outcome too often what we see are policies that are trying that are attempting to write things too prescriptively for one interest or another right use this particular type of chemistry on a battery versus make the make the rules more open for any kind of battery technology right so we don't want um a policy that is so specific that the technology has a very hard time of actually achieving the policy goals so so broad is better on the other hand with projects like ours at basalt vista we've now fostered a discussion at the colorado legislature about well how do we change the policy to allow more of these kinds of projects to come forward because we see their values for doing so maybe our policies aren't set up to reward them the way that they could be rewarded and now that we see that the technology actually works we can go and have a coaching conversation about how the policy should be shaped so that we can scale it up so i actually think it goes both ways depending on where the technology is in its maturity level if it's much closer to the market then i think it drives but if it's early on i think the policy can pull it along by saying this is what we need in order to meet that policy goal yeah and towards what brian said i would like to emphasize that it's so important to have both engineers and policymakers talking constantly because there often is a disconnect um between those two where engineers aren't looking at practical problems it can be implemented potentially because we're too much in our research world policy makers aren't familiar with the actual physical constraints of the grid you can't just install a bunch of renewables and say you have 100 sustainable grid it's a lot more complicated than that unfortunately very true very true um in terms of stakeholder engagement and consumer education about some of these new technologies and these new innovations have have either of you found anything to be particularly helpful or particularly effective when it comes to letting folks know that these these programs are out there they're available they're happening uh the future is here uh can you talk a little bit about bringing people into the into the fold yeah that's i mean that's a really challenging and important area and i think especially webinars like this are so important because a lot of people don't even realize you know how the grid works and what how fragile it is to some degree um i saw a survey done where they asked people what do you think the biggest energy consent consuming appliances in your house and most people said the refrigerator so i think a lot of education towards um helping consumers understand what their electricity bill is made of you know until brian said 50 of that is delivery and 50 is actually the power um probably a lot of people aren't familiar with what those charges are what their money's going to um and how they can participate to not only help themselves but also help the broader system so education is just so important you know i'm a big fan of uh you know see it touch it right now one of the reasons why we pushed forward with the basalt vista project was so that we could bring governor polis we could bring the legislative leaders we could bring other utility executives we could bring uh members of the public uh habitat for humanity uses it to inspire energy efficiency and net zero construction in its projects around the country i think until you actually see it the first time and walk through it and talk to the people who are living there and no it's not always going dark yes our bill is only 12 a month it's the most amazing thing until you see it in the real world for the first time it's always like this mythical creature like oh my gosh someday there's going to be this thing and then you see you're like it's really there and i think that inspires folks both from an innovator standpoint because now you you get excited and you want to do the next best thing on it but it also inspires consumers to say well i've seen it once why can't they give it to me right and that's the kind of pressure that i think creates fertile ground for innovation because there's now a market for that right there's now an opportunity for a business to succeed we are doing this because we think this is how the world's going to be and we know that our communities and our consumers are asking us for this stuff so either we provide it to them or somebody else does and and i know which side i'd like to be on well you mentioned mythical creatures and uh speaking of that the uh the holy grail for a long time has been grid level storage for renewables right a giant battery that we could that we could attach to the grid and hold on to all that solar and hold onto the wind so we can use it when we want it is optimization in the in the sense that both of you are talking about does that somewhat mitigate the need for huge levels of storage because we're able to have we've got a lot of energy on the system and we can sort of move it where we need needed to be or is there still a pretty high need for some kind of a grid level storage breakthrough yeah this is a question that i get a lot especially from my students when i talk about duck curve or when i talk about shifting demand they're like batteries solve all of these problems why do we need to change when we run our dishwashers why don't we just put a bunch of batteries and i think right now i mean if you look at the cost of energy storage the unsubsidized cost it's really prohibitive for most consumers the lifespan of these batteries is also generally shorter than we'd like maybe maybe 10 years you know being generous in some cases also we don't always think about the life cycle effects of constructing a battery or disposing of those batteries and those have high environmental costs mining lithium isn't always environmentally safe disposing of the battery isn't always environmentally safe and so there's a lot of externalities that come into play with energy storage that said i don't think that demand shifting or having consumers change the way they use electricity is going to be the sole solution for um getting to 100 renewables storage is going to play a huge part in that both small scale storage and utility scale storage in my opinion yeah i think that's absolutely right and and we produce so much solar during the midday and we produce in colorado particularly on the eastern plains so much wind in the overnight hours that you're talking about moving around hundreds of megawatts potentially thousands of megawatts and you would have to lay down containers of container size shipping containers of batteries you know over massive amounts of area and and use them you know once a day to try to move those things around and while i certainly it's engineeringly possible um it's a very blunt instrument there are some other opportunities with demand flexibility with shifting uh the way that we use power with taking some of that extra renewable energy and using it to crack water open uh separated into hydrogen and oxygen use the hydrogen and store it which you can do in a much more dense way run that back through a fuel cell later on or use it with captured co2 from the atmosphere to help climate change you can create a fully renewable version of natural gas that you can store in the same places we store natural gas now one of the bigger challenges that i see for energy storage is not can we move it five minutes or can we move the power five hours it's can we move it from the summer when it's sunny to the winter where it's typically not and the heating loads are much much greater it's that seasonal storage for long periods of time large amounts gigawatts over days um this is the challenge that we're all facing whether it's california or colorado and there we look at pump storage hydro we looked at compressed air we look at that renewable natural gas there's there's a variety of scales for which storage is appropriate and as i wrote in the chat we're going to need all of them all shapes all sizes we're seeing battery storage with some of the projects that we're doing today that'll come online in the next two to three years and that's great but that's only this much of the challenge that we're going to face as we go all the way to 100 yeah no absolutely um well we're getting close on our time here but i wanted to wrap up by asking each of you to give me a little bit of a bold prediction or maybe a an optimist an optimistic case of what we can maybe look forward to here in the next few years what's something that is on your mind that uh that you're excited about um we'll go to brian first and then kyrie can have the last word so i've got two i've got a little bit of inside knowledge um one is don't be surprised if you see um a utility actually meet a 100 clean energy target within the next three to five years i think it's completely doable and confidentially i'm planning to do it here okay um so that's one and then the second is you all have heard of the self-driving car um i think we're going to have in very short order a self-driving electric grid the reason being is that with all of the sensors and all of the data and all of the computational power that we have we can actually create that orchestration that sheet music for all of these devices so that they can read and react to one another in a way which will largely be free in my view of human intervention except when something goes really really wrong you'll still need an electric grid operator but that electric grid operator will more be monitoring things and handling the extremes rather than doing a lot of the you know oops something's out we gotta roll the truck um i think you're gonna see things self-driving and it'll be so transparent to you as a consumer you'll hardly even notice yeah mine is similar to that i think the biggest biggest trend i see is self-healing grids modular grids the ability to have higher levels of resiliency to hazards we're going to experience hotter and hotter summers we're going to experience more wind storms whether we like it or not and so having these grids less reliant on you know 70 miles of power line is really important especially for rural areas in colorado i think i saw that somebody is under the mountain parks electric co-op we're working with them one of my master's students to look at a really really rural area of their system and see how could this benefit from a microgrid so more autonomy self-healing more modular grids hopefully these algorithms and these controllers can help us maintain the frequency voltage and power supplied to keep the consumers happy and to keep them with a reliable source of electricity well what a great good note to uh to end this conversation on i'm uh i want to thank you both for your time today for lending us your your insights and experience and uh this was this was fun i think uh i think we had a great discussion here so thank you to you both um i want to thank my museum colleagues for helping us put on this session today and to our audience for all the terrific engagement i'm so i'm so sorry we can't ever get to all the questions uh if you do have additional questions you can send them to us at institute at dmns.org and we can forward them along to the panelists and maybe get you a little bit of insight there we are continuing this series on a monthly basis our next session is going to be tuesday november 17th at the same time 4 p.m mountain and so the best way to stay up to date with all of our upcoming programming is to go to our website institute.dmns.org you can sign up for our newsletter find us on social a recording of this session will be available on our youtube page within about 24 hours if you'd like to revisit anything that we talked about today or or share it with a friend so thank you again for joining us today and we'll hope to see you next time thank you thank you

Channel: The Institute for Science & Policy

Views: 2,317

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Id: gK7dAeVQPBs

Length: 46min 6sec (2766 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020