Electrification is a promising and relatively straightforward way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and heating sectors. To motivate consumers to electrify, utilities will have to keep electricity costs as low as possible. If they can, electric customers stand to see lower rates. But if utilities aren’t focused on minimizing the cost to serve load, electricity will be priced out as a climate solution. There is a lot of talk about utility metrics like number of charging ports, registered vehicles, and avoided GHG emissions. Setting those aside, what if an important metric for understanding the utility’s success in electrification is short and long-run marginal cost. The objective of this panel will be to learn about the possible constraints in the power system, how load growth triggers those constraints, and how that leads to increased marginal costs. Panelists will answer what are the constraints now, what will they be, and what is the marginal cost to serve new load?

Moderator:

Hon. Abigail Anthony, Rhode Island

Panelists:

Alan Dulgeroff, Director of Distribution Planning, SDG&E

Pieter Gagnon, Senior Energy Systems Researcher, NREL

Tom Veselka, Principal Computational Engineer-Energy Systems, Argonne National Lab

Introductions - Hon. Abigail Anthony, Rhode Island

Presentation from the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy on the Administration’s suspension of tariffs on solar panel imports and use of the Defense Production Act to expand domestic manufacturing of solar panel parts, heat pumps, and other grid infrastructure components - Sonia Aggarwal, Special Assistant to the President for Climate Policy, Innovation, and Deployment

Discussion on Future Resolutions - Hon. Abigail Anthony, Rhode Island

Center for Partnerships and Innovation Update - Danielle Sass Brynett, Director

Monday’s opening General Session provided essential insights from NERC assessments and industry experts to help regulators support the clean energy evolution in a reliable manner. This panel will take a deeper dive and discuss how to realistically value capacity from demand side management (DSM), demand response, wind, solar and storage resources so that utilities know what is truly available during an extreme weather or a high demand event. Utilities know how to add the modeled capacity value from a variable resource into its load and resources table, but will the utility actually receive that full capacity from the variable resources when its truly needed. Hear from regional planners and those in charge of grid reliability as they share lessons learned from keeping the lights on when the best-laid load and resources plans are put to the test.

Moderator:

Hon. Charlotte Mitchell, North Carolina

Panelists: 

Tim Burdis, Senior Manager, State Policy Solutions, PJM

Libby Kirby, Transmission Operations Electricial Engineer, Bonneville Power Administation

Gabe Murtaugh, Storage Sector Manager, CAISO

Lynn Hecker, Senior Manager, Resource Adequacy Policy, MISO

Utility regulators face a monumental challenge in considering overall affordability for utility customers as various policy goals, i.e., decarbonization, resilience and security, drive additional infrastructure investment needs. This two-part panel will explore whether and how states can achieve these simultaneous goals. Part two of the discussion will explore current and emerging approaches to balancing various public policy goals with consumer interests. Panelists will shed light on how affordability can be central in the evolution of the grid, with specific interventions for regulators to consider in their evaluations of utility investments and proposals. 

Moderator: Hon. Cecile Fraser, Massachusetts

Panelists:

Hon. Megan Gilman, Colorado

Logan Atkinson Burke, Executive Director, Alliance for Affordable Energy

Jess Cain, Vice President, Customer Operations, Eversource  

Shuchen Cong, PhD Student, Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University