Advancing System & Climate Resilience Initiatives

Thank you to everyone who participated in today's meeting. We had some really great conversations today! In case you missed it, I'm including some high-level takeaways and slides presented by our guest speakers. Action item – please reach out to me if you have anything you'd like to present on at the next quarterly meeting (which will take place sometime in early December). We're looking for topics on: DERs, demand flexibility, electric vehicles, renewables, climate impacts, grid mod, environmental justice, and natural disaster preparedness/recovery.

NG EE vs. Electrification: AESP Resilience Topic Committee Q3 Meeting recap

-Brett Feldman (Customer Energy Management Manager at Rhode Island Energy) presented on how RI Energy is approaching gas EE incentives going forward.

-Erin Kempster (Director of Decarbonization at Opinion Dynamics) provided a national view on NG EE in the age of climate goals.

-Discussion takeaways:

• Contractor networks / TA training needs: critical for heat pump installation advancements
• Policy / code: critical for heat pump installation advancements
• Some places still doing gas incentives, but budgets/rebate amounts waning
• Concern that elimination of gas incentives might push people to low efficiency gas instead of electrification (also equity concerns abound, as high EE electric alternatives might be out of reach for some)
• When NG is just so much cheaper compared electricity - makes electrification a tough sell
• C&I is tough to electrify, so are restaurants
• Heat pumps are expensive, slows market penetration

Thanks again everyone and looking forward to the next quarterly call,

Attachment(s)

Kempster - NG EE in the age of climate goals.pdf   2.18 MB 1 version

AESP Gas EE.pptx   191 KB 1 version

Very good presentations and attachments.  I would like to add a bit to encourage natural gas climate work, by broadening policy objectives. Let me start by making clear that I believe we will need natural gas and propane in something like its current customer configuration and contribution to electric generation through at least 2100 or 2150.  Energy conservation is central to climate work and water, natural gas, and electric utilities can do much important and non-controversial work in energy conservation to advance climate objectives.  Continuing with current conservation planning, both DSM and low-income work is important and is the core of relevant climate work.  in addition, all utilities should work toward decoupling rates as an essential climate practice.  While decoupling was initially designed to better enable energy conservation while contributing to rate stability, the primary value of decoupling now is in putting into place a mechanism to incorporate the costs of climate change.

Climate change shows up as the climate trend towards ever-increasing heat, also as the cyclical-irregular component of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the various irregular weather factors (flooding, slow-moving rainstorms, heat domes, artic vortex, etc.).  Climate change is increasingly important in affecting water, natural gas, and electric systems and driving rates upwards.  Decoupling enables systematic incorporation of climate rate effects and is an essential climate practice.  

On broadening goals, the primary objective should be disaster planning and disaster preparedness, rather than electrification and decarbonization which are secondary.  The reason is that the primary feature of climate change is that heat is increasing, year by year, and the process does not stop (on a human scale).  This means that water, natural gas, and electric utilities need to prioritize infrastructure for resilience in all rate cases to bring systems up to the best in current technology and to advance system resilience under changing climate conditions.  Most systems are far from current.  It also means that systems need back-up and redundancy.  And we need to go into the climate problems with a well-paid and well-trained utility workforce across all of the specialties that make a utility function well.  The territory we are entering becomes more difficult each year - that means we need stop devaluing the future in our cost tests, and to up-value the future.  From a disaster planning and preparedness perspective, we need gas systems along with water and electric systems, and not to tie everything to electricity.  For example, as a climate practice we need the electric systems to build substantial system reserve and redundancy and we need an extensive build-out of gas microgrids to protect government services (administration, policy, fire, education, health, etc.) and essential (food, sanitation, water, medical, etc.) services for when electric central generation goes down.  I would suggest reading Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, as the first advanced methods text oriented towards climate change.  The DMDU book is available from Amazon, both as a free download, and as textbook.