By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
What Happened: The invaluable Michael Panfil, lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), created a tweet-storm on Friday worthy of a president as the nation’s ISOs offered comments on the FERC resilience docket. In short
- With the exception of PJM, the regional ISOs say the weakest link in the current electricity-distribution system is in the wires connecting centralized generation plants to customers.
- More distributed generation with storage is the most likely solution to the problem.
SolarWakeup’s View: Short version: A 19th century grid isn’t the most effective way to transmit electricity in the 21st century.
That sound you hear is the U.S. solar industry saying, in one loud chorus, “Well, duh.”
Of course, the reality of the transmission system in this country is far more complicated than that, but at the same time, it really isn’t.
When you have an electricity distribution system based on stringing wires is liable to break down at some point – and it is far more vulnerable to widespread attacks by people and groups looking to terrorize the U.S. population.
In 2003, my family and I were at Epcot when we started getting phone calls from relatives in Cleveland about widespread outages and fears of large amounts of food spoiling because of a freezer failure.
Turned out, it was a combination of drooping wires combined with a computer glitch – and a lot of energy analysts would tell you little has changed in that system since then.
That’s why most ISOs filing on Friday talked about the importance of adding more distributed electricity production combined with storage. They understand better than anyone how vulnerable our grid is to attack, and they have laid bare a plan to improve it.
Let’s hope FERC is smart enough to listen to them.
More
SolarWakeup Interview with former FERC Chairman, Jon Wellinghoff