Transmission

Find papers and presentations on all transmission topics, or specifically on the topics of financial transmission rights, merchant transmission, siting, and the smart grid.

 

Transmission

Gavan, John C., and Rob Gramlich. John C. Gavan and Rob Gramlich - A New State-Federal Cooperation Agenda for Regional and Interregional Transmission, 2021. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Excerpt from the Introduction:

The experience of grid operators and planners in the United States and around the world has shown that both decarbonization and power system resilience will require large-scale regional and inter-regional trans- mission expansion. In the United States, transmission planning, cost recovery, and siting are all subject to both state and federal jurisdiction. To meet the challenge of expanding transmission to implement decarbonization, the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC) and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) recently announced the Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission to focus on this issue.1 Resolving issues of siting and cost recovery for interstate electric transmission lines will encourage constructive state-federal cooperation. The task force and related regional and national coordination among the states, FERC, the Department of Energy (DOE), and federally regulated transmission providers will be critical to ensuring a resilient and clean power system.

Hogan, William W. Transmission Investment Beneficiaries and Cost Allocation: New Zealand Electricity Authority Proposal, 2020.Abstract

Excerpt from the introduction:

 

In a 2019 Issues Paper under its Transmission Pricing Review, the Electricity Authority of New Zealand set out a framework for efficient electricity system investment, cost allocation, and pricing. The basic design accords with beneficiary-pays principles. The challenges of transmission investment preclude pure market approaches and require consistency across both competitive and monopoly elements of the system. In comments on the Authority’s proposal, submissions of some parties include critiques or alternative recommendations that appeal to implicit assumptions inconsistent with the basic requirements of the technology and associated electricity market components. Although perfection is only possible under narrow conditions, the Authority’s framework provides a careful balance that adheres to first principles and can accommodate workable implementation.

Hogan, William W., Michael Caramanis, Elli Ntakou, and Aranya Chakrabortty. “Co-Optimization of Power and Reserves in Dynamic T&D Power Markets With Nondispatchable Renewable Generation and Distributed Energy Resources .” In, 2016. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Marginal-cost-based dynamic pricing of electric· ity services, including real power, reactive power, and reserves, may provide unprecedented efficiencies and system synergies that are pivotal to the sustainability of massive re· newable generation integrat ion. Extension of wholesale high-voltage power markets to allow distribution network connected prosumers to participate, albeit desirable, has stalled on high transaction costs and the lack of a tractable market clearing framework. This paper presents a distributed, massively parallel architecture that enables tractable transmission and distribution locational marginal price (T&DLMP) discovery along with optimal scheduling of centralized generation, decentralized conventional and flexible loads, and distributed energy resources (DERs). DERs include distributed generation; electric vehicle (EV) battery charging and storage; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) and c:ombined heat & power (CHP) microgenerators; computing; volt/var control devices; grid-friendly applianc:es; smart transformers; and more. The proposed iterative distributed architecture can discover T&DLMPs while capturing the full c:omplexity of each participating DER's intertemporal preferences and physical system dynamics.
Pfeifenberger, Johannes, and Judy Chang. “Well-Planned Electric Transmission Saves Customer Costs: Improved Transmission Planning Is Key to the Transition to a Carbon Constrained Future.” In, 2016.Abstract
Excerpt for the Executive Summary
The electric power industry is transforming rapidly due to low natural gas prices, technological changes, dramatic cost reductions in renewable generation, and increasingly ambitious environmental policy goals and consumer preferences. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Clean Power Plan (CPP) is perhaps the most visible and heavily-debated regulatory mandate in this trend toward an environmentally-constrained electricity industry. Much of the industry’s discussion about CPP and related environmental objectives has focused on energy efficiency, reducing coal-fired generation, and adding more renewable generation. This whitepaper complements those discussions by showing how a well-planned transmission system can help meet environmental objectives at lower overall costs, saving customers tens of billions of dollars compared to a system that is primarily planned to focus on more immediate needs to meet reliability requirements. The current uncertainties over CPP implementation are not likely to change the ongoing trend toward a clean power future, given that both market forces and policy preferences for cleaner energy sources are pushing in the same direction: natural gas prices currently are projected to remain relatively low for the foreseeable future, the costs of various renewable energy technologies continue to decrease, and customer preferences are evolving toward having more control over the their energy usage, including the energy source. Furthermore, many states, towns, corporations, and consumers are pursuing their goal of reducing emissions from electricity generation, independently of federal and state regulations. Such trends will invariably shift the country’s generation mix from coal to natural gas and renewable resources, with necessary upgrades to the nation’s transmission grid.
The Clean Power Plan Endangers Electric Reliability: RTO and ISO Market Perspectives.” In, 2015.Abstract

Excerpt from the Executive Summary

Background

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan (CPP), published in June 2014, raises substantial operational challenges for regional transmission organizations (RTOs). In the CPP, EPA specifies emission reduction targets for 49 of the 50 states, based on EPA’s modeling that purportedly shows that each state can achieve the specified reduction targets through the use of four “building blocks.” States are to develop plans to meet the targets between 2020 and 2030, and are offered “flexibility” to use any combination of the four building blocks specified and/or other means (if approved by EPA) to achieve these targets. The State plans – required by June 30, 2016 (unless an extension is granted) - must specify how each state intends to meet the targets.

While there are many issues, questions and concerns with the ability of states and utilities to meet EPA’s emission reduction targets based on the use of EPA’s four building blocks (or through other means), building block 2, in particular, raises substantial issues for systems operators and RTO/ISO market operations because it involves changing the current methods of how electricity is dispatched throughout the nation’s bulk power systems.

Either FERC or the states have always overseen how security constrained economic dispatch is conducted to maintain reliability while cost-effectively serving customers. But, if EPA’s proposed rule becomes final, it, and not the system operators that federal and state regulators have entrusted, will make such critical decisions for our nation’s utility customers regardless of costs.

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Financial Transmission Rights

Transmission Risk Hedging Products: Solutions for the Market and Consequences for the TSOs.” In, 2006.Abstract

Executive Summary

In the framework of the EC Regulation 1228/2003, the goal of this background paper is to provide a description of the different market based solutions available for transmission risk hedging in congestion management. This paper presents three different transmission risk hedging products that can be offered to the market in the field of cross-border trade and congestion management. Due to various facts several price zones exist within the overall European electricity market where the demand of each zone is met in real time by the production of the respective zone and a zone specific market price is found (e.g. on the respective Power Exchange). This raises the question of how a market player wishing to buy electricity in a certain price zone and to sell it in another one can hedge the risk of a price difference emerging between those zones. This paper describes the three main kinds of transmission risk hedging products identified by ETSO: • Physical Transmission Rights (PTRs); • Financial Transmission Rights (FTRs); • Financial Contracts for Differences (CfDs); The paper also provides a first evaluation of the different solutions adopting a markets’ perspective. From a practical perspective, the implementation of forward PTRs only requires a minimum of market infrastructure and contractual arrangements. This is probably the reason for this product to be widely and successfully implemented on most European interconnections. However, Market Splitting or Coupling or co-ordinated implicit auctions would be the main prerequisite towards the implementation of marketbased FTRs and CfDs in Europe. Vice versa, in case Implicit Auctions (Market Splitting or Coupling) are introduced FTRs form a reasonable complement to those schemes for transmission hedging.

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Merchant Transmission

Joskow, Paul. “Incentive Regulation in Theory and Practice: Electricity Distribution and Transmission Networks.” In, 2006.Abstract

Modern theoretical principles to govern the design of incentive regulation mechanisms are reviewed and discussed. General issues associated with applying these principles in practice are identified. Examples of the actual application of incentive regulation mechanisms to the regulation of prices and service quality for “unbundled” transmission and distribution networks are presented and discussed. Evidence regarding the performance of incentive regulation in practice for electric distribution and transmission networks is reviewed. Issues for future research are identified.

Joskow, Paul. “Patterns of Transmission Investment.” In, 2005. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This paper examines a number of issues associated with alternative analytical approaches for evaluating investments in electricity transmission infrastructure and alternative institutional arrangements to govern network operation, maintenance and investment. The economic and physical attributes of different types of transmission investments are identified and discussed. Alternative organizational and regulatory structures and their attributes are presented. The relationships between transmission investments driven by opportunities to reduce congestion and loss costs and transmission investment driven by traditional engineering reliability criteria are discussed. Reliability rules play a much more important role in transmission investment decisions today than do economic investment criteria as depicted in standard economic models of transmission networks. These models fail to capture key aspects of transmission operating and investment behavior that are heavily influenced by uncertainty, contingency criteria and associated engineering reliability rules. I illustrate how the wholesale market and transmission investment frameworks have addressed these issues in England and Wales (E&W) since 1990 and in the PJM Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) in the U.S. since 2000. I argue that economic and reliability-based criteria for transmission investment are fundamentally interdependent. Ignoring these interdependencies will have adverse effects on the efficiency of investment in transmission infrastructure and undermine the success of electricity market liberalization.

Siting

Gavan, John C., and Rob Gramlich. John C. Gavan and Rob Gramlich - A New State-Federal Cooperation Agenda for Regional and Interregional Transmission, 2021. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Excerpt from the Introduction:

The experience of grid operators and planners in the United States and around the world has shown that both decarbonization and power system resilience will require large-scale regional and inter-regional trans- mission expansion. In the United States, transmission planning, cost recovery, and siting are all subject to both state and federal jurisdiction. To meet the challenge of expanding transmission to implement decarbonization, the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC) and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) recently announced the Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission to focus on this issue.1 Resolving issues of siting and cost recovery for interstate electric transmission lines will encourage constructive state-federal cooperation. The task force and related regional and national coordination among the states, FERC, the Department of Energy (DOE), and federally regulated transmission providers will be critical to ensuring a resilient and clean power system.

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