How rights-of-way in the southeastern U.S. can benefit pollinating insects By Chris Warren There’s nothing ambiguous about the mission of electric company vegetation managers. Above all, their job is to ensure that the growth of trees, bushes, and other vegetation doesn’t negatively impact the reliable production and delivery of electricity. In the case of high-voltage transmission lines, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approves reliability standards that, among other things, specifies maintaining a certain distance between vegetation and the lines themselves. As a result, util ..read more

EPRI leads a consortium identifying vulnerabilities and recommending solutions to protect consumers and the grid By Chris Warren They are the type of stories that cause electric vehicle advocates to lose sleep. On the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, hackers gained access to EV chargers and displayed pornography on the equipment’s screens. In the United States, hosts of a YouTube channel tweeted a video showing how to take control of the operating system of an Electrify America EV charger. A recent story in The Wall Street Journal highlighted the numerous cyber vulnerabilities that EV driv ..read more

Decades of research and pilot projects inform a new EPRI methodology for assessing the viability of microgrids. By Chris Warren Until recently, there has been a lot more discussion about the potential of utility microgrids than their actual development and deployment. The main reason so few microgrids have been built is cost. Indeed, the vast majority of microgrid cost-benefit analyses concluded that the economics of microgrids simply did not pencil out. In recent years, however, that has begun to change. To understand why, it’s helpful to first be clear about what a microgrid is. EPRI defines ..read more

Quantifying the global economic impacts of climate change is an enormously complex and high-stakes task that demands due diligence. By Chris Warren On January 20, 2021, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden signed 17 executive orders covering topics ranging from immigration to the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change. Among the orders issued on that first day of the new administration was one focused on the social cost of carbon. The social cost of carbon is a monetary estimate attempting to quantify the global economic impact of emitting just one ton of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Socia ..read more

The Smart Power Integrated Node (SPIN) delivers backup power along with cost savings and grid support in one small box By Chris Warren In the summer of 2020, California’s grid strained to keep up with demand for electricity during a scorching heat wave. In August of that year, rolling outages impacting hundreds of thousands of customers were initiated because not enough capacity was available to keep up with demand. The outages triggered the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC), and the California Energy Commission (CEC) to issue a jo ..read more

A three-year EPRI research initiative provides tools for energy companies to understand and adapt to water resource challenges By Chris Warren In some respects, the Wabash and San Juan rivers are quite similar. From its headwaters in the west of Ohio, the Wabash flows about 765 kilometers through Indiana and along the border with Illinois until it joins up with the Ohio River near where Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana meet. The San Juan River runs 616 kilometers from southern Colorado through northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah before reaching the Colorado River. But the similarities ..read more

EPRI modeling evaluates potential decarbonization strategies for Minnesota By Chris Warren At the beginning of 2023, Minnesota passed legislation requiring the state’s utilities to use 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. With the law’s passage, Minnesota joined many other states—including California, Nevada, and New York—that have put decarbonizing the electric sector at the center of their strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The law also raised many practical questions about how utilities will reach the mandates and elevated the importance of fully grasping potential impac ..read more

Operating a reliable distribution system is more complex, challenging, and important than ever before. EPRI research is identifying and sharing the skills operators need to do it well. By Chris Warren Public policy, regulations, and technology developments often dominate discussions about the ongoing and rapid transformation of the power system. Incentives and mandates that flow out of state renewable portfolio standards and the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act are big drivers of demand for commercial and residential purchase and interconnection of distributed energy resources (DERs), s ..read more

EPRI’s publicly available OpenDER model aims to ensure accurate interconnection and planning studies By Chris Warren Distributed energy resources (DER) are being added to the power system at a rapidly accelerating pace. In the U.S., for example, the electric power sector was operating around 74 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics at the end of 2022, which was approximately three times the capacity in operation at the end of 2017. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), a combination of declining construction costs and favorable tax credits will add another 63 gigawatts of s ..read more

A new EPRI study examines the feasibility of co-locating solar and pollinator habitat By Chris Warren Anyone paying even a little attention to the power industry’s transformation in recent years will know that the market for solar energy is big and growing quickly. The drivers of solar’s evolution from a niche technology affordable only to those with few alternatives—NASA, to power satellites, for instance—into a mainstream energy source that routinely heads the list of new capacity additions are varied. Among the most important factors are dramatic price declines, performance improvements, fa ..read more