Texas power prices briefly soar 1600% as a spring heat wave is expected to drive record demand for energy - Fortune

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Hotter temperatures in Texas are expected to set new all-time highs for energy use in the month of May, sending electricity prices spiking higher.

The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), predicted demand would jump from 57,486 megawatts on Friday to 71,893 MW on Monday, 72,725 MW on Tuesday, and 74,346 MW on May 24, according to Reuters.

The coming week could see demand topple the current record for May of 71,645 MW set in 2022, while still trailing the all-time high of 85,508 MW set on Aug. 10, 2023.

That’s as weather forecasts for top cities like Houston and Dallas have put high temperatures in the 90s, above seasonal norms, meaning more Texans will crank up their air conditioning.

Expectations for the latest demand surge boosted electricity prices in the spot market, with next-day prices in ERCOT’s north hub soaring to $120 per megawatt hour MWh for Friday from $40 for Thursday, according to LSEG pricing data cited by Reuters.

And for about one hour late Friday, day-ahead prices on ERCOT’s website jumped as high as $688 per MWh, representing an increase of more than 1,600% compared to the prior day.

The Texas power market is deregulated and on its own electricity grid. But the actual price that consumers pay depends on the type of contract they have with their provider. And since February 2021, energy providers have been barred from fully passing along wholesale electricity prices to their residential customers.

Brutal heat waves over recent summers have shattered records for power demand, sending spot prices on wild, sudden swings. In September, Texas power prices surged as much as 20,000%.

Meanwhile, Texas has seen an influx of residents since the pandemic as people fled states like California and New York, where the cost of living is higher, meaning more customers are plugged into the grid.

Texas has also become a hotbed for bitcoin mining, adding to electricity demand, as the state’s deregulated power market and abundance of cheap natural gas became attractive to the energy-intensive sector. The proliferation of data centers and the rise of artificial intelligence technology has also boosted demand.

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Biden policies aid Detroit in the electric vehicle race with China • Michigan Advance - Michigan Advance

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President Joe Biden threw Detroit automakers a lifeline by slapping 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles that have yet to reach our shores.

Citing the threat that China will dump millions of low-priced electric vehicles they can’t sell at home on the U.S. market, Biden on May 14 said, “we’re not going to let China flood our market, making it impossible for American automakers … to compete fairly.”

I wrote a column in March, saying the prospect of Chinese cars being sold in the United States gave me a sense of déjà vu. 

In the 1970s small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars were arriving in the U.S. as fuel prices soared. Detroit automakers, then known as the Big Three, struggled to compete with their gas-guzzling land yachts.

Rick Haglund: Michigan is betting big on electric vehicles with tax breaks. Will it pay off?

Faced with political, economic and xenophobic backlashes, Japanese automakers agreed in 1981 to limit the number of vehicles they exported to the U.S.

The “voluntary” import restrictions, supported by the Reagan administration, were designed to give Detroit automakers time to become competitive with their foreign rivals. But Detroit automakers failed to meet the challenge.

Chrysler, Ford and General Motors controlled about 75% of the domestic auto market in 1980. Today, their share is about 35% as they’ve ceded precious ground to Asian and European automakers.

But the current threat by Chinese automakers makes Japan’s assault on the U.S. market more in the 1980s seem almost trivial.

How it plays out has enormous implications for Michigan’s auto-driven economy. Some 1.1 million jobs are tied to the state’s auto industry, according to MichAuto. About 20% of all cars and trucks built in the U.S. are manufactured here. 

Losing all that would cause incalculable damage to Michigan’s well-being.

The Chinese vowed more than a decade ago to dominate the world market for cars and light trucks with their high-quality, low-cost electric vehicles, using hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies.

Today, China has the capacity to manufacture half the world’s 80 million vehicles, according to Asian auto industry analyst James Dunne, citing figures from research firm GlobalData. That could grow to 75% of world manufacturing capacity in just six years.

“Call it the coming China car colossus,” Dunne said.

Chinese companies already are exporting vehicles to countries around the world, except to the U.S., where political tensions between the two countries are boiling.

But if there’s one thing uniting Democrats and Republicans, it’s keeping electric Chinese cars out of the U.S. market as long as possible.

Former President Donald Trump, the likely GOP presidential nominee, has called incursions into the U.S. auto market by the Chinese a potential “bloodbath” for Detroit automakers. 

Trump has said that as president, he would hit Chinese cars with a 200% tariff and would not allow the Chinese to enter the U.S. tariff-free by building cars in Mexico under the USMCA trade agreement he negotiated while in the White House.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have been investigating Ford’s battery license agreement with Chinese battery maker CATL.

And Democratic Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown last month called for an outright ban of Chinese vehicles in the U.S.

While Trump and Biden may seem aligned on China, their approaches to dealing with the prospect of losing the domestic auto industry to Chinese automakers couldn’t be more different.

As president, Trump ignited a trade war with China, broadly assessing tariffs on thousands of Chinese manufactured goods. Many economists say those tariffs have done little to boost U.S. manufacturing.

Biden’s tariffs are designed to give U.S. producers of electric cars, solar panels and other green-energy products breathing room to compete against the Chinese.

His administration also has enacted stringent regulations on auto exhaust emissions that would eventually require automakers to build mostly battery-powered electric vehicles to blunt the negative impacts of climate change.

WATERLOO, IOWA – DECEMBER 19: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a campaign event on December 19, 2023 in Waterloo, Iowa. Iowa Republicans will be the first to select their party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential race, when they go to caucus on January 15, 2024. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Trump, who has repeatedly called global warming a hoax, opposes those regulations and has said he would eliminate them as president.

According to the Washington Post, he even offered oil executives a quid pro quo: if they would raise $1 billion for his campaign, Trump said would eliminate Biden’s environmental rules and policies, and stop new ones from being enacted.

The former president also says the Biden emissions rules are hurting the Detroit Three because consumers don’t want to buy the electric vehicles he says automakers are being forced to produce.

Biden is more tethered to reality. Most auto executives and industry experts say the auto industry must and will eliminate the internal combustion engine to cut pollution and save the planet.

That’s already happening in much of the world. One out of every four vehicles sold globally last year was electric.

It’s difficult to imagine that Detroit automakers could survive for long in a global industry focusing on just building big gas-burning pickups and SUVs in their home market.

Biden’s policies have given them a chance to compete with the Chinese in an electric automotive future.

It won’t be easy, given that China had a 10-year head start in developing electric vehicles. But there is no other choice for the Detroit Three to remain viable.

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PacifiCorp sues Wyoming regulators who rejected major electric rate hike - WyoFile

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Wyoming’s largest energy supplier sued state regulators Thursday claiming they wrongly reduced a rate hike by disregarding federal requirements.

Filed in U.S. District Court by PacifiCorp, the parent company of  Rocky Mountain Power, the suit asks the court to overturn the commission’s January decision to approve only part of an electricity rate hike sought by the Oregon company, which is the largest utility operating in Wyoming. The complaint names Wyoming Public Service Commissioners Mary Throne, Christopher Petrie and Michael Robinson as defendants. 

The Wyoming order is improperly costing PacifiCorp a $23 million  loss, the company alleges.

Basis of the suit

PacifiCorp saw its rate hike request challenged by a group known as Wyoming Industrial Energy Consumers, which claimed the rate hike would force Wyoming customers to subsidize out-of-state users, according to the litigation.

The desire of consumers in other PacifiCorp states to choose or even require their utilities to secure some wind and solar power has chaffed coal-producing Wyoming, which has seen coal revenues dwindle.

“The [Wyoming Industrial Energy Consumers] adjustment relies entirely on a foundation of dislike and disregard for federal [power] reserve requirements.”

PacifiCorp

PacifiCorp alleges Wyoming regulators practiced “local protectionism” when they issued their rate-case order. The commission agreed with the industrial coalition that the energy company didn’t have to incorporate costs associated with holding reserves of power necessary to guarantee power supplies.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sets those costs for power reserves, the lawsuit says, and the state agency can’t adjust or recalculate them.

Wyoming’s PSC created “an entirely new methodology for calculating the value of reserves and that methodology is directly contrary to federal law and FERC precedent,” the suit states. The Wyoming rate order unfairly shifts costs to non-Wyoming power users, the lawsuit claims.

“The Commission thus violated the Commerce Clause by engaging in clear economic protectionism,” the lawsuit reads, “and by seeking to burden out of state parties by creating and exporting a [PacifiCorp] revenue shortfall.”

How PacifiCorp sees it

Here are some of the descriptions PacifiCorp used in its filing to explain the dense and complex regulatory forest it operates in.

Instead of having a capacity and supplies for reserve power generation, the commission agreed with the industrial group that such resources could be sold to the benefit of Wyoming ratepayers. PacifiCorp said those would be “fictional power generation and sales that [PacifiCorp] could not possibly make while complying with federal regulations, which were promulgated pursuant to FERC’s exclusive jurisdiction.”

“The WIEC adjustment relies entirely on a foundation of dislike and disregard for federal [power] reserve requirements,” the suit states. The industrial group used a “methodology [that] is directly contrary to federal law and FERC precedent.”

In addition to declaring that the Wyoming commission exceeded its authority and ordering it to reverse its decision, the court should allow PacifiCorp to collect attorneys’ fees, costs and expenses and potentially “further relief.”

Another rate hike proposed

Last month, Rocky Mountain Power filed for a 12.3% rate hike for its Wyoming customers to cover, among other things, higher-than-expected fuel costs in 2023, WyoFile reported at the time. That would bump the typical residential customers bill by about $12 a month. 
The size of last year’s proposed increases, meanwhile, sparked anger from customers and legislative action from state lawmakers.

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Eversource bills expected to jump $8 as electricity prices go down - CT Insider

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Eversource bills expected to jump $8 as electricity prices go down  CT Insider

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Electric vehicles, heat pumps driving up electricity demand in Maine - Press Herald

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New England’s grid operator is expecting Maine’s electricity use to soar in the coming decade because of the demand to power heat pumps and a growing number of electric vehicles, despite the state’s rejection of policies calling for broader EV use.

Maine is expected to maintain its position as a leader in electric heat pump installations. The state is forecast to consume more electricity for heat pumps in 2033 than any other New England state except Massachusetts, according to ISO-New England’s 2024-2033 Forecast Report of Capacity, Energy, Loads and Transmission.

As a result, the increase in Maine’s use of electricity in the coming decade is expected to outpace the six-state region.

Overall, electricity consumption is expected to rise by 30% in the next decade in Maine, with most of the increase driven by more heat pumps. For New England, electricity use is forecast to rise by 17%.

But EV use in the state also is expected to grow significantly.

EVs in Maine will require 63 times more power one decade from now, with demand rising to 1,845 gigawatt hours (gWh) annually in 2033 from 29 gWh this year, according to ISO. The state’s shift to electric vehicles would be the second strongest in New England, after New Hampshire.

A gigawatt hour is the amount of electricity generated in one hour by a power plant large enough to support more than 800,000 homes.

The pace of expected EV growth in Maine reflects in part how far Maine lags other New England states in the use of electricity to power vehicles.

Connecticut and Massachusetts, the region’s most urban states, account for 77.5% of the region’s electricity use for transportation. The two states’ share is expected to drop slightly over the decade as the region’s more rural states catch up.

Evolving state policies create uncertainty in forecasting, said Victoria Rojo, lead data scientist at ISO.

“This is the challenge of being a forecaster. We’re doing the best we can with the data we have on hand,” she said. “The data landscape is constantly changing.”

For example, collecting information on electric heating is difficult because reporting on equipment installations is not consistent among the six states, Rojo said. And although efficiency programs are a reliable source for data about the growth in electric heat pump use, many homeowners don’t require subsidies, she said.

The grid operator consults regulators, state environmental officials and others as it designs its data models, she said.

State and federal subsidies have helped make Maine a leader in the installation of electric heat pumps.

10-FOLD INCREASE FOR HEATING

Electric use for heating in Maine is forecast to increase to 1,469 gWh annually in 2033 from 142 gWh this year, a 10-fold increase, outpacing all other New England states except Massachusetts, which is forecast to consume 3,794 gWh in 2033 for electric heating.

As state and federal policies continue to bear down on greenhouse gas emissions and lean into electrification, the six-state region is expected to increase electric use for transportation to more than 15,000 gWh in 2033, compared with 325 gWh this year.

Andrew Price, president and chief executive officer of Competitive Energy Services, a Portland consulting firm, said the adoption of EVs “could be a bit faster or slower than this forecast, but it will happen for performance as well as environmental reasons, regardless of politics.”

EVs will be less expensive to own and operate and perform better, he said. Price compared advances in the vehicles to broader use of heat pumps over oil heat, a traditional source of home heating in Maine.

With as much as half of greenhouse gas emissions from gasoline and diesel-fueled vehicles, environmentalists trying to slow climate change have urged EV expansion in Maine.

“We can do heating. We can do renewables,” Jack Shapiro, climate and clean energy director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said at a forum last week organized by ClimateWork Maine. “But if we don’t address transportation then we’re leaving a huge amount of work undone.”

The state Board of Environmental Protection in March rejected a proposed expansion of electric and hybrid vehicles in Maine. Environmentalists pushed for new EV standards to curb tailpipe emissions, but car dealers and Republican lawmakers opposed the move, calling it government overreach.

The state standards would have required increasing the share of electric and hybrid cars and trucks sold in Maine to 51% of all vehicles sold in 2028 and 82% of all vehicles sold in 2032.

The Legislature and Gov. Janet Mills enacted a law last month giving lawmakers final authority to decide on such rules in the future.

GRID’S CAPACITY NOT ADDRESSED

The ISO report avoids the complicated issue of whether the region’s grid can handle the push to electrify heating and transportation. “My role is to figure out what is coming and characterize it as accurately as possible,” Rojo said.

State law requires Central Maine Power and Versant Power to submit to the Public Utilities Commission plans detailing the expected effect of climate change on their equipment. The PUC is considering numerous comments from environmentalists, ratepayers and others.

Price said electricity consumption growth projections are up significantly nationwide, due not only to more heat pumps and EVs, but also in response to increasing demand for data centers and the rise of some manufacturing sectors. The projected net growth in electricity consumption in New England, 1.8% annually over 10 years, is “at the low end” of forecasts for other regions with greater demand for data centers that process information used by advanced manufacturing, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, he said.

Developers of data centers seek large metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York and high-tech centers in Seattle, Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, California.

Rojo said the overall growth in electricity forecast by ISO is “appropriate for what we have going on in New England,” reflecting that manufacturing and data centers are not high-growth sectors.

Greater electricity use in New England will change the seasonal trends of energy use.

Peak demand, a measure of the greatest use of electricity in an hour, will shift to winter from summer over the coming decade, ISO said. Currently, the annual peak in the region is traditionally during the summer, when air conditioning is used to cool buildings. But as electrification replaces oil and natural gas, ISO expects the winter peak to nearly match the summer peak.

That shift could ease pressure on demands to build out transmission to keep up with greater electrification, Price said. Transmission lines typically heat up and sag and carry less load in the summer than during the winter, when lines have more capacity, he said.

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At a Beverly Hills mansion, where an electric truck is your only source of power - The Verge

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The Chevy Silverado EV, as mobile generator.

Image: Abigail Bassett

Last week, General Motors summoned a small group of journalists to a Beverly Hills mansion to witness the future of home energy. And it started with a preemptive blackout. 

As sunset fell across the Hollywood Hills, the chief engineer from General Motors flipped a breaker and disconnected the five-bedroom home from the grid. The lights went out, and less than 20 seconds later, GM’s home system powered it back up, pulling just 5kW or less from the fully charged Chevy Silverado EV parked in the garage.  

When the lights came back on, the small crowd of journalists and GM Energy employees clapped, as if they were experiencing electricity for the first time.

While a pickup truck may be an unusual site in the tony neighborhood, the company wanted to show off how its new energy subsidiary, GM Energy, can power an entire home using nothing but the Silverado as a mobile generator. GM wanted to demonstrate the new features of its vehicle-to-home (V2H) energy products at a splashy if mostly sterile mansion in the excessively wealthy Los Angeles enclave.

(In case you’re house hunting, the uber-lux Beverly Hills mansion that hosted GM’s demo is currently for sale for nearly $25 million — and is also rumored to have once belonged to Rat Pack member Dean Martin.) 

Before the event, GM Energy installed a bidirectional charger, which the company calls the GM Energy PowerShift Charger, as well as its own V2H Enablement kit, which includes a power inverter, a home hub that includes a computer system that manages the loads through the house, and a backup battery. The full kit retails for $12,699, but buyers can opt for the individual components at the same price. 

Using GM Energy’s equipment, the 10,000-square-foot mansion ran exclusively on battery power from the fully charged 215kWh Ultium battery pack underpinning the new Silverado EV for a few hours on a Thursday evening for the event. 

The house, once owned by Dean Martin, is for sale for $25 million.

Image: Abigail Bassett

But one couldn’t help but be struck by some of the cognitive dissonance on display. Amid cooling demand and flagging sales for EVs, automakers like GM are increasingly trying to market their plug-in cars as something like a Swiss Army knife for the electrical grid. The aim is to entice consumers into spending more on an EV to get access to all these extra features unavailable to anyone driving a car that runs on fossil fuels.  

The home ran off the Silverado EV for the rest of the night, powering more than 50 overhead lights inside, music throughout, the kitchen where a full chef’s staff continued to turn out hot hors-d’oeuvres for guests, and exterior lighting that ran all the way down the 200-foot long driveway. 

While EV technology opens up a number of new and innovative benefits for the consumer, and there are plenty of benefits to creating V2H systems for EVs, the clean energy market has put up somewhat mixed financial results in recent months. Still, GM remains bullish and barreling ahead with a team hired from private equity, climate tech, and more. 

“This is truly unlocking the potential of GM’s electric vehicle lineup,” said Wade Sheffer, VP of GM Energy. “Having that technology, in that garage, prepared to do what it’s doing right now, raises this property’s valuation even more.”

“If you put one of these GM Home systems in every single customer’s home, you can create a decentralized grid,” added William Hotchkiss, head of safety and supplier quality, purchasing, and supply chain. “You can start to make it a connected network so that you can manage demand, and everyone will have more reliability.” 

The full kit from GM Energy retails for over $12,000.

Image: Abigail Bassett

GM launched GM Energy in 2022 as a way to compete in the growing home energy market and has plans to sell additional equipment, including the Power Bank or stationary home battery system. 

The automaker is no stranger to dabbling in areas that seem incongruent with its core automobile business. It made mechanical hearts in the 1950s and, more recently, respirators during the covid-19 pandemic. 

Yet, in an era when EV sales have not grown as quickly as many automakers had anticipated, questions remain about whether it makes good business sense to get into home energy. The market isn’t small, but it’s not exactly growing, with current estimates putting its worth at around $150 billion. 

Other automakers have also sensed an opportunity. Tesla touted its energy business, which includes home chargers, stationary batteries, and solar panels, as a bright spot during last month’s earnings call. The company recently announced that it would start rolling out bidirectional charging in 2025. In the home battery and solar installation market, Tesla dominates.

Hyundai offers its own home energy integration, which includes solar panels and battery storage, alongside its EVs like the Ioniq 5 and 6, which have bidirectional charging. But the automaker has said it’s more focused on vehicle-to-grid power over vehicle-to-home.

GM is taking a similar approach and partnering with Qmerit to help homeowners install their GM Energy technology. The company says that its new “holistic” home system will “help accelerate EV adoption. 

As Sheffer put it during our interview, “General Motors simply believes we’re going to have mass adoption of EVs, and we’re going to invest in the whole ecosystem. We’re a separate company within the company, so General Motors invested in us to deliver all of the pieces of that possible.”

Currently, the Chevy Silverado EV is GM’s only vehicle with V2H capabilities.

Image: Abigail Bassett

While the Silverado EV is the only current vehicle that has this V2H ability, eventually GM’s other electric vehicles, including the GMC Sierra EV Denali, Chevy Equinox and Blazer EVs, and Cadillac Lyriq, will get it, too, either via an over-the-air or dealer-installed update. 

While these features are similar to those already offered on the Ford F-150 Lightning, GM is promising to make it more accessible to the masses. Its plan is to transform its complete lineup of EVs to enable V2H capabilities. But at launch, there are no plans to open the system up to third parties.  

For example, the GM Home kit is currently not compatible with other EVs, including the Honda Prologue, which also gets GM’s Ultium battery. According to executives at last week’s event, there are no current plans to change that until ISO standards change. 

“Right now, GM Energy offers the most comprehensive home charge ecosystem on the market, bar none,” Sheffer said. “Once we had the power bank and connection to solar, stop the tires.”

Hotchkiss and Sheffer also confirmed that there are no current plans for GM to get into the solar panel manufacturing or installing business right now, given how fraught the space can be. (The company previously said it would work with third-party solar providers, like Sun Power.) Plans to allow customers to sell excess energy back to the grid are still in the works, according to Sheffer, noting that GM is currently piloting some smaller programs with utilities across the nation. 

These backup power systems essentially provide microgrids for communities and homeowners looking to insulate themselves from blackouts due to extreme weather resulting from climate change. 

As the world heats up and climate change stretches the electrical grid closer to its limits, consumers are increasingly looking for ways to ensure they still have access to reliable power. Since EVs spend the majority of their time parked in home garages and plugged in, GM sees an opportunity to leverage those parked EVs for power storage. The demonstration last week shows what that might look like.

Politics are also at play in the energy space. As demand for electricity grows, coal plants close, and more solar and wind power come online, some politicians and critics of clean power see the potential for a power reliability crisis to increase. By providing a way for people to power their homes when the grid goes down, GM says it is opening new opportunities for individual consumers. And with Tesla’s polarizing CEO Elon Musk increasingly alienating some of his most loyal potential customers, GM offers a less “political” alternative. 

It also turns out that consumers want these kinds of features from their EVs, at least according to a recent study by JD Power. The study found that over a third of EV owners said they were interested in bidirectional charging as a way to make money by selling power back to the grid and to help balance peak electrical demands. 

While it’s still very early days for GM Energy and its suite of new features supporting V2H support, executives are positive about the future of the venture. “GM is an automobile company, pulling from the grid. It only makes sense that we have the whole ecosystem,” Sheffer said. “That’s why GM said we’re going to pioneer this. If we don’t start, nobody is ever going to get there. So here we go.” 

This was no temporary solution, either. GM executives promised that the mansion could run for three to four days at that level of consumption before fully depleting the battery. When I left at around 9:30PM, the charge on the Silverado EV had only dropped by 1 percent. 

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These Electric School Buses Are on Their Way to Save the Grid - WIRED

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The big yellow school bus is a US icon, but perhaps not one that future Americans will remember fondly. Chugging through neighborhoods, idling in front of kids’ houses, the vehicles spew both noise and fossil-fuel pollution all across town. In a city like Oakland, California, that significantly worsens air quality, especially in underserved neighborhoods already struggling with pollution.

This August, though, 1,300 special-needs students in the Oakland Unified School District will start riding into the future aboard 74 fully electric buses, operated by a startup called Zum. “Most special-ed students, they have health issues—asthma and stuff like that. They go to school on this noisy, smelly, rough ride, just to get their access to education,” says Kim Raney, executive director of transportation at the Oakland Unified School District. “So this is really going to be a game-changer.”

But the students won’t just be enjoying a quiet, clean journey to school—they’ll also be helping revolutionize the way we all get electricity. The newfangled buses are no ordinary EVs: They’re equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, which allows them to both charge and give power back to the grid.

The global challenge is that as grids shift from fossil-fuel power to renewables, they’ll need to store a whole lot of energy. Demand on the grid spikes when people get home from work and switch on appliances—washing machines, air conditioners or heat pumps, electric stoves. That demand is easy enough to meet with a gas-fired power plant, since it just burns more gas. But for the renewable grid of tomorrow, that peak is unfortunately timed, because the sun is also setting, so there’s less and less solar power available. Part of the solution is banks of giant batteries, charging and discharging in a dedicated facility. The capacity of these is already sizable: On April 30 between 7 pm and 10 pm, California got more than a fifth of its electricity from batteries.

V2G is a more distributed option for backup battery power. EVs need special hardware to discharge to the grid, but more of them with the feature have been trickling out, like Ford’s F-150 Lightning. (V2G requires a special charger, too.) The idea is for Zum’s buses to eventually join millions of other EVs—fleets of city vehicles, cars sitting in suburban garages—as an array of surplus energy. Last year, researchers calculated that we’d need less than a third of the world’s EV owners to opt into V2G programs to meet the demand for energy storage by the year 2030.

Courtesy of Zum

The school bus is in many ways ideal for V2G. “There’s no uncertainty in terms of the use of the bus,” says Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Lab at UC San Diego, who studies the grid but wasn’t involved in the project. “Having that clarity on what the transportation needs are—that makes it much easier for the grid to know when they can make use of that asset.”

Zum’s buses start operating at 6 or 6:30 am, drive kids to school, and finish up by 9 or 9:30 am. While the kids are in class—when there’s the most solar energy flowing into the grid—Zum’s buses plug into fast-chargers. The buses then unplug and drive the kids home in the afternoon. “They have large batteries, typically four to six times a Tesla battery, and they drive very few miles,” says Vivek Garg, cofounder and COO of Zum. “So there’s a lot of battery left by end of the day.”

After the kids are dropped off, the buses plug in again, just as demand is spiking on the grid. But instead of further increasing that demand by charging, the buses send their surplus power back to the grid. Once demand has waned, around 10 pm, the buses start charging, topping themselves up with electricity from nonsolar sources, so they’re ready to pick up kids in the morning. Zum’s system decides when to charge or discharge depending on the time of day, so the driver just has to plug in their bus and walk away.

On weekends, holidays, or over the summer, the buses will spend even more time sitting unused—a whole fleet of batteries that might otherwise be idle. Given the resources needed to make batteries and the need for more grid storage, it makes sense to use what batteries are available as much as possible. “It’s not like you’re placing a battery somewhere and then you’re only using them for energy,” says Garg. “You’re using that battery for transportation, and in the evening you’re using the same battery during the peak hour for stabilizing the grid.”

Get ready to see more of these electric buses—if your kid isn’t already riding in one. Between 2022 and 2026, the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program is providing $5 billion to swap out gas-powered school buses for zero-emission and low-emission ones. States like California are providing additional funding to make the switch.

One hurdle is the significant upfront cost for a school district, as an electric bus costs several times more than an old-school gas-guzzler. But if the bus can do V2G, the excess battery power at the end of the day can be traded as energy back to the grid during peak hours to offset the cost difference. “We have used the V2G revenue to bring this transportation cost at par with the diesel buses,” says Garg.

For the Oakland schools project, Zum has been working with the local utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, to pilot how this works in practice. PG&E is testing out an adaptable system: Depending on the time of day and the supply and demand on the grid, a V2G participant pays a dynamic rate for energy use and gets paid based on the same dynamic rate for the energy they send back to the system. “Having a fleet of 74 buses—to be followed by other fleets, with more buses with Zum—is perfect for this, because we really want something that’s going to scale and make an impact,” says Rudi Halbright, product manager of vehicle-grid-integration pilots and analysis at PG&E.

Think of the diversity of vehicles on the road. Passenger cars have smaller batteries, sure enough, but many people might not actually need the 300 miles of range they paid for. Getting paid for V2G can offset the cost of the vehicle. (An EV can also act as a backup home battery during a power outage, providing additional value.) If people can fully charge their EVs at work, they might have a good amount of power left when they park in their garage at the end of the day, making their battery available to the grid as demand spikes. Then there are delivery vehicles, which have bigger batteries to tap into, and are also useful because they operate on a more fixed schedule. And there are legions of other fleets—run by city governments, universities, and businesses—that can also plug into V2G, providing battery power at different times of day, depending on their own operating schedules.

Let’s consider, though, that the extra charging and discharging can shorten the life of a battery. “We need to be mindful of that, to make sure that we’re being paid enough for the degradation that we have in our battery,” says Hidalgo-Gonzalez. While an EV battery needs to be replaced when its capacity drops below 70 or 80 percent, it can still support the grid outside of the vehicle: You can bundle a bunch of them together to provide storage at dedicated facilities. And the price of batteries continues to decline, so it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to replace them in EVs.

As V2G matures, different regions might land on different rates for buying back electricity; it’ll depend on the local utility and what state-level regulations are eventually put in place. But to reach its full potential, V2G will have to properly incentivize people to opt in. The more participants, the less the demand on any one battery. Many wheels make light work. “That’s one of the nice things of having 74 buses: You take a little from each,” says Halbright. “Our goal is to have 2 million vehicles by 2030 on the road that we have some control over when they’re charging, or in some cases, discharging. You don’t need that many, percentage-wise, participating at any one time to make a big impact.”

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FERC makes long-awaited move to overhaul the electric grid - NJ Spotlight News

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FERC makes long-awaited move to overhaul the electric grid  NJ Spotlight News

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New Rules to Overhaul Electric Grids Could Boost Wind and Solar Power - The New York Times

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Federal regulators on Monday approved sweeping changes to how America’s electric grids are planned and funded, in a move that supporters hope could spur thousands of miles of new high-voltage power lines and make it easier to add more wind and solar energy.

The new rule by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees interstate electricity transmission, is the most significant attempt in years to upgrade and expand the country’s creaking electricity network. Experts have warned that there aren’t nearly enough high-voltage power lines being built today, putting the country at greater risk of blackouts from extreme weather while making it harder to shift to renewable sources of energy and cope with rising electricity demand.

A big reason for the slow pace of grid expansion is that operators rarely plan for the long term, the commission said.

The nation’s three main electric grids are overseen by a patchwork of utilities and regional grid operators that mainly focus on ensuring the reliability of electricity to homes and businesses. When it comes to building new transmission lines, grid operators tend to be reactive, responding after a wind-farm developer asks to connect to the existing network or once a reliability problem is spotted.

The new federal rule, which was two years in the making, requires grid operators around the country to identify needs 20 years into the future, taking into account factors like changes in the energy mix, the growing number of states that require wind and solar power and the risks of extreme weather.

Grid planners would have to evaluate the benefits of new transmission lines, such as whether they would lower electricity costs or reduce the risk of blackouts, and develop methods for splitting the costs of those lines among customers and businesses.

“We must plan our nation’s grid for the long term,” said Willie Phillips, a Democrat who chairs the energy commission. “Our country’s aging grid is being tested in ways that we’ve never seen before. Without significant action now, we won’t be able to keep the lights on in the face of increasing demand, extreme weather, and new technologies.”

The commission approved the rule by a 2-1 vote, with the two Democratic commissioners in favor and the lone Republican, Mark Christie, opposed. Mr. Christie said the rule would allow states that want more renewable energy to unfairly pass on the costs of the necessary grid upgrades to their neighbors.

“This rule utterly fails to protect consumers,” said Mr. Christie. He said it “was intended to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to for-profit, special interests, particularly wind and solar developers.”

It could take years for the rule to have an effect, and the commission could face legal challenges from states concerned about higher costs.

Nationwide, energy companies have proposed more than 11,000 wind, solar and battery projects, but many are in limbo because there’s not enough capacity on the grid to accommodate them. What’s more, individual developers are currently required to pay for grid upgrades to accommodate their projects in a process that is piecemeal and slow.

Some critics say that’s like asking a trucking company to pay for an additional lane on a highway that all motorists ultimately use. A better approach, they say, would be to plan ahead for broad upgrades with the costs shared by a wide set of energy providers and users.

But the question of who pays for those grid expansions has sparked furious debate.

Officials in states that are less enthusiastic about wind and solar power, like Kentucky or West Virginia, say they could be forced to foot the bill for new multibillion-dollar transmission lines meant to help states like New Jersey or Illinois fulfill their renewable energy ambitions.

To allay those concerns, the commission laid out guidelines around how to split the costs of new transmission projects. Before any lines are planned, utilities and grid operators are supposed to work with states on a formula for allocating costs to customers based on the potential benefits from the new lines.

There is some precedent for this. The grid that handles electricity in 15 Midwest states, known as MISO, recently approved $10.3 billion in new power lines, partly because many of its states have ambitious renewable energy goals that require more transmission. MISO estimated the lines would create up to $69 billion in total benefits, including lower fuel costs and fewer blackouts. The grid operator was then able to split the costs even among states that didn’t have renewable policies but would share in the rewards.

“It’s super hard, and not everyone got what they wanted, but we all agreed that we would sit in a room and figure this out,” said Carrie Zalewski, a former state regulator for Illinois who is now with the American Clean Power Association, a renewable energy trade group.

Mr. Christie said the final rule didn’t give states enough power to object to how the costs would be shared. But Alison Clements, the other Democrat on the commission, said that giving each state a veto was “a recipe for inaction.”

The rule would also require utilities and grid operators to consider new technologies that might cost more upfront but could make grids more efficient and deliver long-term benefits, such as advanced conductors that can carry twice as much current as traditional lines.

Environmental groups and renewable energy companies praised the new rules.

“This is a monumental day in the fight against climate change,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, who had urged the commission to pass a forceful grid-planning rule.

Over the past year, Mr. Schumer and other Democrats have warned that efforts to fight climate change could fail if the nation’s grids aren’t overhauled. Power plants that burn coal and gas are a major source of the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. While the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds of billions of dollars into cleaner alternatives like wind and solar power, one recent analysis found that half of the climate benefits of that law could be lost if the United States can’t build new transmission at a faster pace.

It remains to be seen how effective the new rule will be, since that will depend on how grid operators implement it. A 2011 attempt by the commission to encourage transmission planning largely faltered, in part because many utilities were opposed to new long-distance lines that might undercut their monopolies, said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. Because of the decentralized nature of the nation’s grids, there is only so much that federal regulators can do to force operators to comply.

“I suspect this rule will be helpful in parts of the country where there’s already momentum for more transmission development” such as the Northeast, said Mr. Peskoe. “But in places where big utilities are resistant to more transmission, I don’t know if FERC can do that much.”

The new rule affects grid planning within 12 large regions around the country, but it wouldn’t require the planning of transmission to connect those different regions to each other, which some experts say is an even bigger need. The rule would also not affect the main grid in Texas, which is insulated from federal regulations because it doesn’t cross state lines.

The rule also doesn’t address the logistical and political challenges of constructing new long-distance power lines. It can take a decade or more for developers to locate a project through numerous jurisdictions, receive permits from a patchwork of different federal and state agencies and resolve lawsuits about spoiled views or damage to ecosystems.

The Biden administration recently finalized a program intended to cut the federal permitting time for certain large transmission lines in half. But speeding things up further might require action from Congress, where lawmakers have struggled to agree on new transmission policies.

In a separate rule on Monday, the federal energy commission did, however, outline certain situations in which it might override state objections to a small subset of new power lines.

At issue are a set of ten “national interest electric transmission corridors” that the Energy Department has tentatively identified across the country — places where new lines would be particularly beneficial. If state regulators either blocked or delayed a project in those corridors, the federal commission could step in to approve it.

But some experts question how often this would happen, since the commission has historically preferred to collaborate with states.

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