Now What?

“Maine voters soundly reject CMP power line corridor”?screams the headline in the Portland Press Herald. The implications of that defeat are significant for power generation in our region for years to come.?

To understand the implications of yesterdays vote, it is necessary to understand how we got here. In 1965, the Great Northeast Blackout left more than 30 million people without power. While I don’t remember the event, I do remember the movie “Where were you when the lights went out” with Doris Day that came out a few years later. Not only did that power failure inspire a movie, it transformed power generation and transmission across the country.?

In 1965, individual utilities were responsible for power generation, transmission of that electricity, and ultimately distribution to local customers. These “kingdoms” were autonomous and self-reliant. But they also turned out to be fragile and unreliable.?

The industry understood it needed to improve reliability and in 1971 the Northeast Power Coordinating Council was formed. The most significant reform of the NPCC was to create “power pools” that allowed generators located on neighboring utilities to more easily provide power outside of their utility.

This system worked for over 30 years, and reliability improved significantly. But over time, prices continued to climb. Since there was not incentive to build generation capacity, or improve infrastructure, utilities did not. In the early 1990’s Congress and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission created Independent System Operators (ISO) to increase competition in wholesale power generation and improve infrastructure. The ISO structure separated power generation companies from transmission and distribution companies. While ISO does many complex activities, likely the most significant is that it created a market that welcomed new wholesale generators access to the grid to offer on-demand electricity generation and compete in an unregulated competitive wholesale market. ISO-NE was born.

It is important to know that transmission rates charged to individual customers are regulated by each state’s Public Utility Commission. That adds another layer of complexity for the industry. The advent of smaller generating “renewable” power generators has also created complexity that we have not solved.??

Where does the power come from that is powering your screen right now? Maine generates less power than it uses (https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ME). Maine requires power generation from other places in the ISO-NE territory to meet our needs. It matters very much to Maine that power is available, reliable and affordable. The ISO-NE website shows a graph in real time of what types of generators are powering our grid and the prices in each state for that wholesale power (see above).?Natural Gas, Nuclear, and Hydro produce the largest percentage of power in our region??(https://www.iso-ne.com).??

This is not to start the debate about Climate Change and our reliance on fossil fuels. My purpose here is to define our problems. Today’s generation capacity is 18,502 MW. Of the power we are using as I write this, 76% comes from burning Natural Gas, Wood, Refuse, and Landfill Gas. Hydropower accounts for 12%, and two percent comes from Solar and Wind.?

Like any market, the more power that gets generated (at a time when people want it - supply meeting demand) the lower the price for that power, demand being equal. With the rush to electric cars and heat pumps, demand for electricity is forecast to increase. Without new generation capacity, prices will go up too.?Adding to the cost problem for consumers are many proposals that swap existing power generation for more expensive alternatives.

And that brings us back to the hydropower in Quebec that is currently being wasted because there isn’t a transmission line to take it to the ISO-NE territory. Maine soundly defeated that line yesterday. Maine has proposed an offshore wind farm, to much resistance, that would produce 120MW, or 0.65% of ISO-NE requirements. Exact numbers are hard to find, but it is safe to say that there is less than 200MW of installed solar power in Maine today (1% of the total ISO-NE requirement). In Maine, no new facility is easy to permit or build. Constructing new energy generation is particularly difficult.?

The bottom line – New England needs to generate more than 18,500MW of electricity for a typical Fall day in 2021. As we grow demand for electric cars and heat pumps, we will require even more generation capacity. Yesterday’s election didn’t help.?