If a tree falls in the forest, and the electric grid is better prepared for it, did it still fall?

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My wife and I visited Hawaii’s Big Island recently. We’ll remember the breezy Kona side of the island for its beaches and one delicious poké lunch. But we fell in love with the Hilo side. Every scene in Hilo felt more dramatic than the last. I mean walls of fresh lava flowing into the ocean; black sand beaches hiding under overgrown bluffs, and waterfalls crashing hundreds of feet through the rainforest. And then, as we drove around looking for a quick dinner with only a couple short hours left until our redeye back to Chicago, Hilo gave us one last dramatic turn—downtown went pitch black. 

We realized the power was out as we looked to turn left on to Kilauea Ave. The traffic lights weren’t working, and two cars swerved through the intersection as we hesitated. A couple dark blocks later, we decided the safest thing to do would be to pull over and try to wait it out. After refreshing Twitter for 20 minutes, we saw a tweet from Hawaii Electric: “Reports of a large tree down on Waianuenue Ave. 1st responder is en route.”

We sat there for a minute, trying to figure out exactly what to do next. I thought back to a couple years of my childhood spent in India, where the power went out almost daily. I remember fumbling around for a flashlight at home, or if we were out, then waiting for the whirr of a generator to click on. But here, sitting in our rental car, we had neither. We figured it was time to head to the airport where they would surely have power. The drive over felt a little eerie. Families streamed out of restaurants and stores and milled around on the sidewalk trying to calm their kids in the darkness. Cars and tourists packed the one solitary well-lit gas station, powered by a backup diesel generator.

We’d learn after we returned to Chicago that power had been restored to most customers in Hilo later that night, and to all customers by 10 am the next morning. Not a terribly long outage, and from what I could tell scrolling into the utility’s Twitter history, not a terribly uncommon one. But I've thought about Hilo again in the weeks since an earthquake in Puerto Rico devastated a power plant and wiped out electricity for millions of people across the island. Puerto Rico was a reminder that outages are more than just inconvenient. They can create health hazards when refrigeration goes down, leave people stranded without transit, disrupt drinking water supplies, and compromise safety when public lighting and security systems fail. They can be life threatening for people relying on power to keep medical devices running. And they tend to disproportionately harm low-income and rural communities who can’t afford back-up generators, and already suffer from high relative energy burdens.

Power outages aren’t a new phenomenon, but the good news is that their worst impacts are not inevitable. In fact, a combination of technology and policy is changing the way we think about electric reliability, outage response, and strengthening the grid. Utilities, regulators, and consumers have a role to play in this shift. Here’s how.

What can utilities do?

Trees—like the one that fell on Wainuenue Avenue—tend to be one of the main culprits behind power outages. For decades, utilities have tried to minimize tree-related outages through “vegetation management,” trimming tree branches to try and make sure that they don’t interfere with power lines. More recently, some utilities have started to go beyond tree trimming, deploying technologies such as Outage Management Systems (OMS) and Distribution Automation (DA). Those technologies can’t stop trees from falling, but they can reduce the number of customers affected by an outage and the time it takes to restore power to affected customers. DA, for instance, allows the utility to not only detect faults, but also isolate the outage to a small section of the power grid close to where the fault occurred before it spreads to other segments on the feeder, and restore power to customers outside that section within minutes rather than hours (sometimes called “self-healing” capabilities). OMS, DA, and other grid modernization technologies can be a valuable addition to utilities’ toolkits. But utilities should be careful to first develop a broader, coherent strategy that articulates their grid needs (for example, strengthening a particularly constrained section of their grid), and how modernization technologies – working in concert – could help solve those needs. That’s where planning, and regulatory oversight, comes in.

What can regulators do?

Utility regulators are generally required by law to focus on ensuring reliable, safe and least-cost service to utility customers. Depending on the state, regulators can pull several different levers to improve utilities’ reliability performance—including scrutinizing utilities’ distribution grid planning processes and system investments (other levers include requiring reporting, and tying the utility’s earnings to its performance—an approach broadly known as “performance-based regulation”—but that is a topic for another post). Traditionally, regulators haven’t looked as closely at distribution system planning and investments as closely as utilities’ generation investments. As utilities propose increasing levels of investment in their distribution systems, however, that is starting to change. Regulators are starting to ask utilities to pull back the curtain and demonstrate exactly how they plan to improve system reliability and meet customers’ needs, especially if the utility is proposing significant “modernization” spending. Regulators also want to know whether utilities are adequately anticipating and leveraging “distributed energy resources” (DERs) (think: rooftop solar, batteries, and flexible load), which have the ability to provide valuable grid-strengthening benefits if they are explicitly incorporated into the distribution planning process. That’s where consumers come in.

What can consumers do?

Back in Hilo, my wife and I felt pretty helpless when the lights went out. But thanks to DERs, people are no longer powerless (excuse the pun) in dealing with frequent outages. Individual homes and businesses, for example, might install batteries as an option for backup power, and as the costs of batteries continue to decline, they are an increasingly attractive alternative to polluting diesel backup generators. Batteries, solar panels, and other DERs can also be aggregated (generally by a third-party) and dispatched to strengthen the grid (in return for compensation from the utility). Several communities have dreamt bigger and implemented microgrids—a cluster of neighborhood DERs that can function independently of the power grid during an outage, and then reconnect to the grid when the power is back on. Microgrids can be especially useful for keeping the lights on at critical facilities like medical clinics, public shelters, grocery stores and gas stations. The Blue Lake Rancheria tribe up in Humboldt, California, for instance, developed a microgrid including solar panels and batteries on its 100-acre reservation. That microgrid was an essential retreat during the recent series of power shutoffs by the Northern California utility PG&E, providing power to 10,000 people, keeping the lights on at key facilities, allowing the local newspaper to continue publishing, and even ensuring that critically ill patients could receive the medical services they needed.

Bringing it all together

In a few promising cases, utilities, regulators and communities are taking steps towards strengthening the grid by working in concert. In New York, the utility Con Edison (which some consider the oldest electric distribution utility in the world) received approval from state regulators to implement a modernization strategy that includes a forward-looking plan for its distribution system, and several advanced investments (like Distribution Automation) to improve reliability. But Con Edison’s problem-solving approach isn’t limited to proposing and implementing its own solutions. It also leans on its customer-sited resources such as battery storage, solar generation, energy efficiency and even microgrids, which, working together, can help the utility meet its grid’s needs.

Con Edison has far from eliminated outages. Trees will still fall on power lines. But it’s an example of how utilities, regulators and communities can link arms to strengthen the grid and minimize the negative impacts of outages when they occur.

P.S. When I returned to Chicago, I couldn’t resist checking what Hawaiian Electric and Hawaii’s utility regulators are doing to shore up reliability in Hawaii. Sure enough, the utility has a pending application before the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission to implement Phase 2 of a “Grid Modernization Strategy,” including several advanced distribution automation capabilities. The Hawaii PUC has also opened a proceeding to investigate a “microgrid services tariff”. That proceeding is expected to facilitate the development of microgrids in Hawaii, and make it easier for customers to participate in those microgrids.

P.P.S. In the two years since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico’s grid, the electric authorities on the island have invested heavily in strengthening their distribution system. Incidentally, those investments include several solar-powered microgrids, including one in the city of Loíza that powers the local Boys and Girls club. According to an interesting article in Fast Company published this week, those microgrids became critical oases in the wake of the recent earthquakes—keeping fire stations, hospitals and community centers running.