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Concerns about Railbelt grid progress
Need for more widespread engagement and statutory clarity have slowed moves towards unification of regional electrical system Alan Bailey Petroleum News
During a Dec. 12 meeting of the Regulatory Commission of Alaska commissioners expressed concern about a slowing of progress towards achieving a more unified approach to the management and operation of the Alaska Railbelt electricity grid. The utilities have signed a memorandum of understanding for the formation of a Railbelt Reliability Council, to govern how the Railbelt grid operates and to oversee reliability standards for the grid. But further progress in RRC implementation has yet to happen. And efforts to form a transmission company, or transco, to operate the transmission grid have also yet to bear fruit.
The overall objective is to minimize the cost of electricity for Railbelt consumers by improving the efficiency of the electrical system.
“That process right now is a bit stalled,” Commissioner Antony Scott commented about the RRC initiative. “The MOU contemplated actions by other parties who were part of the process of negotiating it … some of these parties, including the commission, haven’t lapped at the chance of playing in the role that was defined for them.”
Statutory issues Scott also commented that the signing of the MOU for the RRC had been in many ways a remarkable achievement that he would not have predicted three or four years ago. He said that one issue the commission is trying to figure out is the extent to which there may need to be any statutory changes for the RRC to come into existence as envisaged - the concept involves commission jurisdiction to regulate the new organization. But that jurisdiction would be awkward under the terms of the statute that governs the commission’s regulatory role, Scott said.
In particular, while the RRC would oversee several Railbelt utilities in terms of issues such as transmission grid planning, the statutory wording tends to be geared towards relationships between the commission and individual utilities. And there are issues relating to enforcement actions for an organization like an RRC.
RRC funding Another issue relates to the mechanism whereby the RRC would be funded. The concept that has emerged would involve the recovery of RRC costs through ratepayer bills, rather like the regulatory cost charge for recovering the commission’s costs.
“But right now I don’t see any good statutory mechanism by which that could happen,” Scott said. “I think at minimum there’s some parallel work around creating a statutory approach that will ultimately facilitate whatever comes out of that RRC process … some of us had hoped that by this time we would have issued a definitive order clarifying exactly what our path forward would be and how we would engage in a process, and we’re not there today.”
Scott said that he and Commissioner Robert Pickett had held meetings with most people who have an interest in the Railbelt grid issues.
Reliability standards Pickett commented on progress towards establishing a unified and mandatory set of reliability standards for the electricity grid. In April the Railbelt utilities filed a unified set of standards with the commission, and the utilities are developing a set of cybersecurity standards to add to those existing standards. Pickett said that the commission has conducted meetings with the utilities on the reliability standards issue and still sees a number of questions that need to be addressed. These questions include the protection of critical infrastructure; physical security and cybersecurity; the enforcement of the standards; and the mechanism for updating or changing the standards.
Pickett said that, from the commission’s perspective, one challenge at the moment is the commission’s workload, given the number of dockets with tight timelines that the commission is having to deal with. The commission is also in the process of preparing a report to the Legislature on the status of moves towards grid unification. And the fact that a new Legislature and governor are coming into office may impact the speed at which initiatives can move ahead.
On the other hand, the utilities have made much more progress than Pickett had anticipated in 2015, when the commission had made recommendations for a more unified approach to operating the Railbelt electrical grid.
“I am cautiously optimistic,” Pickett said. “It’s at a point where we can’t let stuff just stop.”
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