By Grant Watson, Market Analyst

As the number of hours the average US consumer experiences power outages continues to climb, the FERC is seeking ways to maintain grid reliability.  One of the ways in which they have attempted to address this and other issues facing the US power grid is with FERC Order 881.  FERC Order 881 requires all transmission providers to use ambient adjusted line ratings to evaluate near-term transmission service and to increase the accuracy of near-term line ratings.

Traditionally, static line ratings have been used to determine how much power a line can carry.  Static line ratings are based on a worst case scenario to ensure public safety.  However, static line ratings are inefficient.  The amount of power a line can carry varies based on factors such as temperature, line composition, cloud cover, and more. 

With wind and solar power as the fastest-growing sources of energy in the world (1), battery storage is becoming critical to solve intermittency dilemmas and provide stability to the grid.  Yes Energy is proud to support market participants as we all navigate the changing dynamics of the grid and transition towards a clean energy future.  Our team recently attended CLEANPOWER 2022 in San Antonio.  It was a great event, and we look forward to attending next year and continuing to support the clean energy community going into the future.  In this blog, we’ll discuss the key learnings from one of our favorite sessions at CLEANPOWER - Headwinds & Tailwinds of Energy Storage Market Growth. 

Today is May 19th.  We haven’t even made it halfway through the year, and we are already experiencing unprecedented weather conditions, record load, and resource adequacy warnings.  Going into the summer, it certainly appears that transmission operators across the country may face challenges meeting load.  Read on to learn more about some of the dynamics affecting the generation stack, ISOs, and ultimately consumers in this week’s blog post.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported on the threat that Russian hackers pose to the U.S. power grid.  The story developed further on Wednesday when agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy issued an alert about new malware “Pipedream” focused on Industrial Control Systems (ICS), particularly, energy facilities.  This is one of the latest energy stories to make headline news, alongside reports of record numbers of utility-scale storage, solar, and wind power coming onto the grid.

Written by Sarah Baxley Scott, Live Power Consultant

The Wind Production Tax Credit and its impact on the cost of wind production

The Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) is available to utility-scale wind projects, and provides a tax credit of $10-20 per MWh of production for the first ten years of operation. As such, the marginal cost of production for eligible projects falls below $0/MWh; for example, if a wind project receives a tax credit of $19/MWh, the project will produce when prices at its local node are above $(19)/MWh.

Renewable penetration is increasing across the U.S., and while this helps meet renewable energy targets, can there be too much of a good thing?  An example of the challenges that increased renewables can cause manifested itself in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP)  last week.  Read on to learn about SPP’s record-breaking week, alongside an analysis of the event from Yes Energy’s Product Solution Expert, Jake Landis.

California's New Goldrush

CAISO has quickly established itself as a hotbed for large-scale energy storage. CAISO added 2,419 megawatts (MW) of storage during 2021, a more than 10-fold increase in battery storage capacity from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021, and interconnection queues continue to fill up with storage and storage-hybrid resources.

In this blog post we’ll break down the causes and ramifications of the reprice event in PJM for February 2022.  The majority of the impact (both in the initial congestion and changes related to the repricing) was in the Northern Neck Peninsula in PJM.