 everybody. This is Guillermo Salatier, your host for today. I am the, I am the, of course, hosting perspective on energy here on things like Hawaii. And my day job, I am a director of international services for HSI, where I am subject matter expert in the industrial skills for the utility industry. And again, welcome to today's episode. Today, we're going to be talking about basically preparation for cold weather peak, right? It's winter electricity stress and maybe low shedding. Hopefully, they don't do any of that. But every discussion kind of how the industry is doing as we just got passed a few months ago past the summer peak. And what some lessons learned from that particular experience for the industry and then how we're looking as we approach the winter. There's a lot of different opportunities that were seized to make improvements. But then we're also expecting there's what happened back in Texas a few years ago with the cold weather snap is still fresh in our minds. We'll be discussing that a little bit on today's show. So what did we learn from the last winter cold snap that ERCOT in Texas experienced? And one of the reasons being is that aside from the actual shortages on fuel surges on the potential output of some of the generators, they had had freeze protection already in place from a previous event nearly 10 years prior. And at that point, they protected down to those temperatures. And the expectation was the temperatures will never get that low again, because, you know, preparing for every additional degree of colder colder weather is an exponentially higher cost. So if you are forecasting that you're unlikely to face that kind of event again, then you protect yourself that worst case event in history, which would have been back in 2000. It goes 2012. So fast forward about what says over years later, less than a decade later, and we come across the experience that we had last year, right? Where we had the problem with having a capacity shortfall in Texas, where we saw issues not just with their renewables, but also with their with their fleet of conventional combustion turbine generators, not having adequate fuel reserves, and even getting issues with the pipeline getting all their pipeline for getting fuel to their different combustion turbines and come by cycle plants. Some of that is not just the electricity infrastructure, but also the natural gas infrastructure levels, compressor stations were having issues with their controls, much like we saw in the previous event, right? Some of their instrumentation and controls were freezing up. This time was a little bit different. They had a lot of problems with the output of all of their renewable resources. Mainly their solar sites were not able to produce. All of them were covered up in snow. And suddenly a lot of the wind turbines also were not able to give the output that was expected. So naturally you end up with some situation where they had to do some feeder rotation and used up all of the available demand site management, which is the interrupt of the load and a lot of these residential accounts. So again, more lessons learned, quite a bit of changes were planned. Quite a few of them have been implemented in preparation for the next event. So here we are. And we're looking at one two-way webinar with the USCA on an outlook for the industry, how they're looking, for example, for this winter. And for the most part, they seemed okay. The preparations were made and they seem to be in pretty good shape, pretty confident they'll be able to meet the demand for this coming winter and then the peak. So given that, I feel pretty good about how the industry in itself has responded to these events and how they prepared for this next cold weather. Now with standing the fact that you have issues occasionally with some of the renewables, whereas if you have a problem with solar sites reducing their forecast, that may go lots. That becomes impossible if a lot of those panels have snow collecting on the surface. You're just not going to get the same amount of power you would hope, if any at all. So with that in mind, we're looking at a winter peak, but let's also look at what happened in California or what almost happened in California this last summer during the summer peaks and they were in the process of doing an interoperable load. And they were also issuing energy emergency alerts level two. And we'll talk about what those are in a minute. But they were they were doing public appeals. They were reducing customer load by shutting up appliances, usually a customer signs up for one of those programs and demand side management. And they, you know, they get paid to be to be available to have their air conditioner, water heaters and pool pumps shut down in an event of, of a capacity shortfall with generation. So clear, clearly they they made use of that resource in California. And they were able to get through those those peak load days without having to rotate too many feet. So luckily for them, you know, they, they, I think they got lucky. Honestly, it wasn't really a fuel issue, just a matter of having enough generation available to meet that peak load. They were already maxed out on their imports. And they could just not bring any more generation online. Sadly, a lot of that had to do with the fact that they retired a lot of their a lot of their fleet. And they replaced that with renewables. And even so that wasn't enough. And of course, with the viability and renewables, it wasn't enough to meet that load, especially during lighting peaks. So for them, they had quite a bit of a challenge. Now, touch upon a couple of topics here on the demand side management, being able to interrupt, basically interrupting appliances in a customer's home, voluntarily, right? So customers sign up for these programs, they usually get paid a couple of dollars a month for, for being on there sometimes as much as 16 or $20. But really what it is, is to, you know, they made themselves available to, to have their, either their pool pumps or water heaters, or their air conditioners, are they, or actually heaters shut down during an event of one of these capacity shortfalls. A great resource, right? And it's, it's usually a lot of bang for the buck when it comes from the utility perspective, as far as investment goes. However, now a lot of customers stay on once they get hit, usually, my customer will be on this program for years, and never, never get hit. And then the way the day they do get hit, utility had a need, then you'll see that they tend to sign off maybe a couple of weeks right after that. Because I guess a few minutes, so that's a couple of hours of having that being inconvenienced was was a, probably more than they wanted to endure. Sadly enough, though, it's, it's, when you don't have that type of resource available and more, more customers sign off, that the impact of that type of resource, you know, diminishes and then the utility loses that, loses that, that type of tool. So now the, the next, the next thing we're looking at as well, I mean, regarding that particular shortfall is winter and we're expecting some, some cold winters coming up and we've already seen a few, a few storms that have already stressed the system quite a bit. And we're going to see, hopefully, what the industry has done in order to prepare for this cold weather. According to, it was NERC, it was Calaiso, New York ISO and a few other entities, you know, that that were at the webinar earlier this week, I attended, they seem pretty confident that, that, you know, everybody was ready, ERCOT, WEC, even the Eastern Interconnection. So pretty confident if you're pretty good about that. But you know, there's, there's always like that cautious optimism, right? You should be fine as long as you don't lose one or two generators, right? And that's usually the challenge when it comes to meeting your winter peak. And of course, the other challenges, you know, say you don't have any, any fuel, fuel capacity shortfalls. That's usually one of the things that, that presents a challenge when approaching these winter peaks. Now, as I was saying earlier, energy emergency alerts, and those are, those are usually issued by their reliability coordinators at the request of a balancing authority. Balancing authority is balancing load and generation. So they are, they are expecting a shortage. They're believed to supply load, they're usually coordinate with their reliability coordinator, the RCs to begin to, to decide what energy, emergency energy alert level to issue. So what are they? There's three levels, right? And then there's a fourth one, energy and emergency alert level zero, which means it's not clear. So let's start with one energy level one describes having all of your resources are currently online, you bought everything you can, and your meeting or your load, you haven't shut anybody off, you haven't used any of your demand side management, you haven't used any of those like tools to reduce customer load by shutting up appliances, everything is pretty much running as running as usual. It's just and and you're able to to withstand losing your largest generator, meaning a more severe single contingency. So that's another level one, I mean, meaning you're right at the edge, but you're still have enough of those contingency reserves to be able to withstand the loss of your worst possible case scenario, which is, you know, is it's like, like, like you're in a watch when it comes to like a hurricane point of. So you're at that stage, if the load is a little higher than you forecasted, and now you're getting, you're eating into that that reserve margin. And say you do happen to lose that largest generating, you know, you have, you know, that most severe single contingency, now you would have to escalate that to a level two. And in this event means that if you do lose that, the generator, the largest generator in your system, you will likely not be able to support that. And you will be forced to at that point, maybe rotate feeders, which is not shedding customers, or using the demand side management, which is shutting up appliances and customers homes and voluntarily, of course. So usually any EA to there, you know, there's your that's not issued right at the point where where you get into it, you issue that, you know, some time ahead, right? So if you're seeing that your load is progressing, and you're noticing that by a certain time, a few hours from now, you're going to have that kind of a shortfall. Usually that EA is issued way ahead of time. And one of the things that are that that the certain set of actions that even go into effect, usually, once you're issued those, any of those alerts, now, all the other BAs and generators in your NTPs, even in your region are alerted to what's happening. So usually, though, they can bring a generator that they may have been off for a reserve shutdown, or just not being run that day, where they may, you know, offer to bring it online and sell you that power, if you have the space available and your your transmission to bring it in, right? So those are some of the solutions that can be presented given that alert, usually get help from your neighbors, or you're able to buy power from some other facility somewhere else. So that's definitely an advantage having that, right? It's also buying emergency power from other places. Of course, also, if you're, if you're about to you're already using the demand side management that also puts you in the EA tool automatically, or even doing public appeals, like we saw happening in California, where the governor and the power company was asking everybody to go ahead and turn up the thermostats. So, you know, from a 72 to a 78 or even 280 degrees Fahrenheit, so you're not you're not consuming as much energy. So, you know, it's all different tools to be able to pretty much do some what they call peak shaving, you're reducing your peak load by maybe a couple of hundred megawatts, 200 megawatts overall in a 20,000 megawatt system. Pretty significant, you know, that that's that's probably one entire combustion turbine site, or half of a typical combined cycle plan. Now, as you're wondering, you know, EA three, right, what constitutes getting into that sort of condition? Well, in that case, now you're looking at when you're about to or you already are basically dropping customers off together, they call that firm load shedding. So, if you're at that stage already, right, it's pretty much you if you run out of options, you just don't have enough power to just meet the load, forget about losing a generator, you can't lose a single generator at this point anymore. So, you just don't have enough to what you have on. So, in this case, now you're now you're asking for help, and you are already hoping, you know, have already got all the hope you can get and see if anybody has any more or more than likely you're already putting customers in the dark at this point. So, that's an EA three. And those are pretty severe. When when you're entering these conditions, hopefully we don't see any of those in this winter. But I think for ERCOT specifically, especially the lessons learned from their winter peak last time, they have enrolled a lot more of those demand side management customers. So, you'll be seeing a lot more of these options right when it comes to peak shaving. The challenge there is of course, is you're in the middle of the winter peak, you're cold, and then you're shutting people's heaters off when you're turning out their central AC or central heaters for like 15, 20 minutes, right? Well, I mean, if it's just for like maybe that one hour during the peak, you know, it should be too much of a hardship to endure for these customers, right? Certainly a lot better than actually rotating feeders where you lose everything out together. But you mentioned the fact that you might even impact some of the compressor stations, right? Some of these places have you lose transmission assets as well. So, definitely something to look at other parts of the country, the Northeast, the Midwest, all that, they've done quite a bit of winterization of their facilities, their plants, their gas compressor stations as well. So it should be in pretty good shape at this point. But again, I mean, the world that we're watching closely, how we as an industry here in this country manage these resources. And that's just, you know, the US, you know, there's definitely concerns in Europe right now with them having adequate natural gas reserves to be able to supply energy during the cold winter. Of course, it gets a lot colder over there than it does here. So for that, that's going to be a quite a big concern. Right now, let's let's, at least for this episode, let's worry about the US and Canada, and how we are shaping up to look at the these winter peaks. For now, one of the other things we noticed is that we normally have a load forecasting in some cases that, you know, it can be anywhere, anywhere between one to three percent error, because it load forecast depends on historical load. Of course, and it all begins with forecasted temperatures. So doing, doing a weather forecast, right, for a particular area will certainly, you know, it's never error free. There's always going to be some level of uncertainty. And with that level of uncertainty, you know, you have to accommodate for that type that has a direct impact on load. You're looking at the same weather pattern that you had last year, based on a similar day, similar pattern of the day, for example. So a load pattern on a Sunday is completely different than a load pattern on a Thursday, for example, people are at home versus people are at work. So so that in itself, you know, introduces error into the whole forecast. So once you have that happening, and you run what they call unit commitment, which is the usually any type of software used to be able to be able to schedule and dispatch generating units, both reliably and economically, you know, that of course, you know, has to plays a role. So you don't want to have every generator running at the wrong schedule, because that becomes expensive, and you're also burning fuel, much needed fuel. But at the same time, you don't want to have don't want to schedule generators too late, because then you won't have them when you need them. So that's one challenge. And the other challenge, of course, is having a limited number of starts due to environmental constraints. Some of these combustion turbines can only start twice a day because of emissions. So if you have a unit starting in the morning, they have to shut down after the morning peak. And then it has to start again in the later early afternoon. And it trips, it may not be available for that particular time of the day. And of course, that presents the balancing authority and the generator operator with some more headaches in that case. So different things to consider here. Certainly something to to watch as we're getting ready. What advice I would have as as customers, you know, for example, I I I definitely have some preparation in mind, you know, whether you're you're looking at having your your vehicle top box, you know, in case you may need that. If you have, for example, a generator at home, make sure you have some fuel ready just in case. Kind of the same way we deal with the hurricanes here in the in in the East Coast of Florida and the Gulf, right? You know, it's kind of the same way with cold weather, except now you're, you know, cold weather can can can be a lot more dangerous than dealing with heat, right? Heat or you're dealing with heat and then dehydration. But with cold weather, it's, you know, there are quite a number of fatalities in that case, right? So if you do have a generator, just be ready. And in some cases, usually you're going to ride an iron or shelter as well. If the forecast that load is getting is getting pretty bad when it comes to the winter, winter weather in that case. So it's a matter of preparing not again, it's not like it's it's it's almost like a hurricane in some regards, but a little bit different others. Weather is cold enough, you know, your water may freeze your food may freeze. You may actually have something adequate to be able to generate heat. But then again, not indoors, because of the fact that if you're, you know, you're burning any combustibles indoors, you can really find yourself in trouble with with suffocation issues, right? So or carbon dioxide poisoning. But along with that, you know, just a matter of being ready to really foresee any any potential problems with this. But just, you know, just take your usual precautions when it comes to this extreme weather. And I think we'll we'll do okay. The other thing to consider as well is as we're looking at electric vehicles, and probably also battery storage and households, a lot of these batteries don't do as well in cold weather as it would in mild to warm weather. So that is another thing to consider, you know, those few of you that probably have some kind of battery storage devices at home, you know, you can definitely have a challenge when it comes to looking at the capacity of those devices, as you're heading into into this particular like dip in temperatures. So just keep that in mind. Always consider a backup. Having a small inverter inverter generator, 2000 watt generator, it's actually pretty much how you need a couple of gallons of fuel and that'll get you to those peaks. Or you can sit in your car and just run that here. Hopefully outside of your garage. You don't want to suffocate. But definitely different options. Running a generator outside can definitely run the extension cords. And you know, you can run a small space heater, electric space heater in your in a room. And you keep yourself comfortable and warm. And those generators can run about maybe two or three hours, right? With the amount of fuel they carry. That's just maybe a couple of gallons. So this can definitely get you through those peaks, right? But that's, you know, worst case scenario, right? Usually, if not, it's if you can probably set it out in your car if you had to, or just, you know, if you want to stay in your house usually for the most part, if your home's already warm, you can probably, well insulated, you can probably enjoy that residual heat for about maybe two, maybe three days, depending on how warm your house was when I finally lost power. So that is the best advice I can give you. If you have any questions or comments, please go ahead and put them in the comments below. I'll try my best to respond to them. And again, thank you all for watching. Again, we'll be watching what happens with this winter. I'm sure I'll do another episode once this season is over as we begin to spring and see how we did. I know that right now winterization and cold weather preparation for all these generating facilities and the natural gas and fuel infrastructure is quite the hot topic and everybody's watching to see how well we are prepared. And more importantly, what else can be done to make sure we're ready. So all right, well, thank you again. This is all I have for today. Again, if I'm interested in learning more about industrial skills and how the electric utility works, just go to hsi.com and in there find industrial skills training. And we have quite the topics under whether it's operating power plants or it's running gas infrastructure or actually system operations training when it comes to electric utilities. So again, thank you very much and and also wishing everybody happy holidays and the happy new year. Looks like this will be my last show for the year. I won't be back until January. So once again, always fun and enjoy the rest of your year. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.