Arizona is among more than 20 states that have joined a plan by the Biden Administration to modernize the country’s energy grid.
According to the White House, the Federal-State Modern Grid Deployment Initiative aims to bring together different levels of government to "cost-effectively meet the challenges and opportunities that the power sector faces in the 21st century."
With The Show to talk about what some of those challenges and opportunities are, both here in Arizona and nationwide, is Nathan Johnson, an associate professor at Arizona State University and director of the Laboratory for Energy and Power Solutions there.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Nathan, what do you think about this agreement that 21 states have made with the feds?
NATHAN JOHNSON: The nation's energy grid has been in need of modernization for decades and that need will continue for the next few decades because every generation poses its own needs and challenges in the global environment, economically, politically, technology changes.
Now, looking at our present stress on the grid, you have the aging infrastructure and there is a seat to maintain that and modernize that. But at the same time, we need to increase the amount of infrastructure we have because the last 20 years we've been generally flat in terms of total energy utilization in the nation. But now we're on a, an exponential growth trend as you've begun to transition into the electrification of everything. And then also bring in data centers and manufacturing online domestically.
BRODIE: Is it entirely clear how to, to do this modernization? And I mostly ask because there are all sorts of, you know, renewable energies, you know, a lot of folks are very high on natural gas. A lot of folks are high, for example, on nuclear energy. Like without really knowing where the energy is coming from, is it possible to to fully modernize the grid and sort of future-proof it from, you know, our needs in the future?
JOHNSON: When we think about modernizing the grid, that scope of question should be expanded to say, how do you modernize the electric sector, which includes generation transmission, distribution and consumption? And at the latter side, you also include metering and other innovations at the customer side of the meter.
So when we think about all of the soup to nuts, end to end parts of the sector, if we're looking at nuclear, if we're looking at solar or wind or virtual power plants, electric vehicles, the answer is, do you pursue one of them or more? It's all, yes. And, and more than that.
And so when anyone focuses on a specific technology to future-proof where we might go in 10 years or 20 years from now, the answer is it is going to be a mix and we also need to innovate and invent things that we don't presently have today to drop down to the integration potential. And also the cost to create a reliable cost-effective, safe and sustainable future.
BRODIE: So does that, for example, mean that if let's say we need more transmission lines, just build the transmission lines, regardless of what type of energy they'll necessarily be carrying and then worry about the rest of it sort of as it comes?
JOHNSON: Over the next few decades, the nation will need to significantly expand its transmission pack capacity in order to route power from where it can be produced to where it's needed, particularly in areas of high solar wind and nuclear geothermal generation to large load centers such as cities and industrial areas.
Now, the transmission corridors which have been championed by the U.S. federal government as well as utilities and other agencies and also the, the act which came out or the initiative to, to coordinate state efforts together is an effort to build up and enhance these corners. But to complement that is not just the where do they go, but how fast can you build them?
Because again, the nation's electric, electricity use is expanding so fast that we just can't build things fast enough. And so then comes a question of, can you get in the materials? Can you increase the permitting so that we can take something that would usually take 10 years and collapse that down to something that would take 2 to 5 years?
BRODIE: That really seems to be a serious consideration here, right? Because pretty much everything that you're talking about when you're talking about modernizing the grid or the energy sector takes a good amount of time. And as you say, like it's needed this kind of work for a long time.
JOHNSON: Now, that's quite right. And if you take a look at the largest load centers, semiconductors, manufacturing data centers, it could take 1 to 2 years to build a plant, but it could take 3 to 5 years to get the electrical power to actually run the operations. And so economic development growth and global expansion of population, et cetera is not being slowed down by those and load centers is actually being slowed down by the availability of materials financing, permitting, engineering to get the job done.
And so when we think about the constraints of the the enhanced longer timeline of these larger scale projects, we might also benefit from looking smaller source at the customer side, at the community side, at the campus side, military bases and commercial industrial customers for, what can they do to modify the electrical demand or what can they do to add solar and storage in a way that reduces the need for those longer duration, more expensive projects that we might be able to displace or at least delay the implementation of by focusing local on on fast moving projects?
BRODIE: When you look at Arizona's energy sector and maybe even the Phoenix area’s, you know, energy situation, what are to you the biggest immediate needs when you talk about, you know, trying to modernize the grid or modernize this industry? What has to happen here?
JOHNSON: The answer to Arizona's energy challenges are probably everything faster everywhere because everyone's estimates for low growth and expansion are well below what is actually happening and we simply can't build fast enough to meet the demand signal. And so that includes additional generation, transmission, distribution and then the inside billing and retailing.
BRODIE: Well, how do you do that? I mean, you, you alluded to this, but I would imagine that population growth plus hotter summers and more air-conditioning is not a great combination for, for a, a system that needs more capacity in the near term.
JOHNSON: We could get to a point where available local resources are inadequate to meet low demand and supply. It could be due to some type of, of outage and extended heat events, premature equipment failure that's degrading due to extended heat, of forest fires or whatever it might be. In those contingency and emergency scenarios, utilities will follow prescript rule sets regarding how to balance load and generation potentially leading to load shedding events, where temporarily people have power losses such as what we've seen in California and other areas.
Now to avoid those comes back to that resource adequacy and it's not just having enough resources, but it's also about where they're located. So can you build transmission and distribution infrastructure and also localized storage or distributed storage in a way that if there are outages at certain parts of the network, other parts of the network can be energized and activated to meet loads. And that's how the U.S. has intelligently designed its grid over time.
But as these threats get more intense, we're seeing circumstances that are beyond the textbook or insurable cases that we would have originally envisioned the system to be designed for.
