“We’ll need new tools and techniques to be even more nimble than we are now,” says Kim Warren, Chief Operating Officer of the IESO. Noting that in the past year, contingencies as far away as Tennessee, the Carolinas and Virginia were the root cause for curtailments of Ontario exports, he stresses that neither the IESO nor market participants should rely on previous assumptions about the operation of the electric power grid. “The complexities and knitted nature of the grid is continuing to escalate. These occurrences are triggering the need for the IESO to expand its external situational awareness. This need will grow even more as grid supplies tighten in neighbouring jurisdictions as they too change out major portions of their generating fleets.”
Speaking at the IESO stakeholder summit on February 11, Warren noted that although the recently implemented system for wind dispatch is working very well, the proportion of variable generation on the grid is growing quickly. “We’re basically doubling what we have today over the next year and a half or so. That takes Ontario to over 4,500 megawatts of wind and 2,000 megawatts of solar in total.”
Managing the risk that supply or demand might diverge from expected levels will be a major priority for the IESO. Although the LTEP contemplates major investments in supply, including nuclear refurbishments, Warren says “it will be necessary to have a form of insurance we can rely on should the schedule for this work not go quite as planned or should there be variations in other planning assumptions. This is the number one item on my radar, not SBG.”
Higher proportions of wind and solar power on the grid are likely to lead to surpluses from time to time. However, supply will be more volatile than it is today, which is why Warren feels the grid needs to develop additional tools to enhance flexibility.
“During the refurbishment years the gas fleet will be used as a baseload resource more than it will as a peaking resource. The intermittent nature of some of our fuels will mean more and larger course corrections over a day’s operations. It will make it much more difficult to plan and manage transmission outages and of course more difficult to posture the grid for potential contingencies.”
The procurement of storage makes more sense under these conditions, he notes: “For reasons like these, resources with the attributes of storage make sense. Certainty in operations will be a rarity; chasing certainty will be a distraction. We’ll need practical, efficient means to manage the volatility we’ll see within a day’s or week’s operations.”
The range of technical challenges seems to be growing in part because consumers are becoming more adept at managing their consumption. Warren notes that, “We are having challenges, too many challenges, in suppressing the grid voltage. To manage that, we’re taking high voltage circuits out of service from time to time to lower grid voltage profiles. There’s nothing wrong with that for brief periods of time. We’re not the only ones doing this. But we’re seeing it more and more and for longer periods of time, and it looks like those circumstances could increase.” Preferable to removing lines from service so frequently would be the installation of various kinds of voltage management devices.
The IESO is conducting an internal review of short term operational needs, to determine whether it will need to procure more or less of what they do today, or perhaps entertain new products or services “to meet our reliability obligations and efficient market operations.” The IESO plans to consult with stakeholders once it has clarified the key options. “We’ll be looking out a bit further and will supply this information to you and those that support us to ensure we meet the operability needs of tomorrow – effectively and efficiently. And do so ever mindful of consumer costs.”
The IESO plans on hosting informal public educational sessions on operational issues twice this year, once in late spring and the other in the fall. Topics would include the management of SBG, seasonal peak operations and of course enhanced operational flexibility.