A former North Dakota Public Service Commissioner, who also served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said when it comes to having electric resource adequacy, we need a system that will be able to deliver power reliably under a number of different operating conditions.
Tony Clark says there have been a number of challenges in the last few years. And he said those challenges could continue in parts of the country.
Clark said there are a number of things that can be done. One is – building more transmission line, especially as reliance on renewable sources grows.
"The challenge is — it's really, really tough," Clark said, in an interview with Prairie Public.
Clark said transmission takes a long time to site, and it's not popular to have a transmission across your property.
"It only gets tougher when you try to site a line outside of a place like North Dakota," Clark said. "In the more congested areas, it's tougher yet."
Clark said in the meantime, on-demand generation needs to be retained, to deal with the intermittency of weather-dependent resources. He said that will mean a couple of different strategies.
"One could be retaining the traditional units we already have," Clark said. "That means the markets will have to value the attribute that they bring, which is reliability and on-demand dispatch-ability."
As far as new units, Clark believes the answer is probably going to be more natural gas.
"That's kind of the irony of it," Clark said. "It's an increase in renewables, and that means you'll have to have an increase in natural gas capacity."
Clark said that’s the situation in California, which he says has been struggling to keep the lights on, in some situations. He said California hasn’t been building the natural gas resources to back up renewables, and has not yet invested in transmission.
"The California trade-off was always,' We can build all these renewables, and just import from the rest of the West, the energy that we need during the hours of the day that we need it," Clark said. "What we're finding is, the energy isn't available, because other states are using it."
Clark said storage for renewables isn’t yet where it should be. He said there is promising battery capability, that could store up to four hours of renewable energy, and that may be good for California.
"However, if you're talking about the northern plains and vast swaths of this country, four hour storage just doesn't cut it," Clark said. "You really need multi-day storage, and we're not even close to that, from a technological standpoint."
Clark was in Bismarck to speak at the Empower conference.
