This week I moderated a panel at the “Mid-C” conference in central Washington. The panel was focused on the role of new transmission in the western interconnect. The panelists discussed a recent long-term, WECC-wide transmission study called WestTEC, the newly energized Sun Zia line connecting New Mexico wind to load centers in Arizona and California, and the under-development North Plains Connector line which will connect the WECC portion of Montana to SPP and MISO in North Dakota. The panelists discussed several themes – notably that different transmission lines play different roles within the ecosystem of the electricity grid. Sun Zia is effectively a huge generation tie with flows on the line expected to entirely be in the east to west direction. Customers for Sun Zia signed wind PPAs which included the transmission. North Plains Connector, in contrast, will connect two regions. Flows on that line are expected to go in both directions depending on prevailing conditions at the time. North Plains Connector is expected to provide substantial resource adequacy benefits to each region in addition to energy arbitrage. The WestTEC study includes all types of transmission. Some of the proposed lines are intended to “harden the grid”, increasing the reliability of deliveries in a certain region. Other lines increase transfer capability between regions. Notably, in the next five years, the Greenlink and SWIP lines will substantially increase north-to-south transfer capability through Nevada and into Idaho.

The overall theme of the day was maintaining reliability while meeting regional policy goals. At the end of the transmission panel we polled the 200+ audience members with the following questions: What are the most important resources which will be required to meet Pacific Northwest reliability and public policy objectives over the next five years. We asked each audience member to vote for two of the options. The results appear in Table 1.

Table 1. Most Important Resources for Meeting Reliability and Policy Goals in the Next Five Years in the Pacific Northwest (Audience Members Each Picked 2)

While I wasn’t surprised that natural gas generation received massive support, it was a bit curious as the Mid-C is located in a state which shuns new natural gas. Wind and solar received zero votes. I intentionally included both “reliability” and “policy” in the question. It will be pretty hard to meet the de-carbonization goals without wind and solar. Transmission also received near universal support which may be because the panel had just hammered home this point. Curiously, only 10% of the audience selected battery storage. This is a pretty shocking result given that battery storage has been by far the largest source of new accredited capacity throughout the WECC over the last five years, a trend that is likely to continue for the next few years. Demand response surprised me, finishing slightly higher than battery storage. Perhaps this is a not-so-subtle message to the data centers. There was a single vote for SMR and Geothermal. A brave, optimistic guy put his hand up high. I asked him what he did for a living, fully expecting he worked in one of those two industries. Nope! He is a Washington State legislator – the one person in the room who can directly impact state policy picks the technologies which have almost no chance of getting interconnected and online at all and certainly not at scale in the Pacific Northwest in the next five years.

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