IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2016 - 61

One approach for the provision of grid services from
distributed resources is to aggregate these distributed assets
in the form of virtual power plants.

The objectives are the following:
1) Meet or exceed the renewable portfolio standards established by the state of California.
2) Include in the plan greenhouse gas reductions that
may economically be reduced.
3) Identify outages quickly so that outages can be quickly restored.
4) Improve communications between the utility and its
customers so that customers have the information they
need when they need it (even if they did not know they
needed it).
5) Maintain or improve customer privacy and security.
6) Maintain rates at or less than the rate of inflation as
measured across retail electricity services sales.
The balancing authority under which BWP operates
requires BWP to control its inadvertent interchange on a
15-min basis and maintain an area control error (ACE)
within prescribed limits. BWP is, in a sense, acting as a
DSO with pseudobalancing area responsibility. To meet this
objective, BWP considers embarking upon a multifaceted
project, including the following components:
✔ Leverage a large grid storage resource to allow the
use of low-cost renewable energy from outside its
footprint, using its current transmission facilities to
dynamically schedule renewable energy to serve its
native load.
✔ Leverage the DR/DER transactive capabilities within
its footprint to supplement its conventional generation
for provision of its DSO/pseudodalancing authority's
balancing energy.
✔ Use its internal resources, including conventional
generation and the DR/DER capabilities within
its footprint, to provide its share of frequency
bias. To provide frequency bias from DR/DERs,
use local controls for autonomous synthetic frequency response.
✔ To the extent the utility might be in a surplus or
deficiency condition in satisfying its share of frequency bias from its internal resources, it is considering primary frequency response (PFR) transactive exchanges, which are now permitted based
on the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Frequency Response and Frequency Bias Setting (BAAL-003-1) Standard and
FERC Orders 794 (16 January 2014) and 819 (20
November 2015).
may/june 2016

Use of Low-Cost Renewable and Storage
Renewable energy can be cost-effective as compared to fossil fuel-fired generation. This is possible because technological improvements continue to reduce the cost of renewable
energy, while fossil fuel generation technology continues to
generally trend upward in price over time.
The recently passed renewable energy requirement
in California for grid electricity requires the addition of
massive amounts of solar energy above and beyond solar
installation that customers may elect to install on their
homes and businesses. This increase in solar capacity will
result in more generation than there will be load throughout the year.
Electricity storage provides a means to produce the electricity from renewable energy and store the surplus energy
displaced by the renewable energy sources and then take that
energy from storage as the sun goes down or the wind dies
down. This approach will minimize the generation of greenhouse gas in a cost-effective manner.
Battery storage is being deployed, but in its current
state, batteries are cost-effective only in limited applications. However, pumped hydro and compressed air energy
storage are well understood, cost-effective means to store
electricity. Both pumped hydro and compressed air energy
storage require certain geological structures. In the case of
compressed air energy storage, underground salt domes have
been found to be the best means to store such compressed
air economically. BWP has located a compressed air energy
storage facility at the same site as its coal-fired generation. It
is currently evaluating and developing this potential electricity storage facility.
The need for storage is strongest on those days when
sunlight and wind are plentiful and electricity loads are
low. Therefore, transmission and distribution systems generally have sufficient capacity to transmit the energy from
the point of generation to the storage location. Storage is
a new element in both the wholesale and retail electric
operations and market models. BWP has found that storage can be economical for an entity that seeks to provide
overall economic rates to its customers. This is possible
because BWP, as a vertically integrated utility, can capture
the assorted values that storage provides in the end to end
electric system operational model.
BWP is planning to convert all of its customers, both residential as well as commercial, to time-of-use (TOU) metering. Currently, all commercial customers are under the TOU
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2016