The Need to ‘Build, Build, Build’ Dominates Conversation at Western Energy Symposium

Energy officials at the Oct. 9 Regional Energy Symposium in Portland, Oregon, offered solutions to address the Pacific Northwest’s urgent resource-adequacy crisis—key among them being the need for more gas infrastructure and natural gas-electric coordination.

Scott Kinney, vice president of energy resources and integrated planning at Avista, said the idea for the symposium could be traced to an outage at the Jackson Prairie natural gas storage facility—co-owned by Avista, Puget Sound Energy and the Williams Companies—during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend winter storm in January 2024. Kinney said the outage, coupled with a string of other challenges during the storm, represented an opportunity to improve natural gas-electric coordination.

“I started to think about how this isn’t just an Avista problem, this is a regional problem,” Kinney said, speaking during a panel. “The region needs to come together and have a conversation about how we can learn from what happened, but more importantly, how can we move forward and put some actions in place to do a better job of coordinating between the gas and electric industries.”

Kinney contacted Crystal Ball, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee, and Dan Kirschner, CEO of the Northwest Gas Association, to jointly plan the symposium, which convened almost 300 energy experts.

Industry officials laid out the conditions that have led to the resource-adequacy crisis and the need for greater natural gas-electric coordination—unprecedented load growth, slow resource additions and increased extreme weather in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Jim Robb, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, said the three main factors driving the energy shortfall are transformation of the grid; replacement of retiring coal-fired power plants by renewables with “variability issues that we need to understand and manage”; and increasing frequency of “broader, deeper and longer” extreme weather events.

Robb pointed to eight years ago as likely the first time that a material amount of uncertainty appeared in NERC’s long-term reliability forecast.

“Every year, as we do that report, we see more and more parts of the country at elevated risk of energy shortfalls,” Robb said in the first panel. “That was all before we had this concept of a data center.”

Meeting demand and maintaining reliability as traditional resources like coal are retired is a significant challenge that hinges on greater gas-electric coordination. But the two systems have been kept largely separate, Robb explained.

“We design and operate the electric grid based on reliability, and we design and operate the gas system based on contracts, and that construct alone creates tremendous challenge between the two sectors,” he said.

Robb pointed to Winter Storm Uri, which “exposed an embarrassing amount of poor coordination” among Texas energy entities in February 2021, as another example of why more visibility between the two sectors is necessary.

Kim Rush, president of NW Natural, shed light on what occurred on the utility’s system during the weeklong cold snap in January 2024.

“During the coldest hour, our system was delivering more energy than the entire [Bonneville Power Administration] hydro system—two-and-a-half times the energy of Puget [Sound Energy], the largest electric utility, and in a single hour, the equivalent energy of 11 nuclear power plants,” Rush said. “Our equipment had to run perfectly, there is no room for error, and that’s not realistic.”

Beyond better coordination, panelists also pointed to the need to build more gas infrastructure, and on quicker timelines.

According to Laura Trolese, director of Western markets and strategy at The Energy Authority, the latest report from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council shows a significant drop in the success rate of building resources, with only 53 percent of scheduled projects in 2023 being built on time, dropping to 51 percent in 2024.

“We’re way behind already, we have a lot to build, and our inability to get resources on line in any kind of timely manner is alarming,” Trolese said.

Greg Cullen, vice president of energy services and development at Energy Northwest, and Kurt Beckett, chair at the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, both said that “endless public comment periods” slow the permitting of necessary projects, and that public input should be reduced to a reasonable time frame.

“I will proudly say that Williams can put new infrastructure in the ground in six to nine months. We just need four to five years to permit it,” added Gary Venz, director of commercial services for Williams Northwest Pipeline.

The emphasis on gas represents a stark shift in the Western narrative, where the commitment to bringing more renewable energy on line has dominated. And while several panelists reiterated that commitment, they underscored that the urgency of the resource-adequacy and reliability crisis cannot be addressed without an “all-of-the-above” energy approach.

“We need to build, build, build. We need to build electric generation and transmission, and we need to build gas pipelines, which is not something that somebody from Washington has probably said in a long time,” Ann Rendahl, commissioner at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, said. “We need to build all of it, and we need to build fast.”

This article has been re-printed with permission from NewsData.