Extreme weather events are speeding up grid resiliency efforts

Arushi Sharma Frank was working for Tesla in 2021 when winter storm Uri hit Texas, causing more than 240 deaths and triggering massive grid outages. It was the costliest winter storm in U.S. history, and Frank says it put the importance of a clean, resilient, electric grid front and center for Texans.

“The storm created that motivation for leadership in…various places of power and authority to pay attention,” she said on the With Great Power podcast. “And I took complete advantage of that.”

In 2020 Frank was part of Tesla’s U.S. energy policy team working on wholesale and retail energy market design strategy. At the time, Tesla was petitioning the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to allow it to interconnect Tesla megapacks to the Texas grid. A few months after winter storm Uri hit, the company did just that – connecting its first 100-megawatt battery to the grid.

“Often opportunity can be driven by a moment of crisis,” Frank said. “And the storm was one of those [moments]. It created massive awareness inside the Texas legislature about the importance of … energy reliability and making sure we have a diversified strategy.”

From there, Tesla sought and received approval to launch an aggregated distributed energy resource, or ADER, pilot in 2022. The pilot, launched in 2023, allows consumers to sell excess energy generated from solar panels and stored in powerwall battery packs to the ERCOT grid via virtual power plants in Houston and Dallas. Now in its second phase, the pilot has shown the value of aggregating residential energy storage to address grid demand, though not without some challenges. More broadly, reports indicate that energy storage is helping ERCOT meet growing demand.

The big (un)easy

This past spring, after four years at Tesla, Frank launched her own consultancy Luminary Strategies, where she began work on a grid resiliency project in New Orleans – another city battered by extreme weather events.

Partnering with two community organizations, Frank crafted a proposal for a microgrid and VPP that the city council green-lit in October. If the full plan is approved, it will use $32M from a settlement fund that the utility Entergy agreed to pay the city council over complaints of mismanagement. That money – together with the conviction of many consumers who testified in support of the plan – helped move the proposal forward, Frank said. Texas residents even called in testimony to advocate for the plan.

“We had retirees who described the perfect residential virtual power plant program design in a few sentences,” she said, noting that when she started petitioning for VPPs on Tesla’s behalf in 2020, regulators she spoke to struggled to describe the technology clearly.

The proposal builds on the success of microgrids that New Orleans deployed after previous natural disasters. “I’m not even going as far back as Katrina,” she said. “More recent events have resulted in loss of life.”

Those experiences and the tightness of the community are driving resiliency efforts, she said.

”You have a city council made of people who live there — same zip codes — as opposed to a state commission [that] is trying to establish a program for multiple utilities at the same time. That definitely brings both speed and scale.”

But even in much larger jurisdictions like Texas, Frank said stakeholders are compelled to accelerate grid resiliency projects that could protect their communities from long power outages.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re the utility, you’re the tech provider, you’re the regulator, you’re the politician, it really doesn’t matter. If you go through that experience of being in an environment where your family members are helpless,… you rally.”

For the full conversation with Arushi Sharma Frank, listen to her interview on season 4 of With Great Power here.

With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Read the original article from Latitude Media here.