Bidgely Engage+ Episode 1: Ft. Seattle City Light and EPRI

hmm [Music] welcome to visually engaged plus a monthly video series focused on the energy industry and the people driving innovation forward we're here in seattle washington to talk with officials from seattle city light who are driving innovation around transportation we'll also speak with people from eppery who have come up with the latest study on advances in electrification let's get started [Music] seattle has a strong legacy for environmental stewardship and that has empowered seattle city light to be very bold in its thinking energy innovation and resources officer emeka onyanwu told us how that freedom inspires this team to be forward thinking historically seattle has been a community that has aspired anyway to be to be very forward-thinking and progressive this is one of the communities in one of the parts of the country that really leaned very heavily into conservation and energy efficiency really early on in the 70s right and so there's a long legacy here of environmental stewardship and so the policy environment here that is that is welcoming of really forward-thinking aspirational thinking around uh both the environment environmental justice and and ultimately sort of racial and social justice gives this community a unique combination of attributes that allow us to to be really bold with our thinking we can do and say things and and and aspire to things and and attempt things in seattle that would be much more difficult than other parts of the country that's certainly inspiring for us for our team right because it it it gives us a sort of a sense of purpose it dares us to again to think boldly and a lot of ambition toward both serving our communities improving the equity of our communities um you know striving for racial and social justice and of course meeting the climate crisis the mecca said prioritizing ev transit over personal vehicles was just the bold choice seattle city light was encouraged to make i think what you see in lots of places and it certainly is true here is that personal electric vehicles right cars are the form of electric mobility that really gets the most attention right draws the most attention gets the most press gets the most discussion there's a lot of discussion around vehicle charging and charging access and those things are certainly all great and important to the electric transportation transition but you know we really looked early on and were in a position to to choose to prioritize communities that have historically been underserved been underrepresented in these conversations right and to make their priorities not just first but primary to what we were trying to do and so the choice to prioritize public transit above even ev charging above bikes and walking and other forms of mobility which are all really important right was a bold choice right because because again um those are communities and those are you know the communities that rely on those services are communities that often don't get their needs met first that don't have the first seat at the table in this conversation so that was a strategic choice we were able to make that maybe would have um met with more resistance uh maybe in other scenarios but but here in seattle you know we we got a lot of support right off the bat from from our policy makers from our communities uh for making that choice we early on sort of identified that relationship that partnership with king county metro as one of those key aspects of electrifying public transit and so many of those communities rely on buses specifically right both transit in general but certainly buses specifically we were there when seattle city light king county metro and the city of tukwila opened their new charging facility thank you all for joining us here today to mark this incredible milestone in uh the electrification and decarbonization of our region transportation electrification really is a an integral part of our utilities modernization journey electric vehicles ev cars may be the most visible personal mobility forms but at seattle city light we have identified and decided to prioritize the electrification of transit as a way to better serve our customers and the community and the region at large when we created our transportation electrification strategic investment plan uh just to about two years ago in our conversations in the community the top priority identified by community leaders and other community stakeholders was electrifying public transportation and in this as you've heard from some of the other speakers in this transition we really have a duty to re-envision an energy system that elevates and uplifts communities throughout the greater seattle region but especially those communities that have been historically left out of important conversations and decisions around our energy system so we're making great strides in the electrification future of our region these coaches that you see here today are just the first of many that we hope to see on the road a mecca went on to put transit electrification in context of seattle city light's larger goal to reshape and reimagine the future of electricity you know one of the things that we are certainly really intent on doing across the our entire body of work related to electrification is really trying to create a different energy future than the one that preceded it i'm excited that you're going to talk to members of our team today obviously who are going to talk about our electrification assessment that we did with our partners over at epprey because again we're beginning to really think about what does that reality look like for us you know what does the world look like for us where we begin to truly move end uses away from a fossil-based forms of energy he recognizes that the grid required to serve a fully electrified utility will look much different than it does today what does the the grid architecture look like that has to serve this electrified future you know what we know really is that the architecture of the system that it will take to serve a fully electrified future is going to look very different than what we have today and will require different operating protocols different business models different control algorithms and capabilities different situational awareness what does it take to achieve such bold goals a mecca emphasized that utilities need to prioritize both adopting a more data-driven planning process while also meaningfully engaging with communities and certainly it is true that we have to not only double down on a lot of our traditional planning disciplines right in terms of how we think and plan uh system and resources but really we have to expand and and evolve those things so that they are much more dynamic and they are much more certainly data rich right so you know we we have to become much more data intensive and really create an ability for us to think dynamically to plan dynamically to operate dynamically with the system but again you know we cannot afford to lose sight of the different ways in which we have to engage communities in doing this work right we cannot afford to have an exclusionary dis process or decision-making um paradigm for this right we have to engage deeply with communities and directly with communities constantly on an ongoing basis we have to have conversations about what are the implications of these new frameworks for them right the new the new system capabilities the new ways in which we are going to think about resiliency and reliability and system flexibility uh the ways in which grid and system assets are going to be held and operated you know that's one thing where there's really a tremendous opportunity for girl for for our entire industry right is you know how do we truly engage communities as equal partners in the work of building the next sort of next generation energy system next we had the chance to dive a little deeper into seattle city light's public transportation and fleet electrification plans with david logsdon director of electrification and strategic technology david tell us about what was the catalyst behind your electrification efforts what i find very unique about our approach is we're very values based city we're very values based organization the community connection piece comes from one of our core values is utility which is equitable community connections it's very tempting as a utility to approach something like transportation electrification and just kind of hire a consultant and come up with a game plan and then maybe your community outreach is like you host some town halls and you say this is what we're doing and aren't you excited to benefit from it and we wanted to turn that around and actually reach out from the earliest stages so the community had a chance to actually give meaningful input to our plan so that was really critical was to go to community from the very beginning before you have the plan fully baked so that you're actually able to listen and implement what you're hearing from community can you talk briefly about some of the comments that came from local community folks what stepwood stood out maybe top two or three items that they were really interested in for their neighborhood we talked to some of the usual suspects and like the oems the manufacturers the electric supply companies to get the full picture but the majority of our outreach was focused on what we call our environmental justice communities and the stakeholders there and what we were hearing from them was their priorities were not around where should a lot of utility investments and a lot of infrastructure investments take place on on personally owned vehicles their priorities were public transit expanding access and greening the fleets that operate through those environmental justice communities and that's where efforts like our our partnership with king county metro and battery electric buses come in and we're also partnering with other transit operators like the washington state ferries they're working to switch to battery electric ferries for the ferry system that can pose huge loads on the grid so we're partnering with them early on to understand and how we're going to charge those and to develop innovative plans like using battery storage so transit's number one and then number two is really the fleets that operate through those communities so we're launching a big new fleet program uh later this year that's also informed by ongoing community outreach to to structure how those those programs get set up where where our focus is uh which communities see the most benefit and then for personally on vehicles it's expanding you know as i mentioned the ride-hail vehicles those are vehicles that operate quite a bit but then also a multi-unit dwelling charging so how do we best expand for multi-unit dwelling multi-family build buildings that's a huge focus for us because the majority of our customers live in those buildings we don't the we have a minority of our customers who actually have access to a single-family garage so we really need to expand the charging infrastructure for those communities and then access is another piece the electric vehicles are expensive so how do we bring that and make that accessible and not have communities those environmental justice communities see new charging infrastructure as displacing or gentrifying and actually a community asset that's been a big topic too is like how do we expand access and and really bring uh communities to a point where they actually want charging infrastructure in their community and view it as something that's positive you mentioned fleets i was thinking about comes like amazon or fedex or the trucks that we see driving around is that a factor that's part of the fleet program we're designing and we've been reaching out to all those fleet operators amazon they've got the partnership with rivien and some of it's you know initially just understanding where will they be charging so we can plan for that on the grid because these are big loads and we need to plan for that uh starting now and one of the other big fleet operators that we've got our eye on is the trucking night of the ports there's you know 3 000 trucks that operate out of the port of seattle so we're trying to figure out like how do we best start to do some pilots to understand where we can be effective and we hear things like you know you need to add amenities like people need to be able to set up and operate their laptop they want to charge overnight they already have difficulty finding parking so we're looking at how do we build some hubs that actually bring amenities to that that the operators are looking for how do we build partnerships a lot of the those operators are smaller shops that maybe have 10 or so trucks and they own their their trucks themselves they they work closely with their drivers um so we're trying to build up some of those partnerships and understanding to to really figure out how do we start to build comfort with that and one of the most important things with electrification is that the early experiences be positive speaking of trucks are people excited about like the ford lightning and and that two-way flow or is that just more aspirational i think that's an important aspect of what we hope to see more of like actually the the excitement that people get from that sort of new offering uh because that that vehicle to building vehicle-to-grid technology's been out there for a while not a lot of people understand the appeal of it but the lightning has done a great job of bringing a new market to that bringing people into the resiliency aspects of it that's something we're interested in for for other purposes including the work that we did with the electric power research institute you know like all of this electrification brings challenges to the grid and one of the most important pieces of that is how do we influence how that load shows up on the grid avoid peaks you know we designed the system to peak coincidence so if we have a system that's that peaks for you know a small percentage of the year and then it's down here the rest of the year we're building the system for this and that's poor utilization it's going to impact our rates so we're looking at things like the lightning for instance or battery storage behind the meter demand response how do we smooth out that load overall as those loads show up bringing it down to the to the end customer if if some of this takes place and there's a lot of investment will will their rates stay about the same would they go up what do you anticipate from that end customer that's where our load forecast comes in so like what's happening with city lights load over time been in a period of very steady load growth without electrification and we've got load forecasts with and without electrification without electrification we're entering a period especially coming out of covet where commercial load is down of declining loads but what that means it's same asset base we still have the name same number of wires in the system same substations but we have fewer sales to spread that across so rates go up in that scenario for all customers electrification we've got some headroom to to build out we have system capacity so we need to start doing that to bring the rates within within reason so like that helps us to keep affordable rates electrification is actually critical to our rate path and keeping rates affordable for all customers but then over time and you saw this in the the electrification assessment over time you shift past that headroom so then you end up at a point where you need to manage that load growth and you need to build out the system to do that so that's where strategies like grid modernization come in to prepare the grid now for that load growth that's coming but also to shift uh peaks like looking at demand response looking at managed charging strategies looking at like vehicle to grid operations those are all ways to bring electrification in as a continued resource even as you enter that later growth phase we do have a future ahead of us where we're going to need more renewable resources at the bulk level and that's something we've been preparing for we've got a large solar array under contract in washington state um we probably need more of that down the road in the like 2026 plus time frame so we're starting to look at that but battery storage as well there's a role for batteries behind the meter there's also potentially a role for them at that bulk level but we're at a point where we really need to plan that out and figure out what are the least cost options to do the peak shifting we need to do so we're testing out things like time of use rates for residential and commercial customers with electric vehicles to incentivize them to charge off peak we're starting to look at managed charging strategies to incentivize off-peak charging um demand response and battery storage is a it has a has a role in that but it's it's kind of not clear to what level and what scale because you want to have your least cost option from all of those different resources in that resource basket kind of a classic question of all this you know technology that's out there and challenges is there one thing that kind of keeps you up at night or when you look at on the long term part of what we're trying to do right now is to prepare for that that future of like true electrification at scale because personally on vehicles they they put some strain on the grid but it's very dispersed it's somewhat manageable those larger loads like when you get fleets electrifying when you get heavy-duty trucking electrifying on the i5 corridor a heavy-duty trucking depot could be you know 35 megawatts of peak load you've got to deliver and then you start to conventionally look at you know that's a new substation our approach has been get as much early information as you can conventional utility model is you sit back you wait for the service connections requests to come to you you say yeah we can serve that it'll cost you x number of dollars but we really are at a point where there's a lot of load growth planning so we really need to know where it's going to be and the way we're doing that is building these early partnerships king county metro they're electrifying all of their buses by 2035 we're going depot by depot and base by base and actually developing plans with them for each of those bases and like going way beyond the meter in terms of how we relate to customers and basically joining their planning process waterfront is similar you know we've got 140 megawatts of load growth on the waterfront port of seattle all the buildings in the waterfront the ferries and maritime we don't there's potential for maritime electrification and that could go beyond 140 megawatts we need to start planning now for that and not just looking at traditional solutions but looking at peak shifting looking at battery storage with a waterfront we're doing studies for you know the potential for a network of microgrids for customer and grid resilience we're looking at renewable hydrogen green hydrogen as a potential for many of the uses for decarbonizing maritime onshore off-road so there's a lot of different strategies that are emerging and especially with for those load clusters we really need to look at all of those and test those out and see what does work scale them up clearly i think one of the the outputs if you will from the latest technologies and the future ones is a lot of data how do you intend to manage that how does that play into your future plans that that whole you know tidal wave of data the data piece is really crucial for you know we've got to build up platforms now that can take in data on where is load growth coming how is the system operating that's a close link with grid modernization especially for things like bi-directional power flows like doing modeling for distributed energy resources so we have a utility technology roadmap that lays out how we're going to approach technology investments for the utility what our current platforms are doing gap analysis how does that enable grid modernization and what does it enable so that utility technology roadmap looks out over the next 20 years and starts to lay out the investments we need to undertake on the the data side with platforms that we can build to take in grid data taking customer data piece all of that together help us model and do scenario planning how do you avoid potential reliability issues going forward yeah in a grid that is changing from the old you know one way to a much more two-way i think that's where you see some a new r emerging with utilities and and that's a key part of our good modernization strategy is like keep the focus on reliability affordability safety that's always been there and that requires investments even just to maintain reliability because you've got the load growth coming from electrification then we need to start investing in new ways to prepare for that new resources on the customer side automation things like distribution automation things like remote switching basically reducing the amount of grid issues that that need to be solved by rolling trucks out because that's a lengthy process it's an expensive process the more we can automate there the more we can stay on top of reliability resilience is a key aspect too that's that new r resilience if we have electrify the ferries we need to ensure that if there's an outage like there's some way to keep the ferries operating there's some way to keep the buses running and that's a big aspect for grid modernization and what we face is utilities because we're expanding the services we provide to the cities to our cities now we're operating the buses we're fuel providers for people's cars we're operating school buses reliability and resilience and bringing new resources to the mix to maintain that it's crucial because we're expanding into all of those new sectors at the same time that seattle city light is advancing its transit and fleet electrification plans they are tackling another complex challenge building out the charging infrastructure to serve their residential customers most of whom live in multi-unit dwellings transportation electrification portfolio manager angela song walked me through the utilities approach to serving the majority multi-unit population just give us an insight into into your role at seattle city light i was brought on to help design deploy and develop implement all of their transportation electrification programs there's a great team behind me so i'm not just the only one here but really it's to carry out a plan that they created with the community and it's called the transportation electrification strategic investment plan t sip for short and talk a little bit about how kind of from a ground up the information from the community brought you to this place the creation of t sip really started with a robust we called it phase one outreach and we went to 25 to 30 different community-based organizations governments groups entities unions laborers so we kind of did a huge diverse outreach to folks that were interested climate electrification at large to help the utility understand where the priorities of the communities were and so during that really intensive process that's how we developed the priorities that you see today in that strategic investment plan so talk a little bit about the the key takeaways or learnings from those those interactions so there was five priorities uh that we we developed out of t-slip and the first and foremost is electrification of transit the second priority that we saw if you're not familiar with seattle there's a industrial part of our city it's called the duwamish valley they're really impacted by this air pollution and so the second priority was really to clean up the fleets in that area that are running through those neighborhoods so we're really focusing on fleet electrification and heavy duty electrification as well because we can get the most greenhouse gas emissions impact the third one is definitely around education and outreach so the communities that we're talking with actually don't really know or understand the benefits of electrification so that's a really big hurdle to get get across when you're trying to advocate for for electrification the fourth priority is around increasing access to multi-family charging and off-street parking as well so we have a lot of a lot of properties here that actually don't have driveways so it's hard to electrify and then the last one is around high mileage vehicles high mileage meaning like for higher drivers so taxis the ubers lifts let's talk about that charging piece whether it's multi-family or single family or fleets what have you that as you say without that infrastructure it's going to be very challenging we're really trying to be aggressive obviously with our electrification goals we're trying to you know hit 50 projects in two years that's that's the timeline and in order to meet that goal we really have to look at our processes internally and so we're undertaking a lot of energy to really look at what is what's the customer journey i guess at the end of the day we're trying to map out that process in order to give give our engineers and internal staff the right resources and information to make decisions you know one of the priorities that i talked about is focusing on multi-family properties and then locations without driveways and really that's the first focus for building electrification for us because it's the toughest to electrify um these buildings were built long ago so the panel infrastructure upgrades every i mean like everything behind it needs to be kind of looked at and and upgraded we're really looking at education as as leading piece we have a lot of customers who have tried to electrify but it's a long process right so it's really like helping them through the process making sure that they know what type of information is needed and when and how we work with like the contractors and electricians that are installing uh the equipment i know that some of the public charging stations i've seen like in library parking lot there might be two or three do you have a roadmap or a strategy for saying okay we're going to put four in and then two years we'll evaluate how do you strategize on those public charging stations the public charging stations right now is in a pilot phase so we're aiming to install 21 by the end of q3 of this year so that'll kind of be the close of that and we're going to go into a program redesign here at the end of the year so it might look a little bit different um but the the public uh program has essentially been built on a lot of community outreach like you know go back to that again it's your core yeah yeah and it's great because you know we can always lean on the community to tell us where they want our investments like that's one thing that's really great about a municipal utility because our owners are the customers so you know getting direct feedback from them is is how i'm trying to approach transportation electrification how the utility is trying to approach it we go to community-based organizations um or they're like neighborhood meetings and just talk about what we're trying to do and how have them help us identify where they think charging should go so a lot of the times it's grocery stores libraries like public faces and so we take that feedback and kind of look at the map and just kind of reassess on where where the capacity is we want to try to find spots where people can go you know enjoy a cup of coffee or do groceries or something besides sit in their car and just wait for an hour have you worked with any oems or dealerships i'm really glad you brought up the dealership this year we're going to be at the seattle auto show and partnering with the washington state dealership association and so we're really excited about that but i think it's just the beginning for us you know this plan really was put in place about a year and a half ago so our focus has really been on the program side now we're going to start pulling into more of those partnerships and trying to accelerate um the deployment of like all these little smaller pilot projects so we can add to those learnings okay so a lot to be determined yeah yeah i think we are on the cusp of a lot of growth a lot of change and a lot of innovation give what you've been through so far in this electrification process what would you recommend to some other utility that's just starting on their journey yeah well i will say the community outreach is very much key to developing the strategy because of our robust efforts on the front end to really understand what community wanted to see their priorities their needs and transportation electrification the strategic investment plan is like a really clear pathway for for me my team for the utility to kind of execute on these programs and know that um you know we're supporting the community and what they want to see i'll also say the collaboration and partnership is key these are large projects that take sometimes years to be installed and operational and so partnerships are really key to all of that making sure you have the right people at the table at the right time as you heard the seattle city light team mentioned a crucial input into their future-ready grid planning is an electrification baseline assessment which was conducted on their behalf by the electric power research institute efforts senior project manager jamie dunkley shared the report's findings just describe for for our audience just how this assessment came about and kind of your top level learnings and where you think it will go for seattle city light seattle city light as well as the city of seattle had a number of um goals that they were trying to meet related to climate change the most kind of stringent of them was the green new deal which required 100 carbon neutral by 2030. this study took a number of different goals and laid out a few different scenarios to try to address each of them and what it would take to meet each of them seattle's uniquely positioned in almost all of their power is renewable and so as they think about decarbonizing for climate change thinking about what if we electrify all of buildings all of transportation what would it take and i think we we approached this from two sides so not only thinking about what transportation would need and what buildings would need in terms of energy and power but what is available on the grid side so where is their available capacity to be able to fulfill the needs that we're looking towards the future for so we we did this assessment from both sides um and and kind of we're trying to pull them together to see you know where is their available capacity where might we have more demand um as seattle thinks about their strategy moving forward in the space so diving a little bit on the transportation piece that that part of the grid that that's really now a big focus for seattle sea lion in this study we ran three different scenarios and we did it on the buildings as well as the transportation side and so within these scenarios we're ranging from christmas as usual scenario to this 100 electrified so that means all school buses all medium and heavy duty transport all garbage trucks all everything is electric um and while most of the um energy will be attributed to light duty vehicles a fleet will electrify in a short amount of time and they will all need power at the same spot seattle city lights is already in there kind of trying to understand this better but for each fleet you need to have an understanding of how many miles of driven a day and how that varies because that's probably not the same every day what the dwell time is and so what i mean by that is how long is the vehicle parked at the depot and then the efficiency of the vehicle so you can imagine how far does one kilowatt hour get you is it one mile two miles when your truck is fully loaded is it that's probably fewer miles that it can go um when it's really cold and you're running your heater that's probably fewer miles so there's there's variability within there but from that you can understand how much energy is needed per day and based on the constraints of how far the vehicles need to go and how long they're parked you have flexibility in when you charge and so different different fleet managers can kind of program their charging to uh impact the grid less let's switch gears just slightly to maybe the data side of the modeling and or how data will be growing importance in terms of managing these kinds of fleets in the load yeah so this is a very active research that i'm working on now getting characteristic behavior is the first step with that the second step is figuring out where this is going to happen right and so a data set figuring out um you know where are these commercial fleets going to be and you can you can go about this a few different ways maybe it's square footage of a building maybe it's satellite imagery showing where the warehouses might be um and then the final one is figuring out how many so how many car cars trucks um that one can be a little bit tricky so there's there's registration data out there so companies will obviously register their vehicles because they're paying insurance but often they're registered at headquarters and not at all of the separate little warehouses so it's a combination of all of those things um and we're finding it's hard because there isn't one perfect data set so it's kind of figuring out the limitations and the advantages of each one and kind of piecing them together um and i guess kind of the final thing is local intel i mean seattle city light knows their customers better than anybody else and so kind of being able to kind of ask them you know where do you see activity who's planning on electrifying at some point um you know do you have any behavior um uh data on them so we can we can put kind of ground truth all of it in kind of the local logistics in the research you did any sort of um big challenges you see ahead that are either obvious or not so obvious that were surprises in the data or or the research we looked at both the grid side and the needs side what was great to see is there is a lot of available capacity on seattle's grid so 100 electrification they can do that the issue with that is figuring out when and where it's available so that's kind of the trickier part and we produced quite a few maps where you could see where there might be areas that were a little bit more limited and then areas that might have more capacity so i think thinking through what kind of electrification would happen in those potentially limited areas and different management strategies that could be used to make electrification still work in those spots without putting in a lot of investment into the grid would be one thing and then i think the other one that really came to light which i was surprised of there are a lot of people living in multi-unit dwellings in seattle and at least from the transportation side of things it's putting in chargers for all of those folks can be hard so obviously you want to put chargers in places where they already go you know it could be workplace can be a really big component of that um supermarkets movie theaters when we do that again [Laughter] shopping malls yeah so thinking about and then of course having those fast chargers around especially in places where there are many residents multi-unit buildings will be really important were there um particular surprises in as you modeled the loads and changes over time especially with the target dates of 2030 and then 2042. in this environment where there's a lot of flexibility with working what does that mean for commutes and transportation so does that mean we will see people just driving less will they change kind of their habits on how they use their vehicles will they need only one so that was something that you know we we just had to go with what what we know or what we knew um and so that'll be interesting to see you know on this long time frame if i had a crystal ball to predict that i should be playing the lotto yeah i agree you know that's a hard one it is really hard because i do think we've seen a big shift in who's going to a place to work or not or some hybrid and it's tbd and energy moving out of the city because they don't need to be here anymore so i think a lot of the big unknowns are kind of about this population change given the two years we've just had and and if that lingers for this 10 or 15 year time frame we're looking at or not or maybe we just kind of spring back into what we're used to i want to shift gears to um again the local community information that was part of this assessment can you talk a little bit about how you know with seattle's um focus on disadvantaged communities if you will or what have you how that played into some of the assessments yeah well that's that's definitely something that's at the forefront of kind of what seattle wants to make sure that they're addressing as they move forward i think with the study we we planned out what was needed in terms of um power and energy i think how seattle decides to implement that is really where that comes in because no one wants someone telling you what technology you should adopt so it's really about kind of understanding each individual community needs so there's not going to be one blueprint for everyone which i think makes it hard right it's a unique solution for each one and so understanding for people in those potentially disadvantaged communities how they commute what do they use what are their habits kind of where where might they dwell for a while where kind of maybe electric charging would come into play um i think kind of prioritizing those communities first as this technology comes out will be really key did you see any takeaways that perhaps other utilities that are in similar situations that you could recommend getting your your kind of head around what it would take is a really um useful exercise right and so the information that we provided here is the energy and power needed if we don't add any smarts to the system and what i mean by that is like managed charging or batteries or some kind of tool that you could use to kind of flatten the load and so it's really almost a worst case scenario when we look at grid impacts and so i think any utility that's trying to think about can we do this a similar sort of assessment where okay how much power is needed how much energy is needed what do we got and then start pulling those two things together and where there's maybe a disconnect figure out strategies that would help you get there so i think that's useful for any utility thinking about um you know really promoting electrification and decarbonization beyond electrification seattle city light is investing equally in its build-out of renewable energy solutions uzuma siddiqui senior manager of grid modernization highlighted some of her work including how the utility is looking at renewable energy to enhance grid reliability uzma tell us about your role at seattle city like what's your team doing i am the senior manager for grid modernization and strategic technology at seattle city light two teams in that one one group of people is working on grid modernization which means how are we getting our grid ready for all the parts and pieces of things that are coming at it new electrification loads our distributed energy resources like solar customer batteries how are we getting ready for that and then the other team is really figuring out how we take those technologies and apply them at city light so for example we're talking about a large battery for the ferry system to help modulate their load so lots of interesting work going on in this team excellent thanks can you talk a little bit about the eppery assessment and how you've you've leveraged that so far where you think that will take you i think that it's been wonderful to help establish kind of the baseline and then helps us to look at what challenges lie ahead it's it's really hard to solve a problem that you haven't defined so what does the load look like what does transportation electrification load look like what does building electrification look like and then we can layer on solutions on top of that and that's really how we're going to solve the challenge of this new grid can you talk a little bit about how the ferry system and charging electric ferry boats is going to look on your grid for the last year or two we've really established a partnership with washington state ferries they see electrification as part of their solution to decarbonize their diesel fuel use one of the things is it's a large load so our grid wasn't designed for that large load we can make some changes and we are but we'd like to figure out are there different approaches to take do we always just do the thing that we've been doing for the last 5 10 20 years one of the neat ideas here is to actually put a battery a large battery that will help charge two boats so about eight times during the day two boats come onto the system and we'll be able to charge the single boat using the grid as it stands and we'll be able to charge two boats when we because we add the grid as we stand plus the battery and so that's a great way of using the system that we have as efficiently as we can in terms of energy mix are you exploring hydrogen absolutely i think that we are looking at lots of different technologies hydrogen has some great features one of the advantages that we have is that because our fuel mix is so green we're able to take that green electricity and generate hydrogen hydrogen can be stored and used for other uses such as ships or trucks or forklifts i mean just so many different kind of end users and then the other thing that you can do with is with hydrogen is to make a use a fuel cell and make electricity again so it becomes an energy storage system also seattle city light is looking at everything makes sense you mentioned um energy storage and in this case batteries can you talk a little bit about your strategy now or how you see it playing out behind the meter or in front of the meter in the grid and kind of where where that is now when we think it's going to go yeah uh so we are actually developing a der strategy we are stepping back we've been doing this ad hoc and we've gotten to a certain point and we've said okay now we need to step back and make sure that we're looking at this really programmatically instead of individually batteries are fabulous for resiliency we have a microgrid that we installed at the miller community center paid for with a washington clean energy fund grant in part and i'm super excited about that because it provides resiliency to a community center which means that we're providing for the whole right anyone who needs it can come to that space so that's one use of a battery you can have a battery for your own home's resiliency other places in the u.s they're using it for things that are more big grid related more of the transmission grid and the pacific northwest is not part of an organized market but we might be heading in that direction so some of that those use cases could be monetized and we'll see what happens in terms of where your grid modernization process is are there takeaways for other utilities that you might say hey here's here's what i would do or i wouldn't do or kind of some high level um feedback to your colleagues around the country so one thing that we did was that we as a team did a grid modernization plan um we used the eppery framework and were talked to our colleagues within city light and asked for you know what what should we be doing what what where do you see the challenges of the grid got some great feedback uh developed a document have been budgeting resourcing it we also went then went back to epprey and asked them to look at our grid mod plan and say okay we've looked at it with our city light focus now take a look at it from a more industry-wide focus and it's actually been really gratifying to see how much of what we internally had decided they have endorsed one of the things i was intrigued about like the grid modernization is this idea of a flexible grid can you talk a little bit about that how that will play out or kind of your vision or where that might be in let's say five or ten years yeah so uh let's talk about the the old grid right right so let's start there so what happens is there's generation and load and the electrical grid requires balance balance instantaneous balance and where we used to be was that our load could do whatever it wanted flip flip switch turns on the generator balances well now we have this new type of generation that isn't controllable it it comes on when the sun shines and the wind blows and so we've got 100 of our generation is no longer at within our control so when that happens something has to happen on the other side also so that's where this whole idea of flexible load comes in it's really important to try to figure out how we can adapt i see managed charging of electric vehicles perhaps you know doing staged 15 minutes you know having four groups 15 minutes at a time i see demand response i see customers being told information such that they can adapt their behavior and they will do it either for a financial benefit or because it makes them feel good so we're going to figure this out but we definitely need to have flexible load in order to really make the system work as it's evolving right and as you integrate those moving parts that in real time that's true i don't envy um you have a pretty big mandate can you talk about maybe the top one two or three things that is really a challenge yeah i think the biggest challenge for me is the paradigm shift that utilities are on um i've looked at the loads for seattle city light starting in like the 40s and we were on this trajectory where we just kept going up year over year it was up and then we hit the 70s and 80s and it's kind of caps off and a little bit of a bend in the curve a little bit abandoned really a flattening and even a little bit of a reduction and now with all this electrification we see that changing and going back up well basically what that means is this entire group of people who's been working at an electric utility is really used to a certain paradigm and now we're changing the paradigm so there's a huge change management component it's people right we all are trying to figure out how the new world looks while we look backwards and it's not applicable so that i see is the kind of the biggest challenge is is just the the paradigm change that we're happening and and folks who look back and say well that's not how it was five years ago it's like you're right you're right but that's not how it's going to be in five years either i think ameca got it right what seattle city light is doing with electrification and renewable energy does represent some of the industry's boldest thinking it was great to spend time with the seattle city light team and learn about their future endeavors i hope you enjoyed it too i'm neil strother see you next time