Episode 14: NYISO VP Zach Smith on Emission-Free Grid Planning, Climate Change & the Interconnection Queue

04/19/21 • 25 min

It’s Zach Smith’s job to prepare the New York energy grid for the future. Our Vice President of System and Resource Planning manages the team that looks at all potential reliability issues the grid could face, from a week to 10 years in the future.
The team also looks at all proposed energy resources that seek to enter the grid via our Interconnection Queue process, and the impact these resources could have on reliability. In the past several years, we’ve made changes to the process of approving new resources, speeding up the approval process to reduce the cost to developers.

“We’ve had this comprehensive planning process for many years now,” he said, in an interview with Kevin Lanahan, Vice President of External Affairs and Corporate Communications. “Now, with the changes to the grid, it’s so much more vitally important. We’re encountering all kinds of new challenges.”

New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) sets the nation’s most ambitious clean energy targets. Under the CLCPA, the grid must get 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, as well as be emission-free by 2040.

“Some of the challenges are based around what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate,” Smith said.

“What if the wind ceases to blow, what if clouds come in and you get less sunshine?” Smith asked. “You are still going to have significant electric demand. You need resources standing, willing and ready to produce, sometimes at a moment’s notice.”

In addition, the changing climate presents its own grid concerns. We recently published our Climate Change and Impact Study, which offers suggestions on where to strengthen the grid in order to keep it resilient in the face of risks to reliability like cold snaps, heat waves and ice storms. We’re evaluating all of the potential conditions and the corresponding economics . The way that we do that is through the interconnection process.

Meanwhile, we continue to see a tremendous number of new clean energy resources that developers are seeking to install in the coming years. Planning for these new resources, a process called the Interconnection Queue, is also a vital part of Smith’s duties.

“We’re evaluating all of that to make sure that the reliability and resiliency of the grid is maintained,” he said. “The New York ISO plays an important role in enabling these new resources and making sure they can interconnect reliably.”

Learn more, read our blog: The Road to 2040: Our Interconnection Queue Shows Unprecedented Growth of Clean Energy Investment in NY

Learn More

Follow us on Twitter @NewYorkISO and LinkedIn @NYISO
Read our blogs and watch our videos
Check out our 2040 grid page

“Some of the challenges are based around what happens when the weather doesn’t cooperate,” Smith said.

Learn more, read our blog: The Road to 2040: Our Interconnection Queue Shows Unprecedented Growth of Clean Energy Investment in NY

Learn More

Follow us on Twitter @NewYorkISO and LinkedIn @NYISO
Read our blogs and watch our videos
Check out our 2040 grid page

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Episode 13: Key Capture Energy’s Jeff Bishop on the Critical Role of Storage in Greening the Grid

Jeff Bishop, CEO and co-founder of Key Capture Energy, got his start in the energy business 20 years ago developing wind farms in New York and around the world. In 2016, he and New York native Dan Fitzgerald crunched the numbers and saw the future in battery storage. Together, they formed Key Capture Energy. The Albany-based company has 54 megawatts of storage in operation in New York and Texas, with an additional 200 MW under construction and a whopping 2.5 gigawatts in development in the Northeast and in Texas.

As New York moves to a zero-emission grid, mandated by the CLCPA to be in place by 2040, energy storage plays a critical role. The state has called for 3,000 MW of storage by then. But Bishop said those numbers are just part of why Key Capture Energy is investing in New York.

“New York is doing everything all at once,” he says. “A bunch of offshore wind, retirement downstate of dual-fuel peakers, all of this just leads to a grid that needs battery storage.”

“Markets have traditionally rewarded what is economical but they need to reward what the grid needs five years from now,” Bishop explains. At the NYISO, our work preparing markets for energy storage led the nation with new rules already in place to broaden the ability of storage to bolster the reliable use of renewable resources.

“We need it all,” says Bishop, referring to the many technologies expected to be serving the grid by 2040. “We need those 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind to come into Long Island and New York City. We need the rooftop solar. We need all sorts of distributed solar. We need transmission upgrades. And we need energy storage.”

Learn More

Follow us on Twitter @NewYorkISO and LinkedIn @NYISO
Read our blogs and watch our videos
Check out our 2040 grid page

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Episode 15: ACE NY’s Anne Reynolds Advises CAC on Fast-Tracking Clean Energy Targets

Anne Reynolds joined the Alliance for Clean Energy (ACE NY) as executive director in 2014. But she has spent her career working on clean energy and environmental issues, including on numerous state programs to help ease the transition to emission-free resources in New York.

She recently spoke with Kevin Lanahan, our vice president for external affairs and corporate communications, on our latest Power Trends Podcast. They discussed her role as a member of the state Climate Action Council (CAC) and her thoughts on what it will take to meet the aggressive clean energy targets of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).

“I’ve been impressed with how much they’ve accomplished,” said Reynolds of the CAC’s work. “It’s illustrated how many moving parts there are to get New York to achieve the really ambitious climate goals that are in the CLCPA. It’s daunting when you understand how much New York is going to have to do.”

Reynolds still sees many challenges ahead to achieving the renewable solar and wind energy goals called for in the CLCPA, including getting these technologies built, sited, permitted, and interconnected onto the grid. “We have to tackle all of those nuts-and-bolts issues,” she said.

One of the biggest hurdles to meeting all of the CLCPA’s goals is the enormous task of electrifying New York’s buildings, which today make up about a third of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

She noted that all tools should be considered in order to ensure reliability while moving to a clean energy economy. There will be roles for carbon pricing, new dispatchable emission-free generation, green hydrogen, as well as a need to invest in storage, transmission improvements, demand response, and efficiency improvements, she says.

“A lot will need to happen over the next 25 years to put us on that right path.”

For more about how we are addressing a zero-emissions grid with market-based solutions, visit the 2040 Power Grid webpage.

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