With leadership in the government changing, the electric utility industry is anticipating major shifts in policy. But sustainability will continue to be a focus of the evolving electric and energy sector according to a strategic advisor for large commercial and industrial organizations looking to manage their sustainability and energy issues. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, we interview Drew Murphy CEO of Trio about what’s ahead for the energy industry.

“There will be reversals, there will be setbacks; there will be things where we’ve moved down one path and then that stops so you have to move down another,” said Murphy. 

Trio was launched 9 years ago by Edison International, one of the nation’s largest utilities, to help its customers navigate the energy transition, which he believes will continue regardless of the administration change.

“Sustainability and energy will continue to go hand-in-hand and we’re going to see this move forward.” 

Murphy says the renewable and clean energy business is constantly evolving and changing. 

“I think that the technological advancement that we’ve seen over the last 20 years in terms of clean energy technology advancement, how the costs have come down; how much we’ve deployed both in the U.S., and globally, I think technology is driving forward and that is something that I think will continue.”

AS chief executive officer of Trio, Murphy is responsible for guiding the organization and empowering the team to help clients manage their energy choices and risks to deliver on their strategic, financial and sustainability goals. 

Previously Murphy was senior vice president of Strategy, Corporate Development and Sustainability for Trio’s parent company, Edison International, where he was responsible for managing the strategic planning process for the company and its subsidiaries and overseeing the analysis of emerging trends in the industry and their impact on Edison International’s regulated utility and competitive businesses.

Murphy earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1983 and a Juris Doctor from George Washington University in 1987.

At first glance, solar energy production and livestock grazing don’t seem like they have much in common, but the two industries have formed a growing partnership with what’s known as solar grazing.

This episode of Grid Talk features Nick Armentrout who is the president of the American Solar Grazing Association. Armentrout reports a steep rise in the use of livestock to graze under and around solar panel deployments in rural America.

“There is vegetation in place to control stormwater. After the site is turned on and is operational, now you need to maintain that vegetation. You don’t want it to grow too tall and shade the panels and impact actual production.” said Armentrout.

It’s turning out to be a win-win situation for farmers and energy producers. Instead of machinery to keep vegetation in check, farmers use the land for grazing animals.

“Over 120,00 acres of solar are being grazed in the United States, so that is more than any other country that we’re aware of on the globe.” 

The trend benefits solar power generators, helping them maintain the land under their power assets, produces new income streams for small family farmers, and is inspiring a new generation of young farmers that want to help tackle climate change.

“I think it’s a fantastic situation, I mean, we’re just scratching the surface on livestock and grazing solar and the potential benefits for the animals in the system.”

Energy storage is considered the holy grail that would unlock a vast increase in solar and wind renewable electricity generation. 

That’s the topic for the latest episode of Grid Talk featuring Will McNamara who is a Grid Energy Policy Storage Analyst with Sandia National Laboratories.

Six national energy labs and a cohort of 200 partners across the energy industry have joined together in a moonshot effort to vastly expand energy storage in America. It is all being coordinated through the National Consortium for the Advancement of Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) technologies. 

“There was a proposal call issued by the Department of Energy offering funds to the national labs to create an industry forum focused on the many challenges that are facing long-duration energy storage technologies and create this forum so that the industry can come together and address these challenges,” said McNamara 

The goal is to boost storage technology on a large scale from about four hours duration to 10 hours.

“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow so we need to find a way to store the energy to make it dispatchable, hence the need for energy storage, so we are absolutely in this evolutionary period. We are building the constructs for the future.”

In his role as Grid Energy Storage Policy Analyst for Sandia National Laboratories, McNamara focuses on energy storage policy development at the federal and state levels. He has spent his entire 23-year career in the energy and utilities industry with a concentration on regulatory and legislative policy.  Additional areas of subject matter expertise include distributed energy resources, AMI/smart grid, renewables, and competitive retail markets.

McNamara has an M.B.A. from University of Phoenix, an M.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from the University of Iowa. 

Solar siting, the future of hydroelectric dams, and grid transmission buildout have been some of the most contentious and important areas needing attention as the U.S. builds out the electric grid of tomorrow. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Dan Reicher who is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy and is associated with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, as well as Dartmouth’s Irving Institute for Energy and Society.

The discussion centers on a program at Stanford called Uncommon Dialogues which aims to sort out divisive issues and make progress solving them.

“I started to look into this Uncommon Dialogue program, and I was really quite intrigued given the difficulties we have in resolving some of today’s big energy, climate and environmental issues,” said Reicher.

The idea is to get opposing parties together at least once and see if there’s any interest in really trying to resolve some of their big differences.

“I think we’ve got a good process, and we’ve tested it now in both hydropower and big solar, and I think it could work well on a lot of other issues. We got some of the biggest solar developers in the United States to sit down with some of the big environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy, the largest U.S. conservation group, and with tribal representatives and a whole host of others.”

The result was the groups bought in on an agreement about how to proceed.

“We’ve been moving forward ever since to really try to improve the way we site, operate, and transmit the power from these big solar projects, often measured in the hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and some of them approaching 1,000 megawatts.”

Dan Reicher is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the Clinton Administration. Mr. Reicher is currently attached to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Mr. Reicher joined Stanford in 2011 as the executive director of Stanford's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy & Finance. Before joining Stanford, he was the Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google.

Mr. Reicher holds a B.A. in biology from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. 

Kansas, in the heart of America’s robust wind belt, has approved a new direct current transmission corridor to help speed the transition to cleaner energy. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Andrew French, the chairman of the Kansas Corporation Commission.

“Kansas actually approved a permit for the Grain Belt Express DC line to extend all the way across our state and all the way to Indiana,” said French.

It comes at a time of increased demand for energy - particularly non-carbon emitting sources. French acknowledges that navigating the regulatory and permitting process is difficult.

“Right now, you’re looking at a few years to get new generation online and it’s a tough spot. You’ve got a lot of customers that want power.”

“This is a complex industry even for developers that are very sophisticated. As they’re developing a wind farm, a solar farm, some other generation source, it’s really hard for them to anticipate how much it’s going to cost for them to interconnect,” the Kansas regulator said. 

He’s also optimistic about the future.

“There are a lot of things moving in the direction of a successful energy transition. There are also a lot of things standing in the way or complications. There is of course, public sentiment that doesn’t understand some of the reasons why we may have need to build new infrastructure and transition to different resources.”

Andrew J. French was appointed to the KCC in 2020. He has served as Chairperson since 2021.

French currently serves as the Kansas representative to the Southwest Power Pool and regularly participates in various SPP stakeholder groups. He is also one of 10 state utility regulators selected to serve on the Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission formed in 2021.

Before his appointment to the KCC, French practiced law with a focus on energy policy and the regulation of utility rates and services. 

French has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Kansas and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Kansas School of Law.
 
 

The sister plant to the ill-fated Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania is getting a new life. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Dan Eggers, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Constellation. 

Constellation will pay $1.6 billion to refurbish Unit 1 at Three Mile Island by 2028. It sits near Unit 2, the reactor that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.  Unit 1 is an independent reactor, and its long-term operation was not impacted by the Unit 2 accident. 

Unit 1 closed in 2019 due to financial conditions, but Microsoft has now agreed to purchase all the energy from the plant to meet demand for its data centers.

“They are undeniably a sustainability leader,” Eggers said of Microsoft. “When we realized that this was a viable project in the sense that we could bring it back from a mechanical and technical perspective, we brought the opportunity to them, explained what it could be, and they were very enthusiastic.” 

Eggers says the need for additional generation made them take another look at TMI Unit 1. 

“We ran it for 20 years. It ran incredibly well, safely, reliably, dependably over that time,” said Eggers.

Daniel L. Eggers is the executive vice president and chief financial officer for Constellation. In this role, he is responsible for leading the execution of all financial activities for the Constellation business. He serves on the Constellation Executive Committee, which sets strategy and direction for the company.

Eggers joined Exelon in 2016. Prior to that he was with Credit Suisse for 18 years with a focus on energy-related sectors. 

Eggers received a bachelor's degree in Finance from Texas Christian University and received the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2000. He also completed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Reactor Technology Course in 2023.

One of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country is preparing for an 80% increase in electricity demand by 2045. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Steve Powell who is the president and CEO of Southern California Edison.

With a customer base of 15 million people across a 50,000 square mile service area, Southern California Edison is changing the way it prepares for the increased demand.

“Our engineers that are frankly used to dealing with relatively small changes on the grid and small amounts of load growth and really focus on just making sure that the infrastructure stays reliable are now having to think very differently about how we plan for customer load growth and load growth is showing up really quickly,” said Powell.

Meeting the demand for carbon free electricity means more generation from wind and solar and other sources like nuclear and geothermal. It also means more transmission to get electricity to customers.

“You look at the California Independent System Operator's 20-year outlook and they're talking about 50 plus billion dollars of new transmission that needs to get built. We're going to need to build transmission miles at four times the pace that we've seen historically.”

Powell admits 20 years is a short timeframe, and the industry needs to move faster. 

“About 20% of the energy that customers use is electricity. By the time you get to 2045, I would expect 50 to 60% of it to be electricity based. So, customers are going to be two to three times more dependent on electricity than they are today. That means our level of service has to be better. Reliability is going to have to be better.”

Steven Powell is president and chief executive officer of Southern California Edison. Powell has held a variety of positions of progressing responsibility since joining the company in 2000, including executive vice president, Operations and senior vice president of Strategy, Planning, and Operational Performance.  

He has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has also held leadership positions in resource planning and strategy, gas and power procurement, and SCE’s plug-in electric vehicle readiness efforts.

Germany and Europe are somewhat envious of the massive federal spending now underway in America to ready the grid and the energy economy to combat climate change. 

That’s according to Simon Müller who is one of Europe’s leading thinkers on the future of energy and sustainability. As the director of the think tank Agora Energiewende, he took time to explain his views on the Department of Energy’s Grid Talk Podcast.

“When it comes to the buildout of renewable energies actually what we see in jurisdictions across the world is that now that you really have very competitive costs that it doesn’t take that much political will any more to go for quite large amount of renewables,” said Müller. 

After the global economic downturn from the Covid pandemic, Europe has watched the U.S. government put in place a stimulus package built around investments in clean energy and the electric power grid. 

“When you look at policymakers in Germany but also in Europe, they’ve been looking to the United States and the Inflation Reduction Act with a certain degree of envy. Why? Because it’s been perceived as being very successful at attracting investments in technologies that are very promising for the future and that are very strategic and position the United States on clean energy technologies.” 

Europe has struggled to match that government support.

“If we want to also play a role as a manufacturing hub going forward, we have to get our act together to find a response to that act in the U.S.”

Simon Müller is Director Germany at Agora Energiewende. He leads Agora's work in Germany on overarching energy and climate policy issues as well as in the areas of electricity, heat and energy infrastructure. Müller has advised governments in over 20 countries on six continents and coordinated and authored various studies on the transition of the power and energy system to renewable energies.

Müller is an alumnus of the Mercator Followship on International Affairs and is a member of the advisory board of the DLR Institute for Networked Energy Systems. He studied in Oldenburg, Bremen and Berlin (psychology, physics) and holds a M.Sc. in physics.

NV Energy and Google have pioneered new utility regulatory policy to help the tech company’s move to power its data center with renewable and green energy.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Doug Cannon, President and CEO of NV Energy. 

Google executives say the agreement could be a template for similar pacts with utilities around the country. Higher revenues from new fee structures will be used to fund new geothermal generation resources in Nevada. 

“We really quickly recognized is we couldn’t just rely on that tariff book anymore and we had, if we were going to stay relevant in the business and we were going to be a value-add energy provider for our customers we had to change our way of business.”

Utilities that don’t adapt to the green energy push of the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft may be headed to challenging times. 

“We’re going to see some utilities bypassed.”

“What this product, what we’re focused on is real time green generation being injected into the NV Energy grid at the same time as Google was utilizing energy… there’s absolutely a real time match on that energy.”

Doug Cannon leads NV Energy’s daily operations and oversees the company’s commitment to deliver low-cost energy, expand its renewable energy portfolio and maintain industry-leading reliability for its customers. He has been with NV Energy since 2013.

NV Energy delivers electricity to nearly 1.3 million customers and nearly 50 million tourists annually throughout its nearly 46,000-mile service territory in the state of Nevada. 

Cannon earned a juris doctor from the University of Colorado School of Law and a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Colorado. He holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental geoscience from Weber State University.

Google’s data centers consume an enormous amount of electricity. That’s prompted the information giant to proactively engage in the accelerating energy revolution. From Nevada to North Carolina and many points between, it is gearing up to power the Artificial Intelligence wave by striking novel relationships with utilities and encouraging the transformation of energy regulation, state by state. 

That is the focus of this episode of Grid talk. Host Marty Rosenberg interviews Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s Global Head of Data Center Energy.

Google, citing industry sources, says and additional $2.5 trillion must be spent on clean energy over the next six years to address climate change. 

“What we have encountered is a universal recognition that we are in a unique moment in time,” said Peterson Corio. “For the first time in decades, we have real load growth in the U.S.”

Google’s response is to deepen its use of clean energy. 

“We are matching 100% of the electricity we use on an annual basis with new additional clean energy that we put onto the grid somewhere in the system or in the world.”

That effort will now be broadened. 

“Our higher standard of our 24/7 carbon-free energy goal actually takes that a step further and says if we’re truly going to decarbonize the grid where we operate, we need to make it first local, meaning we can’t just only sign a new contract for wind or solar, for example, in the Midwest to offset our data center in Singapore, right? Carbon is a global problem, but we also need to find solutions directly where we operate.”

Amanda Peterson Corio has 20 years of experience in energy project finance, development, and the procurement of renewable and traditional energy generation. In her current role, Amanda manages power procurement, energy policy, and energy infrastructure development for Google’s global data centers. 

Amanda holds an MBA from The Wharton School of Business and a BA in Business Administration with Honors from Boston University’s School of Management.

TerraPower, fueled with $1 billion from Bill Gates, hopes to be first out of the gate with next generation nuclear projects that will complement and back up burgeoning renewable energy generation. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Chris Levesque who is president and CEO of TerraPower. 

The company is developing its 345-megawatt prototype. Ultimately, the units will be plugged in to the grid and replace generation at many coal-burning power plants. That will allow the new units ready access to transmission lines.

“We are the only construction permit for a commercial reactor in front of the NRC (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission) today so by that objective measure, it means we’re next. It means the next American reactor is our Natrium Reactor in Wyoming; yes, so we plan to receive that construction license in 2026,” said Levesque

All kinds of nuclear technology should soon follow. 

“All the models show that the optimum mix on an emission-free grid is going to be 20% to 30% nuclear,” Levesque said. “I wish we could move faster, though. TerraPower is the leader. We’re trying to deliver as fast as we can on the first one and scale as fast as we can but we’re going to need multiple technologies.” 

“We really do need to triple nuclear, and we’re excited about being first but even when we deliver hundreds of reactors to triple nuclear, it’s going to require a really massive deployment.”

Chris Levesque is president and chief executive officer of TerraPower and also serves as a member of the TerraPower Board. He was appointed to that position in November 2018 after having served as president of TerraPower since 2015. Levesque leads this nuclear innovation company in the pursuit of next-generation nuclear energy. His proven track record in scoping, planning and implementing complex projects began with his service in the U.S. Nuclear Navy and features more than 30 years of experience in the nuclear field.

Levesque holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Master of Science in mechanical engineering and a naval engineer degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Massive investments to overhaul our aging power grid are underway, but it’s going to require significant planning to be successful.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg sits down with Ron Ambrosio, an energy transformation professional, to talk about getting smarter and more deliberate how we plan for the future.

“One of the key themes that we’re trying to educate the industry on is the importance of not just looking at forward incremental steps and design, but also the importance of looking at that endgame and doing analysis on that from an architectural perspective,” said Ambrosio.

“The endgame is reducing carbon fuels, trying to depend on renewable energy more and more and trying to expand to the use of distributed energy resources.”

Limits on the grid today are delaying the deployments of new grid assets. 

“That bottleneck partially reflects the fact that our current grid design does have limitations in what it can absorb today.” 

Ambrosio noted that, when it comes to planning, we will always have the issue needing new transmission.

“There’s a lot of evolution that the distribution systems need to go through in order to accommodate a very high penetration of more distributed renewable energy and other types of DER resources.” 

Ambrosio is former chief technology officer of smarter energy research at the IBM TJ Walton Research Center and former chairman of the Gridwise Architecture Council. He is a senior technical executive and scientist with a focus on technology, business and policy issues related to energy transformation in the electricity industry. He has 40 years of software engineering experience in distributed, real-time systems and their interoperability with enterprise computing environments, and 20 years of experience specifically in the energy transformation space.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Shay Bahramirad who is the  vice president of T&D, strategy, and sustainability at LUMA and president of the IEEE Power & Engineering Society. The discussion focuses on rebuilding the grid in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and how the world is pivoting to a new electric grid.

Bahramirad is the point person helping to rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico and and go beyond what existed prior to Hurricane Maria. The federal government has earmarked $16 billion to Puerto Rico for grid related work.

“From that total $16 billion dollars, we have initiated over $13 billion dollars of scope of work and over $4 billion dollars of it is approved by FEMA and over $1.2 billion dollars has been constructed in the grid. That includes everything from poles that they would withstand 160 miles per hour winds to modernization of substations,” said Bahramirad. 

Part of the rebuild is making the grid more reliable for customers.

“It also suffered from decades of under investments and lack of maintenance that led customers and citizens of Puerto Rico to experience outages three times more frequently than any other utility in the United States. “

“We got to work. The frequency of outages experienced by customers has gone down by about 25% since we started.”

As for changes confronting IEEE Power & Engineering Society members, utilities, and customers – the organization is focused on building the electrical grid of the future and making sure all the players are working in unison.

“It’s an unprecedented time to be in this industry and the challenges that we deal with cannot wait for a decade to coordinate.”

Dr. Bahramirad is a leading figure in the industry. She is the President of the IEEE Power and Energy Society, an editorial board member of the Electricity Journal, a US CIGRE Executive member, an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the founder of IEEE Women in Power. Dr. Bahramirad completed her PhD in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has issued a new rule to better coordinate the massive buildout of new electric transmission systems. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Ari Peskoe who is the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program.

FERC is trying to help pave the way to get a reported 11,000 wind, solar, and battery projects online. Right now, they are in limbo because of the lack of transmission.

“There are massive amounts of generation, mostly clean generation, stuck in these interconnection lines or interconnection queues,” said Peskoe.

In May, FERC issued Order No. 1920 to coordinate information sharing and transmission buildout. 

“FERC is trying to motivate the industry to develop high-voltage transmission lines and to work together on that development through existing regional alliances.”

Peskoe says there have been tens of billions of dollars a year spent on transmission, but much of it has gone to rebuilding last century’s infrastructure.

“We need to keep the system working, but we also need to think about ways to expand it in a cost-effective way.” 

Order No. 1920 urges the industry to be more forward thinking rather than reacting to these generators on a project-by-project basis.

“Let’s look at the broader trends, the long-term trends that we’re seeing, both in the supply mix changes as well as the potential for increasing demand due to electrification and other factors and plan wholistically going forward to anticipate the future needs.” 

Ari Peskoe has written extensively about regulation of the U.S. power sector, on issues ranging from Constitutional challenges to states’ energy laws to interstate transmission development. Prior to the Environmental and Energy Law Program, Ari was an associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C. where he litigated before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about the Western Energy Crisis. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in electrical engineering and business.

Countries around the world are stepping up efforts to combat climate change but mountainous challenges loom. That’s according to the guest on the latest episode of Grid Talk.

Host Marty Rosenberg speaks with David Waskow, director of International Climate Initiatives at the World Resources Institute. 

Waskow says non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are shoulder to shoulder with national governments’ stepped-up engagement.

“We’re both making a lot of progress and have enormous challenges ahead of us,” said Waskow.

According to Waskow the work is just beginning.

“I think one thing we haven’t taken into account is the depth of transformation that we need.”

Some countries are making notable progress. 

“The surge in renewables in India is just quite remarkable and there over 100 gigawatts at the moment I believe, and continuing to grow rapidly,” he said. 

And he’s talking about massive societal transformations.

“We are moving quickly on EVs but all the evidence is that we’re not only going to have to do EVs at a massive scale, we’re also going to have to shift to other modes of transport than passenger vehicles.”

AS the Director of WRI’s International Climate Initiative Waskow is focused on international cooperation that catalyzes and supports action on climate change at the national level in developed and developing countries Prior to WRI, David directed climate change policy at the development organization Oxfam America, where much of his work focused on the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. 

He has graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University; his undergraduate degree is from Brown University.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is gearing up to fund $40 billion of electric grid and sustainability projects. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks Zealan Hoover who is the EPA Administrator’s Senior Advisor for Implementation. They discuss the range of projects to be funded.

“We’ve received over $100 billion dollars in supplemental appropriations. A lot of that is for electric system decarbonization and other climate investments,” Hoover said. 

The amount far exceeds any effort the agency has undertaken in its 50-year history. 

“We have received tens of billions of dollars across multiple programs through the Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to both accelerate grid decarbonization and to get more zero emission equipment plugged into that grid.”

States, cities, and tribes are now competing for $4.6 billion worth of projects, with awards to be announced starting in July. 

“We’ve received over $30 billion dollars in project proposals so we will be funding the best of the best. We’re seeing really innovative proposals that are tailored to the needs of local communities and states,” Hoover said.

Zealan Hoover has led EPA's agency-wide implementation of more than $100 billion in programs authorized under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Prior to that, he worked in the private sector advising organizations on a wide range of strategic and operational matters with an emphasis on decarbonization and managing climate risk. Hoover graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Offshore wind power generation is about to take off in a big way in the U.S. One of the biggest splashes will be made by Equinor which is building up to 130 ocean-planted wind turbines 15 to 30 miles off Long Island. Grid Talk host Marty Rosenberg goes in-depth on the project details with Equinor’s Vice President of Operations, Sam Byrne.

The operation will be anchored by operations based in Brooklyn, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. The company’s Empire Wind farm will generate 2.1 gigawatts of electricity. New York State has declared that it wants 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

Byrne described the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal now being erected. 

“We’ll be building a building, we’ll be building a substation,” said Byrne. “We need maintenance technicians, marine and vessel crews to get out there, planning teams, medics…”

 Once offshore wind starts spinning, its appeal will be clear. 

“The wind resource blows more strongly and more consistently offshore and it better matches electric consumption patterns than a lot of other renewable sources.”

Byrne also talks about why the U.S. has been slow to adopt offshore wind and why that is changing.

“We’re starting to see the acceleration now. Some of it has to do with support; some of it has to do with the technology that’s come into being; some of it has to do with just the need for electricity.”

Sam Byrne is in his first year with Equinor. His responsibilities include leading and overseeing Equinor’s US offshore wind operations and maintenance activities, while ensuring development and execution of safe, efficient, and cost-effective operations. 

Byrne worked previously Vestas Wind Systems and McKinsey & Co. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University and an M.A. in International Economics and International Relations with a concentration in Energy, Resources, and Environment from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded grants to two entities to enable a deeper dive into tidal energy generation. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Nate Johnson who is the Vice President of Development for ORPC. The Maine based firm will deploy two devices in Cook Inlet, Alaska to further study tidal generation.

“For decades folks have been trying to harness marine energy and I would say it’s still new because there’s only a handful of companies around the world that have achieved that and it’s a harsh environment, it’s complex,” said Johnson. 

The first phase of the study is being paid for with a $3 million DOE grant with a goal generating between one and five megawatts of power. 

“Alaska has an opportunity to produce way more than it needs and produce other forms of electricity, transportable electricity from tidal energies. In Cook Inlet alone in Alaska, we have the potential for 18 gigawatts.”

ORPC and the other grant recipient, a team led by Orcas Power and Light Cooperative in Washington, aim to raise the profile of potential tidal power. 

“A lot of folks aren’t aware that there are technologies out there than can produce electricity from tides or from rivers that aren’t dammed so we really focus on not only getting the device in the water but working with communities or customers to build awareness in different regions and try to grow that marketplace. That’s a big part of what we do.”

Nate Johnson leads ORPC’s development activities and the implementation of its innovative power systems in cost effective, environmentally responsible ways. A native of Long Island, Maine, Nate has a diverse background that includes renewable energy, commercial fishing, aquaculture, groundwater exploration and development, construction management and environmental engineering. He earned a Bachelor of Applied Science from Tufts University.

The grid is getting more complex, complicating the responsibilities of the entities responsible for keeping electricity flowing. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Clair Moeller who is the President and Chief Operating Officer for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO).

The discussion focuses on the evolving power grid and the transition to clean energy.

 “Retirements are outpacing new installations of resources on the grid and that’s a problem that we haven’t had on the grid since its early formation period in the ‘30s,” Moeller said. “Things are moving in an uncoordinated fashion where we’re creating risk for the grid that we maybe didn’t anticipate.”

One of the risks is the need for more transmission to meet demand.

“By the time we’re all in, it will be over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of transmission investments.”

Spending for new generation and transmission will have an impact on consumers.

“Energy costs at the consumer level are going to go up substantially,” said Moeller.

Moeller also talks about the pace of the energy transition and the need for education. 

“We can reduce our carbon footprint faster if we build more gas-fired generation so that we can turn off coal plants. But that just doesn’t make sense to people that think we should turn off combustion because that’s how you reduce the carbon footprint,” he said.

Clair Moeller leads all aspects of the Operations division at MISO, including grid operations, forward markets, system planning, external affairs, information technology and corporate services. Moeller also has executive responsibility for the compliance and external affairs teams.

He is an industry expert with experience in the operation of power systems throughout the Midwest. He is skilled at identifying and implementing the best practices in transmission planning and system operations.

Moeller completed the Oxford Advanced Management and Leadership course at Oxford Said Business School, the Executive Management program at the Carlson School of Business, University of Minnesota, and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State University. 

The federal government is poised to transform the United States' electric grid at an unprecedented, massive clip to fight climate change and embrace sustainability.

That’s according to Sasha Mackler, head of the Bipartisan Policy Center energy program who is the guest on the latest episode of Grid Talk. 

“The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are really two major achievements from a federal policy perspective,” said Mackler. 

“They’re very focused on the developments and in particular the deployment of clean energy technologies across the American economy.”  

The result will unleash an enormous amount of new capital from the federal government into this energy transition and into energy modernization. 

“Dollars are being spent; small grants have gone out the door. Big grants and funding programs have been established and funding commitments have been made but the actual large dollars that are going to flow into the economy, those are still really getting setup because projects take time to sort of work through the commercial permitting phase, to get the consortiums together, to get the contracts in place so that they can actually get out into the market and attract the capital and start the construction.” 

Sasha Mackler has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of energy policy and commercial markets. Prior to leading the Energy Program, he spent nearly 10 years in the private sector, first as vice president of Summit Power Group’s carbon capture business and then overseeing market development activities for Enviva, the largest biomass fuel supplier to the global utility industry. His professional work has focused on the innovations necessary to scale emerging energy technologies along with developing the business models and policy frameworks that support the deployment of low carbon energy systems.

Mackler holds both a Master of Science in Earth Resources Engineering and Master of Public Administration from Columbia University. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Geomechanical Engineering from the University of Rochester.

Ontario Canada’s government is all in on nuclear technology as it stakes out a global leadership position in small modular reactors (SMRs). In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Todd Smith who is the Ontario Energy Minister.

Rapid population and economic growth, coupled with the province’s long reliance on nuclear technology, prompted its decision to pursue SMRs. 

“We felt very comfortable in moving forward with the technology we’d chosen which is a 300-megawatt boiling water reactor from GE Hitachi,” said Smith. “We’re partnering with U.S. Technologies on this and other U.S. and international partners to develop the first-of-the-kind SMR, small modular reactor, here in Ontario.”

“It’s baseload power, it’s there when you need it, it’s there and able to be relied on 365 days a year.”

The province expects to add five million residents over the next decade.

“That’s going to require a lot of electricity.” 

Todd Smith has been the Ontario Energy Minister since June of 2021. Smith has served in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario for more than a decade. He is a graduate of Loyalist College.

Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) could play an important role in meeting future energy needs. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Sandra Dykxhoorn, the vice president of New Nuclear Growth at Ontario Power Generation (OPG), based in Toronto.

“It’s a game-changer,” said Dykxhoorn about SMRs. “We are really at the front of the pack here. OPG is recognized now globally as a world leader in its small modular deployment.”

SMRs will make their international debut in the free world in Ontario, Canada in five years.

“The reason why small modular reactors exist at all and why people are investing in this technology is because we know there is a need for smaller, clean base load power options that can replace gas and coal,” Dykxhoorn said. 

“Part of the solution with the small modular reactor is that it’s smaller so that should be quicker to build; doesn’t take as long,” she told Grid Talk. “Additionally, it’s more modular and more standardized. What we try to do is introduce factory buildout components.”

It will be safer than conventional nuclear plants around for decades. 

“Essentially what they’re trying to do is remove the humans that need to be involved in managing a nuclear reactor in the event that there’s an emergency or something happens. Ultimately, there’s something called passive safety.”

As the Vice President of New Nuclear Development for Ontario Power Generation, Sandra Dykxhoorn oversees the company’s long-term new nuclear growth strategy, building external relationships and creating a pipeline of opportunities. She has been with OPG since 2016
 
 She graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Carleton and is a proud alumnus of the Laurentian Leadership Program in Ottawa and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Grenoble France.

The federal government is accelerating its support of pathbreaking fusion power research, ramping up three fusion research hubs and developing private sector engagement in next generation nuclear power. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Kramer Akli who is with the Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

“What we are hoping on for the hubs in four years is to give us a clear picture which inertial fusion approach we can pursue,” said Akli.

DOE has committed to spend $42 million over four years to support research into the use of lasers to fire up fusion, the process that powers the sun. This comes after researchers achieved a significant milestone in 2022 called "scientific breakeven." 

 “For the first time in history we have achieved ignition and that you can get more energy out of the target,” he said. 

Overall, DOE is spending $500 million dollars a year on fusion.

“With these three national hubs, we have leading institutions, but they bring together more than 30 institutions from national labs, universities, and the private sector to tackle some of these challenges.” 

“What we have today that we didn’t have five, 10 or 20 years ago is we have a private sector, more than 50 companies, that are pursuing fusion energy and we have attracted more than $6 billion dollars in investments,” said Akli.

Kramer Akli has been with the Department of Energy since 2016.

He has a PhD in Applied Science from the University of California, Davis. He received a BS in Plasma Physics from National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). 

The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) meeting in Dubai confirmed it will take a combination of generation sources to decarbonize electricity production, and nuclear energy will play a key role. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Arshad Mansoor who is the President and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Mansoor provides his takeaways from the conference. 

“Now (there is) almost unanimous agreement on the importance on both large nuclear central station and small modular reactors. You can call this COP28 the Nuclear COP28 because I haven’t seen this (before) from leaders, from organizations, from industries,” said Mansoor.

Other generation sources are also needed.

“We should double-down, triple-down on wind and solar but we should triple-down on offshore wind.”

Mansoor said that EPRI research priorities align well with the global direction of energy and climate policy. 

“I think our long-term focus is spot-on which is, we’ve got to double-down on innovation on SMRs and long duration energy storage and on carbon-capture.”

Arshad Mansoor is responsible for the EPRI’s operation and portfolio of R&D programs. Mansoor has been with EPRI for 21 years and previously served as SVP of research and development, and VP of the Power Delivery and Utilization sector. He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology; and a M.S. and doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Texas in Austin. 

Solar power generation deployments are accelerating worldwide - and the grid must evolve to accommodate it. That’s the topic of this episode of Grid Talk. Host Marty Rosenberg talks with Mary Werner who is the Solar Program Manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. 

“We did a Solar Futures Study in 2020 and in that report, we said that if you want to go to a decarbonized electric grid by 2035, we have to ramp up from our 2020 level by 9½ times and that’s just in the United States,” said Werner.

Werner explained the world is on pace to erect $1 billion a day in solar assets.

“By 2035, if we also plan on electrification which would then increase the amount of electricity needed, we would have to get to 12½ times.” 

Production is gearing up in tandem with the escalating need for solar. 

“In a report last week that I saw, our quarterly Market Industry Report, says that there have been 240 gigawatts of solar manufacturing announced since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022,” Werner said. “That is the kind of ramp up is what we need.”

Mary Werner joined NREL in 1995 as an engineer in the Federal Energy Management Program and eventually became the program manager. She has also managed programs for NREL's Building Technologies Program, Integrated Deployment, the Deployment and Market Transformation organization. In 2015, Werner became the program manager for the Solar Program, the flagship program at the lab.

Ms. Werner has an Executive MBA from the University of Colorado, Denver and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from California State University, Sacramento.