Lawmakers introduce a three bill package to promote more transparency within the energy sector following sharp bill increases in winter months.
Prior to Monday’s special joint committee hearing on energy reliability, State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown) followed through on her plans to try and bring more scrutiny to energy providers’ decision making processes.
These are in addition to State Rep. Debra Heffernan's (D-Bellefonte) bill to create the Delaware Energy Fund, which if passed would provide financial assistance to low and moderate income families facing rising energy costs.
The bills would raise the standard of approval necessary when utility companies ask for rate increases, cap Delmarva Power’s recoverable annual capital expenses and require the disclosure of votes cast at meetings of the PJM Interconnection.
PJM is a profit-neutral regional transmission organization that provides power to 65 million consumers, including the entirety of Delaware.
PJM Senior Vice President of Governmental and Member Services Asim Haque told the joint committee the region is facing a series of generation retirements as energy demand continues to grow, forecasting continued strain on the grid.
“We are going to see a lot of resources leaving the system between now and 2030, a lot of it due to policy — policies that are in place to push resources off the system, primarily environmental policies, some economic," he said.
Haque notes there are no significant Delaware policies forcing these generation retirements, but rather major policy decisions in states like Illinois, New Jersey, and Virginia in addition to federal EPA rules.
He adds Delaware is importing more energy than it is exporting, but this is not uncommon. In fact, as of Tuesday, 7 states and Washington D.C. are importing more energy than they are exporting out of the 13 states in PJM's jurisdiction.
Diane Holder, the Vice President of entity Engagement and Corporate Services at ReliabilityFirst, explains supply and demand issues are continent-wide as consumption grows with the increase of electrification and new data centers.
ReliabilityFirst is one of the six Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-approved regional entities responsible for ensuring the reliability of North America’s power system.
Holder says more than half the continent is at high or elevated risk of energy resource adequacy shortfalls in the next 10 years due to new renewable energy generation not keeping pace with prior nonrenewable generation.
“As those base load plants retire, not only are we not keeping pace with that 7 to 1, in some pockets of the grid, we're not even keeping pace on a 1 to 1 basis. And this is a big concern — It's one of our top concerns. We are losing supply faster than we're adding it," she said.
Holder is referring to cases where it could take up to 700 megawatts of solar energy in batteries to match the 24/7 around-the-clock energy output of a 100 megawatt base load generator.
Haque adds although Delaware is small, its worth noting there is only one generation project expected to clear the PJM Interconnection process in 2024 and 2025.
Other states within the grid are adding several more generation sites that are expected to add tens of thousands megawatts to PJM's overall capacity. This includes 107 projects in Virginia, 91 projects in Pennsylvania, 20 projects in New Jersey and 6 projects in Maryland.
"Other states are larger states — completely understood — but for your edification, it may not be a bad idea to just speak to developers out there and say, 'what is it that we need to do conceivably to make this a place where folks want to build," Haque told legislators.
As far as general recommendations, Haque says states should avoid policies intended to push existing generation resources off of the system until an adequate quantity of replacement generation is online and has been shown to be operating.
Additionally, he says states should help to bring new generation resources onto the system as soon as possible and should address state and local challenges in the siting and permitting of all electricity infrastructure.
Monday's hearing occurred the day after the coal-fired Indian River Power Plant in Sussex County officially retired after first opening in 1957.
State Sen. Brian Pettyjohn (R-Georgetown) noted the plant was bringing 410 megawatts into the grid and raised concerns that the amount of land needed to make up for the loss in generation with a solar farm isn't feasible for the state.
Sen. Hansen is of the mind that creating a more reliable mix of energy sources in the First State should be one of the region's highest priorities, in addition to bringing new generation online as fast as possible.
"Now that we know we've got a problem, we need to address it as quickly as we can. And we know that we have certain things— certain levers that we can pull," Hansen said, noting hydroelectric electricity may not be feasible for Delaware, but solar, wind, natural gas, coal and potentially nuclear and hydrogen all remain on the table.
Hansen says the three major Delaware generation projects currently in the works include the state's involvement in a Maryland offshore wind project that is facing county-level permitting issues, the Raceway Solar project in Harrington and the Cedar Creek solar project in Smyrna that is also facing approval holdups.
