| | 8 DECEMBER 2024A CALL FOR TRANSMISSION INNOVATION AND GRID ENHANCING TECHNOLOGIES (GETS)IN MY OPINIONBy Rodica Donaldson, Vice President Transmission Analytics, EDF Renewables North AmericaEDF Renewables North America (EDFR) is a market leading independent power producer and service provider with 35 years of expertise developing and operating renewable energy projects. EDFR has developed 20 GW of renewable projects in North America and has 34 GW of projects in its development pipeline including grid-scale onshore and offshore wind, solar, storage, and distribution-scale offering,such as in-front-of-the metersolar and storage. Our onsite solutions, through our PowerFlex brand, offers behind-the-meter solar, storage, EV charging, microgrid and energy management. EDFR has built projects across the U.S. in both RTO and bilateral markets.In my role as Vice President of Transmission Analytics, I head a group responsible for forecasting and mitigating transmission congestion and curtailment risks for EDFR assets.We use production cost models to simulate the operations of the grid and project future congestion. Forecasting and mitigating transmission and congestion-related risks when grid capacity is limited, as well as accelerating market and transmission policy changes to enable better grid integration, have become a fundamental area of the business, as the pace of renewable installations continues to increase under states' clean energy policies or corporate interest in corporate sustainability and decarbonization. Transmission capacity and interconnection service are playing a critical role in enabling all generation, including renewable energy, to be brought to market. While innovation by a renewable IPP is typically thought of from a generation standpoint, EDFR is a strong advocate of innovation in the transmission space and flexible operations of the grid via adoption of Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs),such as dynamic line ratings, advanced powerflow controllers and topology optimization,whichhave the potential to maximize the capability of the existing infrastructure. The pace of GETs deployment is lagging in the U.S. compared to other parts of the world, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is in the process of taking a hard look at what approaches are required to encourage their deployment. This is a welcome regulatory development. Use cases of GETs have been well documented to date, including, for instance, in a 2019 Brattle report,Improving Transmission Operation with Advanced Technologies. Based on EDFR's experience of analyzing solutions to many transmission bottlenecks across several markets in the U.S., GETs can be efficient and cost-effective solutions to addressing congestion on the grid. They can also be deployed quickly. This is particularly important given the timelinesand complexities of building new transmission while congestion costs -ultimately passed through to end users of Rodica Donaldson
< Page 7 | Page 9 >