Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From WBZ News Radio in Boston. This is New England Weekend.
It's where each week we come together right here we
talk about all the topics important to you and the
place where you live. It is great to be back
with you again this week. I'm Nicole Davis. It's safe
to say I think we're at the point where the
heat is on in our homes. We've had temperatures in
the thirties and twenties, so yeah, we're past that point
(00:29):
where we can say I'm just going to wait a
few more weeks. However, so far this winter, we have
yet to deal with a patented New England deep freeze. Still,
you might be working on winter rising things, making sure
the systems are ready to go to handle whatever cold
snap comes down the pike. At the region's power grid,
they've been working all year long trying to figure out
just how much power all six New England states are
(00:50):
going to need to get through the coldest season, and
you can imagine that takes a lot of leg work.
They certainly don't need to guess though, because there are
plenty of teams in place getting it done at the grid.
So New England, let's learn all about that process. Randy
Berlin Game is a spokesman for the Grid. Randy, it's
really good to have you here to teach us about this.
My first question for you is about how you put
(01:12):
these power forecasts together, kind of figuring out how much
power we need to get through the season.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
How does all that work sure, So it really comes
down to supply and demand, and we have a forecasting
team here at IO New England that takes a look
at historical data for the winter and they kind of
take a look at the trends and what we've needed
in the past in terms of demand consumer demand, and
they can take a look at that and they compare
that to basically what we have available for generation resources,
(01:42):
what might be available for imports from neighboring regions, and
they take a look at potential retirements from generating resources
as well, So they kind of compare these two things
and they can come to a conclusion of whether we
have adequate supply for the demand that they're forecasting this winter.
We're looking at having sufficient resources to meet that demand.
(02:06):
And of course there's forecasting that goes on beyond like
the seasonal forecasting, right, so there's a forecasting that we
do ahead of time for the winter season. But they
also do forecasting every day throughout the winter as well,
and that's a little bit more real time, and they
take a look at you know, generations that generators that
might need to do maintenance and things like that, and
(02:26):
they can put out what we call a twenty one
day rolling forecast, and that kind of looks at the
status and health of the grid in real time, and
that gets published to our website and folks can take
a look at that to see kind of where we're
at as the winter unfold.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
That also must make it a lot easier for you
to keep things maintained, because the worst thing in the
world would be a big blizzard coming through or something
and then the power grade all of a sudden just
kind of collapsing in one part of the region.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, So the way that the grid is kind of
broken down is Iceland, New England, we manage, you know,
a good way to look at it is kind of
compared to a highway system. We manage the transmission what
would be the highways, those those power lines that are
carrying more voltage, and then from there it goes to
the utilities and they're more of the the power lines
(03:16):
that go to your house. Right, So if some of
those things, like those outages from storms, that's more handled
by the utility companies, whereas the bigger transmission lines is
something that the ISO that's more in our realm.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Okay, that makes more sense. So tell me, I guess
what kind of supply sources do you use? Is it
more just you know, the typical power plant? Do you
use cold nuclear? Wind? Where are you getting the power from?
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yes, we have a pretty good mix of resources here
in New England right now. We're predominantly natural gas is
probably about fifty percent of our resource mix, and from
there it kind of go to nuclears about a quarter.
And from there the remaining the remaining quarter of our
resource mix goes to things like renewables, hydro and imports.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, I was going to say about the imports. We
still get power from Canada, correct.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's right. So we import from our neighbors in hydro
hydro Quebec from Canada as well as New York. We
have ties to both of those areas.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
All right, Are we sending out any power as well
or do we just import?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah? That changes day to day, and even you know,
beyond that, it can change hour to hour, minute to minute,
so it kind of depends on who needs what at
what time, and we can sell to them or we
can we can purchase for them as well.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
That's good to know. So, you know, when it comes
to maintaining reliability, that's important. As we were just talking
about a little while ago, what are you doing over
at ISO to make sure that things keep running as
they should and you know you've got the forecasting and
all that, but making sure that all the nuts and
bolts are working as they need to to provide us power.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, so operating the grid is one of our three
critical roles here at the ISO, and reliability is kind
of the name of the game. So we have system
operators that are in our control room twenty four hours
a day, seven days a week, you know, including overnights
and holidays, and they're keeping an eye in the grid
at all times. So while we are predicting to have
(05:20):
adequate resources for this winter, they're going to be in
there keeping an eye on things for any unforeseen kind
of events coming up. And they can work with different
generators to let's say conditions get a little tighter, to
do something like forg maintenance or ask a generator to
ramp up if demand increases.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
We do use a lot of power in the winter
time to keep our homes warm and you know, keep
everything going for the consumers. For people who are taking
in and consuming the utilities, do you believe that they're
going to have to worry about any controlled outages this winter?
You know, we see that happening in places like Texas
and around the country, or any sort of conservation. Do
(06:00):
you think that's going to be at all a necessary
thing to worry about.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Based on our forecasting and our capacity analysis that we
do heading into the winter, we're anticipating having the resources
needed to meet demand in the region. But that said,
our system operators are in the controller room twenty four
hours a day keeping an eye on things, and if
a situation was to occur that went to the point
(06:25):
where the public needs to be notified and we had
something like public conservation, I think it's important for folks
just to keep in mind that that hasn't happened since
I believe it's July twenty thirteen, during extreme heat temperatures
and high humidity, so it's not something that happens often
here in New England. I think the only other time
that I can recall is August two thousand and six,
(06:47):
So it's not something that happens too often, and if
it does happen, it's not necessarily an emergency. That's a
tool that our operators have in their toolbox that can
help just reduce that demand on the grid to make
sure something more drastic or extreme doesn't happen.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
There has been a lot of talk about climate change
right and how it could impact our power grid and
our resources as we go into the winter months, you know,
what is IO doing to take that into consideration and
deal with the effects of climate change.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
So the biggest thing, I mean, we just had to
deal with the reality of what the weather and what
our forecasts are telling us. So I know right now
we have our forecast is saying that this winter is
going to be slightly warmer than normal with a normal
amount of precipitation, So that in and of itself means
there's probably going to be less demand on the grid.
(07:37):
So in that sense, it makes it easier and in
terms of climate change and that and the states have
their decarbonization goals and we're working pretty closely with them
to kind of move our grid towards more renewables and
stuff like that. We used to have more things like
oil that powered the grid and we moved to natural gas.
(07:58):
That was something we helped facilitate and now we're in
this clean energy transition, so that's more of a long
term approach. We're kind of helping to facilitate the transition
to clean energy and renewable so I'd say that's kind
of where that comes into play.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And again that's Randy Berlin game there from ISO New
England breaking down a lot of the processes behind the
scenes at the power grid, kind of teaching us how
this all works and how they get these forecasts ready
for our energy use throughout the winter. If you want
to find out a bit more, we have an article
up on the WBZ website Wbznewsradio dot com search for
ISO neew England. It actually connects you directly to the
(08:35):
resource mix that ISO is using and you can actually
see in real time how all the power levels and
prices and everything fluctuate. It's really interesting stuff if you're
into data, so check it out. All right, have a
safe and healthy weekend. Please join me again next week
for another edition of the show. I'm Nicole Davis from
WBZ news Radio on iHeartRadio