Glendale Water & Power held a town hall, which included presentations, Q&As and a community-based activity, on June 29 to discuss its upcoming 2024 Integrated Resource Plan.
Scott Mellon, assistant general manager for GWP, kicked off the meeting by elaborating on what an IRP is and what it’s used for.
“Glendale uses the IRP to identify how much energy we will need in the future and what types of strategies might help us meet those energy needs for the next 20 years,” Mellon said. “The IRP will answer three critical questions: Where will Glendale get its power? How much of that power will be renewable or clean? How much will that power cost?”
Mellon emphasized that IRPs are “snapshots in time” and subject to change based on new technologies or other changing circumstances, which is why they are submitted to the California Energy Commission every five years despite being a plan for the next 20 years. Adjustments can also be made before it’s time to submit a new IRP.
“We will put [the IRP] together with our best knowledge we have right now to move forward,” Mellon said. “If in a year, technology shifts or we have another COVID event or we have another supply chain issue, we’ll have to bob and weave and figure it out as we go, and we’ll make adjustments.”
The IRP will develop multiple strategies called “scenarios,” which test different mixes of energy resources, different timelines for achieving clean energy goals, different cost preferences and other variables. Then Ascend Analytics, a software and advisory services firm and partner of GWP, will test these scenarios using modeling software and provide results on how each scenario compares on reliability, costs and environmental responsibility.
Next, GWP will present these findings with the community and will choose a “preferred portfolio” of resources to develop to meet Glendale’s energy needs. This will lead to the first draft of the IRP which will be reviewed and finalized before being submitted to the GWP Commission. The final step is submitting the IRP to the California Energy Commission in January 2024.
One community member, Kate, who did not give her last name, attended the town hall and asked the extent to which the community has a role in helping the GWP choose their preferred portfolio. Mellon clarified that while the community doesn’t have a role in the actual choosing of the portfolio, they can provide input for the GWP to consider before making a final decision.
While Glendale must meet the California Renewable Portfolio Standard requirements of having 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% zero-carbon by 2045, the Glendale City Council established a more aggressive goal of achieving 100% clean energy by 2035. Mellon said that meeting reliability and clean energy requirements depends heavily on GWP’s ability to get power from the Western U.S. into Glendale. Currently, Glendale’s system is constrained by only two transmission lines, which control how energy is moved around the country.
“We see the whole world through those lines,” Mellon said. “As you might imagine, it creates a few serious planning challenges to us especially when it comes to our ability to provide reliable power. Any sort of outage on these transmission lines can seriously impact their ability to serve our customers.”
Brandon Mauch, an energy consultant at Ascend Analytics, outlined some of the changes GWP plans to implement in the 2024 IRP: the Intermountain Power Plant converting fully to hydrogen; the addition of Eland solar and storage project; the addition of Scholl biogas (landfill gas); and Grayson repowering and battery storage.
Dhruv Bhatnagar, a senior manager at Strategen Consulting, an energy consulting firm Glendale is also working with, prepared an activity for the participants of the town hall to take part in where they were each given six stickers — three green and three red — to place on resources they most prefer and least prefer.
There were two categories of resources: utility scale resources which included solar, wind, natural gas, green hydrogen, geothermal, small modular nuclear reactors and grid scale energy storage; and customer side resources which included distributed solar, distributed energy storage, and energy efficiency and demand response.
They were asked to compare resources based on maturity (how proven or adopted the technology is), cost, reliability impacts and environmental impacts.
Resources that were ranked solidly green included energy efficiency and demand response, utility scale solar, grid scale energy storage and customer distributed solar. Bhatnagar and Mellon found it interesting that participants ranked customer distributed solar overwhelmingly green, but were mixed on customer distributed energy storage. Mellon encouraged community members to consider how resources can work together.
To that end, Kate spoke about the benefits of distributed solar and storage.
“When you look at [distributed solar and storage together], you have to consider the resiliency benefits of having the behind-the-meter storage as opposed to the storage being elsewhere,” Kate said. “For the individual household, you absolutely can consider the resiliency benefits to the community and the reliability benefits of having aggregated storage resources locally as opposed to having to worry about the transmission lines going down.”
According to the GWP, “behind-the-meter storage refers to energy storage systems, typically in the form of batteries, that are installed on the customer’s side of the electric meter. Depending on their installation, they can provide benefits that could include back-up power in the event of a power outage, or the ability to integrate excess renewable generation from the customer’s solar PV for later use in the day. Behind-the-meter storage is not typically accessible to or controlled by the utility, but is rather a piece of a customer’s own electrical system.”
The second IRP town hall meeting will focus on scenarios and will be held at Sparr Heights Community Center at 6:30 p.m. on July 24. More town hall meetings will be announced at glendaleca.gov/2024IRP when details are finalized.
First published in the July 15 print issue of the Glendale News-Press.
