The POWER Podcast

Sustainable Building at Heart of Collaborative Project. The South Landing project in Spokane, Washington, has been called “the five smartest city blocks in the world.” The development is said to feature “the most sustainable large building in North America.” Known as the Catalyst Building, it is intended to anchor a planned “innovation hub.” The five-story, 150,000-square-foot building features two wings around a light-filled collaborative atrium. Catalyst will host dry labs, offices, classrooms, and common study areas. The Catalyst design team reportedly emphasized sustainability as a core value. The building features cross-laminated timber (CLT)—a mass timber building material made of laminated wood panels—for major structural elements. The design reduces the buildings environmental footprint by reducing energy use and prolonging the expected lifespan of the building. The Catalyst Building connects to Spokane’s growing University District by way of the Gateway Bridge, designed to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. The South Landing project is a joint development of Avista Development and South Landing Investors LLC. Other stakeholders include Katerra (maker of the CLT), Eastern Washington University, McKinstry, and Michael Green Architecture. The sustainable features include an energy-efficient radiant heating and cooling system throughout the building, heat recovery of all exhaust air, high-performing building envelope design, LED lighting, sun shading in the lobby, and a smart building management system to maximize building operations efficiency. Heather Rosentrater, senior vice president of Energy Delivery and Shared Services with Avista Utilities, and Ash Awad, Chief Market Officer from McKinstry, were guests on The POWER Podcast. They explained why the project is important for the community and the many ways all the stakeholders collaborated to make it a success. “As a utility, we recognize that a healthy community creates a healthy utility,” Rosentrater said. “And so, that’s at the core of being involved in this kind of a development is recognizing the value that it can bring to the community in terms of attracting businesses and just providing economic development in this area. So, that’s a big piece of why we’re involved.” “Typically, when a development is happening, the developer and the general contractor and the architect are really working from a top down perspective,” Awad said. However, the South Landing stakeholders worked together in atypical ways. He said Avista and McKinstry collaborated “to think differently about how energy moves.” The two also worked closely with Katerra to bring CLT strategies into the building. “But then, we actually worked with the community, and we thought a lot about ‘What does this southern part of the University District need?’ and working quite closely with the higher ed community and the greater Spokane area to think about some of those elements,” Awad said.

How to Find the Lowest-Cost Option for Electricity in Competitive Markets. How electricity is delivered to customers in the U.S. is complicated. Consumers in some states have no choice who supplies their power; state commissions regulate utilities as vertically integrated electricity providers. Other states utilize a competitive model in which power producers can openly access transmission infrastructure and participate in wholesale electricity markets. Yet, there isn’t complete consistency among states within the two general models. The entire system is a complex mechanism where different technologies, jurisdictions, and regulatory designs must interact. Free-market proponents will tell you that having competition is the preferable alternative, but that is debatable if you look at power prices in different areas. According to a study published by the American Public Power Association, the average revenue per kWh in regulated states has been less than in deregulated states. Currently, 15 states and the District of Columbia have deregulated electricity markets. The states are Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia. But for consumers, understanding and choosing the best option to meet their needs can be difficult. That’s where a company like WattBuy comes in. WattBuy is an online electricity marketplace that helps customers save on electricity costs by identifying the best option and switching users to the cheapest electricity provider. “So, the way that we work is we have an algorithm that looks at how your home uses electricity down to 15-minute increments, and we take into account all sorts of data,” Naman Trivedi, co-founder and CEO of WattBuy, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. Among the things WattBuy considers are a home’s square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and historic usage data. It also compares a customer’s data to that of other consumers in the same area. With the information, “We can get pretty accurate at predicting what your home's electricity usage will look like,” Trivedi said. Understanding usage is only the first piece of the puzzle. Then, WattBuy looks at plans offered by power companies to see which one fits best for the customer in question. That includes evaluating tier-pricing options, which comes into play when a different rate applies to different usage thresholds. For example, rates could differ from 0–500 kWh, 500–1,000 kWh, and greater than 1,000 kWh. Other things that may need to be considered include available rebates, promotional incentives, loyalty plans, time-of-day usage, and renewable energy preferences of the consumer. There’s obviously a lot to consider, but Trivedi said WattBuy can save customers as much as 40% on their electric bills. “We have that machine learning model that assures that we’re going to be very accurate,” he said. “The best part about it is that it continues to improve over time.” Trivedi has an interesting background. He was included on the 2020 Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the Energy category. On the podcast episode, Trivedi told about some of the past projects he’s been involved in, which include working with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group promoting a policy initiative for community choice aggregation, working for the White House Office of Science and Technology under the Obama administration, and working on renewable energy projects in Haiti and Paraguay.

Amicarella ‘Demystifies’ the Role of CEO for Women. The power generation industry has historically been a male-dominated industry, but today there are a number of women who have risen through the ranks to positions of leadership. Ana Amicarella, CEO of EthosEnergy, is one of them. EthosEnergy is a leading independent service provider of rotating equipment services and solutions to the power, oil and gas, and industrial markets. Amicarella was appointed CEO last December after spending 22 years with GE and eight with Aggreko, where she was managing director for its Latin America business prior to taking on her latest role. Speaking as a guest on The POWER Podcast, Amicarella explained how her career evolved. “I started in engineering. I moved to sales. I did strategy. Then I did operations roles,” Amicarella said. “For the past 18 years, I’ve been running different businesses, which is what I love to do and likely will continue to do,” she said. Amicarella’s first seven months at the helm of EthosEnergy have been interesting to say the least. In December, COVID-19 was not yet a major concern to most people around the world, but that quickly changed. Amicarella was forced to deal with the situation. “We reacted swiftly and decisively,” she said. “We built a plan—a strategic plan that we developed as a team—and we just accelerated the execution of the plan, and adapted to the new environment and the different working rules that we had to face.” EthosEnergy has 20 facilities scattered throughout the world, and the company was able to keep them all open, even during the height of the pandemic. Amicarella said keeping people safe was a top priority, so new protocols were created and workplace adjustments were made. “We essentially sent our office personnel home, but we were already users of virtual technology, so our IT team made sure that we had the proper infrastructure to support remote workers,” she said. Concerning women in the workforce, Amicarella said, “All the companies I've work for, I think they valued women, and I think they really tried to do the best they could to retain and develop women.” Still, she suggested there’s a lot more work to be done. “We need definitely more diversity in our industry,” Amicarella said. “I think a lot of it starts at home. We have to encourage girls to do more problem-solving, more involvement in sports to develop that competitive spirit, and then take it into schools and encourage girls to get into math and sciences. Make it fun—hands-on—demystify things,” she said. “When you start seeing that women are in powerful positions then it demystifies the role,” said Amicarella. It allows other women to say, “If she can do it, I probably can do it!” When recruiting personnel, Amicarella looks for the combination of diversity and talent. She suggested the key is to have a diverse slate, and then pick the top candidate. “My leadership team from seven months ago to today is a very diverse leadership team, and it’s not by accident,” she said.

Using Autonomous Drones in the Power Sector. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been dabbled with throughout the power industry for years. POWER featured a drone on its cover in April 2014, and it has published many articles on drone technology since then. Yet, the technology has been used more as a novelty in the power sector up to this point. As a guest on The POWER Podcast, Reese Mozer, CEO and co-founder of American Robotics, suggested that could change in the very near future. “We’ve all been talking about this for a very long time—you know, a decade plus—and despite all that, we really are not even scratching the surface yet of the scale that drones will be implemented and the value that will come from them,” he said. “But we are about to enter a very different generation of drone technology—and really robotics in general—and, you know, I think the next decade is going to look quite a bit different.” According to Mozer, American Robotics has developed the next generation of drone technology. The company offers a fully automated drone system that’s capable of continuous unattended operation. Mozer explained that the autonomous drones work in conjunction with automated base stations to capture, process, analyze, and transfer data remotely to a user. The base stations charge and house the drones to prepare them for their next flight. He said this level of automation is key to finally unlocking drones as a viable tool for the energy sector. “The reality is that until we can remove the human from the loop, drones will not be able to scale to the levels that everybody has imagined,” Mozer said. “Once we can, [that] changes the economics of working with a drone. That changes the logistics. Not only does it make it affordable and practical to actually scale, it actually unlocks a whole different type of data collection, and thus, analysis that we can do on that data.” There are still some challenges to overcome, however, such as getting Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations updated to allow autonomous operation. “That is the primary hurdle stopping this technology from taking off,” Mozer said. “American Robotics has developed the technology, the automation, the machine vision, the AI [artificial intelligence] that’s required to actually conduct these automated operations reliably in the real world. And the last step for us, and for the rest of the industry, is to overcome FAA regulations. “Beyond line of sight is probably the most key. There’s also a list of other ones that would prohibit this kind of automated operation,” he said. “And that's one of the reasons that we don't see drones flying all over the place right now.” There is reason for optimism. “We expect it in the near future,” Mozer said. “This topic is something that has been debated over and worked on from both a technology perspective and a policy perspective for really the past decade, and we think that that change is coming quite soon.”

What Is DERMS and How Can It Help Utilities? A distributed energy resource management system, or DERMS, is a software platform used to manage a group of distributed energy resource (DER) assets—such as rooftop photovoltaic solar panels, behind-the-meter batteries, or a fleet of electric vehicles—to deliver vital grid services and balance demand with supply to help utilities achieve mission-critical outcomes. As a guest on The POWER Podcast, Seth Frader-Thompson, CEO of the DERMS provider EnergyHub, said aggregating DERs can offer a number of benefits to power companies. For example, they may be used to support frequency or voltage on the grid, shift load, or provide emergency demand response. Although many utilities manage DERs through a relatively manual process today, Frader-Thompson said some companies are shifting to a more automated framework, in which computers are identifying issues in the system, proactively forecasting how DERs could be manipulated to mitigate the problem, and executing the strategy. “The utility grid operator does not want to think about a million individual batteries, rooftop solar systems, electric vehicles, smart thermostats, industrial process controllers, etc. They essentially want a virtual power plant and sort of a virtual knob for that plant that they can operate,” Frader-Thompson said. EnergyHub’s Mercury DERMS uses advanced machine learning-based artificial intelligence to manage resources. “We have invested many millions of dollars in a bunch of artificial intelligence that allows the system to take 100,000 resources that happen to be clustered around a certain city and stitch them together in a closed-loop way into something that allows the utility to sort of specify exactly the outcome they want,” said Frader-Thompson. “The DERMS is basically built to allow them to do either something very specific, or something very general, and kind of dial it into exactly what works for them.” In addition to complicating grid operation, the growth in DERs would seem to pose a business challenge for utilities too. For example, if more customers are generating their own power, that means the local electric company is selling less. But Frader-Thompson suggested DERMS could provide new revenue streams for power companies to tap into. “There are other ways to make money and the concept of a DERMS creating grid services from a big group of aggregated DERs is in and of itself another revenue opportunity for utilities,” he said. “Increasingly, you’re seeing regulators say, ‘You know what? This is really valuable to the grid. In many ways, this is preferable to ratepayers—to the community—over a traditional, capital-intensive infrastructure upgrade.’ And you're seeing those regulators say, ‘You—the utility—are able to make a regulated rate of return on that.’ ”

The Importance of a Resilient Power System. It’s hurricane season in the U.S., which runs from June 1 through the end of November, and there have already been three named storms. The most recent was Tropical Storm Christobal, which was the earliest third-named Atlantic storm on record when it formed on June 2. It made landfall in the U.S. along the northern Gulf Coast on June 7, with heavy rain, a storm surge of almost six feet, and a few tornadoes. “Irrespective of which part of the world you belong to, we are seeing the impact of severe weather across the globe,” Amol Sabnis, global lead for Transmission and Distribution with Accenture, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “One thing is clear—that the severe weather events are becoming a recurring global event.” Accenture recently released a report titled “From Reliability to Resilience: Confronting the Challenges of Extreme Weather,” which included insight gleaned from a survey of more than 200 C-suite and senior vice president-level executives at electric utilities spread across 28 countries. “We conducted this research to better understand the risks posed by increased frequency of extreme weather and how we can help our clients navigate these challenges by building a more resilient network,” Sabnis said. The findings from the study are eye-opening. Nearly nine out of 10 executives surveyed said extreme weather events had grown in frequency, severity, or duration over the past 10 years. Furthermore, more than nine out of 10 expect extreme weather events to increase over the next 10 years. Yet, less than a quarter of the executives felt well-prepared to manage the challenges of extreme weather events. “One of the things that we found in our research is that nearly every utility considers resilience as a matter of focus,” said Jason Teckenbrock, North American lead for Transmission and Distribution with Accenture, who was also a guest on podcast. “So, even if they’re not fully prepared, they know they need to focus on it.” Teckenbrock suggested that there are three steps utilities can take to improve resiliency. They can harden their networks, improve restoration effectiveness, and/or develop greater system flexibility. However, network hardening is costly, and improving restoration effectiveness takes time to implement and can require significant procedural changes. Therefore, the most cost-effective approach for enhancing resilience in many scenarios is developing greater system flexibility. Some ways flexibility can be improved include creating automated self-healing grids and incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to help route electricity in a more appropriate manner. AI can also be used to conduct vegetation management assessments and to identify other risks. “We’ve seen lots of utilities starting to work on this,” Teckenbrock said. “We believe that taking a metric-based approach is important here.”

Tips for Check Valve Selection and Installation. Check valves are installed in many piping systems. Their purpose is to allow flow in only one direction, which can be critical for plant safety and to protect equipment from damage. There are a few different check valve designs, including swing check valves and spring-loaded poppet-style check valves. Understanding which type is best for a given application and ensuring valves are properly installed is vital to success. Noah Miller, applications/engineered sales manager with Check-All Valve Manufacturing Co., and Brian Strait, business development and marketing manager with Check-All Valve, explained the differences between check valve designs, and offered installation and sizing tips as guests on The POWER Podcast. Check-All Valve is a West Des Moines, Iowa-based manufacturer of industrial spring-loaded poppet-style check valves. Miller explained that piston poppet check valves have two main advantages over swing check valves. The first concerns water hammer, which is hydraulic shock caused when water stops or changes direction suddenly. “Once that wave gets to the swing check, it'll push that clapper closed and actually slam it shut, which will promote that water hammering effect,” Miller said. However, the spring inside a piston poppet-style check valve helps minimize, and may even eliminate, water hammer, because it closes the valve before the pressure way arrives. “The secondary aspect or advantage of the piston poppet over a swing check is installation orientation,” Miller said. “A swing check is only supposed to be installed in a horizontal-flow position. Whereas, a spring-loaded piston check can be vertical-flow up, vertical-flow down, 45 degrees, 37 degrees, you can kind of pick and choose with that spring, because it allows it to still close in a static condition in the piping system.” Another consideration when installing check valves concerns the run of piping. Miller noted, “Ideally, you'd like to have a minimum of 10 pipe diameters of straight pipe on the upstream side of the check valve.” The reason is to ensure the flow through the valve is laminar in nature, that is, fluid particles following in smooth layers, with little or no mixing. Miller said that would maximize the effective valve life. Getting a valve sized correctly for the application is also important. The goal is for a check valve to always be either fully open or fully closed. “Pressure and flow together create pressure drop across the given check valve,” Miller said. “You can have enough of one, but not enough of the other.” Miller presented an example of a system with 300 psi of pressure, but only 0.005 gpm of flow. He said, “You’re not fully opening any check valve, it doesn't matter what style it is, because you’ve got enough pressure, but you don’t have enough flow, and that pressure and flow together create that pressure drop to fully open the valve.” Listen to The POWER Podcast to hear the complete interview.

Understanding the Dangers of Hydrogen Sulfide Gas. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas is produced as a result of the microbial breakdown of organic materials in the absence of oxygen. It can be found in tanks, vaults, voids, and other confined spaces at industrial facilities including power plants. Besides being flammable and corrosive, H2S is also colorless and toxic, even in relatively low concentrations, so it is extremely hazardous to workers. In fact, it is the second-most-common cause of workplace inhalation fatalities behind carbon monoxide. H2S is noticeable initially by its rotten egg smell, but the gas can deaden senses making it difficult for workers to detect without a gas monitor. Veriforce CEO Colby Lane and Chris Detillier, senior safety analyst with Veriforce, were guests on The POWER Podcast. Veriforce is a leading provider of software and services that enhance workforce and community safety. Among its offerings is a training course called H2S Clear, which provides students with life-saving information while meeting the compliance requirements of ANSI/ASSP standards. “It's extremely toxic. As little as 700 parts per million can cause someone to immediately collapse, and they can die from it,” Detillier said. “So, it is very important to have a good training program in place.” Lane explained that Veriforce’s training model essentially credentials and accredits instructors. Then, those instructors provide the training to actual workers. Detillier said he’s received a lot of positive feedback every time he’s taught a “train-the-trainer” class for H2S Clear. “We've had guys that have been in the industry for years—some of them who have previously been through H2S training—and after class would tell me how much that they learned from the class and appreciate the content that we have in there.”

Solar Power Is Cheap and Getting Cheaper. In many locations, solar power is already the lowest-cost renewable energy alternative available. Some of the advantage stems from advancements made in manufacturing processes and economies of scale that solar companies have captured. Operating costs also factor into the equation—solar’s operating costs are minimal while operating expenses for wind power are more substantial. Still, Brendan Duval, CEO of the Glenfarne Group, suggested the gap between wind and solar costs could widen. “The cost curve for solar has probably got some room to run. Wind is sort of, you know, plateauing out now,” he said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. The Glenfarne Group is a New York-based energy and infrastructure assets owner that develops, constructs, and operates projects across the investment-grade Americas, including in Chile, Panama, and Columbia. Duval said the Glenfarne Group has two distinct business units: a power unit, and a midstream oil and gas unit. Each of the business units are also separated into two different segments. The legs of the midstream unit are divided between a gas gathering business and a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export development project in Texas. On the power side, there is a renewables arm and a backup power arm. “Backup power plants—we think—are really important in the energy transition process,” Duval said. “As more and more renewables come online, having [a] well-run, well-put-together backup power plant network in any country is really important. And we've got a long-term vision for that,” he said. But the Glenfarne Group isn’t just backing up renewable energy projects, it’s also investing in them. Duval said his team focuses on run-of-river hydro projects rather than dam hydro because they are generally smaller and face fewer hurdles during the development process. There is often political pressure surrounding dams, and navigating interactions with the local community, government agencies, agricultural entities, and environmental groups can be daunting. In run-of-river projects, the water is taken out of the river for a kilometer or two, and then it’s returned to the stream, so the disruption is much less extreme. “The run-of-river hydro is just [an] easier asset for us to manage within the community,” Duval said. Duval noted that run-of-river hydro development has really slowed down in Latin America for a number of reasons. For one, the best sites have already been taken. The permitting process has also become more difficult. And finally, power prices have decreased significantly. “When governments are now looking for renewable opportunities, they're looking for a lower price point. And they can achieve that lower price point with renewable sources by looking at solar and to some extent wind,” said Duval. “So, if you look at the dollars per megawatt invested, solar is the most cost-effective, then wind, and then run-of-river hydro. And the cutoff point now is really in that capital cost between wind and run-of-river hydro.”

Technology for Managing Distributed Energy Resources. With the growth of distributed energy resources, including rooftop solar, wind turbines, battery energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and demand response technology, distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS) are becoming increasingly important for utilities. Brad Williams, vice president of Industry Strategy with Oracle Utilities was a guest on The POWER Podcast. He touched on a number of topics, including how DERMS are helping power companies, how electric vehicles are challenging the industry, and how utilities are dealing with the proliferation of edge devices and data. Williams said managing the variety of resources that exist will be a key to meeting renewable energy standards in the future. “Being able to manage these resources—whether they’re distributed energy resources or electric vehicle charging equipment—being able to manage those and forecast—predict—what their operation will be is going to be critical for utilities to be able to fully embrace these renewables standards, because by nature renewable energy is intermittent, which means utilities will have to do more to manage the demand side.”