PennFuture's E-cubed is a commentary biweekly email publication concerning the current themes and trends in the energy market.
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September 26, 2001
Vol. 3, No. 18

Straight to the Source

Last year when PECO Energy and Unicom merged to form Exelon it was big news. Importantly, the merger settlement provided $32 million to fund the development of renewable energy in Pennsylvania.

This year, the company's wholesale trading and marketing unit, Power Team, presented renewable energy advocates with a big surprise - signing long-term contracts to purchase the output of three new wind farms in Pennsylvania. These contracts were not required as part of the merger settlement, and are not included in the $32 million earmarked for renewable energy funding.

Now a key force in renewable energy development in the East, the Power Team contracts are essential to bringing 78 MW of generation online from these new wind farms, two of which will be operational next month. The 15 MW Mill Run wind farm is scheduled to being operation next week, and the 9 MW Somerset wind farm is scheduled to begin commercial operation the following week.

Mike Freeman, the Power Team trader who made the burgeoning wind energy business in Pennsylvania possible, gave us some insight into Exelon's renewable energy commitment as well as how wind energy can be integrated into America's power grids.
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What's in Power Team's renewable portfolio?
We have 525 MW of hydro that is not pumped storage, 150 MW of wind, 100 MW of landfill methane, 35 MW of Municipal Solid Waste, 20 MW of wood waste, and 16 MW of scrap tires.

All of the wind is Green-e certifiable as "new" resources. All of the landfill methane is qualified under Green-e, but only 10 MW is new generation. Of the hydro, all of the generation is in larger projects that have been or are eligible for certification under the low-impact hydro standards. The MSW and tire projects are not qualified under Green-e, but the biomass plant is. 

Why is Power Team developing a renewable portfolio?
There were two principal reasons: a perceived demand for renewable energy products in the wholesale marketplace, and a desire to diversify our portfolio from the perspectives of fuel, emissions, and cost.

Was there internal resistance or other issues to overcome?
I think the initial reaction was that renewable projects would be a very minor sidelight to our overall business. I don't think many people paid attention to the implications of renewable portfolio standards or external corporate mandates for renewable purchases. Part of the hands-off approach was due to, I believe, a sense that renewable products only meant the re-packaging of existing generation, not changing the power system in any way. 

Over time I think many people got comfortable with the idea that the creation of products potentially could initiate new projects that would change the power system. For me that's the most important part of our participation - to help encourage new development. I also think that management began to get comfortable with the idea that renewable energy products could be profitable, and that demand for these products could be sustaining. 

Will this encourage new development? 
Generators get a creditworthy counter-party that is not only willing to buy all of the energy at the generator location, but is also willing to talk about additional new projects. Over time, other market intermediaries such as power marketers and retail suppliers may become interested in doing the same. If this chain of events occurs, I think we may even see renewable credits traded over the counter, just like other energy products now. 

How do renewables fit into Power Team's overall business strategy?
We are a growth company and are constantly in search of ways to sensibly increase our overall generating portfolio. So bringing on new renewable generation into our supply mix really is part of that overall strategy. More specifically, we believe there is sustainable demand for renewable energy, not only because of mandates such as renewable portfolio standards, but also because of natural demand. The average person may not think of it this way, but in supporting the idea of paying a premium for renewable energy I think that people implicitly are accepting the notion that renewable energy is an essential component of how we as a country intend to manage our future energy requirements.  

Why Wind?
There's no question that the momentum for wind projects began to build as a result of the PECO restructuring and merger settlements, under which PECO provided funds for new wind projects. A second reason is that the forward electric markets began a steep upward climb beginning in 1998, and especially the off-peak power market beginning in 2000 and continuing into this year. A third reason was the rapid increase in electric demand in the last five years, and a realization that we need to develop a wide-ranging set of answers to meeting the demand, including supply-side and demand-side solutions. We felt that wind generation could play a role on the supply side while meeting what seems to be a growing demand for renewable sources. 

What are the primary financial considerations for a wind deal?
The first is probably the need for a long-term contract. Wind generators typically want to enter into fixed-price, long-term agreements to make it easier and cheaper to borrow money and to provide a stable revenue source over a long period. We don't have a problem with long-term deals per se, although we do want to emphasize diversity in our contracting as well. We don't want to hold multiple long-term agreements and nothing else. 

In my discussions with generators so far, there has been some flexibility on contract length. In fact, our willingness to enter into a long-term contract is perhaps the key ingredient to getting a wind project financed and built. Beyond the long-term contract, the wind developers want to do business with a creditworthy company that has an investment-grade rating. Exelon Generation is rated A- by S&P so we are a natural counter-party for project financing. Right now, there are not very many long term buyers out there with the kind of credit-worthiness that we have. 

Will that always will be the case? 
No. If we're right about long-lasting demand, I think other large companies, including distribution companies, will participate in the purchase of energy from these projects. We've teamed up with a retail marketer, Community Energy, to stimulate demand and market wind energy in ways that will move companies to buy it. In the development of conventional generation, it is not always necessary to enter into 20-year agreements for a project to get built. For example, a developer may want to hedge off a portion of the output on a long-term basis but will be willing to sell the rest of the output for shorter periods. And in some cases, the financing source may be comfortable with a shorter-term agreement for the whole thing. 

Is there a financial advantage for wind?  
If one's view is that the future value of energy is higher than the present value, a generation source with no fuel risk obviously is good to have. Wind has one key advantage over other resources - perpetual availability without any fuel costs or price volatility. This helps mitigate the other risks that wind does present. 

It is of course difficult to predict what will happen even in the near term. But I am a believer in broad trends or cycles that are relatively easier to project, outside of significant advances in technology. Over a long period of time, 15 or 20 years, I think the probability of fixed-price wind energy riding out the low cycles while providing a greater amount of benefits in the high cycles is higher than the opposite.

I do believe that the demand for wind generation will be sustained at a moderate premium over generic electricity prices for the next 15 to 20 years. 

Is it difficult to integrate wind into your portfolio?
With conventional generation and firm transmission paths, a power marketing entity such as Power Team can bring its resources to the highest markets, whether they are hourly, daily, monthly, or longer. Such transactions are supported by a complex communications network that notifies transmission providers of the timing, amount and ultimate sink of expected output. 

The contracts that we enter into on conventional generators depend to a great extent on economic structures that ensure as much as possible that the generator will fulfill our dispatch schedule as close to 100% of the time as possible, so we can avoid the punitive imbalance fees that transmission providers impose when delivered energy doesn't match scheduled energy. The approach we take on wind generation must be quite different, because wind plants provide intermittent output that is difficult to predict within reasonable boundaries of accuracy. 

I think the serious wind developers know we are serious about incorporating wind energy into our portfolio. We're one of the biggest physical movers of power in the country and have a significant amount of assets - that must count for something in terms of our ability to more easily integrate a 50 MW wind project into our overall mix.

How does intermittent generation add complexity?
A wind farm generates electricity when the wind blows, not when you flip the switch on. It takes a lot more than I expected to accommodate intermittency, even for an experienced organization like ours, because the transmission system and the operational rules and procedures were not developed with wind generation in mind. You don't have the ability to give transmission providers real-time information for purposes of regulating the system between supply and demand. 

In PJM, where generators can offer increments of generation on a day-ahead or real-time basis, and receive (or pay) market-clearing prices depending on actual generation, wind energy can be offered into the system in one of several different ways without experiencing significant imbalance penalties. An obstacle, and we're working with PJM on this right now, is that PJM as the transmission provider typically requires no shorter than 20-minute notice when self-scheduled or must-run generators expect to produce electricity or expect to stop producing electricity. For purposes of regulating the system, PJM then has the ability to tell the self-scheduled generator to go ahead and generate, or to hold off until the energy is needed as a result of the real-time balance of supply and demand. 

This will not be practical with wind generation. We'd literally have to assign a trader to the task of monitoring highly suspect expected output from our wind plants and then calling PJM every hour to determine what to do. In the must-run scenario, we'd still have to notify PJM of expected output so PJM can regulate the system with other generators. Either way, we'd have to predict output, which is a dicey 
proposition. 

Does that make wind generation unreliable?
Not at all. We've got excellent modeling to predict the output from wind generation over a longer period of time, such as a full year. Those predictions underlie our contracts. But it's another thing to tell the wind when to blow. The wind energy industry is working on this from the perspective of improved wind forecasting and a more automated approach than what I've described. In PJM, a 54,000 MW system, this may not seem to be a problem when there is only about 25 MW of wind generation in the system right now, but PJM wants to institute market rules that will be appropriate for a larger amount of wind generation when it arrives. A certain magnitude of wind generation will cause PJM to change the way it now regulates the system. 

The complexity cannot be underestimated and we will be part of the solution. 

How can scheduling and other rules  better accommodate intermittent resources like wind?
An alternative is for the transmission provider to model the output from a wind plant as "negative" load instead of generation. Which is to say, when the plant is generating electricity, the system load will be reduced by the amount the plant is generating. When the plant is not generating, the load will increase. A tradeoff of that approach is that load typically pays ancillary services expenses such as regulation and spinning reserve. In this unique circumstance, which of the ancillary services apply to negative load, and at what level? We're working with PJM on these questions. 

I'm uncertain whether a significant amount of so-called negative load will require any kind of real-time notice to the transmission provider. Of course the transmission systems are operated to react to the unpredictability of load, and one can view the unpredictability of wind generation in the same way. Other countries, and the western U.S. transmission systems, have figured out how to handle large amounts of wind generation, and so can we. 

Are you working on other approaches?
Another possibility is to dynamically schedule the output from a wind plant that is situated in a control area without a real-time energy market, to a control area that does have such a market. The output signal from the plant would be available to the transmission provider in the second control area on an automated basis.  The output then becomes part of available supply from moment to moment. However, notice requirements would not be sidestepped with this approach.

Will PJM resolve these problems?
Yes. PJM is progressive and innovative, and has indicated to us that they are willing to work with us to find solutions to the scheduling/imbalance issue. It's hard now because we're breaking new ground. I expect that it will be much easier for the next projects developed. 

How big might your renewable portfolio get? Will you keep signing more contracts for new projects? 
As long as we continue to see demand for renewable energy, we'll continue to look at projects where there are energy markets whose long-term forward economics support the purchase of energy. I'd like to aggregate a significant amount of wind generation in a single market, such as PJM, to be able to provide PJM with a more diversified supply curve - with multiple projects it may be possible to smooth the output.

We need to do business with companies that have the financing and the organizational will to get these projects completed. We are looking to form relationships with companies that we can build on. If we execute a contract successfully, we'd like to apply the same concepts to additional projects with the same company. Examples of that are Atlantic Renewable Energy Corp. and National Wind Power. 

What are some key developments to make the industry grow faster?
We need technological efficiencies to drive down the cost of the equipment, standardized approaches to the transmission of wind generation, financial innovations to allow more risk-sharing, and hybrid approaches such as wind and energy storage. 

Perhaps most importantly, we need consumers to buy the wind energy! 

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PennFuture (www.pennfuture.org), with offices in Harrisburg, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, is a statewide public interest membership organization, which advances policies to protect and improve the state's environment and economy. PennFuture's activities include litigating cases before regulatory bodies and in local, state and federal courts, advocating and advancing legislative action on a state and federal level, public education and assisting citizens in public advocacy.

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