Non-Wires Alternatives: The Future of the Grid?

“Non-Wires Alternatives,” or NWAs, are growing in importance in a range of jurisdictions across North America.  NWAs leverage distributed or customer sited capabilities such as demand response (DR) or battery storage to reduce the need for to traditional electricity grid investment. Of course, demand side capabilities such as Energy Efficiency measures and DR have been used for many years to help reduce the need for central generating capacity. But NWAs specifically reduce need for investment in the grid itself, and are necessarily more geographically targeted. Leveraging NWAs holds the promise of helping keep down the overall cost of providing electricity service (for more background information, see this article).

However, these new approaches are largely unproven, and there is considerable uncertainty about how they will perform and whether they can be trusted to deliver when and where needed. People who are charged with maintaining and operating the electric grid to provide safe and reliable service are, rightly, reticent to trust these new techniques until they are shown to reliably work in real-life situations. So utilities, regulators and other stakeholders are pushing ahead with a variety of trials, demonstrations and projects aimed at understanding where and how NWAs can be most effective. Some examples include: 

• Xcel Energy’s Belle Plaine project; 
• BPA’s South of Allston transmission project, solicitation information here;
• Consolidated Edison’s ever-in-the-press BQDM, with auction information here;

But, how can solutions as different as investment in a new transformer and re-conductoring vs. investment in DR and smart inverter controls be fairly compared on an apples-apples basis?

This will be a very interesting test for the “locational stacked benefits” methods that have been developed over the past few years.  For example, the Benefit Cost Analysis Handbooks (BCAH) developed as part of the NY REV filings last year are being put to the test in evaluating NWA approaches for specific projects. A similar methodology has been developed as part of the “More Than Smart” work in California.  

Our team at Navigant supported the NY Joint Utilities last year in development of the initial BCA Handbooks.  Each of the utilities subsequently refined the handbook attributes for their own filings (e.g., Avangrid’s can be found here and Consolidated Edison’s can be found here)

The industry will soon see how proposed NWAs stack up against more traditional approaches. We already know from work we have done that there are going to be “sweet spot” for some types of NWAs. The Joint Utilities are telegraphing their thoughts on where NWAs best apply in their recent “NWA Suitability Criteria” filing. But the industry will be learning a lot more about this over the next year or two. The results from these efforts will provide a good indicator of how the electric system is going to evolve over the next 10 to 15 years. So watch carefully!