Dive Brief:

• A pending Virginia law will require the state’s two major vertically integrated utilities to provide detailed distribution grid utilization data to state regulators this year and propose initiatives to use more existing capacity.
• The data must include the ratio of peak system load to capacity, the ratio of delivered load to total potential deliverable load, distribution losses by percentage, an analysis of constrained distribution circuits and an evaluation of the system performance during peak periods.
• Moving forward, the Virginia State Corporation Commission will regularly report its own findings on the utilities’ grid utilization metrics and analyze how “non-wires alternatives” — such as energy storage, distributed generation, synchronous condensers, flexible transmission and power quality monitors — can increase utilization.

Dive Insight:

Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger has until April 13 to sign or veto the bill. If she takes no action, it will automatically become law.

If it does take effect, the law will create a new regulatory framework for grid utilization initiatives. It gives the State Corporation Commission the power to set timelines for Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to increase utilization, and to incorporate utilization metrics into its consideration of utility cost recovery requests for capital investments.

Boosting grid utilization is a top priority for Uitilize, a coalition of large electricity customers, distributed energy providers and grid technology companies. Google, Carrier, Tesla, Renew Home and Sparkfund are among its founding members.

Utilize will “engage directly with states to help translate research into action, working alongside policymakers, industry, utilities, and consumer advocates to ensure better grid utilization becomes a core principle of modern grid planning,” the group said in its debut announcement last month.

The announcement flagged a widely cited Duke University study, published last year, that found nearly two dozen U.S. power systems comprising 95% of the country’s peak load operate at just over half-capacity. These grids could add 76 GW of demand without immediately requiring major infrastructure upgrades if the new customers agreed to curtail 0.25% of their annual loads during peak periods lasting less than two hours on average, the study found.

The coalition also pointed to a study from Stanford University that found most load balancing areas in western North America use less than 50% of available transmission capacity. Areas where transmission bottlenecks do exist could benefit from “targeted replacement, refurbishment, and added flexibility of transmission assets, like transformers and short-distance transmission lines,” rather than expensive, time-consuming investments in new long-distance high-voltage lines, the study said.

In a statement, Jeff Dennis, executive director of the Electricity Customer Alliance, said increased grid utilization would help utilities address affordability concerns that have become a major political issue in places like Virginia. Energy affordability was a top campaign issue for then-candidate Spanberger last year.

“Improving grid utilization to get more out of the grid we already have is a low-cost, near-term way to expand available supply, meet growing demand, spread fixed costs across more electricity sales, and put downward pressure on bills for households and businesses,” Dennis said.

A hypothetical “mid-sized investor-owned utility” could reduce customer rates by 3.4% while boosting revenue by 23% with a 10% increase in grid utilization, the Brattle Group said last month in a report prepared for the Utilize coalition and GridLab, a clean energy nonprofit.

If it becomes law, the Virginia bill will push the state’s major utilities to better understand what’s happening on their distribution grids, said Karen Rubin, chief operating officer of Sense, a Massachusetts-based smart metering software provider. Her company’s technology can help them do that at a more granular level — by neighborhood or even by block, she said.

Even today, “some utilities have no idea where the electric vehicles are,” Rubin told Utility Dive in an interview. That’s surprising and potentially problematic given that it only takes a few EVs drawing full power at once to cause problems for a block-level transformer, she added.

Likewise, Rubin said, advanced metering enables whole-home energy management solutions that can help customers save energy and simultaneously reduce strain on the grid by reducing or shifting loads during peak periods.

In Rhode Island, Sense is among the first to broadly roll out AMI 2.0 technology, which it says can collect as much as 50 million times more data than the first generation of advanced meters. But Rubin said utilities increasingly see the value in knowing more — much more — about what’s happening across distribution networks. As AMI 2.0 technology becomes the industry standard and utilities look to get more out of their existing grids, they’ll need to work closely with automakers, EV managed charging providers, HVAC companies and others in a position to help manage load, she said.

“Partnership will be essential if this is going to be successful,” she said.