Month: January 2024

By Caitlin Odom, RMI Senior Associate, Carbon-Free Electricity

The Electrification 101 series explores the challenges and opportunities that a rapidly electrifying transportation sector presents for the power grid, offering solutions to support proactive grid planning for oncoming EV charging needs. Read the first article in the series here.

January 22, 2024 /3BL/ – Over the past 30 years, US electricity demand has remained relatively flat — generally, new end uses (adding load) and improved efficiency (reducing load) have roughly canceled each other out. But with electric vehicles and other end uses emerging, more demand is coming.

American drivers are rapidly choosing to go electric. Despite some misleading headlines, automakers have sold more EVs every quarter since 2021, and that growth is likely to continue. Individual buyers and corporate and government fleets purchases — enabled by supportive policy, regulation, and incentives — have driven new sales of EVs to a tipping point. By 2030, we expect to see fully electrified fleets and, by 2035, EV’s comprising 100 percent of vehicles sales in some states.

Understandably, we have not built today’s US electric grid to rapidly replace the fossil fuel-based vehicle fueling infrastructure. However, with continued exponential growth in electric vehicle ownership and use, doing so has become increasingly urgent. Unfortunately, though, to plan for the grid of tomorrow, today’s grid planning processes must change from reactive to proactive to ensure that the grid is ready when the vehicles arrive. To enable this, utility engineers and regulators need access to better modeling and data of anticipated load from vehicle electrification. This will help them to accurately plan and build infrastructure to serve this load in a timely manner while simultaneously minimizing any cost to electricity users.

Updating How Utilities and Regulators Plan

Today, utilities propose, and regulators approve, grid investments reactively. Utilities only propose projects when customers (e.g., a new subdivision or a new factory) have committed to new demand. Regulators defined this reactive process because it helped control costs in a world where demand was flat or only slowly increasing and where new demands came online with a long timeline (it takes years to build a new subdivision or a new factory). However, EV loads will come quickly, often as a response to policy mandates, meaning grid planning needs to be done in anticipation of this new load. For example, logistics companies can commission new truck fleets and charging hubs in a matter of months but, if the paradigm of reactive planning remains, will likely need to wait years to connect to the grid.

Today’s infrastructure planning process evolved out of the need for regulators to have reasonable oversight of utility capital expenditure investments. To prevent utilities from overbuilding infrastructure, and overcharging customers, regulators often try to reduce the amount of investment the utilities can rate-base and profit from. Regulators want to be as certain as possible that investment in building new grid infrastructure will promptly result in new customers and load on the system. This process aims to ensure ratepayers don’t experience unnecessary shocks in rate costs and that utilities are making least-cost investment decisions and not overbuilding the grid in pursuit of risk-free profit. To shift out of today’s planning paradigm into a process that can more proactively prepare our grid for rapid load growth from electrification, regulators and utilities need a new method of being confident that new grid infrastructure for electrification will be utilized.

Enter GridUp

Using existing data on vehicle stock, driving patterns, and charging behaviors, we can model the anticipated power and energy demand from different EV market penetration scenarios. RMI’s forthcoming GridUp tool will do exactly this. By providing geographically granular energy and power data to utilities and regulators, GridUp will enable these stakeholders to assess when and where the grid will need upgrades. This sort of modeled future planning is not new to many utilities’ planning processes. Utilities that own generation assets, also known as vertically integrated utilities, plan generation infrastructure a decade or more in advance using integrated resource plans (IRPs) that regulators review. GridUp intends to apply an approach to enable investments in assets to meet demand similar to how IRPs plan for supply. Through the use of the public data in the GridUp tool, both utilities and regulators can assess forthcoming grid needs and begin planning infrastructure to meet that load in anticipation of rapid transportation electrification.

Not only will GridUp allow utilities and regulators to see what power and energy demand will look when all electrifiable vehicles go electric, but the tool will also provide data on the evolution of the expected power and energy demand from vehicles over the next two decades. Users will be able to explore implications on load from deployment of different charger types and in different economic scenarios. This improvement in load forecasting data will allow utilities to propose justifiable infrastructure projects to prepare for vehicle electrification and will allow regulators to review such proposed plans for prudency given the expected changes in load. Senate Bill 410, signed into California law this past October, enables utilities in the state to use this more proactive planning process for grid planning in an effort to prevent the grid from slowing down implementation of California’s decarbonization agenda.

Shifting utility infrastructure planning processes from reactive to proactive will not happen without resources and tools to ensure that regulators can carry out their duty to protect ratepayers from unnecessary increases in the cost of electricity. Utility regulators are tasked with ensuring these natural monopolies, utilities, are not abusing their lack of market competition to exploit customers. Equipping these regulators and policymakers with technical modeling and resources to pressure test proposed grid upgrades for vehicle electrification will ensure expedited grid planning to serve increasing loads from decarbonization does not lead to rate increases to consumers.

The GridUp tool and Electrification 101 article series are supported by a generous grant from FedEx.

Our first solar farm opened in 2014 in Santa Rosa, California and our solar energy footprint across the globe has been growing ever since. In November 2023, we unveiled a solar energy farm at our Mounds View, Minnesota campus, a seven-acre site expected to generate more than 10% of the building’s annual electric needs. With this addition, we have ten Medtronic locations with on-site solar arrays.

Our longstanding commitment to renewable energy predates even our ambition to be net zero by 2045. We’ve invested in a variety of low-carbon energy sources such as purchasing green electricity from the grid or generating our own renewable electricity on site. Last year, we used approximately 414,300 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable electricity – more than 46% of our total electricity usage. This accomplishment was in large part due to our solar arrays at our facilities around the globe.

Here are three things to know about how we’re using the sun to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions:

1. About one-quarter of our sites generate solar power — and more are planned.

Of the 94 Medtronic locations our company tracks around the world, 19 of them already have on-site solar generation. And there are 18 more projects we hope to complete in the near-term, said Daniel Sterner, a 20-year employee who leads our global energy, water, and utility infrastructure.

“They are relatively low-risk projects. We install them, flip the switch, and they’ll produce energy for us for years to come,” noted Sterner.

We’re putting solar infrastructure in place now so that we will have a positive impact and contribution to the greening of the different electricity grids our sites are connected to.

2. Our fleet of solar energy farms spans the globe.

Just as our company is embedded in all parts of the world, so is our commitment to producing green energy.

Our solar generation fields are often installed on roofs, which are otherwise unused spaces, said Daniel. Sometimes, we build carports and install solar panels on top, which offer an extra benefit for employees who drive to work. Some solar array systems generate 5% of a site’s electricity needs, while others are nearly 50%.

Our notable solar sites around the globe include:

Juncos, Puerto Rico: Spanning 13 acres and outputting five megawatts at a given time, this site was first installed in 2017. Later that year, it was destroyed by Hurricane Maria. It reopened in 2021. The site produces clean energy for our Juncos facility and sends surplus power back to the grid for community use.Alajuela, Costa Rica: This 450-kilowatt site was built in under four months, our fastest execution to date. The U.S. Green Building Council recently awarded our facility here a LEED Platinum certification for the building operations and maintenance — a global recognition for green building design efforts.Lafayette, Colorado: One of our recent solar gardens to open, this was built on top of a carport. It’s a one-megawatt system, meaning it can produce up to 2 million kilowatt-hours annually. For reference, the average U.S. home consumes 10,500 kilowatt-hours per year so the energy produced in Lafayette is equivalent to powering 200 homes for an entire year.

3. Our ambitious energy goals are driving this work.

We are expanding our renewable footprint as we anticipate what’s ahead, said Sterner. He noted that very little construction is being done at our sites to install fossil fuel generation. Instead, we are prioritizing and investing in renewable energy, whether it’s solar, wind, hydroelectricity, or geothermal.

Last year, our Ireland and Italy sites began participating in renewable energy purchase programs with their local electric utility providers to achieve 100% renewable energy. And we’re just getting started!

Learn more about our efforts in our most recent Sustainability Report.