Lora Anguay, Chief Energy Resources Officer at California public power utility SMUD, on May 19 detailed for an audience of energy officials how the utility has proactively prepared to meet the arrival of large loads in its service area.
She made her remarks during the Smart Electric Power Alliance’s Energy Evolution Summit in Washington, D.C., on May 19.
Anguay noted that around a year ago, there was a SMUD supervisors meeting that “was about how we prepare for large loads…we had our line supervisors, our substation supervisors in the room and our directors in those areas as well.” At the meeting, she pointed out that SMUD is not a poles and wires company but rather an electric utility.
The question before SMUD is “how do we provide electricity to these customers that are coming into our service territory,” she said.
“We are seeing growth in our area,” she said. "We’re seeing advanced manufacturing coming into our service territory. We have about 3,200 megawatts of peak load. We’ve received a request – we’ve got a deposit down – and we’re doing the engineering right now for an additional 300 megawatts from one application. We’ve got six others in the pipeline.”
The challenge a year ago was “how do we serve these customers and so one of the things that we’ve done to think differently is how do we change our interconnection processes in order to take advantage of flexible loads because some of these loads are flexible – they have back up generation,” Anguay noted.
This raised the question of whether SMUD’s interconnection processes needed to be updated to take advantage of that reality and the answer was yes, with the utility moving forward with updating its interconnection processes.
“The other thing is really looking at onsite generation. So again, we’re not a poles and wires company. It’s part of our business, but we’re here to provide electricity.”
At the same time, the utility is taking steps “so that we’re collecting the costs for growth to pay for growth” in order to protect customers.
“I would say those are probably the big changes that we’ve made over the last year – figuring out how do we serve the load, interconnection processes being updated to take advantage of flexible load was key and then the other one was really around onsite generation” in order to make sure the utility can meet the speed to power.
