Synapse performed a supplemental study to examine the latest information on the social cost of carbon and develop an updated recommendation. Learn more about the AESC study here.

Synapse assisted the Regulatory Assistance Project with developing a guide utility regulators and other policymakers can use to adapt regulatory frameworks so that their jurisdictions can capture the full benefits of beneficial electrification and associated load flexibility in buildings. Technologies such as controllable water heaters, smart thermostats, and air source heat pumps create new opportunities for buildings to flexibly manage energy use and interact with the power grid in ways that benefit the electric system, homeowners, and the environment. Yet, many existing regulations were not designed to support the transition to lower-emission, electrified, and grid-integrated buildings. The guide focuses on ways to adapt regulations so that building electrification can be equitable, flexible, and grid-integrated. The guidebook addresses the need to update to fuel-neutral energy efficiency resource standards and program design, as well as to modernize building codes and performance standards and the evaluation of gas infrastructure needs. In addition to the guide, the authors provided an interactive webinar on ways to help regulators support the evolution of regulatory frameworks. 

On behalf of the City of Boston, Synapse performed an in-depth building energy data analysis to develop a draft building emissions performance standard. The analysis involved developing frameworks and cost impacts for mandatory GHG emissions targets by building type that decrease over time. As part of the project, Synapse convened and facilitated a series of technical discussions with an advisory group comprised of experts in building science, architecture, engineering, construction, building operations, energy policy, renewable energy, and affordable housing. Using input from the City and the advisory group, Synapse developed recommendations, including proposed targets by building type, example compliance strategies, and aggregate cost estimates. Advisory group meeting materials are available on the City's website. The report published below describes the proposed standard and the methodology used to develop it.

NRDC is in the process of developing a “climate test” tool with the capability of assessing the consistency of proposed fossil fuel projects with climate goals. The test, which is anticipated to be published in late 2021/early 2022, will have the capability to determine the consistency of fossil fuel infrastructure proposals with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Synapse provided technical support to NRDC for refinement of this climate test and potential future extensions. Synapse collaborated with NRDC’s team of in-house scientists and policy experts to carry out research and analysis of several case study demonstrations of the tool: a gas pipeline, oil pipeline, oil and gas field, and gas plants. The tool relies on environmental and economic data to quantify the environmental significance of impacts from individual energy infrastructure projects in the oil and gas sector.

GridLab commissioned Synapse to evaluate Duke Energy's 2020 Integrated Resource Plans and to present an alternative, optimized resource portfolio for the state on behalf of a coalition of environmental non-profits. Synapse used the EnCompass capacity optimization and production cost model to create an alternative resource portfolio. This alternative resource plan meets North Carolina's emissions reduction target of 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, relies on a portfolio of increased energy efficiency, renewables, and storage, and is the least-cost option when compared to those presented by Duke in its filings.

Synapse Energy Economics, Climable, GreenRoots, and Clean Energy Solutions provided technical assistance to the City of Chelsea, Massachusetts to develop a community-centric microgrid at two of its critical facilities: City Hall and Police Station 911 Call Center. The team of experts provided technical design, economic analysis, community engagement activities, and policy support to the City. Funding from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Municipal Energy Technical Assistance Grant helped complete the following project activities:

• An energy assessment of City Hall and police station, including recommendations for electrification, resilience, and energy savings.
• Calculation of the public benefits from improved resilience, electrification, and energy efficiency of the 911 Call Center and City Hall.
• Preparation of public-facing materials to describe the upgrades and their benefits to the community.
• Development of design concepts and selection criteria for contractors to perform building improvements.
• Identification of a strategy for City Hall and the Police Station to integrate into a broader distributed microgrid in Chelsea.

The resulting the proposed projects create a variety of opportunities for the City of Chelsea and its residents to “prosper-in-place,” produce decentralized clean energy, develop local career pathways, lower energy costs, improve climate resilience, and engage actively with the community.

Community Flyers on the Benefits of Microgrids

Synapse partnered with subcontractor Slipstream, Inc. to produce a comprehensive assessment of the energy storage potential in Iowa for the Iowa Economic Development Authority. The study produced forecasts of energy storage deployments in Iowa. By 2035, Iowa could see between 1 GW and 2 GW of energy storage deployed within the state. The study found that the scale and pace of energy storage deployments in Iowa will depend on many factors. This includes future capital and maintenance costs for battery storage systems, wholesale market reforms, and the degree to which state regulators incentivize utilities to consider storage as an alternative to traditional utility investments.

The study included macroeconomic modeling using Implan to explore the impacts on Iowa's gross domestic product and employment. The state economic impacts of a growing battery storage industry were estimated to be limited, but positive. This includes net job impacts ranging from 298 to 595 full-time equivalent jobs and state gross domestic product impacts from $13 million to $24 million per year. The macroeconomic impacts could be larger if Iowa attracts new businesses to the state that are part of the battery storage supply chain.

The Iowa energy storage study included an assessment of the barriers and best practices to the development of sustainable market opportunities for energy storage in Iowa. This report identified three key barriers to the broader implementation of storage in Iowa. These include: (1) lack of current alignment between storage value and markets; (2) the relatively high capital cost of battery systems; and (3) uncertainty in the future (for markets, regulation, and battery technology).

Read the Iowa Economic Development Authority's Executive Summary here.

Devi Glick provided expert testimony on behalf of Sierra Club in the Fuel Charge Adjustment Proceeding filed by Duke Energy Carolinas (DEC) and Duke Energy Progress (DEP) in North Carolina on behalf of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in South Carolina. Ms. Glick's testimony evaluated Duke’s unit commitment and dispatch practices at its coal-fired power plants. Her testimony demonstrated that the costs used by Duke to make its unit commitment decisions differ from those costs it sought to recover from customers and discusses how that discrepancy is driving uneconomic unit commitment decisions. Ms. Glick calculates excess costs that are passed on to ratepayers as a result and makes recommendations as to how Duke can improve its unit commitment process.

Synapse assisted Sierra Club with comments on Mississippi Power's 2021 Integrated Resource Plan. These comments identify areas in which Mississippi Power’s IRP failed to advance the goals of protecting ratepayers, providing transparency, and operating a well-planned and efficient electricity system. To address these flaws, Sierra Club and Synapse made the following recommendations:

• Mississippi Power should accelerate the retirement of Plant Daniel, an uneconomic coal plant that the utility currently plans to operate until 2027.

• Mississippi Power should devote more funding to energy efficiency and demand-side management programs that help customers use energy more efficiently - saving money and helping the environment in the long term. Mississippi Power’s commitment to low-income energy efficiency programs pales in comparison to other jurisdictions with comparable high energy burdens and high poverty rates.

• The Commission should revise the IRP rule to require greater transparency and opportunity for public input because utilities will not do so without a stronger mandate. Greater transparency and opportunities for public engagement would strengthen Mississippi’s IRP process and center customers in the process.

Synapse supported Sierra Club in its engagement in Arizona Public Service (APS) and Tucson Electric Power’s (TEP) Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) process. Over the course of the last two years, Synapse attended and participated in many IRP workshops and stakeholder sessions on behalf of the Sierra Club. Synapse also prepared several presentations to the Commission and utilities with recommendations for improving APS and TEP's IRPs. Finally, Synapse assisted in the development of several rounds of comments on both APS and TEP’s IRPs. These comments identified areas in which TEP and APS respectively failed to advance the goals of protecting ratepayers, providing transparency, and operating a well-planned and efficient electricity system.

Synapse and Sierra Club recommendations to APS focused on the following topics:

• APS should develop a more reasonable load forecast that incorporates COVID impacts and corrects the historical pattern of over forecasting load
• APS should better justify its modeling assumptions and decisions that continue to systematically favor new gas resources and disadvantage renewables, and the Company should not be able to add any new gas resources in the near term based on its current modeling.
• APS should conduct a study that properly models the economics of retiring the Four Corners Coal plant early and paying out the remaining coal contract relative to retiring it early and replacing it with clean energy resources.
• APS should properly reflect the costs and risks associated with future environmental regulations, including the coal combustion residuals and effluent limitation guideline rules, and the risk of water shortages.

Synapse and Sierra Club recommendations to TEP focus on the following topics:

• TEP should improve its modeling tools and employ optimized capacity expansion modeling.
• TEP should demonstrate how it will reduce its reliance on fossil resources in light of the substantial quantity of new gas resources it produced just prior to the IRP.
• TEP should utilize gas prices that are higher and more aligned with those forecasted by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).

Synapse was retained by the New Hampshire Office of the Consumer Advocate to provide expert witness services in proceedings related to energy efficiency, grid modernization, rate design, least-cost integrated resource planning, revenue decoupling, alternative regulation, and more.

In docket DE-21-030, Melissa Whited and Ben Havumaki testified regarding Unitil's proposed rate increase for the residential class, multi-year rate plan, revenue decoupling mechanism, and grid modernization investments.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce, Division of Energy Resources retained Synapse to support its exploration of privacy and security issues related to Minnesota utilities’ hosting capacity analyses (HCA) and distribution grid data. As with other jurisdictions modernizing the grid, Minnesota seeks to balance the data access needed to support distributed energy resource (DER) uptake with maintaining a secure grid that protects the privacy of customers.

 Xcel Energy (Xcel), Minnesota’s largest electricity provider, has made its HCA available via an online map, but blurs the display of the data in a way that does not reveal discrete circuits, and provides less system information. Xcel claims that an unblurred map would make the distribution grid unnecessarily vulnerable to attack and would jeopardize customer security and confidentiality.

Synapse wrote a report stating that Xcel should unblur its HCA map and place it behind a verified web login portal that is open to the public. In reaching this conclusion, Synapse noted that:

• Location information on distribution facilities is likely already in the public domain
• Various tools exist to help map distribution lines
• Providing distribution line information provides significant value to DER developers
• Focusing on strengthening the grid’s physical and cybersecurity defenses, and increasing grid resiliency, is more effective at deterring attackers than concealing information.

For sensitive grid data, such as peak substation and feeder loads, which is currently not provided on the HCA map, Synapse recommended applying a risk/cost-benefit framework to balance grid security with the public benefits of HCA map data. The framework could help determine whether specific, sensitive grid data should be published on its HCA map, and how secure access to this data should be provided. Synapse suggested that Xcel consider a tiered-access approach that helps streamline access to non-public grid data and does not make requirements unnecessarily burdensome.

In 2019, Sandia National Laboratories contracted Synapse Energy Economics to improve understanding and provide guidance on the challenges and opportunities facing communities and electric utilities seeking to coordinate energy-related resilience efforts. The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and conducted as part of the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium’s Designing Resilient Communities: A Consequence-Based Approach for Grid Investment (DRC) project. Synapse was one of several government, industry, and university partners on the project team and provided expertise on electric utility regulation.

Synapse produced a series of five reports exploring several important topics related to its area of focus, including:

• Current landscape: structured interviews with six community and utility pairs to better characterize the existing state of resilience planning within and across jurisdictions and identify opportunities for improvement;
• Benefit-cost analysis for grid investments in resilience: the first application of the framework developed in the 2020 National Standard Practice Manual for Benefit-Cost Analysis of Distributed Energy Resources to grid resilience investments;
• Resilience performance metrics: guidance for jurisdictions to take the important step of defining and establishing performance metrics for resilience;
• Resilient public purpose microgrids: definition of the term and characterization of five project types that may be more likely to receive ratepayer funding; and
• Regulatory mechanisms to support resilience: mechanisms that electric utility regulators can use to align grid resilience investments with resilience interests and priorities.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) retained Synapse to analyze the macroeconomic impacts of light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas (GHG) standards and zero emission vehicle (ZEV) policies in the state of Illinois. We assessed the likely employment and GDP impacts in Illinois for three policy scenarios: (1) adoption of low emission vehicle (LEV) tailpipe standards for criteria pollutants and GHGs, and ZEV regulations; (2) the LEV standards with increased ZEV penetration that achieves Governor Pritzker’s goal of 750,000 ZEVs by 2030; and (3) the LEV standards with further ZEV penetration that achieves 100 percent ZEV sales by 2035. Our analysis found that each of the three policy scenarios is likely to result in small but positive long-term macroeconomic impacts in Illinois and that employment and GDP benefits grow as each policy scenario becomes more aggressive in its assumed number of LEVs and ZEVs in Illinois.