ISO New England briefing: region can accommodate planned vehicle electrification if charging is managed, official says

Sarah Adams, senior state policy advisor at ISO New England, told the Senate Transportation Committee that the region's power system can support the states' electrification goals but planners and operators must coordinate on resources, transmission and managed charging.

Adams said reliability is ISO New England's primary responsibility and the operator is technology-neutral; the entity administers wholesale markets, operates the grid and conducts regional planning. "Reliability is our primary goal," she said. "We are completely independent of the market participants in New England."

Adams presented data showing the region currently imports about 13 percent of its electricity, largely from Canada, and has invested roughly $12.7 billion in transmission since 2002 with additional projects planned through 2028. She said the ISO's interconnection queue totals roughly 40,000 megawatts of proposed resources, about half of which is battery storage; Vermont projects in the queue total roughly 344 megawatts and are primarily storage.

ISO staff told senators that state-driven electrification of heating and transportation raises projected annual energy demand from about 114,000 gigawatt-hours in 2023 to roughly 140,000 gigawatt-hours by 2033 under current policy trajectories. Adams said transportation electrification will shift some seasonal load patterns and that the region is projected to move from summer to winter peak around the mid-2030s as heat electrification grows. "As more and more heating and transportation electrified, we do expect that we're going to shift to winter peaking in about the 2035 timeframe," she said.

Adams emphasized that managed electric-vehicle charging programs reduce peak-hour stress on the grid and that ISO incorporates utility-managed charging programs into its forecasts when those programs exist. She described two modeled load shapes: unmanaged charging raises the afternoon peak substantially, while managed/off-peak charging shifts much of charging to lower-demand hours.

Committee members asked whether the system could be built fast enough to meet electrification-driven demand. Adams described four pillars the ISO views as necessary for a reliable clean transition: abundant new clean energy resources, balancing resources (including long-duration storage), energy adequacy or dependable firm resources for extreme conditions, and robust transmission to interconnect generation and load.

Members asked about natural gas dependence and imports. Adams said winter gas pipeline constraints and LNG imports remain a factor for winter reliability today, and that existing imports from Hydro-QuE9bec supply a meaningful portion of regional energy needs.

Adams said the ISO publishes committee materials and forecasts publicly and offered to return to brief the committee after the ISO's updated transportation electrification forecast is released (drafts typically come out in the February cycle).