Powering the People: Fortis

More than a dozen thought leaders and decision makers took the stage at the Edison Foundation's Institute for Electric Innovation's 13th annual Powering the People event in Washington D.C. Enjoy these excerpts.
 

Dave Hutchens: You have them spread across your system, distributed energy resources. So, you have a very different batch of resources' data points.

When we were planning loads and resources thirty years ago, we had twenty discrete generators that served the Tucson Electric Power area. Now there're probably over twenty thousand different generators that you have across the entire system. It is a bit more complicated from the resource side of things.

Now, add in, on the demand side, really high peaky demand, things that we have to be able to respond to. Electric vehicles, a big impact on your distribution system, transmission system, the entire generation transmission and distribution chain has to be able to support those peaky types of loads.

So, this is where we're sitting here today, is having a conversation about, well, with that change in resources and that change in demand, how can we manage to squeeze as much out of those resources as we possibly can to make this as efficient as possible?