🚨Virginia's grid utilization metrics are live!🚨 41% and 33%. Those are the grid utilization metrics that @DominionEnergy just filed for distribution and transmission with the @VAStateCorpComm. This is a big moment for the energy industry: it’s the first time a U.S. utility has filed a comprehensive grid utilization metrics proposal under a state law. Congratulations to Dominion Energy for a thoughtful and serious proposal that helps start this conversation across the industry. We agree with their assessment that “system-level results may obscure localized differences among feeders, substations, and geographic areas,” and we see value in providing more granular data. These average annual metrics may seem low, but utilization is of course much higher at peak (Dominion reported 78.3% “transformer general utilization at local peaks,” for instance). That’s the core point of our recent Beyond Peak white paper: during off-peak hours, there’s significant capacity on the existing grid that can be unlocked through greater flexibility. Link to Dominion’s full filing in the thread.

Last week, we released a new paper on how to measure grid utilization. It was covered by @_LatitudeMedia @rtoinsider @UtilityDive. Read the full paper here: utilizecoalition.org/definin…

U.S. Energy @SecretaryWright on grid utilization: "The states that have done the best on electricity prices, all of them have fast demand growth. The faster your demand growth is, the more you can push your electricity prices down. And another reason for this, it's just more efficient use of assets. Our electricity grid today, as we sit here, it only operates at about 50% capacity. So today, we've got hundreds of gigawatts of spare power right now."