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We recommend consulting with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to fold in climate change assumptions into the river flow and load forecast modeling for the 20-year Extended Planning Horizon scenarios. Using primarily historical data for river flows to project the next 20 years might not represent the system we will see going forward. On the other hand, the projections used by the Power Council for the 2021 Power Plan on temperatures and precipitation "are not intended to be used as what the expected weather will be in any individual future year, rather they illustrate the types of temperatures that can be expected and the data are designed so that the range of weather over each decade represents an estimate of the range of conditions driven by climate change (2021 Power Plan)". The Council selected three out of nineteen RMJOC climate scenarios (developed by Bureau of Reclamation) to analyze the boundary conditions of potential regional climate change impacts. As mentioned in the 2021 Power Plan, from analysis of the temperature and streamflow data of the three RMJOC climate scenarios, the Council projected increasing winter hydropower generation due to increasing fall and winter streamflows from having more precipitation and in contrast, decreasing summer hydropower generation from decreasing summer streamflows caused by a shrinking snowpack and less summer precipitation. Based on these data, the Council also forecasts a trend of less frequent extremely cold winter temperatures and more frequent extremely warm summer temperatures. These climate impacts put downward pressure on winter electricity prices and align regional needs in the summer with the predominant electricity. Thus, it will be important to consider the climate change adjusted river flows and load forecast datasets in this long-term study. The datasets can also be accessed here: https://www.usbr.gov/pn/climate/planning/reports/index.html
Engage regional Transmission Planners early and often in base case review
Coordinate with other regions to see what their plans are for the similar time horizons
Any “unserved load” in an all lines in service optimized PCM simulation should be closely scrutinized as an indicator that the modeled system was insufficient for that scenario.
Additional comments with respect to demand response (DR): This is not a full load or resource issue. It is in-between. The integration of the distribution and transmission systems is an important variable as more solar and storage develops at the distribution level. Some of these may be smart, meaning they may be dispatched by the transmission operator (e.g., virtual power plants). In the future, some of these distribution networks may be integrated into transmission operations to some extent. How to model that effect is challenging from a modeling perspective, but a post-processing adjustment may be justified.