By Kiki Tidwell
Generations of Idahoans here have traditionally cut wood from the forests in the hot summertime so that there are wood stockpiles during the long cold winter.
It is so peaceful here in Idaho in the middle of a very green June, and it is not pleasant to think about catastrophic power outages, but we that’s exactly what we need to do right now; we have to think about how we are going to take care of ourselves with emergency power when we need it in the next ice storm or wildfire—or possibly now, grid attack.
It is time that Blaine County government steps up and invests in our future by prioritizing battery backup installations right now itself rather than waiting on a 1950s-era-thinking utility to see the light.
The good news is that technology has advanced to the point that we have viable and cost-effective solutions today. Microgrids, with distributed solar and geothermal generation and batteries, can ‘island’ from the main grid and survive. There are 200 microgrids installed today in South Carolina, but not one in Idaho!
Through my clean-tech angel investing work, I am introduced to different types of battery technologies and I have recently invested in a syndicate lending Primus Power, which has a flow battery, the Energy Pod, pictured above, that provides fade-free, long-duration power for 4-8 hours at grid scale. But there are several battery options today. I also read quite a bit about other communities, like Nantucket and Westmoreland, N.H., which have deployed battery solutions.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/eversource-wants-to-back-up-an-entire-rural-town-with-batteries-large-and-s#gs.m1mj5u
https://ideas.stantec.com/blog/microgrids-an-energy-stion-for-small-towns-with-big-aspirations
We also have tremendous renewable energy natural resources here in Idaho, like solar, which can recharge the batteries. We have Idaho National Laboratory (INL) as the world leader of grid cyber-security. POWER Engineers and Schweitzer Electric have been installing microgrids worldwide for years.
The Blaine County Commissioners recently voted that Idaho Power could have a redundant transmission line in our scenic highway corridor only if it was buried. And—crazy!—Idaho Power thinks that Blaine County citizens should be on the hook for this $30-million burying cost beyond the $35-million cost it is already planning to charge ratepayers for this project. With that amount of money, we could have great, long-term batteries at our substations AND bury part of our original transmission line the 4-5 miles that is in difficult terrain.
We are vulnerable here in Blaine County at the edge of the grid, where a large portion of our power comes from hundreds of miles away from the states around us. I remember how we were caught completely flat-footed in the power outage of Christmas 2009 with no backup generators at our substations. It is time for us to be self-sufficient here in Blaine County and stockpile our own emergency energy solution, just as other generations of Idahoans have set the example.
The New York Times’ “Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/politics/russia-cyberattacks.html?module=inline) states, “Department of Homeland Security on Thursday made clear that Russian state hackers had the foothold they would have needed to manipulate or shut down power plants.”
The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council’s “Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage” (https://www.dhs.gov/publication/niac-catastrophic-power-outage-study) states, “The most successful and impactful response following an emergency is local, but local governments are often not actively engaged in disaster response planning.”