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Berkshire Hathaway Energy

NV Energy to Save Millions Through Energy Imbalance Market

(BRK.A), (BRK.B)

Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s NV Energy, which serves the Nevada market, will save millions a year when it enters the new Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) that debuted earlier this year.

The utility company is expected to enter the EIM on Nov. 1, 2015.

Millions in Projected Savings

NV Energy will save millions annually, with its attributed share of gross benefits estimated to range from $6 million to $10 million in 2017, and from $8 million to $12 million by 2022.

The Savings Are Real

In 2014, when Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s PacifiCorp agreed to become the first participant in the new EIM, it was touted as a way to balance electricity in-flows and out-flows on a regional basis that would bring millions of dollars in benefits to participating utilities.

The predicted benefits for PacifiCorp have proven to be true, and the California Independent Service Operator (CAISO) has been able to quantify the benefits from the April, May, and June 2015 to be $10.18 million. Annual benefits will be around $30 million.

The EIM improves the integration of renewable resources and increases reliability by sharing information between balancing authorities on electricity delivery conditions across the entire EIM region. The only real-time energy market in the Western U.S., advanced ISO market systems automatically balance supply and demand for electricity every fifteen minutes, dispatching the least-cost resources every five minutes.

In its July report, CAISO said that it, “continues to prove EIM’s ability to select the lowest cost resource across the PacifiCorp and ISO balancing authority areas to serve demand and measures benefits within the following categories, which were described in an earlier study conducted by Energy + Environmental Economics (E3)1 for PacifiCorp and the ISO.”

The report noted:

• More efficient dispatch, both inter- and intra-regional, in the Fifteen-Minute Market (FMM) and Real-Time Dispatch (RTD) by automating dispatch every fifteen minutes and every five minutes within PacifiCorp’s two BAAs and between the PacifiCorp and California ISO BAAs.

• Reduced renewable energy curtailment by allowing BAAs to export or reduce imports of renewable generation when it would otherwise need to be economically curtailed.

• Reduced flexibility reserves needed in PacifiCorp BAAs, which saves cost by aggregating the load, wind, and solar variability and forecast errors of the combined EIM footprint. This report introduces the flexibility reserve benefits for PacifiCorp but defers measurement of reduced flexibility reserve benefits for the ISO to future reports due to the need to develop additional measurement techniques.

By allowing Balancing Authorities to pool load and wind and solar resources, an EIM lowers total flexibility reserve requirements and reduce curtailment of wind and solar generation for the region as a whole, lowering costs for customers. An EIM may also help to improve compliance with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 764, which emphasizes 15‐ minute scheduling over interties but may not be implemented on an optimized basis due to the difficulty of bilateral trading on such short time intervals.

© 2015 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.