Light board hears proposal for battery-based ‘microgrid’ to supplement aging feeder lines
/By Carol Britton Meyer
Near the end of Monday’s three-and-a-half-hour light board meeting, member Jake Vaillancourt presented a report as a member of the newly created electric capacity planning task force with recommendations for near-term reliability and capacity mitigation as the town faces increased risk of outages and brownouts by or before 2027.
Member Patrick Cannon is the other task force member.
LIGHTS OUT: Hull Light Operations Manager Panos Tokadjian, who has worked for the plant since 2014, will retire at the end of the month.
“Our supply lines are about 90 years old, and current operations are beyond best practices,” he said. “Hotter summers and load growth increase these risks without mitigation.”
To help address this issue, the task force is recommending exploring the possibility of installing a battery-backed “microgrid” at the former landfill to “shave peaks and hold to under 17.5 MW until feeder upgrades are made, and to provide enhanced storm resilience with safe, staged load pickup and clean re-sync.” Hull is served by two National Grid feeder lines (10 megawatts and 7.5 megawatts).
Past failures of the feeder lines, which pass through remote areas of Hingham, led the light plant to rent the townwide generators to supply electricity during an outage caused by failure of the National Grid lines.
Click here to download the complete presentation
Vaillancourt’s presentation will be forwarded to the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company to prime them to assist the board in accomplishing this goal and to explore the availability of funding. The board expects to meet with MMWEC in early October.
MMWEC assists Massachusetts municipal light departments such as Hull’s with their needs to contract for energy.
In other business…
Light Plant Operations Manager Panos Tokadjian is retiring at the end of September. He began working at Hull Light in 2014 as assistant manager.
Resident David Irwin, who attended Monday’s meeting, asked the board if they had considered hiring him as a consultant.
“He knows our system, what’s good and bad,” he said.
“We’ve already talked with him, and he’s taking it under consideration,” Light Board Chair Tom Burns responded.
While noting that the light plant manager would make that decision, “several on the board think it’s a good idea,” he said.
The next light board meeting is scheduled for Thursday, October 16.
A replay of this week’s meeting will be available on demand on Hull Community Television’s website, www.hulltv.net.
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