Mindful Decommissioning: A Data-Driven Tool for Prioritizing Strategic Gas Asset Decommissioning
DNV GL USA, Inc.
Recipient
Dublin, OH
Recipient Location
$770,382
Amount Spent
Active
Project Status
Project Update
Over the last year, the project has developed and is testing a beta version of the tool. The team developed the tool from collected already-available data (acquired via CPUC's Long-Term Gas Planning Rulemaking) and from feedback received from various key energy stakeholders. As part of the engagement activities, input is also being sought from community representatives and individuals to determine how accurately the beta tool can capture specific situations at community scales. The research team is developing case studies to help describe the findings at specific sites.
The Issue
The state of California is committed to decarbonizing its energy system. Decreasing reliance on fossil fuels is an important part of the strategy for achieving this goal. The gas network provides fossil fuels to residential, commercial, and industrial customers through transmission and distribution pipelines. If customers begin to be removed from this system without strategic decommissioning of gas pipelines, there may be considerable negative financial impacts on the customers remaining on the network, due to the costs of maintaining the pipeline network. Further, there will be both positive and negative impacts on the health, safety, and energy resilience of both those customers remaining on the network and those who decommission. These impacts will depend on various factors that may be heterogeneously distributed across the state, based upon community characteristics, local access to clean energy, and other geospatial factors. The focus of this project is to quantify these factors and present them in a visual, data-driven tool that enables examination of the factors to understand the impacts as factors receive different weights.
Project Innovation
The recipient will develop a scalable, systematic approach to screen for promising candidate gas decommissioning sites. The research and development of the tool is intended to support the targets and timeline set by the State of California for decarbonizing the energy system by 2045. The project will adopt a GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (GIS-MCDA) framework to support development of the Data-Driven Tool. This is a well-established analytical methodology that systematically combines a set of geospatial data layers, each representing an independent decision criterion/factor, to inform complex, multi-dimensional, geographic site screening.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
By illuminating geospatial dependence of risks and benefits based on gas asset decommissioning and operator costs, as well as measures for energy equity that impact ratepayers in their communities, the tool will support prioritizing and preparing for future decarbonization activities. Because it will enable examination of potential economic impacts of decommissioning, the tool will contribute to increased energy reliability and cost management.
Affordability
By incorporating data that includes the potential changes in costs of energy and costs per customer to maintain the gas network as it is in the process of decommissioning, the project will provide insight into maintaining affordability of the gas system for both users and utilities.
Equity
Through assessment of impacts and by engaging with non-profit groups, community based organizations, and other stakeholders, the data-driven tool will provide insight into the various impacts of and concerns related to gas system decommissioning on energy equity.
Economic Development
The tool will support understanding of economic development by helping identify the most economical and impactful segments of gas assets to decommission according to operating cost (vs. decommissioning cost), net expected greenhouse gas reduction, and community impact.
Energy Security
By combining various data sources, the tool aims to provide better understanding of the significant dependencies on the gas system and how they may be impacted by decommissioning of segments of the gas system. Gas decommissioning has potential for significant energy security impacts, as it may involve removing an energy source from an energy user, and that loss of an energy source will likely need to be replaced.
Safety
While also supporting understanding of the impacts on the rate bases to customers, the tool will support maintenance of gas asset safety by helping assess how decommissioning of gas assets can be optimized to assets most in need of repair or replacement from a safety and reliability standpoint.
Key Project Members
Hari Polaki
Cici Vu
Subrecipients
The Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Los Angeles Campus
Match Partners
DNV
