Electric Power Engineers CEO Hala Ballouz thinks we need to holistically reimagine the modern grid to accomodate increasing load growth.
Hala Ballouz loves figuring out how things work. The big stuff, especially.
“What makes me tick is the electric grid,” she explains over the din of a crowded convention hall at RE+. “The production and delivery of energy to end consumers, and making sure that electricity reaches the end consumer in a reliable, resilient, and affordable way.”
Although her statement might read like it was proofed by a utility’s public relations department, it doesn’t come off as canned. Ballouz genuinely eats, sleeps, and breathes power systems.
Accordingly, the president and chief executive officer of consultancy Electric Power Engineers has a lot to say about the current state of the electric grid. Ballouz recognizes potential pitfalls along the path of load growth we’re charting- and suggests we take drastic action before it’s too late.
An energy aptitude
A fascination with energy has been an ever-present component of Hala Ballouz’s life, dating back to strolls with her father as a young girl in her native Lebanon.
“He was always an innovative thinker,” she recalls. “He said, look at our powerful steps. I wonder if we can generate energy from them?”
That got Hala thinking. First about energy, then about electricity. Her mom was sometimes frustrated by the persistence of her childhood curiosity. Why are you interested in a washing machine?!
“We plug it in and it’s working, but how?” Ballouz needed to know.
Math. Physics. Complexity. These are what drew her to power systems.
“A little nerdish,” she admits.
A dual citizen, Ballouz left Lebanon in her early twenties for an internship in Houston, Texas as part of the third year of her engineering program. It was 1989. She had been in the United States for just a couple of months before she received a call from her parents that would change her life.
A fateful phone call
“Stay there. Don’t come back,” they instructed her. Economic uncertainties in Lebanon prompted Hala’s family to move to the U.S.- Hala would not be returning to the only home she’d ever known.
“I had nothing packed,” Ballouz shared. “But I stayed… I went and looked for a college and that was it.”
She confesses she never considered having a choice in the matter.
“At that age, things weren’t a fight,” she smiled. “For me, everything was an opportunity.”
She continued her education at Texas A&M, where Ballouz pursued a Master’s Degree, studying the roles storage can play in balancing the grid and making it more efficient. (That was in 1992- we’re still talking about the same stuff now.)
Ballouz credits Dr. A.D. Patton, “an amazing professor” who taught courses on power systems and worked with Hala on a thesis related to energy storage, for propelling her passion for the field.
“My interest (in energy) as a child coincided with getting people that come your way and make that journey possible,” she suggests.
Starting something
Soon that journey would lead her back to Lebanon. After graduating, Ballouz took what was supposed to be a temporary job with a lifestyle company. A one-man show, as she puts it, that wasn’t built with growth as a top priority.
“He barely hired me,” she admits, recalling a conversation with Charles Freeman, the founder of Electric Power Engineers. “I made him hire me.”
In 1995, Ballouz desired to return home. She tried to resign from her gig in the U.S., but Freeman wasn’t ready to give her up. He asked her to work remotely.
That meant something different in 1995 than it does now. Ballouz remembers exchanging data via fax machines and spending a lot of time on the phone chatting up wind developers- the only renewables worth talking about back then. She was Lebanon’s fifth internet subscriber.
She fell in love with what she was doing and worked remotely from Lebanon for more than a decade despite an eight-hour time difference. Ballouz claims she stopped noticing.
“I worked around the clock,” she attests. “I have never stopped ever since.”
In 2007, after starting a family, Ballouz decided to come back to the United States. She wouldn’t be seeking new employment- she came back to acquire Freeman’s company after he fell ill.
The job wasn’t done- it was another decision that didn’t require any overthinking.
Ballouz promised to take the company to new heights. To start, that meant backing renewables, a tenet that remains central for Electric Power Engineers today.
Confronting a growing problem in Texas (and beyond)
Ballouz tells me EPE has had a hand in about 40% of renewable energy development in Texas, now the nation’s leader in utility-scale solar generation capacity and second in battery energy storage. EPE conducted a first-of-its-kind study in Texas, later adopted by the Public Utility Commission, on Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ). She attests that this enabled the construction of transmission lines that supported the state’s renewable energy boom.
“We do a lot of work here because we started here,” Ballouz says. “It’s a great place to learn and apply.”
EPE’s CEO credits ERCOT for its easier-than-most permitting approach and the “Connect and Manage” system for interconnection, which helps get clean energy projects connected to the grid faster than anywhere else in the United States.
As it navigates rampant renewable energy development, Texas is also staring down the barrel of a potential load growth crisis. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), electricity consumption is growing fastest in Texas, and one of the primary sources of growing demand for power is large-scale computing facilities such as data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations.
The EIA estimates ERCOT’s large flexible load customers will use 54 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2025, an increase of nearly 60% from this year’s expected demand. If the prediction holds true, LFL customers will represent about 10% of the total forecast electricity consumption on the ERCOT grid next year. EIA predicts about 5% load growth from this year to next in ERCOT territory.
ERCOT estimates its total peak system demand could be as high as 153 GW by 2033, nearly double the current grid’s proven capacity. Some models project even greater electricity consumption.
Utilities plan to spend more than $13.6 billion on transmission development through 2026 to support 4,600 circuit miles of power line upgrades and additions, and the deployment of transformers and new reactive power equipment. Will that be enough to satiate the appetite of hungry, hungry data centers and soothe the pangs associated with electrifying everything?
Maybe, Ballouz believes, but our box of Band-Aids can only do so much, and each stopgap solution and retrofit comes with costs to ratepayers. What we put in the ground today will impact future generations.
Reimagining the grid
Imagine a massive American city tripled in size over a few years. What would it take to accommodate transportation, for example? If there isn’t enough time to build a bunch of new roads, Ballouz suggests, we’d need to reimagine how we use the ones we’ve got, and likely change the way we live and commute.
She thinks we need to do something similar when considering the impacts of load growth on the power grid, and not just in ERCOT territory.
“It’s a North America problem, and it’s the entire world’s problem,” Ballouz insists of increased electricity consumption. “It is a changing landscape, and we are not ready for it.”
Ballouz points out that the ratio of large load to residential load is rapidly shifting, as illustrated in the EIA graph above. “In the next three years, it could be 44%,” she warns.
As big customers account for more and more of our total electricity usage, how do we ensure the little guy doesn’t get squeezed out? Certain large-load facilities have entered into voluntary curtailment agreements with ERCOT to temporarily reduce their power consumption during periods of high system demand. As part of the program, LFL facilities can participate in ERCOT’s energy and ancillary service markets. The LFL process intends to minimize the risk of wholesale power prices spiking to levels of $1,000/MWh or more.
Still, Ballouz is concerned. Even if only one-third of ERCOT’s growth projections come to pass, she surmises, we’re going to have to get creative with our solutions to satisfy demand. Microgrids must become more common, grid enhancing technologies will need to be embraced, and we’ve got to approach load growth with an open-minded, holistic strategy.
“I believe that we lose so much if we don’t do it right to start with,” Ballouz explains. “We need to redesign the grid from scratch. There is a certain time when the ecosystem changes so much it doesn’t make sense not to pause and restructure. It’s like taking a house and renovating it when you really want to build a high-tech, modern house that completely looks different.”
Would you expect the telephone wires in your home to somehow enable your cell phone? Of course not, but that’s the sort of technological divide we’re considering when trying to make a very old system of poles and wires accommodate modern electricity usage.
“I’m not saying we take down the lines,” EPE’s CEO implores. “But we need to redesign the system as if there’s nothing here. I say, put that new design on a wall like a North Star, and everything we do, we navigate towards it.”
“Otherwise, I kid you not, we’re gonna really see things we don’t want to see very soon in the U.S. in terms of reliability and the cost of electricity, not to mention utilities and others not being able to say yes to integrating new load. We’re not used to that.”
Ballouz believes energy equity needs to be a huge part of the conversation. Data center construction- and the corresponding power suck- don’t give anything tangible back to the customers paying increased rates to accommodate them. Technology is great and all, but I don’t think anybody feels juiced about funding a data center for Mark Zuckerberg.
“This infrastructure we’re building is going to have to be paid for by the load itself,” Ballouz recognizes.
We’re seeing the data center giants do just that. Meta is tapping geothermal baseload power. Google and Amazon are swooping in on solar and wind projects. Microsoft just took it to the next logical level, signing a 20-year PPA with Constellation that will prompt the restart of the 835 MW nuclear unit at Three Mile Island. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the re-opened plant to help offset the power its data centers in PJM territory use with carbon-free energy.
Ballouz acknowledges now is a critical time for regulators and policymakers to come together and do the necessary work to ensure affordable energy access in the future.
A national convention
Ballouz believes the problems facing grid operators are too grand and existential to be managed in silos. She believes we need to assemble some sort of national convention to redesign the grid, overseen by a regulatory body. (Hey FERC, I see you)
“Allow me to take it one step further,” she entails. “I believe in free and open markets, but it’s beyond talking at this point. We need to be forced to do it the right way.”
Ballouz suggests we impose a three-year time limit and mandate an agreed-upon framework and guardrails that can be implemented coast-to-coast, for end-to-end uniformity and consistency in a reimagined grid of the future.
“We’re beyond collaboration. The clock is ticking,” she quips.
Time might be running out on the utilities’ classic business model, Ballouz recognizes. She sees each consumer as a tiny utility unto themselves. Everyone with distributed energy resources is now a stakeholder in a democratized system. “From large loads to communities, we are already migrating towards, and have the technology for, a decentralized system.”
Every democracy relies on laws. An essential commodity must be regulated- a utility can’t deliver energy to the grid without oversight, after all. But who is regulating the consumer? Ballouz thinks the key to aggregating distributed resources will be ensuring a hard commitment from the asset owner to the utility. A subscription model, perhaps, that grants control of a home thermostat or electric vehicle battery under defined parameters.
“I don’t really believe that just price signals will do it for the customers,” she says. “No, it has to be a subscription model, a commitment.”
Without a number to plan around, electricity is going to be more expensive for the end consumer because the utility has to figure out ways to get power from somewhere else, since it cannot accurately or reliably count on distributed resources being part of the equation. Guesswork doesn’t pencil when reliability is #1.
“The utility will still have to plan for extensive upgrades and infrastructure, so we’ll be double dipping, and that’s something we’re not talking enough about,” Ballouz adds.
Debuting a plan
The “tear down the grid and start over” philosophy isn’t a new romance for Hala Ballouz. She actually wrote an article outlining some of the above recommendations four years ago. She’s been holding on to it for the right time.
“The word wasn’t ready for it. It is ready now,” she says. Ballouz plans on publishing those ideas in her next LinkedIn blog.
The family she brought to the United States in 2007 is flourishing. One of Hala’s children is an electrical engineer, studying quantum computing and nanotechnology. The other is an environmentalist- a fitting combination of interests, considering their mother’s passions.
“Nobody wanted to do what mom does. She worked too hard for it,” Ballouz laughs.
Since she went back to Lebanon and worked remotely during the early days of Electric Power Engineers, Ballouz maintains her mind never rests. As a dedicated lifelong problem solver, she wouldn’t have it any other way. Once, a colleague asked her when she’d be willing to relax.
“I calculated it,” she reveals. “I calculated, I think, several lifetimes from today. I don’t think I will be able to stop wanting to make things work, and it’s going to take a lot of time.”
Originally published in Renewable Energy World.