The following is a transcript of the July 8, 2024, episode of Public Power Now. Learn more about subscribing to Public Power Now at Publicpower.org/Podcasts. Some quotes may have been edited for clarity.
Paul Ciampoli
Welcome to the latest episode of Public Power Now. I'm Paul Ciampoli, APPA’s news director. Our guest in this episode is Vennela Yadhati, Vice President of Renewables Development at the New York Power Authority, a role she assumed in October 2023. The new role for Vennela marks a return to NYPA for her. From September 2018 to January 2022, she worked at NYPA as Business Development Engineer for Renewable Energy and then became Manager for Clean Energy Advisory Services at NYPA. Vennela, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Paul Ciampoli
I'm aware of the fact that you have a deep and impressive record in terms of your energy sector experience. I wanted to give you an opportunity to provide an overview of your career in the energy sector.
Vennela Yadhati
My entire career [has been] in renewables and that’s by choice. I've been bitten by the bug early on in my life and this is what I love to do and this is what I want to do. Over the past 15 years, I have worn multiple hats. I've seen the entire, for lack of better words, the value chain of renewable energy projects from working for an EPC company, doing management consulting there, looking at even things like bankability studies for renewable equipment like solar PV inverters and other things, the batteries, et cetera, to actually full-fledged being the engineer on record to working for the private developers and developing projects early stage all the way to execution of projects all the way to supporting the operations and maintenance elements as well -- as well as now working for a utility slash a state owned utility basically. So it is what I'm passionate about. It is what I want to be doing and that is why I'm here.
Paul Ciampoli
I wanted to pivot and talk specifically about your current role at NYPA. I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell our listeners about your role and specific responsibilities in your current role.
Vennela Yadhati
My current role involves [being] the Vice President for NYPA’s Renewable Project Development Group. My current role involves drafting of the strategic plan to identify NYPA’s actions and priorities for building more renewable resources and supporting the state's grid under the new expanded authority NYPA received last year. Basically what it means is developing a vision and the business plan, ensuring alignment with NYPA’s core strategy for short term and long term objectives all pertaining to how do we go about development of renewable projects. And what is our winning strategy to support the state in its aggressive goals, including building a team, leveraging the existing resources that we may have and how do we structure all of that and leverage what the private sector can bring to us to complement what we're already doing as well.
Paul Ciampoli
I think that’s a nice segue to my next question, which is as you mentioned, New York State's 2023-24 enacted state budget provides NYPA with enhanced authority related to renewable energy as well as energy storage projects. So what are the specific ways in which this enhanced authority is going to empower NYPA to pursue renewable energy and energy storage projects?
Vennela Yadhati
First and foremost, it aligns with....what NYPA has been doing in several ways, right? Be it developing large complex power engineering projects or leading the state and our customers in their path towards decarbonization. So we're already the largest supplier of renewable energy through our hydroelectric [facilities] and we have proven experience in doing public private partnerships even more so in recent times as you may know through our transmission development. We have in depth knowledge of the NYISO system. I think humbly....we've been around for longer than the NYISO has been in New York State. We know the system inside out. This is our centenary decade in New York and that in depth knowledge of the NYISO system has been the success factor for us to be able to build the transmission that we have been again in support of bringing more renewable generation online.
We have a strong customer base and we have strong stakeholder relationships across the state where we are a trusted partner not just to the private sector and our customers but also to the communities across the state. What the expanded authority does is it gives us a chance to tie all of these elements together in a cohesive way to bring more renewable capacity online in support of, again like the state's CLCPA [Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act] goals. It allows us to have ownership in projects. That is a major difference.
Although we've been doing small DG scale projects on our customers’ behalf for quite some time now, we did not have the ability to own projects or have ownership in the projects. So the new enhanced authority allows us to have ownership in projects, making NYPA essentially a developer now. And this opens doors to further collaboration with the private sector, understand the challenges they're facing in project development, identify areas again across the value chain of a specific renewable project where NYPA can step in and play a role to make the project come to reality.
Paul Ciampoli
In your long experience in the renewables sector, what's the current state of play in terms of pricing for renewable energy?
Vennela Yadhati
It's the nature of the business, right? So they are intermittent resources, they're variable resources as we used to previously call them. And that's exactly how the different elements of a renewable project when it comes to pricing also goes and that's always been the case. It's the macroeconomic condition to conditions to everything else is impacting renewable energy projects, but it is nothing new to the industry.
So the trends that you're seeing are again trends we would have expected -- there are some challenges and changes including like the pandemic....the disruption in supply chain, some of the newer tariffs that we're seeing, the more focus on domestic content and Made in America or Buy America kind of elements as well. But these are all expected and anticipated. And in a way, it's almost like a cycle that you see it has happened in the past, it's happening again.
Paul Ciampoli
Switching gears a little bit and kind of drilling down in terms of recent news activities related to NYPA. As you know, in May, NYPA said it had pre-qualified 79 private developers and investors to collaborate with NYPA on the development of renewable energy generating projects. Selected entities were identified through a request for qualifications released in March. So my question is how will the pre-qualification approach benefit developers and investors as well as NYPA as it pursues renewable energy generating projects?
Vennela Yadhati
What the pre-qualification process allows NYPA is it allows us to have a stable of qualified developers and in this case investors as well that want to collaborate with NYPA on specific project opportunities. These 79 developers can work with NYPA over the next five years on such projects. We are keeping the RFQ open because we continue to receive interest and expressed in wanting to collaborate with NYPA. So we are keeping the RFQ open and we'll be accepting applications on a rolling basis from the private sector from those that may not have already had a chance to respond to the RFQ yet. So 79 based on the initial I think 94 or so responses that we received, but we continue to expand that stable of qualified developers as well. Once pre qualified, the developers or...investors can bring projects to us that they want to collaborate with us on that we’ll consider on a project by project basis or they'll have the ability to respond to future solicitations from NYPA on any specific projects, let's say our greenfield self-developed kind of project opportunities that we may issue in the future.
Paul Ciampoli
How unusual is this pre qualification approach?
Vennela Yadhati
It is a common mechanism we do utilize. Even in my former role when I was in the Distributed Energy Resources Advisory Services group, we had a stable of, again, pre-qualified developers there as well. Basically as a state entity, you know we have stringent procurement rules where we go through usually competitive solicitation processes and most often public solicitations processes that could be cumbersome not just for us but even for the private sector to partner in. Doing a pre qualification now for five years at the entity level now allows us to do what we call mini request for proposals.... basically to assure a pool of developers with a quicker turn around. So to say the least, it accelerates the process on and expedites how we could come to collaboration on specific project opportunities and how we can bring them to fruition.
Paul Ciampoli
So presumably having that large pool of pre-qualified entities decreases a chance or odds that you'll have a kind of a dramatic fall off of people who are entities that are pre qualified.
Vennela Yadhati
That is correct. Especially going back to your earlier comment of the state of renewables. There are very large players that are not just in the state, but also nationally and globally recognized [as] global players as well as local regional players and newer market players that won an entry into New York State. So the stable involves all of these aspects and it helps us diversify the risk when it comes to choosing partners that we want to work with.
Paul Ciampoli
I want to take a broader perspective, tapping your energy experience and have you talk about any challenges or opportunities unique to New York State related to the development of renewable energy projects in New York State.
Vennela Yadhati
Here's one other thing that I always quote. There's only one New York and not just talking about the city, but one New York in the entire world. And there's a reason why, right?
We are unique in a lot of ways. We also have aggressive climate goals. Across the entire globe over the past two plus decades if you see what drove renewable projects is the policy and we already lead by example on that front. We are proactive not just in our policy on our regulatory approach [but also] how we go about implementing these. You might have seen the storage road map recently published or previously the transition from RPS to New York State CES to then we have the CLCPA. Everything that we see we are far ahead. We are thinking proactively and that's one of the reasons why you see the continued interest in development even by the private sector, albeit slow at times. And that's where I think some of the other uniqueness of New York comes into play because it is a complex market.
In general, renewables is a complex market, even more so in New York State. And it involves a lot of elements including the macroeconomic situation that I had mentioned before to permitting to grid modernization that includes both transmission development because there's always this chicken and egg kind of situation when it comes to generation versus transmission, right? It is not in fact versus it is and -- and that's been New York's approach. And of course that also involves interconnection and lastly to supply chain. How the sun shines in New York State -- It is different from how the sun shines...in Texas or Florida or elsewhere in California or even Arizona. So from the resource, I call it like the resources themselves when it comes to when I say resources that you're talking about the irradiance or however the technical jargon is for renewable projects, for solar projects or how the wind blows to the permitting processes to the interconnection processes. All of those and including the labor elements as well availability of skilled and et cetera are all very unique and different to New York State.
Paul Ciampoli
The idea of pairing storage with solar seems to be an ever increasing option for utilities nationwide. Do you have any thoughts on that in terms of perhaps diminishing the level of unpredictability?
Vennela Yadhati
Energy storage has a lot of value add and whether it's stand alone or especially paired with intermittent renewable resources, the least or the defaults that you've mentioned is the capacity firming. So let's say when the wind isn't blowing as much or the sun isn't shining as much, if you have the project paired with battery energy storage or any sort of energy storage system, then you have the ability to continue to keep it at that capacity, right? That's capacity firming. But it also adds value in a lot of other aspects as well, including offering some of the ancillary services to the grid to anything else basically that where energy storage is needed. So this is not a new trend. Again, I had the opportunity to be part of the first of its kind DC coupled solar plus storage project that happened in the in the country. So back in we're talking about 2015/2016 timeframe, so very close to a decade ago now. And it's just becoming more and more and picking up the trend and we are going to start we are going to see it more and more even in New York State as well.
Paul Ciampoli
Vennela, thanks again for taking the time to speak with us. I'm going to end this conversation by inviting you to come back sometime next year. I'm sure there will be a lot of updates and or new announcements between now and then that fall in your bailiwick of responsibilities that we could talk about.
Vennela Yadhati
Absolutely. I would greatly appreciate that opportunity as well and be able to give you a lot more updates, a lot more exciting things that we've done between now and then.
Paul Ciampoli
Thanks for listening to this episode of Public Power Now, which is produced by Julio Guerrero, Graphic and Digital Designer at APPA. I'm Paul Ciampoli and we'll be back with more next week from the world of public power.
