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Posted on 08/15/2007 6:54:51 AM PDT by Uncledave
Expect gridlock along road to renewables New energy sources could easily overload the power network
By TOM PAULSON P-I REPORTER
There's a big obstacle to creating a shiny techno-green future by adding wind, sun and wave energy to our power system: the grid.
The nation's electric power transmission system, aka the grid, could be imagined as an overworked tangle of fraying household wires repeatedly spliced together by your grandfather, who refuses to call the electrician. It is based on century-old technology and, from a modern management perspective, is dumb.
Often, it's likened to the nation's highway system. But one local utilities executive said that is wishful thinking.
"More like a collection of New England country lanes," said Roger Garratt, resource acquisition manager for Puget Sound Energy.
Today, these country lanes are increasingly potholed, getting hit by massive snarls of traffic, with more vehicles every day and drivers demanding even higher speed limits.
Over the next decade, nationwide power consumption is expected to increase 19 percent while transmission capacity on the grid is projected to increase 7 percent.
The strain on grandpa's grid already is beginning to show.
The largest power blackout in U.S. history, on Aug. 14, 2003, began when a single power plant in Ohio shut down. Power lines overheated, short-circuited and led to an outage affecting 50 million people in the northeastern U.S. and Canada. The blackout is estimated to have cost as much as $10 billion.
Last winter's windstorm here, which killed 15 people, cost the region about $10 million and knocked out power to 1.5 million people across the Pacific Northwest, was another reminder of just how fragile is our connection to the power grid.
Initiative 937, which requires utilities to use more renewable sources of energy, will add to the demand and to the complexity of managing the grid. Wind and solar energy, for example, are intermittent sources that will feed unpredictably into the power flow. One effect of I-937 will be like introducing a fleet of cars that routinely slow down or stop on country lanes.
Such problems are manageable, experts say, but only if we improve and expand the grid as we expand energy generation.
"We're already trying to deliver more energy than the existing infrastructure can handle," said Jud Virden, an energy systems expert at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
"We can just try to add more transmission capacity, more high-voltage power lines, to expand the grid, but that's expensive, and it's getting harder to do," said Rob Pratt, Virden's colleague and director of the lab's activities in a grid-improvement project known as GridWise.
A better, approach, Pratt and Virden said, is to make the grid smarter.
The GridWise project is one of several national efforts to improve management of the grid for both producers and consumers. It could do for the power grid what the Internet did for the communications system.
"Right now, the grid is operated by managers who respond to issues or challenges directly and with a feedback time on the scale of minutes," Pratt said.
Managers faced with power overloads or energy deficits turn power lines on or off to try to keep the grid's flow in balance, he said.
GridWise sensors would automatically monitor electricity flow and respond to changes in seconds rather than minutes, Pratt said.
"What we want to do is manage the grid in real time to optimize its efficiency," Virden said.
Though still largely experimental, he said, some of the automated monitoring equipment is being tested on the grid.
Pratt and Virden are also involved in the "Grid-Friendly Appliance" project, which puts small circuit boards in appliances so they can respond to changes on the power grid. If the grid is under stress, the appliances turn off or advise the user to wait before using them.
"If all appliances had these boards in them, it would smooth or flatten out power demand at the consumer end by quite a bit," Pratt said.
Puget Sound Energy's Garratt said he's enthusiastic about projects like GridWise, but said the grid still must be expanded. "We simply have to have more, new investment in the infrastructure, and we need to get moving on this pretty soon," he said.
Wind power is the most viable renewable energy source in this region, Garratt said, and most of it will be generated east of the Cascades.
"And most of the demand will be where most of the population is, along the I-5 corridor," Garratt said. "We have to get that energy across the Cascades somehow. With the existing system already at transmission capacity, that will be a challenge." P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattlepi.com.
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Not to mention the pesky 1st and 2nd laws of Thermodynamics
And how, precisely, are the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics supposed to affect wind, sun, and wave energy???
Twenty odd years ago I did some programming as a student for MIT’s Electric Power Systems Engineering Lab - they were working on a project for the power companies to handle loads and surges and shutdowns on the grid. I just found a picture from 1968 with the EPSEL guys working on the problem and standing by one of the room size computers. They’ve been working on this program for a long long time.
Mrs VS
“...overload the power network.”
Darn, that sounds SO much like these environmentalists are trying to avert a possible system breakdown.
As a matter of real balance between supply and demand, generated electricity has this disadvantage of not being subject to storage, and when the full demand is placed on the system, all the reserve in the system disappears.
A huge breakthrough is needed in the power generation grid, some means of storing the excess power generation capacity so it is available at peak power demand. So far, only a few ideas have been put forth.
Some kind of super-capacitor, in which the energy is stored until discharge, or possibly a huge flywheel, which gets spooled up when power demand is low and there is excess capacity, then the power is released during peak demand by allowing the flywheel to drive a generator. Another possibility is to generate hydrogen by hydrolysis of water, and hold the hydrogen in high-pressure tanks, then using it to power a series of fuel cells that drive auxillary dynamos. This last method has the advantage of also producing chemically and biologically pure water, adaptable to all potable purposes, possibly eliminating the need for some water purification plants.
The cheapest and least impactful source of power to drive the power production is STILL nuclear power plants, but plants built with the technology of the 21st Century. That means making a great deal more efficient use of nuclear fuel, recycling and concentrating the remaining radioactivity into fuel-grade actinides. Theoretically, only about 3% of the energy in a fuel rod is consumed when it is considered “spent”. Real engineering consists of tapping into the remaining 97% of energy.
2nd Law guarantees that nothing can ever be 100% efficient further reducing their viability
I have been waiting for someone to realize that building windmills doesn't just cause power to get to your home... Grid capacity is one issue, grid connections for these generators is another issue.
If we are to put up enough wind and solar (etc) installations to even make a dent in the demand, we are going to have wires strung EVERYWHERE.
I don't think most people realize this.
American Superconductor already makes high temp superconductor lines with dramatically reduced resistance that will allow more electricity to reach the end user and a farther radius of transmission. More expensive no doubt, but if you can avoid building that new power plant by improving your lines, you can justify the expense.
The only way the utilities will improve their transmission grid is with incentives. Why this isn’t in an energy bill I don’t know.
People will really love appliances with busy signals. LOL
With respect to your "first law" objection---a watt is a watt, the only difference about wind and solar is that you have to have a larger collector area due to their more diffuse nature. A 1 MW wind generator still generates 1 MW.
Your "second law" objection is simply ridiculous. NO energy source is anywhere near 100% efficient. A car engine and a solar cell have just about comparable conversion efficiency.
I'm in favor of building nukes instead of wind and solar but don't make arguments not correctly grounded in science.
My central air unit draws about 5 Kva. If we have vehicles that have batteries that must be recharged by plugging them into the electric outlet, because of the immense amount of power that vehicles require, their rechargers will have a demand that is in the neighborhood of what my air conditioner demands of the grid.
In other words, recharging electric cars will approximate the same load on the grid as if we doubled the amount of home air conditioners.
It is not that the grid cannot be beefed up to handle this, but since electric distribution has the topology of a tree, higher demand at the ends of the branches ‘rolls up’ to much higher demand at the trunk and roots. This will mean more power lines and bigger power lines unless recharging is limited to non-peak time or even that some device in the recharger will have to communicate to the utility to request permission to draw power, in a manner similar to the way that some utilities remotely disconnect electric hot water heaters to control peak demand.
They’ll be “Made in China” so the alerts will be in Mandarin and nobody here will understand them anyway.
Did the PI actually read the NERC report?... probably not...
They just pulled a WAG out of their backsides and stated the lines short circuited...
The problem was a little more complicated...
The 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics obviously don’t preclude wind, hydro, and solar because the earth is not a closed system. It continually receives energy input from the Sun. In many parts of the world, however, the economic Laws of Supply and Demand do preclude such renewables, but legislatures can manipulate the economics with subsidies, taxes, etc. Ultimately, advances in wind and solar technologies will almost certainly yield additional energy, and environmentalists will find new objections to such technologies.
However, when environmentalists start talking about hydrogen and fuel cells, the laws of thermodynamics are real barriers. Lots of folks seem to think that all it takes is technology to obtain hydrogen from water, and that the hydrogren storage and delivery infrastructure are the main barriers. In all of the hoopla about fuel cells, I’ve seldom seen anything about where the hydrogen would come from. That’s because the most economic source of hydrogen is currently from steam-reforming hydrocarbons. In the very best case, this involves seven pounds of CO2 byproduct for every pound of hydrogen produced.
With current prices, those pesky laws of thermodynamics make hydrolysis uneconomic for large scale production of hydrogen.
Well, of course this is true. But the probability is VERY good that current prices will not be the norm, given the continuing signficant advances in solar cells (I don't see much in the way of more advances being probable for wind power). Thin-film cells and advanced concentrator cells are both continuing to improve in efficiency and lowered cost.
Of course, I would much prefer immediate implementation of a breeder fission economy, instead of the politically correct emphasis on "renewables", as a lead-in to fusion, but I'm not gonna bitch about ANYTHING that puts more ergs on the table, and keeps our dollars away from the ragheads.
High tension lines cost over $1 million per mile even under the best of conditions (many times that in congested areas.)
We can build wind farms way out in the boonies where even a Kennedy won't be offended, but don't forget to consider the cost of getting the high-cost intermittent electricity they generate the hundreds of miles it has to go to be of any use.
The Renewable Energy Crowd, the Conservation of Energy Crowd, The Use CFL Crowd, The Water on Wednesday Crowd,
are really just the:
Cover Up That Politicians Spent Money on Vote Buying Social Schemes Rather Than Build Infrastructure Crowd.
Sadly many of them have no idea who they are working for.
— lates
— jrawk
I would think if it were an individual system, the idea would be to get off the grid ..........
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