Interesting and impressive analysis.
http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/257481/why-power-density-matters
Showing posts with label electricity distribution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electricity distribution. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Friday, January 11, 2013
Four Storms in Quick Succession Expose the Flaws in New York City’s Electrical System - WNYC
Good coverage of the challenges utilities face in the future thanks to climate change:
Four Storms in Quick Succession Expose the Flaws in New York City’s Electrical System - WNYC
Four Storms in Quick Succession Expose the Flaws in New York City’s Electrical System - WNYC
Monday, November 05, 2012
Cuomo on utilities: "Not God-given monopolies'
November 5, 2012
By
By
Hudson Valley leaders blasted the region's electric utilities on Monday as election officials scrambled to prepare for the presidential vote, gas lines shrunk slightly, kids returned to school and a nor'easter threatened to bring more wind and rain to residents struggling to recover from Hurricane Sandy.
"I am not happy with any of them," Cuomo said of Con Edison, Orange & Rockland and New York State Electric and Gas during an evening news conference in Albany. "The utility companies have not performed adequately. I have let them know that."
Cuomo said the state would conduct hearings on the performance of the utilities and potentially impose penalties, which could range from sanctions to revoking their licenses.
"We can contract with other utility companies," Cuomo said, noting that 480,000 New Yorkers still have no electricity, including about 110,000 utility customers in the Hudson Valley. "These are not God-given monopolies. I will review all of them."
Cuomo took his shots after county executives in Rockland, Westchester and Orange County said they were fed up.
Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef had a news conference with Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy as about 19,000 Rockland County customers remained without power as of late Monday. The number of outages represents around 20 percent of the county's residents, Vanderhoef said.
"One in five people after 7 1/2 days is unacceptable," he said. "They are angry and frustrated and they want to know what we're doing. It's just impossible to think that that many people will spend a cold night in Rockland County without any power."
In Westchester County, County Executive Rob Astorino said that he would climb utility poles and join repair crews if it would help the approximately 70,000 Westchester County residents who still didn't have electricity as of Monday evening.
But Astorino added that stridency would not speed up the process.
"The louder we shout, 'Death penalty for the utility companies' is not going to get things done any more quickly," Astorino said. "Rest assured we're holding their feet to the fire."
With about 14,000 Orange County residents still without power on Monday night, County Executive Ed Diana demanded that state regulators review the performance of utility companies.
"It is simply unacceptable that so many Orange County residents remain without power this long after the storm," Diana said in a statement. "The outages threaten the life and safety of our residents, especially our sick and elderly."
Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano also chimed in, charging that Con Ed has failed to respond to the city's 10,000 customers without power.
"Yonkers has been overlooked by Con Ed," Spano said in a statement.
O&R spokesman Mike Donovan acknowledged that "frustration is building up" but said power had been restored to 81 percent of the company's customers in Rockland County and 80 percent in Orange County.
"We're doing everything we can," Donovan said.
Con Edison Spokesman Allan Drury said the delays in bringing power back were a result of the scope of Sandy's damage.
Tropical Storm Irene, which had been the biggest storm in Con Ed history, caused blackouts for 203,841 customers in 2011, Drury said. By contrast, Sandy knocked out more than 950,000. "This is not only the biggest in company history, but the biggest by a huge margin," Drury said.
The power outages caused board of elections officials throughout the Hudson Valley to scramble for much of the day to make sure polling stations had electricity. By Monday evening, Rockland and Orange counties had designated a few alternate sites, and Westchester County officials told voters to proceed to their normal locations, saying generators would be running at buildings in need of power.
"All voters should go to their regular polling places," said Westchester County Board of Election Commissioners Douglas Colety and Reginald LaFayette in a public statement.
Random observations and comments from drivers suggested gas lines were growing shorter on Monday as repairs brought electricity to stations that had shut down and other were resupplied. But it was still common to wait a few hours for gas on Monday evening. Many New Yorkers were traveling upstate or to Connecticut to find open stations.
Charles Green, a Manhattan resident working a construction job in Peekskill, pulled his car into the Shell station in Westchester County as his gas gauge registered empty early on Monday and fueled up quickly.
"I'm pretty much shocked," Green said. "I feel like I got lucky, really lucky."
At his news conference, Cuomo said the state was streamlining rules to bring fuel from neighboring states. But he also warned people not to gas up more than they needed.
"Hoarding is only going to compound the situation and make it worse," he said.
The sense that the region was slowly but surely bouncing back was perhaps most pronounced in schools that opened after a week of closures due to the storm.
Sixteen-year-old Jess Tuttman, an 11th-grader at Ossining High School, said he was easing back into his regular routine.
"I just want to get back into the swing of things," he said.
Monday's good news was tempered by fears of the nor'easter that was threatening to arrive in the Hudson Valley on Wednesday.
Forecast to churn up the coast from Georgia, the storm could bring more rain and pack gusts of 35-40 mph in the southern portions of the Hudson Valley and 25-35 mph farther north, National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Pollina said.
"The trees that endured Sandy may have been weakened a little," he said. "Any wind that comes with this storm could make other trees fall down."
Early in the day, Con Edison issued a statement saying that 84 percent of customers who had lost power during Sandy had their power restored, significant progress on the company's pledge to fix 90 percent of power outages by the end of the weekend. The company added that the coming nor'easter could slow restoration efforts.
"The company is monitoring the rain and wind forecasted for later this week," the statement said. The company said high winds and heavy rains could delay work on homes and businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy and could cause additional outages."
O&R's Donovan was more positive. The extraordinarily large group of 2,500 outside contractors supplementing the utility's 1,000-strong in-house repair force puts the company in a unique position to cope with the storm, he said.
"We have sufficient crews to address any damage," he said. "We're not setting aside crews to deal with the nor'easter. When it comes, we'll deal with it."
Although he didn't relieve the utilities of their responsibilities, Cuomo agreed that the new storm could hamper the region's recovery.
"This is complicated because it is a storm that would approach before we've recovered from the first storm and it would hit communities, some of which will not have power," the governor said.
Relief workers warned residents without heat to beware of signs of hypothermia as temperatures dip into the 30s in the coming days.
"If you feel yourself getting confused, where you can't feel your extremities, make sure you have plenty of blankets and you drink plenty of water," said Naomi Adler, president of the United Way of Westchester and Putnam.
Friday, October 05, 2012
Sustainable Urban Energy for Dhaka City
by Md. Zahidur Rahman and Saeed Ahmed Siddiquee
October 5, 2012
October 5, 2012
Blitz
Our entire way of life and all of our economic projections relies on more energy. Howbeit, the world is now facing most serious challenge in energy supply which could be a more devastating crisis than world wars. Global energy depletion has already begun, although few countries have realized it. The peak energy affects the future of the entire global economy. Presently the energy producing resources like fossil fuel, gas, coal, and uranium has placed in peak position. It is predicted that those non-renewable energy is going to be declined position in every place of the earth.
Dominant consumption of non-renewable energy for electricity is leading to Green House Gasses (GHG) emission into the atmosphere. According to the International Energy Agency (2011), approximately 901 grammes of CO2 or equivalent are released per kilowatt hour of electricity that generated from coal. Presumably, global urban populations are principle responsible for GHG emissions due to the consumption of bulk amount of energy for the aristocratic lifestyle. While on the contrary, Renewable World stated that still 1.3 billion people in the world still live without access to electricity and 2.7 billion people have no access to clean cooking facilities. Admittedly, energy crisis will happen in future and then urban inhabitants will be more sufferer compare to rural people. In this situation, global economic wheel may be plummeted and thus leading to global inevitable poverty. Indeed, a concerning era has already arise in front of the global leaders to make them busy thinking alternatively about how to overcome this energy crisis?
At present, what is the overview of Bangladesh's energy situation? Currently, around 43% population belongs to electricity facilities with per capita consumption of 140 kilowatt hour. The electricity consumption rate has increased gradually due to the demand of overwhelmed growing population. Reported by the country power system Master Plan 2010, the forecasted demand would be 19,000 megawatt by the year 2021 and 34,000 megawatt by 2030. Till now majority of our energy come from non-renewable sources which are facing challenges in order to growing energy demand for mostly electricity generation. Presently, Bangladesh has 20.5 TFC recoverable natural gas reserve and 420 million tones of coal reserve. Noticeable gas fields are already facing multifaceted crisis for gas supply for electricity generation. For example, Sangu gas field has reduced the supply of gas from a well. In addition, day by day oil prices have increased in the global market schemes which lead to raise prices per unit cost of electricity.
Surprisingly, the capital city of Dhaka itself consumes almost 41.22% of the total generated electricity while the demand of electricity is approximately 12000 megawatt and only 5493 megawatt is on pipeline. Stated by DESA, the demand for power in Dhaka city has increased by around 10% a year. As the supply is not adequate to meet the demand in the city, so either we have to adopt it or think alternative path way to solve the power crisis. If we consider Thailand, we can see that almost 28% electricity comes from the renewable sources. Bangladesh also has plenty of renewable energy sources to innovate and mainstreaming it to the main grid.
In Dhaka city we have not enough wind speed for windmill, neither enough River current for hydroelectric power plant nor even any suitable peri-urban places for nuclear power station installation. Nuclear power plant might be a suitable option for bulk amount of power generation and also it has no carbon emission but it is supposed to be risky in terms of earthquake frequency. Surprisingly, Dhaka is situated in the solar radiation receiving zone on the earth with almost 335 sunny days a year. Hence, solar photovoltaic energy generation is the best option for Dhaka city to face the present energy crisis.
According to CDMP's Urban Risk Reduction Specialists, there are 3,26,000 (appx.) buildings in Dhaka City. If we consider introducing a 5m2 solar panel for each building, it might produce about 222 megawatt (5*136W*326000) electricity. Another expert from the same domain said that, we have almost 20000 shopping malls in Dhaka city and where we could introduce renewable energy for electricity generation. Furthermore, the growing real estate companies could also use environment favorable architectural design like Council Building-2 (Solar energy capturing building) in Melbourne where produce a substantial amount of electricity locally for every building. Apart from this, solar technology also reduce GHG emission rate by absorbing around 20% solar radiations that might balance the inner city heat. Cutting down of existing load shading, long term health and financial benefits are also might be ensured and even people could get installation cost back within three years.
From renewable energy sources, Bangladesh government has set a target to meet 5% by the year 2015 and 10% by 2020 of total power demand (RENDEV). However, our government has already been taken some effective initiative for enhancing efficiency of electricity through energy saving distribution within urban communities. Bangladesh has an extensive renewable energy policy. Few governmental offices, institutions and common places are now being implemented solar power installation for the purpose of alternative power generation.
Energy is one o f the most important ingredients required to alleviate poverty, realize socio-economic and human development. Energy returned on energy invested, banning of profligate users, increase people awareness, policy implementation, generation of individual or household level options, community or private sector initiative along with investment, zero interest bank loans for renewable energy and enforcement of law and order situation are required to overcome the present condition. Furthermore, we need feasibility study of those technologies aiming to adopt suitable technology for electricity production from renewable resources. For an instance close your eyes and think, what will be the situation without or insufficient electricity supply of Dhaka? Completely become dead city!
Friday, July 27, 2012
More French Power Flowing to Britain in Time for Games
By REUTERS
July 27, 2012
CALAIS, France (Reuters) - Paris may not have won its bid to stage the 2012 Olympics, but France is doing its bit for the London games, supplying electricity through a 70 km-long under-sea link that has been upgraded just in time for Friday's opening ceremony.
The 90 million euro ($110.70 million) upgrade to the more than 25-year old power connection between Folkestone, England and Sangatte, France, was completed last week, after two years of work on the ageing and outage-prone cable link.
"This is an investment for the next 25, 30 years, it had to be done anyway. But our objective was to be ready for the Games," said Dominique Houdard, North-East director of the French grid operator RTE, at a press trip this week.
With a capacity of 2,000 MW, enough to supply the needs of 2 million people, the IFA 2000 connection started transporting electricity between Britain and France in 1986, plugging the British Isles to the continent's power grid for the first time.
At the time, 45 kms (28 miles) of copper cables had to be laid 1.5 meter deep in the soft, limestone seabed of the Channel by a subsea robot. At each end, an inverter plant converts the regular, alternating current into more transportable direct current.
"France was in overcapacity and a big exporter of electricity in the 1980s and 1990s, so England was a welcome market, while England was gaining access to cheaper electricity without having to build plants on its soil," Bruno Baronian, project manager at RTE, told reporters.
Until 2000, the flow was almost exclusively towards Britain, but RTE and Britain's National Grid opened the capacity to competition in 2001, and flows from Britain to France now account for about a third of total volumes.
In 2006, a year after London was awarded the Olympic Games, RTE and National Grid decided to upgrade the interconnector, which had about 30 incidents every year, with French turbine maker Alstom being picked for the renovation work.
RTE invested 50 million euros, and National Grid about 40 million euros, RTE's Baronian said.
Over the last two years, half of the capacity was cut during work that took place in the spring and summer of 2011 and 2012, maintaining the full 2,000 MW output in the winter, when power consumption is at its peak.
In practical terms, new converters -- sparkling new metallic structures equipped with about 2,000 valves --, cooling systems and a command control were installed in the huge, red-concrete Mandarins inverter plant near Calais.
The whole installation is now ready to supply French electricity to British homes in time for the 800-MW increase in power demand expected by Britain's National Grid on Friday night, when millions of Britons will turn on their telly to watch the opening ceremony masterminded by Oscar-winning film director Danny Boyle.
($1 = 0.8130 euros)
(Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps in London; editing by James Jukwey)
Monday, June 04, 2012
Climate Change Threatens Power Output, Study Says
By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times
June 4, 2012
As the climate gets warmer, so do the rivers and lakes that power plants draw their cooling water from. And that is going to make it harder to generate electricity in decades to come, researchers report.
In an article in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists measured temperatures now and projected what they would be at midcentury. The temperatures vary according to the time of year, and, even if the extremes remain similar, they will be more frequent — meaning that the water will be too warm to allow full power production, they predict.
All power plants that burn coal or split uranium, and most of the plants that burn natural gas, turn the resulting heat into steam, which spins a turbine that turns a generator to make power. Then the steam has to be converted back to water before being reheated. If the river or lake water used to condense the steam is getting warmer, the amount it can condense is reduced, leading to a decline in power output.
Using computer projections of climate change possible outcomes, the researchers wrote that generating capacity in the United States could fall 4.4 to 16 percent on hot days from 2031 to 2060. And the number of days when river water is at a temperature that is now considered extremely high will be triple the number today, on average, they said.
The idea of varying availability of cooling water is not new; many American steam-electric plants already have a summer power rating and a winter power rating.
The idea of varying availability of cooling water is not new; many American steam-electric plants already have a summer power rating and a winter power rating.
Extremely hot weather is not the norm today. Still, power plants have experienced the headache of cooling water shortages in the past. Some power plants in the United States shut down during a drought in 1988 because the level of water in the Mississippi fell below the opening of their intake pipes.
The Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility consortium, produced a lengthy study in 1995 on the threat posed by climate change. It discussed the possibility of federal limits on carbon dioxide emissions (which 17 years later, may now be approaching) and the problem of hot cooling water.
It found that in addition to making electricity harder to generate, warm weather would make peaks in electricity demand even higher. That would raise costs, it said, because utilities might need more generating stations that would run for only a few hours a year, during the peak summer demand periods.
It also pointed out that if rainfall patterns changed, hydroelectric dams would be less productive.
The solutions to this problem are not obvious. Wind generation might not help much, because the wind usually does not blow much in hot weather. Solar photovoltaic cells could help, but they do not generate much in the last hour before sunset, and not at all after that. That is the period in which many utilities experience peak demand, as people return home from work and turn on air-conditioners, television sets and ovens.
Some generating stations have air-cooled condensers that use electrically driven fans instead of water. But that means less output of electricity – and more carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour.
The researchers who wrote the article for Nature Climate Change — from Austria, the Netherlands, Germany and Washington State — pointed out that plants running on natural gas at a higher efficiency – that is, putting more of the heat into making power and less into waste that must be absorbed by water — could be helpful. Because generating plants usually last for many decades, ”adaptation options should be included in today’s planning,’’ they wrote.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/climate-change-threatens-power-output-study-says/?src=recg
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Ship’s Espresso-Fueled Mission: Laying Cables Beneath the Hudson
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
New York Times
Published: December 26, 2011
For several minutes on Thursday, Al Figueroa was up to his neck in mud nearly 70 feet below the swift-moving surface of the Hudson River.
Mr. Figueroa, who has been diving in and around New York Harbor for 24 years, was well acquainted with the river’s shifting currents. Not so for the sailors and engineers on the hulking ship floating above him: almost all of them had traveled from Italy in the fall to stretch several miles of power cables beneath the river between Midtown Manhattan and New Jersey.
The cables, coiled in huge steel baskets on the deck of the ship, were custom-made in a factory near Naples to survive for decades in the muck and clay beneath the Hudson. The ship, the Giulio Verne, is one of only two in the world capable of laying so much heavy cable across ocean floors and deep riverbeds.
“The ship is filled like an egg,” said Sebastiano Aleo, an executive who oversees installation projects for its owner, Prysmian Powerlink. “There is no more room on it.”
The Giulio Verne left Naples in late October and, after 25 days on the Atlantic Ocean, arrived in New York, where a crew of 70 began preparing for a project that had been years in the planning. By Monday, it was halfway to its destination of Edgewater, N.J.
The cables on the ship were designed to carry as much as 660 megawatts of electricity — about 5 percent of the power consumed in New York City on the hottest summer days — to Midtown Manhattan from the main power grid west of the Hudson. The power could replace some of the supply that would be lost if Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo succeeds in his quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, 35 miles north of Midtown.
The New York Power Authority, which buys electricity for many city and state agencies, strongly supported the cross-Hudson cable plan. But the $850 million project is a privately financed venture, managed by PowerBridge, the same company that ran a cable from New Jersey to Long Island in 2007.
PowerBridge has sold most of the capacity on the cable to the power authority. But it can sell additional capacity to Consolidated Edison or other power providers. The laying of the cable accounts for about $175 million of the total cost, said Edward M. Stern, the chief executive of PowerBridge.
The electricity that is to run through the cables, three of them bundled together with two thinner fiber-optic wires, is from the grid that serves New Jersey and several other states. It is usually significantly less expensive than electricity made in the city.
But first, the men on the ship — they are all men and almost all Italian — must get the cables buried. That was why Mr. Figueroa was deep in the water, feeling his way around a plow that had been lowered to the river bottom.
After plunging into the 48-degree water about 700 feet from the west end of 53rd Street, Mr. Figueroa reported his observations through a microphone inside his bright yellow helmet. He had a camera too, but it was virtually useless in the murk of the Hudson.
In the “dive shack” — a steel freight container filled with hoses and gauges — on a barge tethered to the ship, two supervisors listened to Mr. Figueroa’s transmissions. Beside them stood a member of the Giulio Verne’s engineering crew, who translated the information into Italian and relayed it to the control room on the ship’s main deck.
Inside the control room, Mr. Aleo and his engineers kept up a spirited debate as they surveyed the 21 computer screens mounted on one wall. Some displayed video of the situation underwater from different angles; some showed data about the angle of the plow and the tension on the cables passing through it into the riverbed.
The discussion rarely ceased, with one notable exception: Every hour, a crew member circulated with a pot of espresso and a stack of two-inch-tall plastic cups.
If an army travels on its stomach, an Italian ship’s crew floats on a steady stream of coffee. They eat well, too. On Thursday, lunch was fettuccine alla bolognese with an antipasto spread, oranges and, of course, espresso.
The Christmas tree in the mess hall served as a reminder that the crew would miss the holidays with their families. Their work in the Hudson was not likely to wrap up until just before or after New Year’s Day.
“Unfortunately, it’s not the first Christmas we have passed on this ship,” Mr. Aleo said.
The ship has traveled the world, laying cables across seas from Sardinia to Australia, he said. Mr. Aleo said that the length and depth of those crossings presented more vexing technical challenges than the Hudson project, which will run only a few miles underwater, from West 52nd Street to Edgewater. The construction on the two sides of the river is not scheduled to be completed until mid-2013. So, on Thursday afternoon, when the brief lull between the strong tides of the Hudson passed before the crew of the Giulio Verne could get the plow moving upriver, Mr. Stern, the chief executive, remained sanguine.
“I’ve waited four years, I can wait another few hours,” he said, leaning against the ship’s rail, BlackBerry in hand.
On Friday, the plow, using jets of water to cut through the silt and clay, began threading the cables into the trench at the tortoise-like pace of about 325 feet per hour. Almost immediately, it ran into some industrial junk. But after finding a way around it, the crew resumed laying the cables.
They expected to reach New Jersey before the end of this week.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Lines go up to ferry wind energy to major cities
By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: October 21, 2011
SWEETWATER — Enormous transmission towers stand beside a West Texas country road, waiting for electric wires to be strung through them. Nearby, the task of threading wires through the steel towers is already under way, as men in hard hats shift equipment into position.
“We’re going to work 12 hours a day through Thanksgiving,” said Pat Hogan, a consultant with McCurley Enterprises, a company helping with the construction. The only real break comes around midafternoon on Sundays when, he said, “you can get your clothes cleaned or go to the grocery store.”
The rush to build transmission lines is part of Texas’ efforts to promote wind power, which provides 8 percent of the state grid’s electricity. Across the state, thousands of miles of wires are being strung at a cost that has soared to an estimated $6.8 billion. The main purpose is to ferry wind energy from remote areas like Sweetwater — already home to many big wind farms — to major cities like Dallas and Fort Worth. Texas leads the nation in wind production, and the lines are intended to nearly double the state’s wind capacity.
The build-out, which Texans will pay for in future electric bill increases projected at about $5 a month per customer for years, has been contentious. Some Texas landowners have fought to prevent the lines from crossing their property, even though they receive a one-time payment for hosting them.
Travis Besier, the manager of transmission right of way for Oncor, a Dallas-based utility overseeing construction of the largest chunk of lines (including the Sweetwater segments), said that payments for an easement could range from around $3,000 to $10,000 or more an acre, depending on factors like the property’s proximity to a large city.
In some cases, Mr. Besier said, Oncor has needed eminent domain proceedings, in which the utility can take the land if negotiations with the landowner fail.
For businesses in Sweetwater, which normally cater to energy-company workers and tourists attending the town’s springtime Rattlesnake Roundup, the construction has brought a boom. One recent morning at Big Boy’s Bar-B-Que began with Oncor ordering $265 worth of sandwiches, according to Gaylan Marth, the restaurant’s owner.
“What a way to start off!” Mr. Marth said.
Christy Silva, general manager of the Best Western hotel in Sweetwater, said that her business had increased by about 35 percent because of the transmission work — although she is aware that at some point the construction will end and the workers will leave.
All lines are supposed to be completed by the end of 2013. Work is going smoothly, builders say, though there are hitches. Workers must always beware of rattlesnakes and bad weather, including high winds.
Andy Weaver, co-owner of Weaver Construction Texas, a company doing grading work for Oncor, said that because of the drought and tighter water restrictions, he had trouble getting enough water (necessary for processing the material) while preparing a substation site near Brownwood. “You couldn’t find a driller in Texas to drill you a water well,” he said. He was eventually able to buy water from ranchers and farmers with wells.
Wind developers, for their part, are eagerly awaiting the completion of the lines, which should spur more activity in West Texas, including the area around Sweetwater, where currently some turbines must stop spinning at windy times because there are not enough wires to carry out the power. The Panhandle, the windiest region in the state, albeit one with relatively few turbines because of its remoteness, is also poised for more development.
But Andy Bowman, president of Pioneer Green Energy, a renewable energy developer, said that much near-term wind activity is focused on South Texas — where the state has not ordered construction of new transmission lines for wind. Austin Energy, for example, recently announced plans to buy coastal wind power for a relatively low price. (Coastal winds tend to be slower but better matched to electricity use patterns than West Texas winds.)
“It’s an interesting turn of events that we’re seeing wind being competitive on the market again,” even before the lines are built, Mr. Bowman said.
Friday, September 09, 2011
USAID Municipal Heating Reform
USAID district energy upgrades project in Ukraine.
http://www.youtube.com/AllianceToSaveEnergy#p/u/5/X8YMIQCEbzk
http://www.youtube.com/AllianceToSaveEnergy#p/u/5/X8YMIQCEbzk
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Getting a Grip on the Grid
By MATTHEW L. WALDNY TImes
One of the crucial factors that limits the capacity of the electricity grid is the temperature of the lines; as their metal is heated by the current flowing through them, the lines get longer, and they sag, and can contact trees or other objects.
That development helped set off the great Northeast blackout of August 2003.
But the utility companies have never had a precise idea of what the temperatures are, or where their lines are in relation to obstructions below. They use a complicated formula for calculating the temperature that involves the angle of the sun, the wind speed and direction in relation to the lines, and the air temperature.
Now, though, utilities are testing a new technology that could reduce the guesswork. The company marketing the technology, Utility Risk Management Corporation of Stowe, Vt., says it could increase the useful capacity of some lines by 15 percent, without any of the cost or regulatory difficulty of building new transmission.
A prominent grid expert involved in testing the technology agreed, but said that in some cases it could lead to reducing the capacity, if better data showed that the temperature had been underestimated and the maximum safe loading was lower than what is assumed today.
With or without new technology, the companies that own transmission lines have been ordered by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry group that has governmental powers, to survey all of their lines in the next three years and get a better idea of the clearances between the bare wire of the transmission lines and the natural and man-made objects on which they might droop.
The standard technique is to equip a helicopter with Lidar , a remote sensing technology that is like radar but uses light instead of radio waves.
The Vermont company, known by its initials, U.R.M.C., has married the Lidar gun to a thermal sensor, so a helicopter can get the temperature as well as the position. Once those are known, a layer of approximation is eliminated.
“Our industry has been artificially constraining our transmission lines because of a formula the industry has been using since the 1940s,” said Adam Rousselle, the chief executive of the company. And demands on the power grid are growing, Mr. Rousselle said, because of restructuring that has let independent companies add generation stations around the country, and because of state requirements for renewable energy. Wind and solar “farms” tend to be located in out-of-the-way areas.
By starting with a hard number instead of the one derived by formula, an engineer can calculate how much the cable would sag with varying amounts of current running through it.
The Lidar system can pinpoint birds and mice, and has no trouble finding power lines, he said.
In independent testing conducted in June by the Electric Power Research Institute at a high-voltage laboratory in Lenox, Mass., that has previously been used to test robot power line inspectors, the heat measurement system generally correlated very well with temperature measurement devices installed on test lines. And both were better than the approximation arrived at by the formula.
A transmission expert, Dale A. Douglass of Power Delivery Consultants, said it would be a big benefit to get more work out of existing lines, because building new ones was so difficult. “Utilizing what we have is a big deal,” he said.
Whenever new transmission capacity appears, said Dr. Douglass, whether because of new construction or because of refinement of existing calculations, consumers may benefit because the system can make better use of low-cost electricity supplies shipped over longer distances.
And some generators will benefit, because new markets will open to them. But some will lose, he said, because distant generators will be able to compete with them.
Dr. Douglass, who has worked as a consultant for the Electric Power Research Institute, and for U.R.M.C. and various other companies, said that using the old formula required knowing the wind speed and direction over the course of a transmission line that could stretch for miles, and sometimes utilities did not go to the expense of getting weather measurements close to the line.
“They’d use airport data,” he said. “But you never see power lines at airports.”
Some utilities could discover, with more precise measurements, that their power lines cannot carry quite as much as they are now rated for, he said. But whichever way the rating was adjusted after getting more accurate measurements, he said, the system should be less prone to line failure and blackout.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Along 240 Miles of Power Lines, Preparing Every Tower for Winter’s Wrath
Joyce Dopkeen for The New York Times
Eric DeChent, an inspector for Con Edison, scaled a tower in Verplanck, N.Y., to check for structural problems.
With the leaves turning and the temperatures dropping, homeowners are chopping wood, storing lawn furniture and weatherizing windows.
Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Mr. DeChent and Doug Wassil, driving, can inspect about 30 towers a day.
Doug Wassil and Eric DeChent have a different winter checklist: Help inspect the 1,600 towers that support high-voltage electrical lines in New York City, Westchester County and points farther north. On a recent morning, the two men, who work in Con Edison’s transmission line maintenance department, used binoculars, hoists and voltage meters to ensure that the towers’ concrete bases, steel beams, ceramic insulators and other hardware will be able to withstand the high winds, freezing cold and heavy snow that winter brings.
“Basically, we want to batten down the hatches,” said their boss, George Czerniewski, standing below a tower not far from the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
The stability of Con Edison’s towers, some nearly 500 feet tall, is critical to the health of the state’s electrical grid, which carries much of the power New York City needs from upstate. If one of the lines carrying up to 500,000 volts of electricity were downed by a falling tree, high winds or ice, parts of the city and its suburbs could go dark.
That is why each of the towers along the 240 miles of Con Edison-owned pathways that stretch from Dutchess County to the Bronx-Yonkers border is inspected twice a year, or more if maintenance is required. Every month, inspectors in helicopters fly over the towers and the hundreds of miles of cables between them.
Winter weather, though, brings additional risks and can make it more difficult for workers to get to the towers, some of which can be reached only by all-terrain vehicle.
“The worst for us is when ice builds up and wind pushes the cables and puts stress on the towers, which can break an arm,” said Mr. Wassil, 53, who has worked on transmission lines since 1983 and was finishing the fall patrol with Mr. DeChent late last month.
Like Con Ed’s half-dozen other inspection teams, the two men inspect about 30 towers a day. First, they use binoculars to survey the joints of the steel towers and the health of the equipment at the top. The ceramic, circular insulators, for instance, can be damaged by lightning — or by frustrated hunters, who have been known to shoot at them when deer are scarce.
They search the base of the tower for cracks and graffiti, a telltale sign of potential damage elsewhere. Sometimes, intruders dump washing machines, cars and barrels of toxic chemicals around the towers. Thieves try to remove grounding wires in hopes of selling the copper in them.
Nests are another potential hazard. Hawks, vultures and raptors carry food to their perches that can end up damaging equipment. Red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures can also short-circuit feeders when they leap off cables and discharge streams of excrement that, at up to 12 feet long, can simultaneously touch a live wire and a grounded structure. Nests without eggs in them are removed.
Then there are the trees — hundreds of thousands of them. Con Edison uses light detection and ranging technology, or Lidar, to keep track of every tree, cable, tower and other structure on its property. To create a map accurate to within two feet, helicopters equipped with devices that shoot 50,000 laser pulses a second survey the pathways. The heights of the objects below are determined by how fast the laser beams bounce back.
Con Edison paid a contractor about $500,000 in 2005 to create a map and a parallel database. On a spreadsheet of one stretch between Buchanan and the Hudson River, Mr. Czerniewski could see each tower, the sag of the cables and their horizontal and vertical clearance from trees nearby. He could also see the distance of the cables between towers.
The database helps Con Edison prioritize its three-year tree-trimming cycle. On his spreadsheet, Mr. Czerniewski could see that trees that were less than 10 feet from a cable were colored red and had to be trimmed first. Those that were 10 to 20 feet from a cable were marked yellow, while those more than 20 feet from a cable were green and considered out of harm’s way.
Con Edison also uses the database to determine whether residents living along its rights of way can plant trees abutting the property, and to decide whether trucks would have enough room to pass under transmission lines.
On a computer at Con Edison’s headquarters near Union Square in Manhattan, each tree along one stretch looked like a lollipop: Circles had been drawn around the trunks indicating how far they could fall in every direction. Some trees had circles that crossed over the circles around other trees and transmission lines, suggesting potential problems.
Orville O. Cocking, an engineer in the utility’s substation and transmissions group, can also analyze the impact of extreme temperatures, high winds and ice to determine whether cables and other equipment need to be replaced.
“You can play a lot of what-if games,” Mr. Cocking said. “This lets us know whether we can add extra weight to the towers.”
With winter approaching, though, Con Edison is intent on clearing trees in danger of falling into towers or transmission lines. Along a 9.5-mile corridor between Buchanan and Millwood, a team of contractors was busy removing oaks, birches and other trees to create a quarter-mile clearing. In one clearing, a feller buncher — a kind of bulldozer with a giant claw in front — grabbed the trunk of a black locust.
In one motion, the machine ripped the tree out of the ground. Shrubs and small trees nearby were left intact because they do not grow fast enough or high enough to pose a danger, according to Mike Amato, a field operations planner who oversees the tree-trimming and removal program.
“Lidar kind of sets a benchmark and puts into perspective whether your eye is right, whether the tree might hit the line,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/nyregion/10tree.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion
The New Greens Like It Big
The green view based on small sources and market power will give way to one based on scale and subsidies.
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Dec 8, 2008
The winds of economic destruction are flattening not just retirement accounts but also naive visions for a green economy. Public support for costly new green mandates is weakening, and government budgets to fund them are bleeding red ink. Plummeting prices of oil and other fossil fuels have made it harder for green to compete in the marketplace. IPOs of firms working on "clean tech" green energy that have fueled fantasies of the coming energy revolution have crashed to a halt. In all the bad economic news, a new face of green is coming into focus. Whereas the old view of green tech was based on many small, decentralized sources of power and a green economy that harnessed the power of the marketplace, the new version will rely more heavily on regulation and subsidies. It will also embrace the wisdom, true in most of the energy business, that bigger is better for weathering economic storms.
The market, it's now clear, is not a reliable force for driving the adoption of green technologies. Just as the role of government is rising across banking and other sectors of the economy, new green will be much more wary of market forces as the route to profit. Google dreamed, in its "RE <>
The carbon market may be another casualty of the poor economy. It became the darling of green economists because in theory it created a market price to encourage switching from high-carbon fuels that cause global warming. In recent years European countries have imposed caps on emissions of carbon dioxide and let firms trade emission credits. Cap and trade, however, has not done much to reward green energy. The cost of emission credits in Europe over the last year weren't even half what they would need to be to coax power companies to drop coal for natural gas. Those market forces have been even less effective in pushing zero-emission green energy into Europe's electric-power system. Green energy has taken off, but because European governments channeled direct payments to renewable energy, especially wind; carbon markets had little to do with it. Solar energy, which is more expensive than wind, is most successful in Germany and Japan, which are famous not for sunshine but regulatory subsidies.
On the logic that greenness could come from harnessing markets, governments from Washington to Beijing dreamed of creating "green GDP" accounts that would make it easier to manage each nation's economy with a fuller picture of ecological assets and liabilities. But politicians scuttled the schemes out of fear in part because of the transparency they would bring, and because of the difficulty of measuring true greenness. Dreams of green tax reform—in which government would replace growth-sapping taxes on labor and investment with new taxes on pollution—have been abandoned nearly everywhere because pollution taxes are too unreliable as a source of income to run a modern government.
The other change to the face of greenery will be scale. Advocates for everything green have always had a hard time with heavy industry, preferring the ideals of self-sufficiency and localism. The paragon of old green was a Lilliputian solar panel on every rooftop linked by local lines to households and even electric vehicles. But "small is beautiful" isn't working because people don't like to live near industrial facilities, even very small ones. Installers of solar panels are finding neighbors wary about letting rooftops shift to odd-colored silicon. When New York City's power utility tried to build a few small gas-fired turbines to stabilize the local grid, neighbors were adamantly opposed. Developers of wind power are finding similar blowback where their giant towers are visible. That's why the richest area in wind power is now in huge offshore wind parks. A future with large amounts of intermittent wind and solar supplies will lead to more big industry, not less: the grid, for instance, will require storage (think batteries) to ride out periods when the wind isn't blowing. In such a world, big operators are more likely to thrive than mom-and-pop green power providers.
Plans to jump-start the economy with green spending won't pan out either. Serious greenery is about efficiency—not only in the use of energy but also labor and capital. Some of the green projects most cherished for their jobs, such as installing rooftop solar panels on homes, are the most dubious economically because of high labor costs. The most profitable green firms require few highly skilled workers. A full-scale shift to green could eventually employ millions, but not until long after the current crisis is over. Green will look much different than what most people imagine.
Victor is professor at Stanford Law School and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry
Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.
The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.
The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.'
Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.
The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'
The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'
The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.
'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'
Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos
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