Monthly Archives: February 2008

Update on Florida substation fire

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Lynne Kiesling

This Miami Herald article discusses the large outage earlier this week in Florida, caused by the combination of a substation fire and a switch that was supposed to trip to isolate the substation, but did not. In particular, note the comments from Colorado State University engineering professor, and emeritus GridWise Architecture Council member Wade Troxell:

Tuesday’s outage also reflects the system’s complexity, said Wade Troxell, an engineering professor at Colorado State. “The electric power grid is like the world’s most complex machine. No one person or entity controls or operates it. It operates much like a living organism.” …

Troxell, the Colorado engineer, said some countries are now building a ”smart grid,” which is less centralized and a greater diversity of power makers, such as solar units in homes. “That helps manage the system to prevent cascading from happening.”

Of course, decentralized and diverse power generation is only one part of the smart grid story. Redundant electronic digital remote sensing can provide backup trips if, as happened here, the main switch fails to trip. I’d be curious to know if it was a mechanical failure or an electronic failure (but that’s just me being a smart grid geek …).

One thing the reporter missed in Wade’s comments is that the smart grid is here, right under our noses, and even in particular in this case. As I mentioned in my original post on the outage, Florida Power & Light has implemented Silver Spring’s smart grid technologies. None of the main media stories has been sufficiently detailed to indicate whether their digital remote sensing technologies are embedded in substations such as this one, and whether or not the presence of such technology (if installed) actually mitigated the harm and reduced the time it took for the power to be reinstated.

That’s an important thing to notice in this outage: for an outage of this magnitude, service was restored pretty quickly, in about five hours overall.

Meanwhile, in Texas, a brief lull in the wind

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Michael Giberson

On Tuesday this week, while Florida transmission operators were getting everyone back online after a sub-station fire lead to cascading outages around the state, in Texas grid operators were responding to an emergency of their own. A sudden drop off in the West Texas wind produced an almost as sudden drop in wind power generation, from about 1700 MW to 300 MW. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported:

Operators of the Texas power grid scrambled Tuesday night to keep the lights on after a sudden drop in wind power threatened to cause rolling blackouts, officials confirmed Wednesday.

At about 6:41 p.m., power grid operators ordered a shutoff of power to so-called interruptible customers, which are industrial electric users who have agreed previously to forego power in times of crisis. The move ensured continued stability of the grid after power dropped to alarmingly low levels.

Dottie Roark, a spokeswoman for the power grid, said a sudden uptick in electricity use coupled with a sudden drop in wind power caused the unexpected dip. As a result, grid officials immediately went to the second stage of its emergency blackout prevention plan.

“This situation means that there is a heightened risk of … regular customers being dropped through rotating outages, but that would occur only if further contingencies occur, and only as a last resort to avoid the risk of a complete blackout,” the State Operations Center stated in an e-mail notice to municipalities.

The episode may embolden wind power critics — the Star-Telegram quotes an attorney as saying, “This is a warning to all those who think that renewable energy is the sole answer” — but I’d rather call it a reminder rather than a warning.

After all, other than some industrial customers who voluntarily shut down, and who are compensated for standing ready to shut down on short notice, no one in the restructured Texas power market lost power on Tuesday night. A rare event happened and from public reports it appears that existing, standard reliability measures at ERCOT, the state’s integrated power market and transmission system operator, were sufficient to keep the system running.

If wind is more susceptible to such swings in output than other generators — and it is — efficient coordination of the power system simply requires ensuring that such generators pay the right price for the additional reserves or other measures needed to maintain system reliability.

And, by the way, as a follow-up story notes, in addition to the sudden drop off in wind generation the ERCOT system was also faced with “a failure of several [other] energy providers to reach scheduled production.” It isn’t just wind that shows some variability in output.

The obstacles to the smart grid are regulatory

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Lynne Kiesling

Last week, at the National Electricity Delivery Forum, Kurt Yeager of the Galvin Electricity Initiative issued a challenge to the electricity industry and to regulators to transform the industry, its technology, and its regulation. As reported at The Fuel Cell Market Report,

Speaking before an audience of federal and state regulators, utilities and other industry players as part of a keynote panel during the National Electricity Delivery Forum in Washington, D.C., Yeager said that the future of the U.S. electric power system rests upon our ability to take advantage of the technology available today and prioritizing the modernization of our unreliable, inefficient and insecure grid infrastructure. …

The technology exists today to transform the 1950s-era grid into a smarter, reliable and efficient power system. To secure this future, state leadership is needed to remove the regulatory policy obstacles to smart grid development and implementation.

Utilities need incentives to drive grid modernization efforts. Utilities are compensated for selling more electricity, not for providing quality service or efficiency programs. States need to support “decoupling,” or separating utilities’ profits from their energy sales. Only then will utilities become motivated to offer consumers tools such as time-of-use pricing and smart meters that can reduce the escalating demand that is taxing our aging grid infrastructure, increasing emissions of dangerous pollutants. Consumers should be treated as individuals with individual needs. As with other industries that have been opened to competition and choice, given the option, most consumers will take control and reduce their energy use.

Yeah. What he said. Squared.

Career advice from Hal Varian

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Michael Giberson

At Freakonomics they have an interview with Hal Varian, lately the chief economist at Google. Many interesting remarks, but students reading Knowledge Problem may be especially interested in his career advice:

Q: Your job sounds extremely interesting. What jobs would you recommend to a young person with an interest, and maybe a bachelors degree, in economics?

A: If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap. So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap? Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis. So my recommendation is to take lots of courses about how to manipulate and analyze data: databases, machine learning, econometrics, statistics, visualization, and so on.

Just for example, consider the overwhelming quantity of data that will be accumulated by the installation of advanced electric power metering. That data can be turned into energy savings, business opportunities, cheaper reliability for power systems, and many other useful and cool things, but it will require some creative data manipulation and analysis. Not everyone is suited for such work, but if you are, your skills will almost certainly be in high demand.

(The WSJ Real Time Economics blog ran a shorter interview with Varian last July, when he jumped to Google from UC Berkeley.)

Texas does carbon big, and that’s not all…

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Michael Giberson

… Texas does the non-carbon thing in a pretty big way, too.

3pct_csp_tx.jpgTom Fowler, at NewsWatch: Energy, pulls together some numbers. Among his points (edited and slightly rearranged):

  • Texas leads the nation in greenhouse gas emissions; and
  • If Texas were a country, it would rank seventh in the world in greenhouse gas emissions.

But also:

  • Texas is the nation’s top wind-power producing state [as also noted here at KP a few days ago. -MG] , avoiding over three million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually;
  • The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) expects to have 4,500MW of installed wind generation capacity – roughly 7% of peak demand – by mid-2008;
  • The potential for solar power is also among the highest in the country, with high levels of direct solar radiation concentrated in West Texas*; and
  • Texas has an abundance of biomass energy resources.

*Translation: It sunny out there.

Texas will never aspire to be the “Persian Gulf of solar energy,” but it will darn-well be proud to be the “Texas of solar energy.”

Power outage in Florida

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Lynne Kiesling

Few details yet, but I’m sure this will give us stuff to talk about over the next week: a large power outage in Florida, affecting 3-4 million people. Florida Power & Light representatives officials expect to have the power restored by 5:30, which is pretty quick.

But can such a large outage be due to one substation failure? That’s a heck of a cascade.

What I’ll be most interested in hearing about is how the Silver Spring Networks smart grid technology that FP&L uses affects the speed and quality of the restoration of power services for customers. If you want to read more about Silver Springs Networks, check out this smart grid tech take article by Erich Gunther in the Smart Grid News.

BTW, I know we’re having comment registration troubles, so if you have a comment on this that you’d like me to post, please email it to me and I’ll put it in the body of this post. Thanks!

“Bourgeois commitments to virtue” reduce collective action problems

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Lynne Kiesling

Lots of folks who worry about climate change argue for large-scale collective action, usually taking the form of some sort of government intervention that involves some degree of coercion. Guest-blogging at Instapundit, Megan McArdle makes a very trenchant observation about how self-reflective virtuous behavior can reduce the need for collective action, in this case with respect to climate change:

… if you want everyone to do something, you are morally bound to do it whether or not they follow suit. I am rethinking that–but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments [sic.] to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion.

I absolutely believe that this is very true, very important, and completely overlooked in almost all policy debates. In part that’s probably because, in electricity geek-speak, it’s not dispatchable — you can’t be 100 percent sure that you can rely on it to be there at the exact time when you need it. A quest for higher certainty reduces our ability to rely on virtue, custom, and other social norms that do enforce longer-term beneficial behavior.

Naturally, my response to those who yearn for higher certainty, and implement coercive collective action policies to achieve it, is “get over it”. But that doesn’t win many arguments, even if it’s true that too often we seek more certainty than is optimal, or even feasible. That’s probably also why so many coercive collective action policies end up creating so many unintended consequences.

Can Arizona become the “Persian Gulf of Solar Energy”?

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Michael Giberson

Spanish company Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company have announced plans to build a large solar powered electric generator, to come online in 2011, but like many such announcements it comes with a couple of public-policy related “ifs”; they’ll build it if they get the necessary approvals from the Arizona utility regulator, and if the U.S. Congress extends the federal solar investment tax credit.

An Associated Press story described the announcement:

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) — A Spanish company is planning to take 3 square miles of desert southwest of Phoenix and turn them into one of the largest solar power plants in the world.

Abengoa Solar, which has plants in Spain, northern Africa and other parts of the U.S., could begin construction as early as next year on the 280-megawatt plant in Gila Bend — a small, dusty town 50 miles southeast [sic] of Phoenix.

The company said Thursday it could be producing solar energy by 2011.

Abengoa would build, own and operate the $1 billion plant, named the Solana Generating Station.

Solana will be enough to supply up to 70,000 homes at full capacity.

It won’t be Abengoa’s first solar project in Arizona. Since 1999 the company has operated a 17,000 square foot solar powered hot water system serving a federal prison complex. The system is said to have reduced overall electric consumption at the facility by about 10 percent.

The AP story quoted Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as saying, “There is no reason that Arizona should not be the Persian Gulf of solar energy.”

AZCSP.gif

It is always tempting to “do the math” when a politician makes such, um, enthusiastic claims.

Well, why not? Let’s see: Three square miles yields a 280 MW capacity plant. Using the 70,000 homes number, a little calculation gives a 38 percent capacity factor for the plant, so that implies the plant will produce about 932,000 MWh per year. If Arizona is going to become the “Persian Gulf” then they must be a net exporter of solar, meaning they first serve all the state’s own consumers and have power left over to export. If all of the state’s electric power needs were generated using similar technologies and assuming constant economies of scale, it would take about 236 square miles (or about 1.2 percent of the land mass in the state) to accommodate the necessary solar power plants.

So 236 square miles of Arizona would, on the assumptions listed, get self-sufficiency from solar. Presumably a “Persian Gulf” would be a big exporter of power, not just self sufficient. Here the calculations rapidly get crazy (i.e., over 36,000 square miles of land), depending on just what you think a “Persian Gulf of solar energy” means, and that doesn’t include the land needed for additional transmission lines.

Nowhere in the article does it say just how expensive the new solar plant will be, but given that the project hinges on regulatory approvals and continuation of the federal solar investment tax credit, we can assume it isn’t yet competitive with other commercial electric generation technologies.

UPDATE: See also this related post: How can Arizona become a solar power exporter if it opposes building interstate power lines?

Welcome to the new Knowledge Problem!

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Lynne Kiesling

And this time I mean it! Full Movable Type 4.1 upgrade, a wide range of social bookmarking options on the permalinks and archives of individual entries, a new look-and-feel, and hopefully the elimination of some wonky behaviors that the site had developed after five years of a half-assed recreational programmer (that would be me).

There are still a couple of bugs to work out in terms of commenter registration, so please be patient as I sort it out over the next couple of days.

I’ll have more to say on this topic, but for now let it suffice to give credit where credit is due: Mihai at Pro IT Service did a fantastic, timely, and reasonably priced job of implementing all of these changes! I recommend him to anyone interested in doing a Movable Type upgrade. He’s also written a bit about the project at the Pro IT Service blog.

Texas wind power: Gets by with a little help from tax credits

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Michael Giberson

Out in west Texas you can still see the occasional old-style wind mill on a farm or ranch, dutifully pumping up water when the wind blows. A much more common sight these days is the new, sleek wind power generator. A combination of good fundamentals for wind power, federal tax credits, state renewable energy mandates, and consumer demand for renewable power has led to rapid growth in wind power in the state.

A story in the New York Times reports that Texas surpassed California two years ago to become the largest wind power producer in the United States.

Rapid growth in power production has brought some challenges. Getting all that power delivered from west Texas into the state’s population centers in the east will take an investment in transmission. At least Sweetwater, Texas — highlighted in the article — is within ERCOT, the intrastate power interconnection in Texas that includes the bulk of the state’s population. Some otherwise desirable sites in west Texas fall outside of ERCOT, and may face bigger challenges getting connected to the grid and finding a market for their power.

Congress sometimes lets federal clean energy tax credits expire, too. While oilfield Texans are used to boom and bust cycle in the energy business, it is somehow easier to be at the mercy of nature and the international oil market than to find one’s livelihood in the hands of a mercurial Congressional majority. In the long run, however, federal policy should be directed at properly internalizing the externalities associated with various forms of power generation and let the market sort out technologies of production.

Crazy, I know, but an economist can dream, can’t he?