Daily Archives: March 10, 2008

Analysis out of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center

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Michael Giberson

I’m swamped with work and have a lot of reading stacked up in the queue, so I haven’t had a chance to check out all of the good stuff that has been coming out of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center lately.

Here are a couple of recent working papers:

Seth Blumsack, Lester B. Lave, and Jay Apt, “Electricity Prices and Costs Under Regulation and Restructuring.” The report makes another run at computing the effects of restructuring on retail prices. According to the abstract, they “conclude that restructuring has been beneficial to companies that restructured, but the evidence is far less clear concerning benefits to consumers.”

Sompop Pattanariyankool and Lester B. Lave, “Optimizing Transmission from Distant Wind Farms.” The paper addresses the question of proper sizing of transmission lines to link power consumers to distant wind farms. The introduction said, “Using current estimates of the cost of a wind turbine and the cost of a transmission line, we estimate that the cost of delivered power from a wind farm with about 33% capacity that is locate 1,000 miles from the customer will be about $150/MWh with almost 2/3 of the cost due to transmission. This cost does not include measures to solve the moment to moment variability of wind turbine output or the intermittency of output.”

Paul Hines, Jay Apt and Sarosh Talukdar, “Trends in the History of Large Blackouts in the United States.” A scan of the article suggests it provides a fairly thorough examination of blackout data. Not surprisingly, blackouts are more frequent during summers (high loads, thunderstorms, and late summer hurricanes) and winter (rain, snow and ice storms). Somewhat surprising to me, the duration of a blackout is nearly uncorrelated with the blackout size. These findings and many others are elaborated in the paper.

And while I’m mentioning the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center I should also note that they are hosting the Fourth Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry, today and tomorrow. If you aren’t already there (and I’m not, see that aforementioned work swamp), it is probably too late to book a flight to Pittsburgh, but get on their mailing list for next year.

A couple of interesting climate change articles

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Lynne Kiesling

I found a couple of interesting climate change articles over the weekend. First, this Foreign Affairs article discusses the geopolitical implications of Arctic ice cap melting; it creates and destroys territory in ways that various Arctic (and non-Arctic) nation-states are responding to by trying to stake property claims to the territory. Hmmm … I haven’t heard of any of that happening in places in the Southern Hemisphere where the ice is accumulating … hat tip to Marginal Revolution for the article link.

Second, Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing post and notes on Saul Griffith’s presentation on energy consumption at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference last week. In particular, I think I’m in line with commenter #7 on Cory’s post — anthropogenic or not, reversible or not, actual or not, a lot of the kind of research and innovation in non-carbon-based energy technologies is a good thing to pursue for a lot of reasons. Of course, I’d drop the other shoe that Cory doesn’t — if we had retail pricing of electricity that better communicated the true cost of our consumption choices, that would go a long way to optimizing our energy use.

Smart grid podcast

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Lynne Kiesling

If you’re looking for a nice overview and an update on the smart grid ideas, technologies, and business strategies we’ve been discussing here at KP for a few years, check out this Currents podcast from PennWell:

We’re actually seeing real-world implementation of smart grid technologies and starting to realize some of the benefits the smart grid can provide. That was the prevailing sentiment at the 2008 DistribuTECH Conference and Exhibition. On this episode of Currents: The Energy News Podcast, Steve Brown, chief editor of Utility Automation & Engineering T&D magazine and DistribuTECH Conference program chair, offers a report from DTECH’s keynote session, where president and CEO of PNM Resources and chairman of EEI Jeff Sterba, former U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, and division vice president of regulated operations technology at CenterPoint Energy Don Cortez gave their perspectives on how new technology can help solve the myriad challenges facing the power industry.