Daily Archives: March 27, 2008

How is changing a government mandate “killing” the electric car?

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Lynne KIesling

Can someone please explain the logic of the argument in this Wired Autopia blog post to me?

EV advocates say the California Air Resources Board is trying to kill the electric car — again.

Under a proposal pending before the Air Resources Board, state regulators would slash — from 75,000 to as few as 27,500 — the number of zero-emission vehicles automakers must build between 2012 and 2017. Under the changes, the big automakers could put fewer than 2,500 nonpolluting cars on the road in the next four years. That’s only 300 more than Tesla Motors plans to produce in the next two.

Ummmm … first of all, the whole reference to killing the electric car “again” is a reference to the fact that the technology was not scalable and commercializable the last time California passed an electric car mandate. Wishing didn’t make it so then, and it still doesn’t, despite all of the arguments about government policy being “technology forcing”. High gasoline prices and increased environmental concerns at a distributed, decentralized level are much more effective at inducing resilient technological change than government mandates. Such mandates run much more of a risk of the unintended consequences of governments having the hubris to think that they can pick technology winners. They cannot. What if, for example, such mandates induce researchers to shift entirely into electric vehicles and out of plug-in-electric hybrids, and what if it turns out that the PHEV has a larger portfolio of benefits and is more consumer-friendly than the EV? Then the government has picked wrong, and we all bear the cost of the coercion.

Second, does it occur to any of these so-called EV supporters that with the electric car plans of Tesla and GM, such government policy is irrelevant? That last sentence of the quote — that Tesla itself will be producing almost as many as are named in California’s mandate — belies the argument that more government forcing is needed.

I think the carrot is there, the lures are all around, and the commercial electric vehicle (and plug-in hybrid) is in the near future. How can changing a government target in a wishing-it-to-happen piece of legislation reverse that? Ridiculous.

Reliable power: the winds of West Texas vs. a maintenance worker mistake in Florida

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Michael Giberson

It is rare that these little “learning moments” come nicely packaged, but the two near contemporaneous power system emergencies in Florida and Texas on February 26, 2008 present such a package. Still, otherwise intelligent industry observers seem to miss the point. Example, the Smart Grid News of March 26, which presents an overly harsh interpretation of the “challenges” of working with wind, and points to the Texas event as supporting evidence.

ERCOT operators had to react promptly on February 26 to balance load through demand response (DR) because of system reliability problems caused by wind intermittency. But systems reliability was not the only issue caught in the headlights by this event. The Wall Street Journal also spotlighted the economic impact; namely that the unexpected loss of wind generation caused wholesale power prices to soar from $30 per MWH to $105 per MWH in West Texas.

The article continues with a discussion of “system reliability and pricing challenges” and concludes with an ominous, “Federal and state incentives and mandated renewable standards, along with investor interest …, will all drive additional wind generation. Whether the grid can keep up is another matter.”

No mention was made of the Florida event, but here is the short version: a worker’s error while performing maintenance led to a fire at transmission substation which tripped a series of transmission lines out of service and shut down several major power plants. About 2600 MW of capacity was lost from the system. About 2.5 million Floridians lost power during the event.

So in Florida, 2.5 million people suddenly could not buy power at any price, because in the few seconds that the transmission lines went down and power plants went off line, the local integrated utility system operators didn’t have time to react.

In Texas, later that same day, wind power unexpectedly dropped well below day-earlier forecasts over a period of several hours. Some other non-wind generators in Texas were operating below schedule at the same time, and evening electrical load was beginning to shoot up. The combination of factors left the independent power system operators at ERCOT scrambling to keep the system in balance, which they did in part by calling on market-based voluntary load reductions. No one lost power, though prices did spike in reaction to the emergency conditions.

As the Energy Legal Blog notes, ERCOT has recently released its operations report on the event. One problem – ERCOT has relied upon day-ahead forecasts of wind power capacity, but the wind is not (yet?) so reliably forecasted so far in advance. The Texas grid operator is seeking to advance a wind forecasting tool under development, which was scheduled to be added to the system in conjunction with a switch in the ERCOT market system later this year.

While in Florida businesses were shut down and millions of people were made significantly worse off, in Texas mosts residents were likely unaware of the problems until they read about in the newspaper the next day. Of course there is much more to the picture than is captured in these two public events, but my point is that the “unreliability of wind” just needs to be kept in perspective. (Or better, just priced appropriately.)

It is not yet clear whether Florida Power & Light will be integrating an improved worker error forecasting system into its operations.