Archive for April, 2009

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An all solar city? Not exactly

April 10, 2009

Michael Giberson

A development company in Florida has announced plans for what is being called an “all solar powered” city.  The developer doesn’t quite say it that way, but comes close on the Babcock Ranch website:

Raising the initiative of a sustainable, environmentally sensitive, green community to new heights, Babcock Ranch is the first city planned to be powered by the sun, with the majority of its electric needs generated from the largest on-site solar photovoltaic energy facility powering any city on earth.  By consuming less KW hours than the solar facilities located on the property will produce, Babcock Ranch will become the first city in the world powered by clean, renewable solar energy.

It seems to me that there are a few not entirely consistent claims presented:

  1. “Babcock Ranch is the first city planned to be powered by the sun”
  2. “the majority of its electric needs generated from the … on-site solar photovoltaic energy facility”
  3. Babcock Ranch will consume “less KW hours than the solar facilities located on the property will produce.”

So what is up? First of all, is (2) true, so only the majority of its electric needs will be generated from on-site solar, implying some generated elsewhere, or is (3) true, which says it will generate more power on-site than it will use?

Second, if (3) is true, then it must be the case that the city will be interconnected to an outside transmission grid. When local electric power consumption exceeds local solar production – is it ever cloudy in Southwest Florida? is it ever nighttime? – the city will be drawing power from the Florida grid.  According to recent EIA data, about 43 percent of Florida’s power comes from natural gas, 30 percent comes from coal, 10 percent from petroleum,14 percent in nuclear, and the remaining few percent comes from hydro and other renewables.

How does this make Babcock Ranch the “the first city in the world powered by clean, renewable solar energy”?

I might be impressed if they planned on having residents and businesses in the city pay a high enough price to cover all of the costs of the solar power. As it turns out, however, the costs will be paid by all Florida Power & Light ratepayers, as the utility plans to fold the costs of constructing and operating the facility into its regulated rate base. (Only about an extra 20 cents a month for the “typical residential customer”, according to the Greenwire report, even if the “typical residential customer” in Florida won’t be able to afford to live in the development. Ain’t regulation grand?)

I’d be even more impressed with the “all solar city” claims if Babcock Ranch were really “all solar,” and demonstrated it by not being linked to the FPL transmission system. At the minimum, anyone induced to purchase property from Babcock Ranch based on the “all solar” claims should get a contractual guarantee, subject to meaningful penalties, that the on-site solar production will meet or exceed the community’s power consumption. If the developer actually believes its marketing materials, the commitment should be nearly riskless.

The Miami Herald adds, “The solar project will be the fourth planned by FPL. The first three, totaling 110 megawatts, were planned after the Legislature passed a bill allowing a utility to have full-cost recovery of renewable energy projects up to 110 megawatts.” The Herald quotes a FPL spokesperson as indicating that the new project is contingent on “approvals from the Public Service Commission and action by the Legislature to approve new arrangements for renewable energy that would make the project economically worthwhile.”

So really, Babcock Ranch will be just another Florida town getting power provided by the local, vertically-integrated utility company, but just happens to be located next to a solar power facility. So why should we be impressed?

Posted in Electricity, Technology | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

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Follow KP on Twitter!

April 9, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

Through the miracle that is TwitterFeed, you can now follow Knowledge Problem posts via the new KP Twitter feed. Yay!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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Hey, someone in Bakersfield just bought purple Converse hi-tops!

April 9, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

Alex Tabarrok and Zappos FTW!!!!! Check out this ridiculously fun real-time map of Zappos shoe sales. I am sure that this has some massively important implications for social networking, fashion trends, and so on, but it’s also just.darn.cool.

Posted in Economics, How cool is this?, Shoes!, Technology | 2 Comments »

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A Thursday afternoon links roundup

April 9, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

I should probably follow David Zetland’s lead and start calling these speed blogging, because it’s really just me clearing out my links to open and interesting reads!

This is an old Environmental Leader article from November, but it describes Sun’s Open Eco application:

Sun Microsystems has updated OpenEco.org, an online community that provides tools to help companies calculate, compare and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s cool is that it’s a community, complete with discussion forums, developers, and so on. It enables organizations to benchmark their carbon emissions against industry peers. Regardless of one’s stance on carbon policy, software tools that make information gathering cheaper and make information more transparent are good things.

Similarly, this Environmental Leader article discusses another information tool, this time from the Rocky Mountain Institute, that estimates “electricity productivity” by state. By electricity productivity they mean state domestic product (SDP) per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. New York gets the most bang for its buck from its electricity consumption, not very surprising, given its population density. 48, 49, 50: Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi, respectively. I leave it to you to develop a hypothesis for that!

From the Oil Drum, here’s a lengthy guest post from Joost van den Bulk with an estimated economic benefit-cost analysis of electric cars relative to internal combustion cars in the Netherlands. I have not digested it fully, but it’s based on his Master’s thesis, and quite informative.

Posted in Economics, Electricity | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Cap-and-trade and politics

April 9, 2009

Michael Giberson

From Environmental Capital, reports that selling all greenhouse gas emission permits under a cap-and-trade scheme may not be politically attractive:

Europe already saw what happened when it gave away emissions permits—utilities gobbled up more than 100 billion euros in windfall profits.

The pain for the consumer—i.e., the voter–will be the same whether the permits are sold or given away.

Writer Keith Johnson notes that “for the overall emissions-targets to work, prices would have to rise more in other parts of the economy to compensate” (if, that is, giving permits to utilities serves to limit power price increases).

Billions in profits for companies well represented in D.C. versus non-transparent price increases in unspecified other industries? I guess we can work out the political calculus easy enough.

And for readers who think this is a reason to prefer a carbon tax…, well, I’m not convinced that lobbyists or their congressional aides would keep their hands off the tax code, either.

Posted in Energy markets, Environmental policy, Politics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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Cybersecurity and the smart grid

April 9, 2009

Michael Giberson

Yesterday on the front page of the Wall Street Journal was a report of cyber-attacks on electric utility systems. Computerworld gives this overview of the story. Cheryl Morgan provides a run down of some of the issues, including whether development of a smart grid will increase or decrease the vulnerability of transmission infrastructure to internet-based disruptions.

The WSJ‘s Environmental Capital blog also raises the smart grid angle, asking whether a smart grid will help repel attackers or make access easier.

At NewsWatch: Energy, Tom Fowler notes reactions to the WSJ story from NERC and ERCOT, and follows up with comments from former FERC chairman Pat Wood.

I’m not expert enough on utility computer systems generally, or computer security specifically, to offer many useful remarks. My intuition is that a well-designed transactive smart grid will help minimize the costs of any intrusion, since it should decentralize decisionmaking and control relative to the vertically-oriented, centralized utility systems we have today.

Posted in Electricity | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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iTunes and music price discrimination

April 9, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

You may have noticed on Tuesday that Apple’s iTunes store implemented price discrimination for the purchase of singles.

On Tuesday, Apple’s traditional 99-cent song price was shelved. From now on, record labels can choose to charge $1.29 for new releases. Some older catalog titles will sell for 69 cents, and everything else will be available for the tried-and-true 99 cents.

The pricing structure decision is the record label’s, not Apple’s, and the label is the one making the calculation of whether or not the additional revenue from selling the $1.29 songs at that higher price more than offsets the reduction in revenue from the reduction in quantity demanded for those songs plus the reduction in revenue from selling the older songs at $0.69. Put another way, they have to estimate whether the price elasticity of demand for the new songs is sufficiently low to make the higher price profitable, as well as whether the price elasticity of demand for the older songs is sufficiently high to make the lower price profitable.

The CNet article linked above contains a good discussion of the difficulty of determining a price structure and estimating willingness to pay. But there’s another issue, discussed in both the CNet article and this Wired blog post on the change:

Although new prices will be a step in the right direction for many iTunes customers, they are a superficial fix for iTunes’ real threat: that most consumers and even some artists think 69 cents per track is far too dear.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, paid downloads growth slowed last year, increasing 27 percent in 2008, where it increased 45 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, free streaming services accessed through web browsers and mobile apps are growing in popularity. Apple and the labels raising the prices 30 percent on popular songs and dropping them 30 percent on back catalog tracks won’t help them compete with shifting consumer behavior.

Note also that in the paid music market, the structure has become a duopoly; Amazon has competed effectively with iTunes, matching their $0.99 pricing and offering a streamlined download application that connects directly with your iTunes application. I’ve used both recently, although I have to admit that I’ve been using Amazon more just to make sure and support competition … Wal-Mart also has an online music store, and both Amazon and Wal-Mart have followed iTunes in changing their pricing, but not exactly:

The Electronista blog noted that a new $1.29 price, the same top-level cost at iTunes, was applied to ten of Amazon.com’s top 100 songs, but a reduced $0.79 price was also applied more liberally to older tracks than over at iTunes. Wal-Mart, for its part, caps the top price at $1.24, and sells its bargain bin tracks at $0.64.

Posted in Economics | Tagged , , | Comments Off

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Overlapping transmission grids in West Texas will give power plants the power to choose

April 8, 2009

Michael Giberson

At the Gulf Coast Power Association meetings last week in Houston, Jay Caspary of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) was discussing transmission expansion plans, and at slide 20 offered a map showing the overlapping transmission plans of SPP and ERCOT.  The purple lines are proposed 765 kV lines in SPP, the red lines are proposed 345 kV lines in ERCOT.

This slide was by far my favorite from among the numerous slides shown at the conference.

Caspary_GCPA_2009_p20

(Clicking on the image should bring up a larger view at Flickr. You can also download the full Caspary presentation from the GCPA website.)

Typically, neighboring transmission grids don’t overlap in this way. Usually at the transmission level grids have clear boundaries, meaning that generators (and transmission-scale load connections) don’t have much of a choice as to which transmission system to hook up with.  Or rather, more precisely, the choice of a site embeds the choice of the transmission system to link to.

The prospect of two separate, high-capacity transmission systems serving the same area means that generation units in the area will be able to choose which system – SPP or ERCOT – that it sells its power into. In fact, as in the case of the Tenaska Frontier generating plant, generators in the Texas panhandle might even connect to both systems and sell power in both directions at once.

Given the location – with its good wind resource and limited water supplies – it is likely much of the new generation resource development in the region will be wind power.  Having dual connections will not only add a strategic option to the wind power plant developer, but also aid the ability of the two power systems to accommodate the variable power supplies at lower cost.

And if you check out Caspary’s following slide, which shows a bigger area, it isn’t too hard to imagine a third possible delivery alternative for power plant developments in the area.

[ADDITIONAL NOTE: The ERCOT expansion plans are pretty established. Regulatory approval has been granted and contracts are being put in place to build the new lines. My understanding is the the SPP plans are at a more preliminary stage, and other options are also under consideration. But since SPP already has transmission infrastructure in place, the result will be overlapping transmission grids. The question is just how good the SPP transmission capacity will be.

For those of you wondering where Lubbock, Texas is, it is just south of the southwesternmost point of SPP's planned expansion, shown in purple in the image.]

Posted in Electricity, Energy markets | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

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Vampire killers

April 8, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

No, this is not a post about Buffy, this is about all of those electronic devices that use electricity in standby mode, or device chargers that you leave plugged in when you take your cell phone anad head to work. This very cool vampure graphic from Good points out the worst culprits: plasma TV (by a long shot!), game console, computer, laptop, laser printer. These data may not be definitive, but it’s certainly true that plasma TVs and game consoles are major standby power users in the home.

Today’s Lifehacker has a post on a power strip to help you suffocate those vampires — a mechanical off switch for each outlet on the strip. Simple but effective; leave your vampires plugged in, but turn off the outlet while leaving other devices on the strip plugged in and running.

Here’s my simple-minded smart grid engineering question: does it have to be a mechanical switch to turn off the individual outlets? Why not a software switch? If there’s digital embedded intelligence in the strip, then I can tell my strip and the devices simple rules to follow … such as turning off the power to the outlet once the device is fully charged, or specifying a time when the outlet powers on and therefore powers whatever is plugged into it.

And I bet we could come up with cool things to do with a Bluetooth-enabled power strip …

Posted in Electricity, How cool is this? | 2 Comments »

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Yo athletes! What’s your preferred online training log?

April 7, 2009

Lynne Kiesling

OK folks, exercise time … I am just Type-A enough to keep a training log, and lazy enough to do it online and want it to be simple but to do the calculations for me (like running paces, 100 swim split times, etc.). I used to use the log at Beginner Triathlete, but it is WAY over-the-top more detailed than I am ever likely to use. Their discussion forums and articles are great, though.

Navigating all of their options was not working for me, so I switched to Daily Mile. Nice, clean interface, great visual display of my training record for the week, can scroll through past months … but the online community there just isn’t my vibe. Not bad, just not my thing.

I also have a profile on athlinks, which is really cool because it pulls in your race results for as far back as I’ve got online race results. They have a little box on your profile called “WDYDT” for “what did you do today?”, and that’s meant to be a quick note on your training that day. For me, this is not detailed enough, and does not provide enough pre-programmed data analysis.

In other dimensions I am indifferent among the three.

Do you know of/use/recommend any other online training log? Do you have opinions about these? I am keen to hear some other opinions than my own.

Posted in Sport and fitness | 2 Comments »

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