Michael Giberson Cogeneration plants, which use a fuel source to produce both electric power and useful heat, can be very efficient projects. Whether particular projects are efficient will depend on the implementation, of course, and whether projects are profitable will depend on fuel and other costs and the revenues from selling power and heat. From …
Lynne Kiesling One of the recurring themes here at KP is that smart grid technology makes it possible to harness distributed intelligence in the electric power network, and when you couple that network of distributed intelligence with a decentralized flow of information (such as price signals and market processes), you can get reliability through decentralized …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Overlapping Transmission Grids in West Texas Will Give Power Plants the Power to Choose Read More »
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 …
Michael Giberson Last week I attended the Gulf Coast Power Association‘s spring conference. Very good time. More comments later this week after I have time to catch up. Just a note today on the pre-conference power plant tour featuring the Tenaska Frontier Generating Plant in Shiro, Texas (about 50 north of Houston). The 830-MW combined-cycle …
Michael Giberson At EnergyPulse, Ron Rebenitsch discusses the unsettled foundation of the wind power industry: uncertain rights to use the energy present in the wind. Currently the industry seems to work on a “capture what you can” model, but the approach has its problems and the problems are likely to become more pronounced as the …
Is “First in Time, First in Right” the Best Way to Allocate Rights to Wind Energy? Read More »
Michael Giberson ERCOT tries to keep the electric power grid in Texas operating at 60 Hertz (i.e., 60 cycles per second, Hertz is abbreviated “Hz”), like the rest of North America, and a few other places in the world. If electrical load grows faster than power supply, the system frequency will fall below 60 Hz; …
Are Wind Power Producers the Low Cost Suppliers of Frequency Control Service in Ercot? Read More »
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