I’ve been reading lately how electrical power demand is exceeding supply in several areas of the United States and especially in California. Is this sensationalist media ranting or is there a genuine power deficit a’brewing?
As a side question, given that nuclear power plants are apparently not being built anymore in the U.S., are coal and oil fired plants the only current technologies in play for servicing metro sized power grids, or are there other practical technologies that can deliver competitively priced (vs coal and oil) power on a large scale?
I saw an AP article that stated most of the Western US is operating within about five percent of full power generation capacity. (at work, no cite) This alleged problem is the result of the explosive growth experienced in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Colorado. I do know that the Front Range of Colorado has several natural gas fired powerplants which provide cheaper-than-average power.
I think we got to within 3.5% of capacity on the afternoon of august 1. Cutting it pretty close…
Lots of issues here. One thing they’re trying to sell us is that all of the computer technology has increased usage; partially true, but mostly due to the cooling systems required. The booming economy has led to lots of development, tax credits for energy conservation were eliminated during the 80’s, etc…
Most of the big issues surround deregulation of the utilities, which we implemented ~18 months ago. The push for an open market has been going on for years, and so none of the utilities wanted to invest in generating capacity during the 90’s. Thus no new power plants have been built here for a decade.
There are a few new plants in the pipeline, but it’ll be interesting to see whether there’s money out there to pick up a significant amount of the slack. The current “best” technology involves a low-friction turbine that is being built in Asia IIRC. But these have been back-ordered for a while, so construction of plants is held up.
However, investors are skittish about putting money into current technologies since fuel cells could conceivably make them obsolete within a decade or so.
In the mean time, companies that have paid down their stranded debt are free to negotiate for power on the open market, where short supply is pushing the price up. Customers in San Diego and south Orange County are seeing electric rates double and triple. If this happens in the rest of the state (Edison and PG&E should have their stranded debt paid down within the next year or so) the uproar from consumers will be deafening.
Companies bought a lot of air time to sell Californians on deregulation. We were told that competition would increase the quality of available power, decrease rates, and give us the option of buying “green” power. People will remember these promises like they remembered “READ MY LIPS…” and deregulation will be dead.
NOTE: I’m not opposed to deregulation per se. There are complex issues here, not the least of which is the current spate of hot, muggy weather. But try explaining the complexity of the issues to an angry mob.
Well, hydroelectric can work pretty well in the right situations. Las Vegas, for instance, is powered almost entirely by Hoover Dam, if I recall correctly, and power from Niagra Falls is still economically competitive with locally-generated power even as far away as Cleveland. Of course, there aren’t enough places to build dams to supply the whole country this way, and it doesn’t help the folks in Kansas much, but it certainly can work on a citywide scale.
There is not really too much more of a power problem than there has been since about 1988. Utilities have simply stopped building most new baseload plants for a while, and are adding power in piecemeal fashion via gas turbines. Reserve capacity is going down, and the EPA isn’t making life any easier changing the rules after they write them (like their SCOTUS overturned low NOx burner ruling, and the current “added capacity” lawsuits in the East).
California I have no sympathy for. They don’t want those evil, Satanic power plants in their state (other than the occasional GT), so they buy a lot of power from outside the state, like from Utah, Washington, and Arizona. Arizona is experiencing high growth, and won’t be able to sell anything soon. And while some merchant plants are being discussed in Arizona, people don’t want to compete against the Salt River Project’s dirt cheap coal plants.
One problem still is the transmission grid capacity from state to state. For example, while Utah often has power to sell (like from Deseret), they can’t get it to CA because they don’t want a repeat of the sagging main lines shorting out again, like a couple years ago.
First a correction. Other than in a few niche markets (Florida), no one really uses oil for significant power generation in the US anymore. Check out The Energy Information Administration for more detailed breakdowns of supply - I can’t recall numbers this late in the day. The big three are Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear. And like nuclear, coal plants aren’t being built anymore either in the US, despite their low fuel cost and the extensive environmental regulation of any new plants that would be built (technically, Hawthorne (KCPL) is being “rebuilt”, but that doesn’t count since it is a repair from when it blew up). Capacity is being added by gas turbines in the US - expensive, high fuel cost gas turbines. There are “baseload” gas turbine designs now, but they really can’t compete with coal and nuclear plants for providing the large scale cheap base capacity.
However, you can say that a capacity problem in the Summer is either the fault of a baseload that is too low, or of a peaking capacity that is too low. Two years ago, it was low peaking capacity (coupled with some unexpected forced outages) Right now it’s a little bit of both being too low.
You can blame deregulation if you want for the low capacity, but us in the industry saw these cutbacks and erosions of excess capacity starting well before deregulation was even joked about. Plus, deregulation hasn’t even had an effect in many parts of the US yet. Overall though, from what I’ve personally been seeing happening to the industry, I’m of the opinion that in this case deruglation might not be a good thing.
I’m really surprised to hear of “several” new plants in the pipeline - I think these are just more gas turbines.
Finally, we have all the hydro power we will probably ever have in the US - no new large dams can be built here without serious fighting going on. I just helped do a supply cost study for Cleveland - I’m pretty sure power from Niagara Falls is not being sold there cheaper than, say, from the Avon Lake coal plant just west of Cleveland.
There is currently under construction in California four natural gas plant projects representing about 3000 MW. They are scheduled to go online between 7/1/2001 and 1/1/2002.
Nine more smaller projects have been approved by the California Energy Commission but have not started construction, they represent only 1700 MW and there is no guarantee they will ever be built.
As for alternative power sources: nothing is very promising. Hydroelectric had been discussed already, so I’ll skip it. Geothermal is great, but unless you live in Wyoming there won’t be any around. Solar energy is horribly inefficient. To completely power a house (with no dependence on outside energy sources), you’d need an array of solar cells several times larger than the house itself. And then what do you do if it’s a cloudy day? There are a couple of other sources, like wind power, but again you need to draw from a very large area to power a single building. All in all, I’d say that Kalifornia should just stop bitching and build a nuclear plant. It’s the cheapest power available, it doesn’t release CO2 or any other greenhouse gasses, and American nuke plants have about the safest record around. Plus, if it does blow up, it’s only Los Angeles :D.
They are not cheap, although they can be relatively cheaper than coal in capital cost terms. And they aren’t getting any cheaper. There is no argument about this. Natural gas itself is not cheap - it’s difficult to even compare 230 cent/MBtu gas with 120 cent/MBtu coal, even after you take into account the higher O&M cost of the coal plant. And gas supply in quantities large enough for power generation is not available in many locations, and pipelines are very expensive, and sometimes politically impossible to run.
They are not quiet, although they can be quieter - with qualification. I’ve been to more than 70 coal, gas, oil, etc. plants and can testify to this. Gas turbines, even with significant soundproofing, still produce annoying high-frequency noise that is audible for quite a distance. Coal plants produce noise which is audible at a greater distance, but is a much lower frequency noise and in my opinion much less an irritant.
They don’t make a mess - mostly true. If you refer to the issues of bottom and flyash disposal, scrubber and catalyst waste, coal tailings and dust, then yes they are very clean. If you refer to gaseous pollution, well they still are a large source of greenhouse gas emissions, NOx, etc. and sometimes require catalytic reduction to reduce the NOx (which creates waste catalyst, ammonia issues, etc.)
This isn’t a whole lot of extra capacity, and I understand this is almost entirely peaking capacity. The equivalent availability of these plants may be high on paper, but economically and life-cycle speaking it will be artificially limited like for most installations, thus pushing down the maximum possible capacity factor of the units.
It will help, but on the grand scheme of the grid it will not do much. Even if all 4700 MW (actually, my understanding is about 6500 MW are going to be added in CA) are added, it will be gone in 5 years again. The effect of depressing the baseload capacity relative to the peaking capacity will continue unabated IMO. If you look at a plant inventory of CA, you see it is a very different profile than any other state in the US - CA has an enormous number of small, mainly peaking-designed plants (that’s not to say that they aren’t trying to operate them as baseload, however, which presents it’s own problems). Sure, they have Diablo Canyon and San Onofre for a total of about 4300 MW, but most fit the category described.
Of course, if those nuclear plants go away for any reason, there’s 4300 baseload MW (about 95% capacity factor IIRC) that CA will be trying to replace…
Here in DC it is the hot summer days when all AC is running that we start having brownouts. The problem is peak usage rather than average usage. There is no incentive to use electricity in hours of lower demand. If everyine had some incentive to shift consumption to low-demand hours, then demand would flatten out somewhat.
One way would be with time dependent rates but this requires specialized meters.
A simpler way I have seen in Europe which is quite effective and makes sense: Your supply has a limiter and you pay an amount depending on how much. You can have your supply limited to 4.5, 6, 7.5, 10 Kw or whatever you like but you pay a fixed monthly cost per Kw installed. The reasoning is that the supplier has to invest in plant even if you are not using all that power most of the time. The supplier has to be ready to supply it if you would demand it. So you have an incentive to limit your demand even if it means not being able to run everything at the same time and having to stagger some jobs.
If you have a 6Kw limiter and you go over, it trips the limiter and you have to reset it… you soon learn not to go over as it is a major pain to reset it and then the VCR clock etc.
I will find out the total breakdown when I get to work on Monday, but I think you are over-emphasizing the current dependence on peak-loading units. Although I guess what is meant by a lot is debatable. Are you including cogeneration in that definition on peaking?
The real “culprit” in California, in the sense it was not really planned for (the time it would take to get new generation online was pretyy much known) is the amazong load growth seen the last couple of years. Load growth the last couple of years has been 6% or so. When deregulation wa originally concieved it was 2% and that was a going forward assumption. Over just two years, if your peak load at the start is (for example) 40 Gwh the extra load growth changes peak load from 41.6 Gwh to 44.9 Gwh. And there goes your excess capacity AND your reserve requirements.
Right now California is running at about 46 Gwh if you correct for load shaving from interruptible programs. But we have yet to see a state-wide heat storm the quivalent of anything in 98 or 99.
Of course building more capacity is vital, but there also needs to be better demand responsiveness programs. This is especially vital when you consider that the Interruptible programs are set to expire in March of 2002. That is upwards of 2000 Mwh that the ISO depends on to manage the grid.
Another problem for the UDCs was the lack of flexibility they had in procuring energy. Just yesterday, SCE and PGE were giving limited permission to enter into bilateral agreements by the PUC.
But at least it would be work well for AC…the more sunlight you have, the hotter it is (usually), and the more
you want to crank up the air conditioner. Has a pleasing logic about it.
Hmm, what I had heard was that one of the reasons that Municipal Light and Power was able to offer rates so much lower than Cleveland Electric Illuminating* was that Muny was able to sell Niagra power, whereas CEI was not, since Niagra Falls power is only available to publicly-owned power companies. Of course, my information was only from hearsay, so I’ll gladly bow before the knowledge of someone working in the field.
Cleveland has had two separate power companies since long before anyone was even discussing deregulation, the city-owned Muny and the private company CEI. Muny’s rates are lower, but CEI’s service is better, so they’re both able to compete. It means a lot of extra infrastructure, but it’s nice having a choice.