Tag Archives: grid

India baseload power grid failure

Last month the U.S. grid failed due to heat wave demand, this month, it’s India’s grid. There are several common features: coal, baseload, outdated grid, and distributed renewable energy through a smart grid as the solution.

SFGate quoting NY Times, yesterday, India grid failure causes power blackout,

The Ministry of Power was investigating the cause, but officials suggested that part of the problem was probably excessive demand during the torrid summer.

Same as in the U.S. grid failure. Except India did it bigger, according to the Economic Times of India today,

The blackout which has left 600 million people without electricity in one of the world’s most widespread power failures.

Yet officials are in denial, according to the SFGate story:

“This is a one-off situation,” said Ajai Nirula, the chief operating officer of North Delhi Power Limited, which distributes power to nearly 1.2 million people in the region. “Everyone was surprised.”

Well, they shouldn’t be, if they were watching what happened in the U.S. And India gets most of its electricity from coal, whose CO2 emissions contribute to climate change, producing ever-hotter summers. Just like in the U.S.

The story includes a clue to the solution:

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Invent batteries to the price point of the electricity market —Donald Sadoway

MIT Prof. Donald Sadoway thinks he’s found a way to build electric-grid-scale batteries out of dirt.

Electric utilities complain solar and wind power are not baseload, capacity, energy sources because they are intermittent. You know, if they weren’t busy running up cost overruns that could easily exceed the entire annual budget of the state of Georgia, maybe the utilities could solve this problem. Meanwhile, Prof. Sadoway, instead of looking for the snazziest coolest most efficient new method of energy storage, defined the problem in terms of the market:



the demanding performance requirements of the grid, namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime, and super low cost. We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big. We need to think cheap.

Then he set parameters on the solution:

If you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt. Preferably dirt that’s locally sourced.

He cast about for possible precedents and found aluminum smelting gave him some ideas for using low density liquid metal at the top, high density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between. Choosing the right metals is the trick, which he thinks he’s found: magnesium at the top, and antimony at the bottom.

Is Sadoway right? Will his battery work at grid scale? I don’t know. But he’s asking the right questions, and it’s worth a try.

As Kyle Sager wrote for Heliocurrent 4 May 2012, Renewable Storage: Leave it to MIT,

Has Dr. Sadoway achieved the holy grail of renewable energy? Judge for yourself. Our attention is compelled by the degree of his certainty and the seeming simplicity of the approach. Watch MIT’s Donald Sadoway explain his vision here (link).

Seems to me there are at least two major approaches:

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Why CWIP is a bad idea

Iowa is rejecting CWIP, and Georgia can, too.
Here’s why.

Herman K. Trabish wrote for Green Tech Media 22 February 2012,

The Nuclear Industry’s Answer to Its Marketplace Woes:
Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) financing shifts the risks of nuclear energy to utility ratepayers,

A sign of the nuclear industry’s difficult situation in the
aftermath of Fukushima is a proposal before the Iowa legislature

“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the
core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making
process,”

that would allow utility MidAmerican Energy Holdings, a subsidiary
of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to build a new nuclear
facility in the state using Construction Work in Progress (CWIP)
financing (also called advanced cost recovery).

“Investment in nuclear power is the antithesis of the kind of


investments you would want to make under the current uncertain
conditions,” explained nuclear industry authority Mark Cooper,
a senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s
Institute for Energy and the Environment. “They cannot raise
the capital to build these plants in normal markets under the normal
regulatory structures.”

CWIP would allow the utility to raise the money necessary to build a
nuclear power plant by billing ratepayers in advance of and during
construction.

“Construction Work in Progress was intended to circumvent the


core consumer protection of the regulatory decision-making
process,” Cooper explained. “It exposes ratepayers to
all the risk.” The nuclear industry’s answer to its
post-Fukushima challenges, he said, “is to simply rip out the
heart of consumer protection and turn the logic of capital markets
on their head.”

And the Iowa Utilities Board staff agreed with Cooper and recommended against CWIP.

His message to policymakers is simple, Cooper said. “This is
an investment you would not make with your own money. Therefore, you
should not make it with the ratepayers’ money.”

Meanwhile, in Georgia:

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Solar: jobs, leadership, grid, independence, and health

Peak power when you need it: solar.
Somebody has been studying it, and addressing problems
local decisionmakers right here in south Georgia have been raising.


Solar Power Generation in the US:
Too expensive, or a bargain?
by
Richard Perez, ASRC, University at Albany,
Ken Zweibel, GW Solar Institute, George Washington University,
Thomas E. Hoff, Clean Power Research.
That’s Albany, New York, but it applies even more to Albany, Georgia
and Lowndes County, Georgia, since we’re so much farther south,
with much more sun.

Let’s cut to the chase:



The fuel of heat waves is the sun; a heat wave cannot take place without a
massive local solar energy influx. The bottom part of Figure 2 illustrates
an example of a heat wave in the southeastern US in the spring of 2010
and the top part of the figure shows the cloud cover at the same time:
the qualitative agreement between solar availability and the regional
heat wave is striking. Quantitative evidence has also shown that the
mean availability of solar generation during the largest heat wave
driven rolling blackouts in the US was nearly 90% ideal (Letendre et
al. 2006). One of the most convincing examples, however, is the August
2003 Northeast blackout that lasted several days and cost nearly $8
billion region wide (Perez et al., 2004). The blackout was indirectly
caused by high demand, fueled by a regional heat wave3. As little as 500
MW of distributed PV region wide would have kept every single cascading
failure from feeding into one another and precipitating the outage. The
analysis of a similar subcontinental scale blackout in the Western US
a few years before that led to nearly identical conclusions (Perez et
al., 1997).

In essence, the peak load driver, the sun via heat waves and A/C demand,
is also the fuel powering solar electric technologies. Because of this
natural synergy, the solar technologies deliver hard wired peak shaving
capability for the locations/regions with the appropriate demand mix
peak loads driven by commercial/industrial A/C that is to say, much
of America. This capability remains significant up to 30% capacity
penetration (Perez et al., 2010), representing a deployment potential
of nearly 375 GW in the US.

The sun supplies solar power when you need it:
at the same time the sun drives heat waves.

The paper identifies the problem I’ve encountered talking to local
policy makers, especially ones associated with power companies:

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U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere —Jennifer DeCesaro of DoE



Jennifer DeCesaro of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)
said she liked showing a map of U.S. insolation
outside the U.S. southwest because
then she could point out that
Spain has not as good resources and a larger solar market,
while Germany, the world leader in deployed solar,
has solar resources like the state of Alaska.


So the U.S. has plenty of solar energy everywhere.

She made a few other comparisons between U.S. and Germany.
U.S.: 30% investment tax credit.
Germany: National Feed-in Tariff.

She talked about

SunShot: the Apollo mission of our time.
It aims to reduce solar costs by 75% by the end of the decade,
making solar cost-competitive with fossil fuels without subsidy.

Actual panels cost about the same in U.S. and Germany,
but the rest

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Energy as a National Security Challenge —Col. Dan Nolan @ Solar Summit

In his morning keynote at the sold-out

Southern Solar Summit,
Col. Dan Nolan (U.S. Army ret.) asked the musical question:

“When did our Marines become Birkenstock-wearing tree huggers?”

This was after some Marines asked for solar power so they wouldn’t
have to haul fuel in long convoys, which were among the most dangerous missions.
Most of that fuel was going into very inefficient generators to run
very inefficient air conditioners in tents in the desert.
Dealing with that got the military thinking about energy security:
assured access to mission-critical energy.

Looking up, he asked:



“What is it we as a nation need to understand about our own energy security?”

He identified America’s strategic center of gravity as its economy.
It’s very resilient but has vulnerabilities open to attack.
So how do we secure those vulnerabilities?

The main vulnerabilities are:

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High-Voltage Grid of the Future — Daniel E. Frank

No new grid is needed

to profit by becoming electrical generators on your own rooftops,
but with a smarter grid south Georgia can export power to Atlanta and beyond.

I found this over in

NO COAL PLANT IN BEN HILL COUNTY!
with this comment by Dan Corrie:

This Georgia Tech announcement emphasizes how quickly technology is
changing toward healthier energy production and away from coal. I would
hate to see our South Georgia stuck with a contaminating, health-harming
coal plant for 50 years while so much progress would be going on during
that time.

The article by Daniel E. Frank dated 18 May 2011
appears on a law firm’s page,

Georgia Tech Clean Energy Speaker Series: “High-Voltage Grid of the Future”:

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