Makes more sense than most alternative energy projects. Remember the first rule of leftist engineering: If everyone believes hard enough that a technology will work, then it will work.
Energy & Power Generation
Energy “Plan” – No New Transmission
DECEPTION
The energy industry in the US is complicated and when I write posts I like to provide a decent amount of background for my thesis that we are allowing our energy infrastructure to deteriorate and not doing anything constructive about the situation. One critical element of this is that the greens and left-leaning individuals, who decry “old school” solutions like building new coal plants and promote complicated and unproven alternatives to these known, sensible and cost-effective solutions – are being disingenuous when they counter propose their “solutions”, because in the end they don’t want to do anything constructive at all to re mediate and solve the issues. This opinion article, in the New York Times, neatly encapsulates their duplicity by clearly stating that they don’t WANT to solve the transmission problem, even if someone could wind their way through the rats nest of financing, legal issues, and permitting. Thus it represents an important piece of evidence as a “confession” of their duplicity.
BACKGROUND
The energy infrastructure of the United States consists of three main components:
– Generation (nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, and other)
– Transmission (the lines that connect power stations to cities, and the utilities to each other)
– Distribution (the local electric lines, customer meter, trucks, etc…)
In general, the US has failed to invest in generation and transmission assets over the last 25 years or so. “Base load” generation primarily consists of 1) coal plants (no one is building new ones because of environmental legislation) 2) hydroelectric plants (no one is damming rivers due to the Sierra Club) 3) nuclear plant (they are far too expensive, regulation is uncertain, and Three Mile Island hasn’t gone away). There have been some “peaker” plants running natural gas (more expensive) and some minor “renewable” projects but generally we have just been “running in place” with regards to capacity and utilizing up all the “reserve” capacity that had been built up in previous years, as evidenced by blackouts in places like California.
Transmission consists of the long high voltage lines that crisscross the country. While some of these lines have been rebuilt and capacity upgraded, generally we have NOT built new transmission lines. Transmission lines that cross the country or long distances require permitting and siting and can take decades to build, if you can stomach the endless rounds of negotiating with all parties along the way and an ever changing morass of regulatory issues. Even after a line is permitted and built, the courts can stop them from functioning, such as a famous undersea transmission cable in the East that cost hundreds of millions to build.
Federal Tax Credits For Energy Efficient HVAC Equipment
President Obama signed the “stimulus” package into law on February 17. I prefer the term “porkulus”.
Embedded in that garbage legislation are a mind boggling array of things that really have not much of anything to do with reviving our economy. Pretty much everybody knows that.
There is a small piece of the “porkulus” that may help you if you are needing to update the mechanical systems of your domicile.
Macrogrid and Microgrid
Last week, I picked up a copy of American Scientist on the strength of a couple of interesting-looking articles, one of them relevant to our ongoing discussion of America’s energy future. It contains a graph which, at first glance, looks pretty unbelievable. The graph is title “U.S. electric industry fuel-conversion efficiency,” and it starts in 1880 with an efficiency of 50%. It reaches a peak of nearly 65%, circa 1910, before beginning a long decline to around 30%, at which level it has been from about 1960 to the present.
How can this be? Were the reciprocating steam engines and hand-fired boilers of the early power plants somehow more efficient than modern turbines?
“Shovel Ready” Transmission
HISTORICAL VIEWS OF THE TRANSMISSION GRID
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the nations’ electrical transmission grid. The transmission grid connects the power stations to the local distribution network. The transmission grid also allows utilities to “interconnect” and exchange / sell power between different entities.
Upgrading the transmission grid would have many advantages to the United States. Many of the lines are older and don’t have much spare capacity, or they are less efficient than new modern designs and waste less electricity along the way.
The transmission grid also does not connect to where the “new” sources of generation may lie. For example, the grid was designed to match fossil fuel / nuclear generating stations to major population centers, or to bring power from large hydroelectric facilities to the cities, as well. In some instances the grid was designed to “interconnect” major power companies to one another, such as on the East Coast.
As you can imagine, these reasons for building the original grid aren’t ready-made for new, “renewable” sources of energy. If you want to connect up a wind farm or a set of solar panels in the desert, it doesn’t matter how much power you can generate unless it can be brought onto the grid and transmitted to the cities (without excessive line loss).
When I was in the utility industry working as a consultant one time I went to an EEI conference (the big electrical utility conference) where I heard one of the CEO’s at the time talk about the transmission grid. The topic was how to value the transmission grid assets. His response was
The value of the transmission grid is infinite and unmeasurable, because we could never obtain those rights-of-way to rebuild them at any price
TRANSMISSION GRID TODAY
Since the greens and democrats have come into power energy topics are back in vogue. For a little while there was a romance with nuclear power (which will never materialize, see here) and now we see a wave of interest in transmission. Now that the democrats have to govern the country they realize that they have to actually govern and not just throw stones at a republican administration and that these are issues that require policy and resolution.
This map below shows a proposed transmission line in California (from The Economist dated February 14, 2009), designed to bring power from the desert where solar cells will be installed to the rest of the line and major cities. Note that this line is PROPOSED – this writer and most readers will likely be deceased before this line ever is accepted, built, and comes into service.
But you can see from the PROPOSED line how many compromises are needed in the current political climate. The line has to snake around any sort of park or Indian tribal area. The line is clearly not the most efficient route from point A to point B, and since you pay for transmission lines by the mile, this is going to make the cost of the line much higher than it would be otherwise.