Nuclear Energy, Clean Coal, Sterling Engines etc

This will go a long ways towards resilience via redundancy. Central grips are prone to failure for various reasons and can be crippling to a community or even half a nation as we have seen in the past. Diversity and localization of resources is the best way to reduce risks and increase community relationships.

 

There are almost 3,000 large power plants in the U.S. You don't have to go small at all to get enormous redundancy in a system this big.

The 2003 Northeast Blackout was not caused by a lack of redundancy in power sources. It was a cascading failure in the response to fluctuating power demands after a single plant went down, power lines from alternate sources shorted to some trees, and a software bug that prevented other power suppliers from being notified.

In this case, a better system design and fault protection response is needed to make use of the redundant assets. Not more redundancy.

 

In some cases no but in a lot cases smaller power sources will create more resilience. Ultimately relying on personal home power alone would be great. I'm not a grid specialist so I'll have to defer to your knowledge.

 

This attitude is common, and it drives me nuts. So many people seem to have this idea that using less energy involves some kind of "sacrifice" that will make life utterly miserable. And for that reason a large percentage of people seem to ignore the issue entirely. Just go about life as usual as if nothing's happening!

Sure, we're going to need more energy. That's a fact with an ever-increasing human population and a developing world that wants to improve their own standard of living. But we can make changes to reduce the number of new nuke and fossil plants that have to be built. I happen to think that failing to take those actions...to use less wherever possible and perhaps even making a "sacrifice" here or there...is the only way to move forward and avoid being thrust back into the 19th century. We can't just blindly expect technology to save the day without taking a little responsibility of our own. Don't just dismiss the possibility as if she told you to trade your Ferrari and your Corvette for a horse-drawn carriage.

 

My sentiments exactly. The europeans and japanese use half the energy per capita that we do and their standard of living is the same if not better. We simply waste large amounts of energy because it's cheap.

In reference to the PV on house holds... They're great but if they're an intertie system (which the vast majority are these days) they're dependant on the grid too. In fact, in a blackout, those systems will stop putting power into the grid in order to protect the grid. We want a grid and will need one for the forseeable future. We just need to change it's diet and trim off some of the fat (through efficicient consumption).

 

Not True. Many sustained power losses here in FL are due to power lines taken down by hurricanes and storms. There is a flaw in you logic. Yes, there are plenty of plants, but there is actually very little redundancy in most distribution systems. Read the report on the Northeast power failure and you can see the problem was not a "software bug" but a cascade of overloads on the distribution networks. Note especially how overloaded transmission lines heat up, sag down, and then get shorted out by contacting tree limbs.

https://reports.energy.gov/

Most local losses here were wind blowing trees into power lines and there is no method or plan to provide last leg redundancy to each house. When you are without power, it does not matter if a main plant is down (routine). It does matter when one of the distribution points to your house is down. When this happens, plan on being without power for days. Ice storms happen, earthquakes happen, hurricanes happen, and trees just keep on growing into power lines. Having a solar powered residence is a good thing due to the redundancy provided.

 

Not if it's a grid tie system. It's useless in a blackout. You have to have battery backup, which is very expensive if you want any real coverage. I'm not slagging home PV, it makes a lot of sense (I'm planning to get a system) but inter-tie systems don't provide any redundancy either.

 

Part of the problem was in fact a software bug. Look at the report you referenced on pages 55 and 56. This bug prevented an alarm and resulted in 40 minutes of cluelessness by the operators, during which time other operators of other stations could have been responding. This is all part of "Cause 2: Inadequate Situational Awareness". More detail on the bug can be found in this report: "Technical Analysis of the August 14, 2003, Blackout", starting on page 32.

The bug is actually in the list of famous software bugs, made so by their significant and publicized consequences. (A disturbing number of those bugs are in my field of space exploration. Three of them directly impacted me.)

 

The original post was referring to the cascading failure that took out an entire region of the Northeast US and Canada even though almost all of their last legs of transmission (as well as the power plants) were perfectly fine. That was a system design and response failure. Completely different from having the power lines or transformers near your house taken out, for which there is no remedy other than repair.

As for rooftop solar power solving the non-redundant last leg problem, current grid-tie solar installations do not permit that. The idea with grid-tie is that your system doesn't need power storage, since you effectively use the grid for that (including putting energy into the grid and getting paid for it). So grid-tie systems are much cheaper. However you can't be power independent since you don't have batteries and/or some other auxiliary source of power. These systems don't allow you to run off the solar panels at all when the grid is down, since the inverter is designed to work with an operational grid attached.

If you spend a lot more money, you could in principle get a system that allows both grid-tie and off-grid operation with batteries and auxiliary power, but I haven't actually seen any like that advertised.

 

That would be costly indeed. For longterm storage at least.

So what do you and Tripp think is the best solution thus far?

 

It doesn't make any financial sense to have battery back-up with an inter-tie system. Unless you have critical stuff running in your house or you live somewhere where there are blackouts or brownouts on a regular basis the cost benefit ain't there. Batteries are not cheap.

F8L, as far as what I think's better... if you really want a computer programmer's (with a BA in Geology) opinion...

I think what we've got is working pretty well. It has issues and is going to need upgrades, but what doesn't? I think we should focus on greening up our utility scale power plants and adding more utility scale green power. It's simply cheaper at this point to have big plants. We should also be developing transmission to more remote areas that have good renewable resources. Wind in the Dakotas, geothermal in the west, solar (thermal) in the southwest, etc. Texas has built a good model for how this should be done (I don't know the particulars) and other states are looking to what they've done to get some ideas.

We should, of course be encouraging distributed generation. However, DG makes the most sense in a grid (so you can sell your excess). Some folks have envisioned the grid evolving into something akin to the internet. I think that this makes a lot of sense, moving forward. We are, unfortunately, beholden to a lot of legacy infrastructure, and replacing it and upgrading it will cost money. More importantly, changing minds in the utility industry is critical for success. By all accounts they're a conservative lot and aren't going to immediately embrace a web-like grid with thousands (if not millions of power producers buying and selling power). In this scenario, the utilities are like the telecoms. They own the infrastructure over which the energy is transmitted, but they don't necessarily produce the energy.

 

I (respectfully) disagree with the "useless" statement. It has been proven otherwise. Grid Tie systems automatically disconnect to not power dead utility systems. The PV owner then has the option of providing neighbors power for critical things. (e.g. medical equipment). The only PV systems that are useless are the ones with no batteries and it is night. During the day, there are lots of items that are powered (radios, recharging cell phones, house lights) that people with no utility power found quite useful to have powered with PV panels. Lead Acid backup batteries are more expensive than no battery, but "Very expensive" is in the eye of the beholder.

I have read the report fully. If one bug is a key contributor to failures like this, count on a lot more blackouts. This was just ONE site. One "bug" does not account for anywhere close to why the entire northeast lost power. Nor does it account for why it took so long to recover. It was a VAST MULTITUDE of shortcomings. The point I would reemphasize is that blackouts come from all sources (the tree next door to massive system failures) and the the original point about redundancy is quite valid.

It is the utilities responsibility to provide redundancy for the utility. It is within the power of individuals to provide redundancy for their needs. If the discussion is utility system redundancy, I will obviously agree that local PV systems are not suited for that. If the discussion is redundancy for the end user (you and me), then PV systems have few equals. Grid tie designs that go down with the utility will soon be modified to not be so limited. Most PV owners figure this out.

 

I agree with that statement with today's economic structure. I disagree with that statement once energy costs start to skyrocket. Once an electric car is in the garage, the dependence on PV energy changes the economics.

You might get some comments on that statement (once CO2 and nuclear waste generation is factored in)....but since the point (yours and mine) is to make things better, I'll defer.

The utilities will always follow the money. Their minds change with the wallets of the consumer. The minds that need to be changed are the consumers. Once the realization occurs that they (e.g. me) do not need the utilities AT ALL, then things will start to change. The success of the Prius is a good example. Most car companies are desiring the big financial success of the Prius, not the reduced environmental impact. The next sucessor to the Prius will be the PHEV or EV that is production available.

 

You can then always agree with the statement then, because I said financial sense. Once energy costs skyrocket it will make financial sense by definition.

I qualified that statement. There are obviously exceptions. I don't care about powering anything in a blackout (we've never had one here to my knowledge), thus having a battery backup would be a waste of money. I would do a lot more good to add solar water heating with that money. That's my personal case. People that need power 24-7 at their house would obviously have a different perspective.

A diesel generator would be a helluva lot cheaper than PV w/battery, unless you have blackouts all the time. In that case you might think about moving. PV in FL would be at risk of damage due to wind and flying debris.

Uh, at this point that's a massive leap. What about energy intensive industries, what about all that air conditioning that you guys use in the SE? At the current price, PV is considerably more expensive than conventional electricity. It's even more so when you factor in large battery arrays to store unused power.

Of course the Prius is still dependent on the refinery system, which is the transportation sectors utility equivalent.

I agree that there are serious short comings with what we've got and going forward there are opportunities to change the paradigm. I particularly like the idea of the average joe generating electricity because it gives people a sense of ownership. However, there will always be a grid. I think the computer network analogy is a good one. You computer is not nearly as powerful if it sits there unconnected to the world. The same is true of countless DG facilities without a means of selling/buying power.

Your home system isn't redundant if it's not an inter-tie. If it get's whacked by a big tree branch flying through the air at 60 mph you're stuffed. No power for you. That's where the inter-tie is important. Without a grid that's not possible and you're without power. Besides, if you're clever and have an efficient house, why wouldn't you want to sell at least some of your excess? Can't do that without a grid either.

 

True enough. But when I bought the 2001 Prius, everyone at work noted that it did not make financial sense. It still does not according to most CPA thinking. As I examine putting PV systems in, I do not want to fall into the trap of using today's economics for tomorrow's problems. That's really the only sticking point I have. Everything else discussed has convergence.

Things like strip mining and aluminum refining will require completely different solutions that are sustainable, but hydroelectric and concentrated solar may be partial answers. There will always be utilities and good advantages to intertie systems. However, the real gains in energy consumption reduction are at the individual consumer level.

You have homed into the big hurdle (Air Conditioning) that I am trying to figure out. You are absolutely correct that a 1 to 1 replacement of Utility Power with PV power for present Florida air conditioning is a lost cause for a long time. However, keeping a small number of people comfortable can be done for a lot less energy than force cooling an entire house with electric power. (Why cool the bedrooms during the day? Why cool the kitchen at night? Do we have to use doors that release most of the energy?) But (to me) the problem is not the cost, it is the lack of a viable, if expensive, system that can perform this within the size of rooftop PV array. I am working on it.

 

I know because I grew up in Savannah.

Air conditioners have come a long way. I don't know what a SEER 23 costs (obviously depends on the size) but they're out there and they use a lot less energy than the run of the mil ACl. It's all about insulation to keep in the nice, cold, dry air. The problems is that in FL you don't see a lot of that kind of thing (yet). Skruse has done a lot of retrofitting into a tract house and his bills are quite cheap (and he's in CA!). He might chime in.

I think that CSP holds a lot of promise (it's already in use, but we should have more). The heat storage issue is interesting. I like the idea of these plants running after the sun goes down.

 

Why are you still arguing with widkow?

 

I'll simply state for the last time that yes, the bug was a key contributing factor in the chain of events. Not sufficient by itself, but necessary. If you have better information than what is in the reports, then you should contact the authors.

The "one site" was the originating site of the cascade of events.

From the technical report:

 

I completely agree with what you are saying. But we are getting away from the original point. I'm not discounting that the software "bug" was a factor. It was a very big factor. I was pointing out that the total lack of fault redundancy in the system allowed a single bug at a single site to become a factor. It was this overall system architecture shortcoming that allowed individual faults to cascade.

As a similar example, the Columbia Accident Investigation report clearly identified the left bipod ramp section tile seperation as "causing" the accident. Yet the board quite correctly put the blame as the NASA culture that allowed flying shuttles with routinely breaking foam pieces......and nothing has changed in NASA culture. They still fly the shuttle with routinely breaking foam pieces.

 

At first I thought it was dberman but now I don't know who it is.