All Posts Tagged With: "Distributed energy"
Communities for Advanced Distributed Energy Resources
Am attending the CADER conference being held this week in La Jolla. One of the topics so appealing to me is “Community Energy + Cleantech = Homebase for the new economy. ” Hot topics will include community owned energy AND micro-grids!!! They will be talking about the role of energy in our economic future.
No representatives of Coos County attended the Future Energy Conference in Portland that I saw but other communities are actively embracing the potential of energy to produce badly needed revenue streams. The cities of Troutdale, Gresham, Corvallis, Klamath Falls and Portland are all actively implementing and looking for ways to finance energy projects to fund public services.
Then there is Coos Bay…. how long will the citizens allow the moratorium on wind energy??? Rogue River Wind has plenty of business without Coos Bay but the citizens are the real losers if they allow city leaders to ignore decentralized energy opportunities.
The myth of centralized grid redundancy
Redundancy, in the context of power transmission and distribution, means simply that there are lots of backup sources for power to take over, should a power source fail anywhere along the grid. My push for distributed energy micro-grids has been criticized locally claiming it lacks redundancy when in fact wide scale distributed energy is the epitome of a redundant electrical system. To make my point here are a few examples of massive power outages that occurred because there is no redundancy in the centralized grid. The article lists many examples of catastrophic grid failure but this one below is pretty amazing.
November 2006: A German power company switches off a high voltage line over a river to let a cruise ship pass. It triggers outages for 10 million people in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Recently, we had an outage in North Bend that cascaded through sections of Coos Bay. In the event of such an outage most utilities fall all over themselves disconnecting from the faltering line as quickly as possible to avoid massive outages. They do not, as is believed rush to help by rerouting power to the stricken area. It is more akin to a mass exodus to the life boats with all lines cut to keep from being sunk with the ship. No one tries to keep it floating.
Earth Hour in Coquille… someday, hopefully
This week I met with Congressman Peter DeFazio in his DC office about the Western Oregon Wind Project a 5MW renewable energy smart/micro-grid to generate $2 million in alternative funding for local schools. Happily, he agreed to carry the request to the House Appropriation’s Energy and Water Subcommittee but cautions it is a very competitive arena and he has received $800 million in requests from the 4th District alone.
In Coos County the unemployment rate has reached almost 14% and Coquille Schools are facing an $850,000 budget reduction next year. More than ever our local leaders need to start looking for alternatives for our greatest resource, our children. Oregon already has one of the shortest school years in the nation while at the same time spending more on corrections than higher education. There is a correlation between poor education and crime and prisons.
Studies have indicated for a family of four to make ends meet and have one stay at home parent requires $24 per hour. The WOW will save or create 196 family wage jobs right out the gate and because the $1million now being exported out of the local economy to import power will stay local many more jobs will spring up. Repeating the WOW template ten times will generate, over ten years, $310 million to put back into Oregon schools.
Additionally, $35 million in federal stimulus money is being set aside for projects in Oregon that reduce fossil fuel emissions and energy use. Coos County can harvest electrons through its rich wind and solar resource and sell those electrons just exactly as it harvests timber and get paid extra to do it by helping the state achieve carbon neutrality.
Before returning to Oregon I am meeting with the US Department of Energy to learn how best to bring these and other federal energy stimulus dollars into our area working through the Oregon DOE. Opportunities are abundant despite the dire news and if we work together, organize and maintain pressure on our federal and state representatives to support decentralized power generation in rural Oregon and beyond our children can expect the same or better educational benefits of every other child in America.
Last year Dian Courtright and I observed Earth Hour at my home by turning off the lights and appliances for one hour and walking around Coquille to see who else might be making the gesture. This year in Alexandria, Virginia many lights went out and the nation’s Capitol did make an effort, as did other major cities around the world, to dim the lights and hold candle light vigils for our planet.
Pubs served drinks by votive candle and restaurants brought battery-powered lights into restaurants and drums beat softly amidst the cherry blossoms as I walked around the city. Hopefully, next year Coos County and Coquille will join the increasing number of communities each year that celebrate Earth Hour by turning off the lights.
Coos County can harvest wind as well as timber
Fabricating a prototype, particularly when very few off the shelf parts are used in the assembly, is always difficult and a learning process. Last fall Rogue River Wind, Ltd took delivery of a custom rotor built from a composite material that requires a fixed cure time. Anxious to deliver and believing the lay up was fully cured the manufacturer pulled the rotor off the mold a day early and it continued to cure all the way to Coos Bay from Blaine, WA losing its ‘true’.
Tolerances on the V-LIM generator are pretty tight and while we were able to correct the important interior dimensions and make the rotor work electrically it wasn’t as beautiful as we hoped for. Saturday we received our replacement rotor, this time from a carbon fiber composite blend, and what we lost in time we gained in both perfection and a 50% weight reduction.
Deadlines for completing this prototype and beginning testing are all self imposed but you can imagine after all this work my team and I are so anxious to fire it up and start exciting electrons and creating electricity here on the coast. Successfully implementing micro-grids locally has the potential to save and create jobs and turn our economy around using our plentiful renewable resources.
The PSU capstone team working with Rogue River Wind has completed their preliminary work and submitted their final proposal for all the motor control circuitry and data collection monitoring and analysis. With this final hurdle aside we expect to start capturing electrons and lighting up meters by the end of the month.
This week I will firm up travel plans to DC to work our way through the appropriations committee for a proposed 5MW micro-grid to help fund local schools. Additionally I am meeting with some federal agency officials including the Department of Energy supportive of distributed energy, locally owned micro-grids and renewable energy development. We are confident our proposed model of providing alternative funding for our beleaguered school districts will succeed here and be implemented in rural school districts everywhere.
Locally owned micro-grids have the potential to fund many public programs currently suffering massive cutbacks. For rural Americans energy independence may be even more imperative to improving quality of life and enabling economic survival than our more urban cousins.
Present transmission lines terminating on the coast are at capacity, saturated, unable to meet any increased demands. If Coos County wants to entertain the barest hint of industrial growth it must consider the necessity of providing energy to support that growth. Exporting dollars to import power is an expensive option while investing dollars to produce power can be a very lucrative long-term solution.
Harvesting wind and solar to create electrons and sell them is no different than harvesting trees and selling timber. Their may be one difference which is that according to the US Governors Association for every million dollars invested in infrastructure 40 jobs are created. Utilizing this formula the revenue generated from one 5MW micro-grid will create or save 124 jobs. It just makes economic sense to enter the energy production business on a small local scale.
Energy business still thriving
Winter weather has brought about more wide spread power outages from Illinois, Ohio and east to New England. The Western States are not expected to fare much better according to the North America Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees reliability of the U.S. electric power grid, is projecting an increasing risk for blackouts because of the lack of available power.
The annual revenue projected for a build out of 20% energy from wind is estimated to be $23 Trillion. To put that in perspective our annual budget for 2008 was $3.1T and we receipted $2.8T with the deficit applied to our national debt now at over $10T. So in one year, earnings from renewable energy production could run our country at current costs for over seven years or pay off our national debt twice.
Yet Congress does not choose to invest our tax dollars in energy preferring to leave it to the private sector. Energy is up from 2008 but still accounts for less than 3% compared to 21% for the Global War on Terror and utility costs to the consumer have risen steeply in the last ten years.
GE inked a $500B deal to provide gas and coal powered electric generators for power in Iraq on a continued course of centralized power despite repeated failures such as we are suffering here. Clearly there is money to be made in energy and energy production and the same holds true for more reliable decentralized energy.
Decentralizing allows smaller investments in local energy production $5M projects rather than $500B and affords the opportunity for communities and neighborhoods to share in revenue that would normally be sent to a distant investor owned utility. The money normally paid in utilities can cover the debt service on local generation and net profits reinvested in schools, roads and infrastructure.
Beginning in early January I begin working, once again, with Portland State University to design new motor control circuitry for the V-LIM generator as well as data collection to determine output, wind speed, ambient and coil temperature and other parameters. The PSU Software Engineering Capstone provides students with a realistic software development experience that utilizes the skills and knowledge acquired during the first three years of their program.
Energy management is key to economic recovery
Energy efficiency, investing in public infrastructure, including schools and education, and improving access to broadband internet are all part of president-elect Obama’s plan to create millions of new jobs. During his weekly address, Obama emphasized the importance of all these matters in order to reduce our dependence upon foreign resources and improve our competitiveness in the global market.
Rebuilding our roads, dams, bridges, schools and transportation and power networks cannot happen too soon. A new report produced by London-based GFC Economics is predicting by next spring, the United States could be facing a million layoffs every successive month.
“Expenses related to corporate debt, and muddy credit markets consumed by fear, are driving a fast-approaching ‘hard landing’.”
Whether Obama’s plan can avert these dire predictions and how he plans to pay for it will soon be learned as he prepares to take office next month. Either way, his drive for energy efficiency is going to be crucial to the ultimate success of his economic plan.
With energy demands expected to increase, the push to find renewable energy sources and almost daily intermittent grid failures, investing in the grid or rethinking the single machine grid matrix is crucial for our economic survival. In order to fully realize renewable energy generation, absent clean storage solutions, is it easier to implement renewable energy using the centralized production model or a decentralized model?
Comparisons between electricity storage and transmission almost always center on utility scale capacity rather than smaller, more manageable micro-grids. Within the realm of centralized electricity storage technologies such as pumped hydro, compressed air, flow batteries, etc., are thought not just in terms of load leveling, peak shaving and arbitrage but also power conditioning.
The best argument for maintaining the single machine grid and subsequent utility scale storage is financial gain whereby huge producers continue to game the system as Enron did to control profit margins. Despite the well documented technological and efficiency benefits of micro-grid applications it is the independence offered to consumers that brings up the most resistance from privatized energy producers.
In any event, the development of electricity storage technologies, such as capacitors, flywheels, superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), pumped hydro and more will have a profound effect upon the economic recovery of the country and its future as an energy independent state. Rural America has an advantage over our power hungry urban neighbors because we can implement micro-grids and smaller storage systems to manage our load demands much easier and without imposing on a grid network owned by out of state investors.
To help Obama overcome the enormous hurdles before him we all need to do our part and address our energy use habits and our energy production methods. Demonstrating energy independence and modeling it for the rest of the nation will not only help resurrect our own local economy by keeping dollars local but may help small towns all across the country.
Credit crunch and the impact on energy production
The credit crunch is rightly having an impact upon the construction of new power generation plants. In Montana the construction of a 250MW coal powered plant has broken ground, using existing capital, amidst serious questions as to the developer’s ability to finance the $800M price tag.
To survive the credit crunch become a high-tech cockroach
Industry insiders fear more blackouts and brownouts unless more capacity is built into the aging electrical grid and more power transmitted through it. Events on Wall Street are serious implications on many facets of our daily life including energy, however, it is also the specter of an imposed Carbon Tax that is putting a damper on the appeal of fossil fuel energy projects to bankers.
Renewable energy project developers are capitalizing on increasing energy needs and lenders concerns to push through financing on carbon free energy production. Energy, of course, is a very profitable industry with consumers dependent upon energy producers to supply power to their homes and businesses and while complex deals to work through are normally easy to finance.
However, the price tag of the Montana plant is coming in at $3.2M per megawatt and this excludes the $1M per mile cost of transmission lines. The additional costs of step up transformers, step down transformers and, of course, the environmental footprint associated with centralized power production must also be considered.
Decentralizing power production reduces these costs significantly, one study shows as much as a 44% reduction in capital costs, depending on the type of generation deployed. Further decentralized or distributed energy is proven more reliable than centralized energy where an operator error in Ohio can take out power to the entire Northeast as we saw in 2003.
Microgrids and smaller combined heat and power (CHP) generators are becoming more economical and much easier to finance. Energy prices are expected to rise making community investment in local power generation more and more attractive and offering a faster return on investment.
Using a typical trading figure of $65 per MW a small 5MW wind farm will generate almost $1M in annual revenue. An example project that a community might undertake would be to develop a wind, solar, geothermal or CHP system or any combination thereof with known high electricity users such as a hospital, industrial site or grocery store.
The concept of a microgrid is that energy produced and not used onsite is directed to the surrounding neighborhood as heat or some other form of energy transference. This type of energy management is being widely deployed in Europe and several US cities including NY and has proven efficient, effective, environmentally responsible and because they offer consistent long-term profits, financeable.
Those of us working feverishly on the V-LIM turbine are optimistic the LIM will become a standard part of this new mix of energy offerings to communities and power hungry industry. Collectively, our greatest hope and a goal we are putting great effort into obtaining is that the LIM and other upcoming technology will replace lost timber jobs here in Coos County.
Electrical grid not ready for renewable energy
Once again the evidence that centralized power production is a colossal dinosaur is overwhelming. The intermittent nature of renewable energy which is manageable at a microgrid distributed level is highly problematic at the high voltage transmission level.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. The corporation is the industry body authorized by the U.S. government to enforce reliability rules for the interlocking system of electrical power generation and transmission.
Such carbon-reduction rules are already in place in 27 American states and four Canadian provinces, and new ones could be mandated nationally in both countries. They may force changes in the utility industry, the group said, including the shutting down of coal plants that are located near load centers, and substituting power from wind turbines or solar plants in remote areas.
These actions would impose new demands on a transmission system that was never designed for large power transfers over extremely long distances.
So why persist on flogging a dead iron horse? With the privatization of electrical production, an essential service, profit and the subsequent need to control the market mandates a centralized model. Presently, fewer than ten multinational corporations control the world’s electricity. Decentralizing wrests control from these corporate giants and significantly reduces dependence upon them as a supplier of essential needs.
Not to sound too trite but decentralizing puts the power into the hands of the people, literally and figuratively and even metaphorically.
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