Power Outages and Demand
Posted by Heading Out on July 23, 2006 - 5:06pm
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: electricity demand, power outages, temperatures [list all tags]
It has been suggested, given the demands for electricity around the country, and the outages that are occuring for various reasons (St Louis and NYC being the two most obvious, although neither were due directly to demand apparently), that we get all the information together in a single thread. (It also might help those of us planning to go somewhere if we know that there won't be power when we get there). So, gentle folk, can we collect the stories here ?
UPDATE: 10:18 pm EST Courtesy of step back the California ISO is predicting a peak demand tomorrow of 52,336 megawatts, which is higher than Friday’s record 49,036 megawatts, as cyclelicious tells us. And as our Alpha Male just noted, Santa Rosa just had a power loss. (From comments brought forward).
Just laying in bed (keeping cool) listening to my new radio (battery operated rechargeable) and picking up some of the talk here and there..... cops are busy, and at a large outdoor concert here, Music Matrix I think, they're talking about the heat quite a bit.
Good for you man!! Isn't it great being first??
==AC
"Given the right leadership and sufficient external threat, the primary product of such spirituality may be extraordinary social cohesion.
...Almost every leader of note has, either consciously or unconsciously, fished these murky waters at some time or other.
Their reward is a united people armed with humanity's shining Excalibur. To unsheathe this magic blade, such visionary leaders must first win over the populace with the primal fairy tale, which invariably contains two ingredients;
1.) A Monster-preferably one who speaks an alien tongue, prays to heathen gods, wears peculiar clothing, and/or has different-colored skin.
2.) A Miracle-earned only by sacrifice, but culminating in triumph for the home team and a nasty end for the Monster.
This tired old routine has worked its magic with astonishing regularity since the dawn of history, and no one with fully functioning DNA seems wholly immune to the lure of it. Its genetic nature shines through the grisly statistics that follow every major conflict, especially those that incorporate genocidal slaughter."
~Reg Morrison, 1999 "The Spirit in the Gene, Humanity's Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature"
Most natable news is alot of drownings :(. Alot of people in the water.
Wife says traffic is horible. ? what do you do drive around with the A/C on.????? JC go to the store and pretend you are trying to decide what kind of ice cream you want.
Powerdown will kill alot of people, no doubt.
I don't have a bike right now, I need to look for a good one. If I had one I'd ride it to the library and "cool out" there, since I don't, I guess I'll putt over in the Prius.
More on the radio intel - people going out to buy fans and "none to be had", lots of large co's it seems trying their best to cut down energy usage by cutting back on lights, opening/closing doors, etc.
Fleam,
It's Sunday.
Here is the California ISO chart
Tomorrow businesses will be adding to demand
Every Office building needs A/C
Today was Easy Day for PG&E
Tomorrow, demand may exceed supply
I kept thinking, the super heated temperatures, due to climate change caused by exorbitant fossil fuel use, were being addresses by the exorbitant use of fossil fuels to cool things down. Heading back home the temperature was 108 F in Grants Pass at 1 pm. Its always wonderful to hit the coast where today the temperature dropped 40 degrees in less than 40 miles.
I don't know how climate change will impact us here in Costa Rica. The seasons, such as they are, seem to have shifted some in the past couple of years. My landlord is worried about it. The dependable rainy season seems to be starting later and ending earlier, with rainy periods during the historically dry times and dry periods during the historically rainy times, but they say we still get about nine feet of rain a year, although I haven't measured it. There are so many micro-climates in Costa Rica that you can travel 10 kms and be in a totally different environment. The Tapanti National Park, for example, is only about 10 kms down the road from us. It is the third wettest place in the world and gets nearly three times the rainfall we get.
But thank god we don't get the heat the US is having. We are in a valley but still at 1051m above sea level. Our temps rarely get to the mid 80s and only occasionally do they fall into the low 50s/high 40s. It's the perfect temp year-round, and surprisingly, it does not feel very humid either, no where near as humid as FL or NO or even Norhtern AL felt to me. Perfect sleeping weather. If we decide, however, that we miss being sticky and miserable, we are only four hours from either coast by bus.
No electrical problems in CR yet. There are three small diesel powered electric generator stations in country but most of our electric is generated by mini- and micr-hydro plants with only a couple of big dams in the country, plus there are also a few wind farms. My electric bill is about 8 cents/kwh for the regular service and 13 cents/kwh for my 220.
You might want to make sure you live > 20m above sea level.
Apparently they have over two dozen parallel feeders on the medium voltage circuit. A couple went out and instead of load shedding immediately, they let in run. Enough to damage the wirubg on teh other circuits. I would be willing to bet that they are WAY behind in their tighten downs and other routine maintanence. (Tighten downs eliminate loose, high resistance connections).
And our social-science academics, in their disconnection from reality, still keep wondering why a lot of Americans abhor big cities!
http://knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_4856543,00.html
No notable outages in northern Alabama. Although power reliability has always been bad where I live. I gave up setting my VCR clock 10 years ago.
Can't seem to find a web site that show real time data for the TVA.
As the Knoxnews story quoted by Bitteroldcoot predicted, the weekend in the Ohio Valley and Tennessee River Valley has turned out beautiful and cool, finally giving some relief and comfort to us.
Here in Central Kentucky, I decided last week to see if I could weather the summer the way I did in the old days as a child in this same neighborhood, and not turn on the air conditioning at all.
So far victory! And I was actually surprised that it was not unbearable....uncomfortable yes, but not unbearable. Of course, I knew it should not have been unbearable. From 1965 to 1973, I went to elementary and Junior High School not a full two blocks from where I now sit typing, and we never had air conditioning, including some assorted summer school classes, and I grew up on within a half block of here, and did not live in an air conditioned home until 1977, the year I graduated high school....not at all out of the ordinary in those days, many of my neighbors did not have it either....when someone got "central air" the kids on the block would visit the kids there and "try it out", and come home with rave reviews of how "cold" it was in so and so's house! Such was a consumption revolution made.
Even with no air conditioning, I still consumed some $38 dollars of electric power on the month, mainly with electric stove and range, washing machine, and a deep freeze.
My pride was great in having made it without AC, and saved so much money but of course, there was a lesson to be learned about real design and intelligence coming to me.
I live in an old frame house built in 1955.
A friend of mine showed me his electric bill. I had been to his house on several occasions, once around the 4th of July, and had to compliment the comfort of nice air conditioned home while there, as cool as he wanted it to be. He pointed out that back in the 1990's when the home was built, he was encouraged to install a "Geothermal furnace" as the utility called it, a ground coupled heat pump" which uses the ground tempeture in both winter and summer to climate control the home, with the HVAC always working from a ground temp of nice spring like 56F degrees.
The opposite of me, he NEVER turns his climate control off.
He too, was under $40 dollars on the month on his electric bill.
I drove home to my hot house, and on the way looked at the new development neighborhoods, being built in Hardin and Meade County KY, that were built in a hurry, no time to waste on that "ground coupled crap" (one of the contractors I spoke to uses that phrase) with the central air unit sitting unassisted out in the July sun, one of the biggest housing booms our area has known in decades.
We will live, the owners will live with that consumption for another half a century, the rest of most of our lives, and NEVER KNOW the opportunity we missed. I go on my computer, and glance over the NPC (National Petroleum Council) Report of 2003 indicating that without massive export of American money and an almost emergency push on building facilities to gain access to LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) we simply will fall short of the amount needed and suffer radical price swings, loss of American jobs and economic power, and possible spot shortages which could even be life threatening if they occur at the wrong times.
It is possible to be brought almost to tears by the sheer sheer lack of intelligence in the way America does business, the absolute waste of opportunities.
This is not, as some like to say, a problem of "physics" or "overshoot", not yet anyway....it is a problem of madness.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Anyone see anything about natgas supplies vs. this heat wave? I haven't. Gotta wonder, and I also wonder how this hot summer may impact the supplies for next winter.
"Nuthin' left to do but Smile, Smile, Smile..."
The weather in Texas is the usual July hot, dry and nasty. The best part about it is that the weather keeps Californians from moving here.
"I'd sell my house for a huge profit and move inland if it wasn't for the fabulous weather here," said she. "At least our housing prices keep all the Texans out."
Maybe this makes me a Commie Rat, but at least under price controls we could drill a well and predict cash flow.
Speaking of failures in the power grid, it' time for another natural gas post, I think. I've got the work of Andy Weissman in mind. There is stuff that is more current than what I linked to here. Do you know his work?
I hadn't particularly noted his by-line before and see that he has written on LNG in the past, but I did not see anything recent. OGJ has just come out with a new set of info on LNG (not on the website last time I checked). I saw (as I skimmed my way forward through the past week's comments - only half-way there yet) that there is now some concern about Mexican supplies of Natural gas and LNG as Cantarell falters. As the next month plays out natural gas is something that should be watched, since this is where much of the new power construction has been.
America, a country without a coherent energy policy. A country going down in flames (no pun intended). As far as I can see, the US natural gas policy is pray for another warm winter.
Einstein said there were only two infinite things, the Universe and human stupidity. He wasn't so sure about the Universe. And he really didn't get to know Americans well enough hanging around at Princeton. We can be counted on to do the right thing after we've exhausted all the other possibilities. By then, it will be too late.
He is immensely informed, but his idea of a Powerpoint presentation is to talk through about 30% of his slides before running out of time. I'm sure that he's very busy running his NG hedge fund as commodities bump along, since I haven't seen an update recently.
Look at Qatargas.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0710/p02s01-usec.html
Apropos looking for coal, I recall seeing a statement from some graduate students here that there was immense amounts of coal under the north sea. I don't know how reliable that research was, and I doubt we will ever get to the point that that coal will be profitable, anyway.
There's a decent interview at GPM http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/709 with Jeff Goodell, author of "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future" re: the status of coal and the entrenched Coal Industry in the US.
Heading out, I noticed that the gentleman you reference also references the NPC (National Petroleum Council Report that I hace often made reference to:
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=556
In my own study, I use The Hirsch Report, Matt Simmons presentations on his website and his book "Twilight In The Desert", Darley's "High Noon For Natural Gas" (despite reservations on that one, still a good overview), and every more authoritive to me, The NPC Report on natural gas, and an important report that ASPO did on the Tar Sands as my core bibliography. All the rest are mostly panic mongers. The facts in the above listed material is more than enough to spook you without anybody else running around screaming, and they have the factual numbers on their side.
The natural gas issue is still with us, but the mild winter created a situation that made it look like it has "solved itself". The problem with that is that the low gas prices reduces the willingness of investors to put money into "long lead time" projects such as LNG terminals, contracts and shipping, and needed pipeline projects plus the effort to liberate stranded gas. All well and fine right now, but then when we have a massively cold winter some two or three years down the road, the needed natural gas infrastructure will not be there, and this is infrastructure that takes 5 plus years to build. We could be setting ourselves up for a catastrophic situation.
Interest in efficiency of use and conservation of natural gas has likewise gone down. The method of reducing natural gas consumption for heating and air conditioning is about 3 feet below us, almost everywhere in America, in the form of geothermal heat pumps. If you add in widespread use in the South and the sunbelt of solar hot water, natural gas demand could be shaved by more that enough to match supply and demand, and possibly even free some gas and LPG Propane up for transporation use in an efficient manner.
The next step, of course, is wide spread adaption of solar electric and solar thermal, again, the methods are already well known, and improving daily:
http://www.ecotopia.com/ases/SolarToday/DawnOfTheSolarEra.pdf
http://www.ecotopia.com/ases/SolarToday/
The coversion is coming because it MUST come. It will be the biggest change in a single century since the birth of the Industrial Revolution. It is already underway. But, the unanswered question is can it happen fast enough to avert great suffering. That is our choice.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
During demand-induced outages, heat records are also being broken around the state of California. It's all connnected.
Been on the grid most of the day rather than the PV system so we can irrigate. It was 98 yesterday and 97 today. It's been like this for a couple of weeks which is unusual for our area.
Todd