Does President Obama’s plan to squelch carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants really threaten the stability of the grid? That politically-charged question is scheduled for a high-profile airing today at a meeting in Washington to be telecast live starting at 9 am ET from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Such “technical meetings” at FERC are usually pretty dry affairs. But this one could be unusually colorful, presenting starkly conflicting views of lower-carbon living, judging from written remarks submitted by panelists.
Environmental advocates and renewable energy interests will be hitting back, challenging the credibility of worrisome grid studies wielded by Bitter Smith and other EPA critics. Some come from organizations that are supposed to be neutral arbiters of grid operation, such as the standards-setting North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Clean energy advocates see evidence of bias and fear-mongering in these studies, and they are asking FERC to step in to assure the transparency and neutrality of future analyses. Continue reading “Will Shuttering Coal Plants Really Threaten the Grid?”
Power cables to Oahu could reduce curtailment of Maui wind farms. Credit: First Wind
Since 2013, a big mainland energy firm has been raring to build Hawaii’s first inter-island power cable, arguing that only a unified power grid can enable the renewable energy developments needed to break Hawaii’s addiction to imported petroleum. Now that big outsider—Juno Beach, Florida-based NextEra Energy—is trying to absorb Hawaii’s power providers in one big bite.
NextEra secures Hawaiian Electric and builds cables to unify its assets, unleashing renewable energy development
NextEra’s bid for Hawaiian Electric is squashed by officials with longstanding mistrust of outside interests, and the island utilities proceed on their own
NextEra wins approval for the acquisition but drops its cable ambitions, focusing instead on bringing liquefied natural gas to Hawaii to repower Oahu’s oil and coal-fired generators
Interconnecting the islands is an idea that dates all the way back to an 1881 meeting in New York City between Hawaii’s then-King Kalakaua and Thomas Edison. Kalakaua’s officials asked Edison if electricity could be generated from the Big Island’s active volcano and delivered via subsea cable to Oahu to bring electric light to Honolulu, thus sparing Hawaii greater dependence on Australian coal. Edison said the scheme could work, according to a report by the New York Sun, but demurred that it, “would cost so much, that’s all.”
134 years later, one hears essentially the same arguments for and against a unified Hawaiian grid. Proponents such as NextEra and the Hawaii State Energy Office say Oahu must hook up to its neighbors’ grids because it lacks the renewable resources needed to meet even half of its power demand—over 7,500 gigawatt-hours (GWh) per year, or nearly three-quarters of the state’s total.
Hawaii’s other islands, by contrast, have renewable potential to spare, says a 2010 analysis commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab. Lanai and Molokai could each generate over 1,000 GWh per year of wind power; Maui has over 2,000 GWh of viable geothermal, wind, and solar resources; and Hawai’i (better known as the Big Island) has over 6,000 GWh of geothermal potential. Sharing these resources with Oahu via subsea cables, the authors concluded, was the only way to meet Hawaii’s goal to push renewables to 70 percent of the power supply by 2030.
In 2013, NextEra proposed to start with a 180-kilometer-long, high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between Maui and Oahu dubbed NextGrid Hawaii. Last year, Pacific Business News reported that NextEra had secured property in downtown Honolulu for the converter station where NextGrid’s pair of 200-megawatt cables would come ashore and link up with Oahu’s AC grid.
NextGrid would cost an “enormous” $600-800 million, according to Pacifc Business News, but NextEra said it would save the islands’ utilities at least $4.8 billion over its first 40 years of operation. The State Energy Office conservatively pegs net savings to consumers at a more modest $423 million, plus $128 million in environmental benefits.
The promise of better renewable energy utilization earned NextEra support from some environmental groups. “We’re stronger together,” says Jeff Mikaluna, executive director for the Honolulu-based Blue Planet Foundation. In addition to better integrating renewables, says Mikaluna, tying the islands together should also reduce the need to keep fossil fueled power plants running in reserve.
NextGrid also appears to be spurring interest in cables to other islands, such as the Big Island. That island’s biggest landholder, the historic Parker Ranch, says a cable to Oahu could benefit a pumped hydroelectricity storage project it is developing. “Parker Ranch could enable a large-scale storage solution as part of an integrated statewide grid,” wrote Parker Ranch CEO Neil Kuyper inan August 2014 press release.
Of course, as is usually the case for transmission proposals, the idea of inter-island cables also has its critics. Some question, as Thomas Edison did, whether cables will really pencil out economically. Henry Curtis, executive director for Honolulu-based environmental advocacy group Life of the Land and a blogger on energy issues, says technical challenges associated with laying power cable over steep subsea slopes could inflate project costs.
Curtis also questions the cables’ environmental benefits, and highlights potential environmental harm. NextEra’s Maui-Oahu cable, for example, would traverse a humpback whale sanctuary.
Distributed generation advocates, meanwhile, are raising alarms about the track record of NextEra subsidiary Florida Power and Light (FPL), the utility that serves most of Florida. In December, Greentech Media noted that Florida ranks 29th in the country for overall renewable energy development, and blamed FPL for the sun-soaked state’s shortage of solar power: “It’s not for lack of sunshine; it’s lack of policy. Florida has no renewable standard—FPL has crushed every effort to establish one.”
Energy analyst William Pentland raised similar alarms in Forbeslast month. “Hawaiians should think long and hard about NextEra’s track record in the Sunshine State before approving any merger,” writes Pentland.
NextEra is, for its part, playing the grid unification card close to its chest as Hawaii’s regulators weigh its offer for Hawaiian Electric. One thing appears certain: NextEra will face heightened expectations to deliver on Hawaii’s renewable energy aspirations if the acquisition goes through.
Blue Planet Foundation’s Mikaluna says Hawaiian Electric was saying what state leaders wanted to hear at the state capitol earlier this week. During a hearing on a bill proposing a 100-percent-renewables standard for Hawaii’s utilities for 2040, Hawaiian Electric’s representative abandoned the utility’s traditional tack. Rather than hedging on the prospects for zeroing-out fossil fuel consumption, the new message was ‘How about 2050?’ “That’s a first,” says Mikaluna.
This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate
Ten years after the Northeast Blackout that shut off power in seven U.S. states and Ontario cascading power grid failures remain a fact of life. And, as I argue today on Spectrum’s Energywise blog, engineers are little closer to predicting and preventing them.
The good news is that engineers are beginning to accept that they have a complex system problem on their hands — an insight that could help them find solutions.
Such understanding was in short supply one year after the Northeast blackout, as I discovered with the publication of my August 2004 cover story for IEEE Spectrum commemorating its one-year anniversary profiling the apparent mathematical inevitability of cascading power-system failures. That message raised a firestorm of protest from engineers who saw their can-do creed under attack.
Today, however, the black sheep who spotted the tell-tale signs of a chaotic self-organizing system in blackout databases have come in from the cold. The University of Wisconsin’s Ian Dobson, for example, says he is having success attracting grants — no mean feat for interdisciplinary research targeting the uber-unsexy field of power transmission. And the IEEE set up a task force on cascading failures (with Dobson at the table).
An industrial research consortium that is a who’s-who of the European power industry says development of technologies to produce high-voltage DC (HVDC) supergrids accelerated in 2012 — “surpassing expectations.” The assessment comes in the supergrids technology roadmap updated earlier this month by Friends of the Supergrid, whose members include power equipment suppliers such as Siemens, ABB and Alstom, as well as transmission system operators and renewable energy developers.
Summarizing the conclusions of an expert group within the International Council on Large Electric Systems — better known as CIGRE, its French acroynm — the Friends of the Supergrid says there is now no doubt as to the feasibility of HVDC networks ferrying renewable energy resources from wherever they are in surplus to wherever they are needed: “CIGRE Working Group B4–52 considered this question, specifically whether it was technically and economically feasible to build a DC Grid, and the answer was yes.” Continue reading “Supergrid Technology Beats Expectations”
The European Commission issued its Strategic Energy Review yesterday, proposing energy efficiency investments, a shift to alternative fuel vehicles to end oil dependence in transport, and more aggressive deployment of renewable energy and carbon capture and storage to “decarbonise” the EU electricity supply. Figuring prominantly among its first six “priorities essential for the EU’s energy security” are the North Sea offshore electric power supergrid that Energywise covered in September and the Mediterranean Ring electric interconnection of Europe and North Africa that I’ve been harping on this week.
The EC energy strategy not only endorses the MedRing, but views it as a component of a future supergrid traversing Europe and stretching beyond the Mediterranean to Iraq, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.
How would this new vision (and $100/barrel oil) alter the complexion of European energy consumption? The energy review projects that by 2020 total energy demand drops from the equivalent of 1811 metric tons of oil in 2005 to 1672 MTOE in 2020. Demand met by renewables such as wind, solar and hydro more than doubles in real terms from 123 to 274 MTOE, while their share of total demand leaps from 6.8% to 16.4%. Imported renewables – with the MedRing delivering North African wind and solar power – jump 10-fold from 0.8% in 2005 to 8.8% in 2020.
Oil, gas, coal and nuclear, meanwhile, all see a diminished role, both in real terms and as a share of European energy demand. Interestingly the role of natural gas – the low-carbon fossil fuel – drops the most, from 25% to 21%, reflecting EU concern over dependence on gas imports from Russia. Nuclear’s share drops the least, from just slightly over to slightly under 14% of demand; this assumes that nuclear phaseout plans, particularly Germany’s, are followed through.
How to make it all come true? Accompanying the EC review is a ‘green paper‘ (the EU’s unbleached alternative terminology for what we’d call a ‘white paper’) outlining a variety of new regulatory and financial mechanisms. The EU is already a world leader in terms of incentives for lower carbon energy with strong price supports for solar and wind and a carbon cap and trade program up and running (though still lacking teeth as my Energywise colleague Bill Sweet notes). However, the energy review warns that the primarily national-level financing that drives energy projects today are inadequate to drive infrastructure that is pan-European or larger. A perfect example is the massive investment in high-voltage dc lines needed to turn the MedRing into a bulk power mover (see the second half of our feature on MedRing: “Closing the Circuit”).
Even less viable under existing financing mechanisms are those projects that entail considerable “non-commercial risks” such as threats of political instability or terrorism. Did someone say North Africa?
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This post was created for Energywise, IEEE Spectrum’s blog on green power, cars and climate
Peter Fairley 