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3D Electric powerlines over sunrise
On Christmas Eve, the operator of the Eastern US power grid, one of the three grids in the country, declared a system-wide emergency as a savage winter storm brought high winds and sub-zero temperatures to much of the country. Demand for electricity, especially for heat, was threatening to overwhelm the system, as it did last year in Texas.
A system-wide Stage 2 emergency, which is what PJM, the company that operates the grid, declared, is quite rare in the Eastern grid, the previous one having occurred eight years ago. In such an emergency, power companies in the network are required to plead with their customers to voluntarily reduce power consumption by turning down thermostats (not something you want to hear in a blizzard) and forgoing the use of major appliances. In addition, businesses enrolled in “demand response” programs, by prior agreement with electric utilities, reduce their consumption and are compensated later for doing so.
The tricky part about managing the grid is this: if demand ever exceeds the generation capacity online, the grid shuts down to protect itself from permanent damage, and recovery from an emergency shutdown is exceedingly slow. The surface damage done by the Christmas snowstorm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people in 25 states, yet the demand was still threatening to overwhelm the grid. (Someone, I forget who, observed sarcastically that “they’ve been deploying this technology for 200 years, and the best they can come up with is strings on sticks?”)
The voluntary cutbacks worked, and as the deep freeze began to release its hold on the country the emergency was over. If it had not worked, and a Stage 3 emergency had been declared, the grid operators would have begun a series of rolling blackouts, denying power to large chunks of their service area for relatively short (unless you’re freezing to death in a blizzard) periods of time. As it was, at least 37 people died nationwide in the event; had rolling blackouts been necessary — they were instituted briefly by the Tennessee Valley Authority — the death toll would have been much higher.
Kudos to the managers of the Eastern Grid, and congratulations for their successful defense of the system. Gratitude to the intrepid linemen and foresters that had to leave their families on Christmas and work long hours in brutal conditions to get the power back on.
Oh, and a message to the CEOs of the big electric utilities and the wholly-owned politicians who serve them: are you out of your freaking minds?
You have allowed the entire grid to sink into obsolescence and disrepair for forty years, since deregulation and privatization became the handmaidens of unlimited greed. And having done that, you now propose, along with the CEOs of the big car manufacturers, to convert the whole country’s transportation system — which now uses one-third of all the energy consumed in the country — to electric vehicles.
There is no question in my mind that if a significant portion of the population had been trying to charge their cars in the 2022 blizzard the grid would have failed utterly. Yet the drive to convert everybody to electric vehicles is relentless and growing.
We are being urged by the people who are supposed to govern and serve us to jump into our new electric vehicles and drive them, Thelma-and-Louise style, off the electric cliff.
We live in the Maryland D.C. suburbs, part of the PJM region. I never heard about a call for voluntary cutback on usage until after the fact. (We lost power for about 5 hours on Friday, December 23.) The voluntary-cutback calls need to much better publicised. In the meantime, time to install a fireplace insert and a wood stove and stock up on firewood before next winter…
Before you by a wood stove I urge you to research masonry heaters. They cost more but are much cleaner and efficient, using a third of the wood to heat as well as a conventional wood stove. They have been used in Europe for at least three hundred years, wood has been expensive there that long.
As an army-brat teen, I lived in Germany for several years. On a family drive in the country one day, I noticed that the utility poles were straight, smooth and oddly uniform in structure. My father explained that the poles were constructed of concrete; this due to the fact that the Germans were very strict about forest conservation. As an American, I thought this odd at the time, but when I got back to the States, I realized how essentially ugly the wooden telephone pole is.
Indeed, what are they thinking? California already can barely keep the lights on and they think they’re going to sell only electric cars by 2030. Yard tools as well. They will probably all be charged by secret, illegal gas gensets. But man will the Golden State be virtuous or what?
As an electrical engineer working on the Grid and also sponsoring some rather large electrical projects, nothing brings more fear or trepidation than the idea of electrify everything.
During the cold snap in Western Canada the gas companies produced a power equivalent utilization compared to the record electrical power use. Power, not energy. The gas equivalent power was three times the electrical power. If all the gas load was converted to electricity the grid would have to be four times the size.
That’s a problem.
Next time, when on my computer I will point you to the Electric Highway report done by National Grid for the New York and Maine/or Mass area. One charging plaza for both trucks and passenger cars could be 40 MW, or equivalent to a small town.
I would like to know how they plan to accommodate all this capacity increase because I sure don’t see it. You should see what it takes just to keep the existing one going.
One of the reasons why I find what China is doing so spooky, yet at the same time, so weirdly awe inspiring. Already, 26% of China’s automobile fleet are fully electric, and that figure is set to double by 2025!
And it will!* Additionally, China has more cars on those hyper modern roadways of theirs, than we have here in the US on our decrepit ones.
One of the reasons, perhaps, they feel it necessary to construct what amounts to, dedicated high speed rail lines for coal!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sObkDaelCjs
If I’ve seen one of these 8th wonder of the world type mega-projects in my virtual tours of China in the last 10 months, I’ve seen a thousand.
155 cities with over 1 million people, and all of them light up like Christmas trees every night. Every night! Then these cities, both great and small, do this thing I call, the Dance of Skycrapers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVdahyXIjts
Shenzhen, a city that didn’t exist 30 years ago, now has a population of 23 million.
* I have no doubts. In 2008, China announed a 12 year plan to lay down 17,000 kilometers of high speed rail by 2020, and I wrote at the time, this is impossible, as their’s is mountainous country, and it would require thousands of bridges, dozens of them larger than the Golden Gate Bridge, not to mention, hundreds and hundreds of miles of tunnels; but good for them, at least they are determined to make an effort.
They’re at 40,000 now, while also in that same time frame, inserting 60,000 kilometers of metro below their major cities. .
Is this sustainable? Lmao … China picked the wrong time to become, by many magnitudes and almost all relative metrics, the greatest civilization this planet has known.
They will be cut down long before they reach their prime, poor bastards.
” … inserting 60,000 kilometers … ”
Oops, there is an extra zero there. That should read 6,000. China is good, but they ain’t that good.
Metro is tough action. It’s easier to dig tunnels underneath the ocean (which they do with alarming frequency), as you don’t have to worry about bumping into sh*t.
And here my “Great Power” country can’t dig a tunnel from New Jersey to Manhatten. It’s too much for us.
Holland Tunnel – Hoboken, NJ to Port Authority, Manhattan.
Yup, and the Lincoln tunnel as well. I was thinking more about the infamous Commuter Tunnel, the one that’s been in the planning stages for the last 30 years, which the likes of Chris Christie and the Republicans kept blocking, because, get this, at 2 billions dollars, it would cost too much!
Should have specified.
Add to that the Ultra High Voltage Network, or specifically the HVDC network. Go to the table for Asia and look at the bottom half and note the country where all these HVDC projects are constructed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
Either U.S. or Canada does one of these projects, maybe every decade at best, and we congratulate ourselves, and marvel at our titanic achievements. I can understand why the Chinese may regard us with a degree of condescension. Like Crocodile Dundee, “This is a knife”.
“I can understand why the Chinese may regard us with a degree of condescension.”
Probably more like pity at this point.
There’s ex-pat China vlogger I follow on YouTube, from Great Britian, does well on the platform, 287,000 subscribers, but in China, he’s killing.it. 5 or 6 million subscribers on one of their major platforms, his vids almost always hit 1 million plus views, and he had one top 100 million!
His shtick is he walks around China and points out, by way of comparison, how great China is compared to the West, specifically the United States.
He’ll point at something as he’s walking, these days, it could be pretty much anything really, and say sardonically, “Look at that America, can you imagine ever having something so grand as that?”
No I can’t actually, not in a million years.
The one that topped a 100 million views, had him searching every nook and cranny of his Tier 6 city looking for signs of homelessness, while splicing in footage of various, miles long homeless encampments in LA.
Needless to say, he didn’t find any.
A few more thoughts about “strings on sticks”:
During my two-decade residency in Baltimore, electrical outages were virtually unheard of. All the wiring is underground, both in the urban center and the greater part of the residential structure. Weather be damned, the juice was always on!
When I relocated to Columbus – an otherwise pleasant and serviceable berg – I was surprised by the frequency of electrical power outages. Windstorms, broken tree branches, wet snow falls, drunken drivers careening off course, and just plain routine maintenance due to exposure to the elements; all of these and more makes for an unreliable electric grid. And all due to the fact that, outside of the downtown core, practically all the electricity in Columbus is delivered atop wooden utility poles – strings on sticks.
What’s more, as far as the negative aesthetic impact this ugly, antiquated arrangement has on our town…well, don’t get me started!
Agree about the aesthetics of “strings on sticks”. These constructions do go up at a fraction of the cost for underground. Urban centers are underground for the aesthetics reason and also population density makes it financially feasible.
However, underground is also a magnitude more expensive to repair. And the underground vaults can be quite dangerous. I don’t like going into them AT ALL. I don’t know how those linemen put up with it. An overhead line can be repaired by a single lineman, while underground requires a minimum of two, and usually three linemen. Power outage frequency is not really a function of the technical design, it is a function of Biz Kids running utilities and lack of capacity and maintenance thereof. Its a self-induced wound.
Let’s take the scale up a notch though. I have been working with a consortium that are proposing a portfolio of infrastructure projects for Western Canada. These are through a First Nations organization and therefore have latitude to get around provincial roadblocks. One of our projects is a Western Canada “super grid” (see China reference above – however, not quite that scale :-) ). The HVDC transmission system is designed primarily as an underground cable system installed along the railway right-of-way (ROW). Same as the SOO transmission project in the U.S. Midwest. They stole our idea, but in reality it is more so great minds think alike. We may see a lot more HVDC projects getting installed in railway ROW.
The transmission supergrid is anchored by a 4,000 MW PSH in eastern BC. The facility can be 6,000 MW, but we think this would only be required if the U.S. interconnects to store wind power from Montana and Wyoming.
Another technical development we have that will coming to a theatre near you in the coming years is the HVDC “transformer”, or Tap. It is essentially an Inverter designed to connect to a 500 kV HVDC line. These would be installed at intervals along the HVDC circuit to facilitate regional grids and large EV charging platforms, including electric railway. This is how we build out the EV charging infrastructure. For reference, see:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/us/EVhighway
(And Tom should do an essay or two on this Study).
That is the other half. A new freight electric railway interconnecting ports on the Pacific (new) and Churchill, MB. That’s right, shipping through the Arctic via Hudson’s Bay. The primary purpose is for bulk commodities including Green Ammonia for use as hydrogen and fertilizer, LNG, and other usual suspects such as wheat and potash.
(Are we fighting climate change? Indirectly, yes, but at the same time keeping other economies going so they can fight as well – that is, help them from not using coal because they are out of options.)
The rail system is designed using our new IndyDrive system. Each rail car has an electric drive; about the same size as a Toyota Prius (slightly older version as Toyota as revised the design). The system doesn’t need a locomotive, or series of locomotives. Its about time we moved away from the horse pulling a wagon paradigm. The performance and safety gains are parallel to the Tesla Semi. You see, in heavy freight the powertrain is typically not the safety issue, it is the braking and momentum.
Interesting info, BC, if a little over my head. Anyway, I’m glad someone’s working on this stuff.
An odd remembrance: when cable television came on the scene, in the mid 70s’ I believe, few in Baltimore city could acquire it – no utility poles, no cable!…Funny how the United States often seems like a grand montage of unintended consequences.
Does the ‘Site C’ damn figure into any of it? Assuming it doesn’t collapse.
Tesla Supercharger station coming to Maple Ridge
Chargers are being installed at Maple Ridge Square
“Tesla is building a Supercharger station in Maple Ridge.
Construction is underway in the parking lot of Maple Ridge Square at the corner of 224 Street and Dewdney Trunk Road.
According to PlugShare, a website that has mapped more than 610,000 EV charging stations across the globe, the Tesla Supercharger station will eventually have 12 Tesla V3 Superchargers available for consumers and is scheduled to open in 2023.”
“However, the same workshop noted that Tesla Superchargers are fast-charging stations only compatible with Tesla vehicles.”
https://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/tesla-supercharger-station-coming-to-maple-ridge/
I walk by this Tesla charging almost everyday. It’s right across the street from my local library. I don’t know any details other than what is in the article and that Elon is that stuff you don’t want to step in.
Across & down the street a 1/2 block there are two charging stations. They are in front of city hall & the RCMP station. I’ve only seen them being used maybe 3/4ths of the time -guesstimating.
Happy new year y’all!
Don’t get me started on Site C…, sure >$120/MWh is a great deal . Can do wind at 1/3 the LCOE and not flood a valley – that happens to be a unique micro climate and can sustain the region with agriculture. Weird that far north, but true. They even have cactus up there. And we have palm trees in Vancouver and Victoria.
The part not said about Site C and the LNG development in NW BC is that BC Hydro can’t transmit the power. The transmission system is severely lacking and they seem to spend more time navel gazing on the subject than taking an iota of risk and getting it done. This will continue to be a problem in BC for the foreseeable future.
We are working on a solution outside the BC Hydro domain, but don’t tell them that. Their feelings get hurt easily. (Yes, there is a reason we call them “hydroids”).
Tom, in your list of topics I don’t see one for Extinction. Have you written on it and do you believe it’s possible. I think it’s going to show its true Nature soon and then exponentially. What gem goes with a 6th Mass Extinction? Perhaps coal as a future diamond.
Human extinction, which is what I understand you to mean, is certainly possible but I remain unconvinced by those who insist it is inevitable. My unsubstantiated opinion is that the world is big enough that even in the worst circumstances there will be pockets where life and some sort of society can be sustained.
Tom, I believe Sissyfuss is referring to the 6th Mass Extinction event where (IIRC) 90% of life on earth will die off. Humans, ever the bipedal cockroach will still be around in some form. (or virus, or parasite, pick your pejorative).