The Easy Way to Avoid Power Blackouts this Summer

(07/15/2004 03:42 PM)

The Important Distinction between Space and Time

Hal Hellman is mistaken in thinking that the choices leading  to recent power blackouts were made a hundred years ago. He is attracted by the "blood and thunder" of the Edison-Westinghouse-Tesla clash, and  therefore  neglects the actual decision, specifically, the decision to adopt air conditioning. This decision was taken by default, in small increments, as people bought air conditioners. However,  this decision was made in the context of a larger policy, that of  "load balancing," that is, the electric utility practice of quoting low rates to new uses, in order to achieve economies of scale. New uses were supposed to counterbalance the power fluctuations caused by existing uses, and therefore to diminish the need for reserve generating  capacity, that is, generating capacity which was not used most of the time, and therefore had difficulty paying for its keep. A regional blackout occurs  only when there is too little reserve capacity left, under conditions when small, self-contained networks with the same proportion of reserve capacity would have experienced widespread blackouts.

Thomas Hughes went into  the question of large-scale electric networking in _Networks of Power._ DC was not necessarily incompatible with large networks. There were devices such as motor-generator sets. A motor running on one electrical system turned a shaft, driving one or  more generators operating on other electrical systems. Systems such as that of London, which were formed by ad hoc amalgamation (See George Bernard Shaw's _Municipal Trading_ for a general contemporary picture) had islands of AC and DC on various voltages, which were spliced together with motor-generators. A motor-generator set would have considerable rotational inertia in any case, and might very well incorporate a flywheel in addition. It would tend to accumulate sudden surges and damp them out. DC networks also often had storage batteries wired in, for additional damping.  Motor-generators were compatible with AC networks, but they were displaced by the smaller and compacter transformer. The  important thing about a transformer was that it cycled every sixtieth of a second, and therefore had very little capacity for energy storage. With modern electronics, of course, it is feasible to plug storage batteries into an AC network-- a common example is an Uninteruptable Power Supply for a computer. Nowadays, such batteries are commonly placed close to the point of use, where they can be  matched to the  actual criticality of whatever they power.

At present, the main source of instability in electric power networks is air conditioning. The problem with this is that air conditioning  load fluctuates with temperature, and temperature varies over a whole continent. If a wind starts blowing north in Mexico, it pushes Mexican air into Texas, and Texan air into Oklahoma, and so on, all the way to  Massachusetts. All the way along the line, the temperatures rise, and air conditioners start working harder and using more electricity. The national electric grid is designed to redistribute electricity geographically-- it is not designed to redistribute it in time.

The way to redistribute air conditioning load in time is to fit buildings for geothermal heating and cooling. The thermal mass of the earth below a building serves as an energy storage device. This would have been the sensible way to do air conditioning in the first place, but the dominant early form of air conditioning was the room air conditioner, a self contained little box that could be put in a window and plugged into an electrical outlet. By electric-utility standards, geothermal cooling is extremely cheap "negative electricity." However, it is not the  electric company which pays for an air conditioning installation, but the homeowner. The result is a "tragedy of the commons" in which each party is trying to spend as little money as possible, at the expense of the others. Building codes recognize this sort of conflict in areas like sewage, and stipulate as to the required pipes. The codes have not, however caught up with air conditioning. A similar sort of tragedy of the commons operates in telecommunications, pertaining to broadband internet access. One useful function an enlightened government can perform is to print money and buy off the conflicting interests en masse, the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, with the Tennessee Valley Authority, Bonneville Power Administration,  Rural Electrification administration, etc.

It has been estimated that it would cost less than  ten thousand dollars to refit a house in such a way as to reduce its electricity consumption tenfold, and its peak electricity consumption still more. Widespread use of geothermal heating and cooling, as well as solar heating, would confine household electricity consumption to the things electricity does uniquely well, such as lighting and electronics. The resulting surplus of electric generation capacity could be made available for that other great use of energy-- transportation.

Dispersed "micropower"  is not a bad idea, but it is a considerable way down the list of priorities.

(07/16/2004 12:52 PM)

The first  thing you have to remember is that energy conversion involves losses (Maxwell's demon and all that). If you can achieve  90% efficiency, you are way ahead of the game.  However, you may have to settle for 30% efficiency. The implication is that it is almost always better to store energy in the form of something you can ultimately use, if that is feasible. There are industries such as aluminum smelters,  which get their electricity on the standby system, getting a cheaper rate in exchange for agreeing to shut down when the grid gets overloaded.  Industrial users are  much more conservative about using electricity that domestic users are, because electricity is very expensive energy. The implication is that  once geothermalization is carried out on a large scale, industrial users will become comparatively more important.
 
    These sorts of thermodynamic considerations tend to set natural limits on the "financialization" of energy. The energy market tends to shake itself out into a series of natural monopolies and monopsonies, based on things like transportation costs. For example, Wyoming coal costs something like three dollars a ton at the mine, but thirty dollars a ton when it has been shipped to the Midwest or Texas. The landowner's royalty is  about sixty cents, if I recall correctly. The railroads have a concept of "captive" mines, that is mines which they do not legally own, but for which they are the sole feasible  mode of transportation, and to which they can behave as landlords.

Another point is that the search for a reliable supply of a commodity tends to generate a glut.  People arrange to produce as much as they _might_ need, rather than what they _will_ need; they  store what surplus they can; and they dump the excess on the market at giveaway prices. Look at what happened in long-distance telecommunications. One optical fiber can carry all the traffic of a city. But no city can tolerate being at the mercy of a single idiot with a backhoe. When you  crank in a reasonable level of back-up,  the long-distance telecommunications market gets thrown into a state of hyperglut, with the resulting fraudulent bankruptcies. The same thing can be  expected to happen if large numbers of people decide they  want their own  windmills.