Moving Power from Here to There

Special Issue Volume A Number 1

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David Modeen is Director, external affairs, nuclear power, Electric Power Research Institute, Charlotte, N.C. He has over 30 years of operational, technical and policy experience in the nuclear field. He was previously a director of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

GENE WOLF: We need to be able to connect all of the renewables to the transmission grid, whether it's nuclear, biomass solar, or wind. How would you address those issues?

DAVID MODEEN, Director of External Affairs for the Electric Power Research Institute: New nuclear power is necessary, but let's not lose sight of what we have today. We've heard about how the industry improved its operating efficiency. It's great to go build more, but it's really, what can you do with what you have?

PAMELA CONTAG, President and CEO, Cobalt Biofuels: Gene's comment about a national strategy and a long-term view really hit home, especially for biofuels. Be thankful that you have a grid. In biofuels, the template for ethanol was no grid. Every ethanol plant had to build its own distribution, through trucking, mainly. Most of the feed stock is in the central United States, and most of the energy is used on the coast. That's a problem.
For biofuels, we have to distribute feed stock to refineries, and then take a product to the sites where it's used. We have precious little opportunity to enter transmission systems. It needs a national strategy.

STEVE LINDENBERG, Senior Advisor, Renewable Energy, Department of Energy: Most of us represent a disruptive technology trying to enter an incumbent market and that is never a welcoming situation. I think solar, wind, geothermal and certainly biofuels have felt that. So we need to find ways as a nation to open the minds of the incumbents to the value they will receive from investing in and participating in this new technology.

I think that's roughly where we are today with the wind industry and we're bringing along geothermal and solar as they build out. Concentrating solar and geothermal are going to have almost identical issues. They have a more constant power supply, but they still have transmission facilities that they're going to have to build.

Under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulation, something like 6,000 miles of gas pipeline have been built in the last six to eight years. But less than a thousand miles of FERC-regulated transmission lines have been built in that same period of time. Things are backed up in the process of siting, routing and construction and we need to get a general agreement that we're going to move forward with this and then think about which incumbents are helping and which are in the way.

TERRY PETERSON, Principal, Solar Power Consulting: I've been observing the need for a transmission upgrade for the last half dozen years. I think part of the problem is deciding who "we" are. Ever since deregulation swept through the industry and delaminated some of the entities who used to be the "we" who were responsible for building that infrastructure and maintaining it, the delaminated entities weren't sure which ones of them were the responsible parties and who should be seeking financing for these new investments.

The studies looking at technical issues are certainly welcome and can set up the ultimate solution, but without some political changes to codify who "we" are—€”who's responsible for making these new investments in infrastructure that will be required to handle the load of tomorrow—€”we're not going to make the progress. All the technical understanding is going to be short of the full requirements.

A lot of the problems we have with transmission did start with deregulation. It wasn't so much that people were against building, but nobody knew who was responsible for it. We have endeavored to go out and do RTOs, Regional Transmission Organizations, and Independent System Operations, ISOs. "They" and "we" have become the same. "We" is the industry. It's all of us. Whether you're a utility regulator or a power producer, we're all in the same boat. We're trying to sell power to the customer and provide a reliable service, but what has not happened is getting to be a real issue. A thousand miles in the last few years isn't a lot. Does DOE or any agency have an existing facility that focuses on the integration of alternatives into the grid?

LINDENBERG: We have a whole group of folks at the Department of Energy called the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. In that group are folks who work on policy questions and technology improvements. Their role is to interact with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Reliability Council and the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners. I think they do a good job, but they have a limited staff and a relatively limited budget. When you consider that we have a grid on a scale of a trillion dollars, we spend a whopping $530 million a year in helping to support it at DOE. So we put in a fair amount of energy and effort with the help of laboratories and outside contractors.

Congress has recognized some of these problems. These folks that I just talked about have the responsibility of taking a look at corridors and congestion and doing biannual studies, but the DOE does not run the grid. It's run by the owners, and they make the decisions. They are influenced by a number of different pressures—€”business pressure, regulatory pressure and demand and supply. They find solutions as best they can. It's worked pretty well to date but it may not be adequate for the future.

One of the things in relation to that is national security. The intelligent grid is about national security, and renewables fit into that pretty well. Homeland Security has a project in New York City called Project Hydra. Like the mythical monster of Greek mythology, if one head is cut off, two or three more grow back.
They're putting superconducting cables from substation to substation in an effort to carry more power. We talked about putting smaller nukes in areas that are remote from transmission. The same would go with generation from solar, wind and biomass.

MODEEN: In our industry, probably anything under 600 megawatts is considered small. But in the commercial market place, the small tend to be 100 to 150 megawatts and today, at least in the U.S., Europe and Asia, almost any large utility is looking at 1,000 megawatts or more. I like the idea of small power plants and I can appreciate why one would want to have a mix.

One point I did want to make is that nuclear plants are also dependent on the grid. Large base-load plants help support the grid in frequency-voltage stability but at the same time, because of the heat, you need a lot of motive power to remove that heat and maintain voltage frequency. So distributed generation just provides that much more flexibility and resiliency.

LINDENBERG: From a perspective of renewables, there's certainly some distributed generation options. The challenge of great penetration of a distributed resource is that you then start to become dependent upon yourself. And that's a challenge. If you break yourself away from the grid, and you try to operate as a smaller island, that might work for a period but based upon maintenance or other kinds of issues, you can be without energy at points in time.

There's a complex mix of balancing. If you distribute a bunch of generation, and individuals use it as their energy supply and choose not to buy energy from a supplier that's in the neighborhood, what's the scheme that makes it all work so that the supply is there for continuous operation? Those are models that haven't gotten worked out yet, and I know that a number of regulatory commissions have been challenged with different perspectives on that. We haven't come to a general agreement about what's the right way to integrate distributed resources.

CONTAG: Biofuels are absolutely renewable. You just have to think about biofuels more broadly than as ethanol and biodiesel. When we site our facilities, we have to be connected to the grid, but we still consider a distributed model as one that can access smaller amounts of feed stock in areas farther from the population centers where energy is being used. Biofuels absolutely have to be connected to another energy source—€”and a cheap energy source, by the way—€”so that you can actually make more energy than you're using. But it's very dependent. We have the same cooling issues and heating issues that a refinery has.

PETERSON: I think two time frames are relevant here. In the immediate future, we clearly need to refurbish and expand the existing grid, a 20th century invention. I'm rather suspicious that our long-term projections for the needs of that 20th century invention are overblown. I think the energy transmission infrastructure will evolve over the next few decades to be less dependent on that 20th century structure and more dependent on a smart grid—€”locally controlled, micro-grids that operate either most of the time or some of the time independently of any nationwide structure. And they will be driven by local generation sources, perhaps biodiesel-powered, certainly somewhat solar-powered.

I can't predict whether that will, by the end of this century, make the 20th century invention look quaint or whether it will just sort of co-exist with the extension of that 20th century invention. I think we underestimate the extent to which innovations in the smart-grid parts of our enterprise today are going to have impacts.

We tend to judge the future by today's technology. You were talking about disruptive technology, Steve. Nobody at Ma Bell would have thought we would do away with our land lines 20 or 30 years ago. And the mainframe was king everywhere in business. How do we foster cooperation between the states on siting issues, so you can build a long transmission line from the wind farms of the Midwest or the solar fields, or where your pipelines are?

CONTAG: Part of the reason I started looking at developing our technology in different states is because the permitting timelines in California are outrageously long. I'll have pilot plant data that can roll into a demo-scale commercial plant, and I need that data to go through the permitting process. At the point in time when I have that data, its still going to be three to five years before I can get a permit to start the next plant. What would help us move from state to state is some standardization in the permitting environment. Right now, I get permitted on local, county and state levels and I have eight different commissions I have to go to get a single permit to begin construction.
That's just to begin construction, to even house the employees, never mind building the refinery itself.

MODEEN: Look at spending on Yucca Mountain. We think it's definitely a safe site and yet we're spending billions more building interim repositories outside our power plants and it's just a big waste of money. At some point you have to make a decision. Regional greenhouse gas initiatives and other efforts to reduce emissions only go so far. One region went forward with a trading system and one state said, "You know, we don't really like how that's structured. After five years of putting it together, we're going to opt out."

So at some point we've got to say, "No, there's a bigger good here," and we just have to get on with it.

CONTAG: When you say people need to make a decision, "no" is a decision too, and if you tell me no, that's fine. Just tell me no fast; let me go somewhere else. I see a time when states will be competing for companies that bring them energy, and "no" will not be an option for them any longer.

LINDENBERG: As we think about renewables in the west, most of the 11 states that make up the western grid have an RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard), some of them quite aggressive. They're going to need to find renewable energy supplies.
So then the question becomes, should they do that within their own boundaries and is that their requirement, or do they want to try to find the least costly supply out there that could fit that portfolio requirement? I'm working, along with the western governors, on this renewable energy zone approach. If we can find places that are likely to accept large construction of renewables, and if we can demonstrate that it's a less costly and better solution, that's one beginning. Then we have either the chicken or the egg in the form of this zone. We have to find a delivery system.

Personally, given the proposition of building thousands of 69 kilovolt lines or a few 500 kilovolt lines, I think I'd take the few 500. It seems less of an impact on the environment, on the human experience and generally on the economics of the problem we're trying to solve.

Transmission right now is considered a local issue. We really do need to have a national issue in which the federal government comes in, as it did with the interstate highway system, and builds it. China is a good example. They have a lot of hydro in the western area, but the load is in the east. They built the hydro and started losing money because they didn't have a way to get the power into the load centers. They now have three transmission corridors, in the north, the central region and the south, and they're building 800 kilovolt DC lines from east to west, and they're also building some 1,000 kilovolt AC transmission lines. They've come up with a national program to move large blocks of cheap, renewable hydro into the load centers. DC transmission lines are not expensive to build, especially for long distances, because their losses are so much less than an AC transmission line, and you can carry so much more power over them, but they're expensive to tap. A 500 kilovolt DC line will carry the equivalent of three 500 kilovolt AC lines. We have to be able to avoid the what's-in-it-for-me attitude that we see in a lot of states. Here in the west, we have Pale Verde. There was a second 500 kilovolt transmission line called Beavers II to be built from the Pale Verde switchyard into Southern California.
It's been delayed, if not almost stopped, because the citizenry of Arizona said, "Time out. This is an Arizona resource that you're taking to California." But it was always planned. We need to have a policy that weighs the good of the nation rather than just the good of a small area. What are the panel's thoughts on New Mexico's Renewable Energy Transmission Authority, RETA?

LINDENBERG: I think its great. Wyoming and Colorado both have similar propositions. I think it shows the will of the state. In all of the situations I am aware of, it's been a legislative decision, signed by a governor, and it states that there is an intention to try to get a solution to this problem. I don't think they are a solution necessarily all by themselves because we still have to figure out what the transmission plan is and what the supply and load centers are going to be. But at least there's a stated proposition that there is a solution needed and the state is willing to put up money and political power to try and get to that solution. So I applaud them.

California has an independent process. They're putting together a renewable energy system and trying to identify generation sites and transmission corridors.

These states are heading in the right direction. You then come to the question of what you do to cross state lines. Hopefully we'll be able to inform and educate people about the value they will see in joint processes of building and creating these transmission systems.

PETERSON: I believe you're right that transmission is ultimately a federal problem, and the "we" that's involved there needs to be the federal government rather than state governments. I understand that one of the reasons that New Mexico moved from an impasse over where a 50 megawatt or bigger CSP (concentrating solar power) plant should be built within the state was the formation of the transmission authority. So, it seems to have been a good step even though it may be a temporary step.

The American Wind Energy Association identified something on the order of 10,000 megawatts of wind resources in eastern New Mexico. I think we have approximately 500 megawatts being generated right now. One of the big things holding it back is transmission. The wind farms in eastern New Mexico are built close to transmission lines. There is only one 345 kilovolt line running from Clovis into Albuquerque. That has two wind farms on it right now. The other wind farms are on the Xcel Energy system that doesn't serve Albuquerque. What is the current total capacity of the grid and how much alternative generation capacity could we accommodate?

LINDENBERG: I don't honestly know what the level of the entire grid would be. From some of the analysis we've done, we didn't think we'd get much more than 10 percent of that onto the existing grid. The grid has been pretty well mined for wind opportunities—€”a good site for a wind farm and transmission nearby. Most of those cherries have been picked. You might get perhaps 50 gigawatts of wind onto the existing system, but you'd have to build more beyond that. You might get another 10 gigawatts of solar, either concentrating solar power or concentrating PV, because it's in a little different area and the transmission might be possible.

But we are stymied by the existing grid not being able to take a lot more of any energy supply. It's not just renewables, it's any energy supply. We've not built a lot of grid, and we have used what we had by increasing load almost every place the grid goes.

How viable is localized generation towards solving our transmission issues? Terry was talking about how it's hard to look at today's technology and transport it into the future. With the intelligent grid concept we can put more power on the transmission system if we took advantage of some of the newer technologies. ACSRs (aluminum conductor steel reinforced) make up about 80 percent of the transmission conductor on the grid today. At the turn of the century it was copper and there was big resistance to moving into aluminum.
Today we're seeing a lot of resistance to moving into composites. What governs how much power you can put down transmission line is how much the line heats up and sags. With a different conductor that doesn't sag nearly as much, you can put twice to three times the power down the line. That doesn't really answer the question about localized generation, but here's a different technology that's available, and we're seeing pushback but we're also seeing acceptance slowly. We're seeing pushback to the photovoltaic on the rooftops, but it's definitely getting to be more viable. So what do you think your technologies have done in solving those problems?

PETERSON: Well distributed generation certainly can address part of the problem because those sources are close to the loads and a kilowatt hour displaced by a rooftop solar system is one that doesn't have to be transmitted over the transmission or distribution system. If there was a storage option, that would make the whole system more flexible. They're getting more and more non-dispatchable generation sources on the grid, so this storage system that we don't yet have is becoming more valuable by the day.

Another aspect of distributed generation is the fact that the load curves utilities have today are not dictates of God, they are phenomena of how we live. For example, in desert communities we see the load peak late in the afternoon because people come home and put on their air conditioners. If the cheapest kilowatt hour that you could buy occurred at noon, some people would run their air conditioners at noon and turn them off when they come home in evening. The house would be a little chilly when they got home, but it would be comfortable for the rest of the night.

So how much will people change in the coming decades to accommodate the changes in technology? I'm not sure. But it's a longer time frame than the issue of what we're going to do in the next five years about this aging transmission system.

LINDENBERG: What do you put in for distributed generation? I spent about five years looking at distributed resources using fossil or gas energy, and most of them are going to bring a lot of emissions into neighborhoods. And frankly, hardly any of them is as efficient as some of the large fossil plants we have operating today. Their emissions are certainly causing environmental effects.
The alternatives may be small and controlled, but if you move micro-turbines into everybody's backyard, you're going to have all kinds of ramifications, even if they're running on natural gas.

So you've got to be careful about what distributed resource you're going to put into what community. Large wind turbines are appropriate for some settings. Small wind turbines are about as appropriate as a solar PV panel if you've got the right wind regime and it makes sense and pays for itself.

What question didn't I ask that you'd like to address?

CONTAG: How can we live off-grid? I think nuclear is some part of that for certain small communities. How do we use alternative energies to drive some of the larger-scale fuels that we need to run the infrastructure? When we talk about transmission, who owns it and who are the stake holders? I don't think it is asked often enough. Who gets blamed when you go to the switch and no light goes on? At first it's your electrical company and then it's the government.

LINDENBERG: What are we all going to do now after learning about the challenge we've got, and how are we going to help educate, inform and perhaps influence others around us? I don't think this question is easily solved by a few government agents sitting in some office. This is a problem that this nation has collectively. We've gotten into it collectively, and we're going to have to work our way out of it collectively.

PETERSON: How much pain is there going to be before the problem is solved? The American economic system is very good at solving critical problems when they become painful. I'm hoping this one doesn't have to become painful to the extent of rolling brownouts and blackouts and a few more system crashes.
Nobody brought up the "negawatt," the megawatt that's not generated. We talk about carbon footprints and CO2, but just using our system more proficiently will help reduce that carbon. I'm working on a project with EPRI right now on reducing transmission line losses. The typical transmission line can have five to ten percent losses. If you could get that down to two or three percent, which higher voltages do for you, we'd have more capacity to put more renewables, more nukes, on these lines and be able to reduce our carbon footprint too.