The market for distributed energy resources expands rapidly. Two distributed energy sources that are at the center of interest in this context are wind energy converters and fuel cells. While renewable energy based and environmentally benign, a major problem of wind energy conversion with regard to large-scale network integration is the direct dependence of the power generation capability on the given wind speed. Similar problems of controllability exist for other renewable energy sources with intermittent output. This conflicts with the need to schedule power output in a deterministic manner. A concept to overcome the stochastic nature of the source is proposed. The overall solution consists of a plant where the stochastic source is coupled over a DC bus with storage and a versatile grid interface. As storage solutions hydrogen and a capacitor are considered. The intermittent source is so transformed into an emission-free deterministic generation plant with controlled power output to the grid.
BPA owns and operates 15,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in four Northwest states. Despite sizeable population increases throughout the region, no transmission additions have been made to the system since the mid-1980s. Today, BPA is challenged with an aging transmission system stretched to its limit in meeting current demands. In an effort to make sure that the Bonneville Power Administration provides the most cost-effective solution to meeting the region?s transmission needs, the agency initiated an innovative study to look at its transmission planning process to make sure that it took an all-angles approve to improving reliability. As a result of that study, BPA formed a round table of Northwest leaders in 2001 to help the agency investigate how to effectively integrate non-wires solutions into its transmission planning process.
The April 8 presentation will cover significant issues and accomplishments tackled by the round table including pilot programs, development of screening criteria to evaluate proposed projects for non-wires solutions and detailed studies of current proposed transmission projects.
As electricity markets continue to expand beyond national borders or traditional state boundaries, many firms in one country (or state) now compete with generators in other countries (or states) in interconnected electricity markets. Different operation entities may have different market structures and rules to clear the energy market and handle congestion. Especially, how congestion inside an individual market is handled has important implications on power flows and prices in neighboring markets. For example, additional costs for energy in one market can be imposed by redispatch to remove intra-zonal congestion in another market. However, the impact of congestion management rules on social cost of an individual market has not been investigated systematically for grids with multiple markets.
In this talk, it will be shown how intra-zonal congestion management rules can be designed in such a way that it gives preference to the local generators over generators in neighboring markets. Case studies will be presented to illustrate that a different congestion management method is preferred to minimize the payment to a foreign generator depending on whether unconstrained generation schedules for foreign generators are reduced or increased to avoid congestion inside the country.
Several recent power system blackouts were associated with voltage instability and/or collapse. These kinds of blackout have occurred worldwide in countries that include Belgium, Canada, France, Japan, Sweden and the United States. Voltage instability and/or collapse are major concerns in modern power system operation and planning. In the last 15 years the broad area of voltage stability has become a subject of great interest to researchers and analysis tool developers in the power system community. A vast number of methods ranging from simple static techniques to complex dynamic methods have been proposed for voltage stability analysis.
In this talk, I will describe a comprehensive computer package for on-line voltage stability assessments and control of large-scale power systems. The theoretical basis and new computational methods underlying this tool will be presented. The tool employs the full AC nonlinear power system model and takes account of the practical aspects of power system characteristics, such as real power generation limitation, generator reactive power capability curve, and generation participation factor. This tool performs voltage security assessment of power systems against a list of credible contingencies. Once insecure contingencies are detected, this tool identifies effective preventive control or/and enhancement control to strengthen the power system's ability to withstand contingencies which can be event disturbances and demand disturbances. The multiple criteria of selecting control actions are implemented: user-desired priority-based control scheme, the minimum number of control actions and the minimum amount of control actions. The current version of the tool can handle power system models up to 50,000 buses. The tool is installed in a major RTO in the U.S. as well as several power companies. The tool can be applied in two modes: on-line study mode and real-time mode.
Wind power developer Chris Crowley, President of Columbia Energy Partners, will present a description of the wind power project development process. His talk will incorporate slides, information and financial basics about his company's current 5MW wind power project in Arlington, Oregon.
PacifiCorp's Ken Dragoon, Oringinator, Commercial & Trading group (in charge of acquiring renewable energy for PacifiCorp) will also attend and address issues surrounding integration of wind power. Challenges facing the regional transmission grid will also be open for discussion. PacifiCorp is the off taker for Columbia Energy Partners' Arlington OR project.
Steve Lewis of Lands Energy Consulting, which provides transmission consulting services to Columbia Energy Partners, will also be on hand and available to join the discussion.
Professor William Melody[1] argues that we are in the "...early phase of a fundamental transformation of the global economy. The industrial economy of the 20th century is being transformed into an information and knowledge economy. This is changing the character of local, national and international economic, social, cultural and political activity."
The economic regulation of electric utilities, by its very nature, protects and insulates utilities from the competitive forces of the market. This protection and insulation from market forces has the perverse effect of slowing down the adoption and integration of many of the advancements of the information economy. Combined with a rapid development of transmission markets well beyond the capabilities of the existing operation and control infrastructure, the major ingredients for a massive blackout were in place.
The Blackout Report issued last month focused on four main "causes" of the Blackout:
These were not causes, but symptoms of a deeper institutional and structural problem that strikes at the core of the US and European electric utility regulatory model, which provides for state, or in the case of Europe, national control of electric grid operation, planning and control.
The talk will briefly summarize the findings of the Blackout Report and the electric utility regulatory model; discuss regulatory barriers to grid innovation and improvement and suggest alternative regulatory models for modern electric grids.
[1] Farewell Address: The Triumph and Tragedy of Human Capital: Foundation Resource for the Global Knowledge Economy, Professor William H. Melody, Delft University of Technology
The amount of power flowing through a high voltage transmission line is proportional to its voltage and the current flowing through it. To increase power flow without modifying the line to allow increased voltage, the current must be increased. There is a limit to this, however, since increasing the current causes the conductor temperature to increase and hence the conductors to elongate and sag. In this paper a method to simply and inexpensively measure the amount of conductor sag and, by simple calculation, the average conductor core temperature is described and the results of a field test are summarized. The method involves attaching two ends of a grounded wire of high electrical resistance to an appropriate location on each of two transmission line towers and measuring the current induced on the wire by the nearby transmission line conductors. Information from this measurement is a critical input to any method for dynamically rating transmission lines.
The Western Transmission grid brings remote power (both hydro & thermally generated) into load centers. In recent years several factors (fuel prices, capital costs, 2-4 year lead times) favored local gas fired generation. The natural gas fuel price and availability has moved to the point where large transmission projects may once again be a power supply option.
The presentation will discuss the results of regional efforts to quantify the transmission needs if the region were to develop remote wind and coal instead of local gas generation.
