ERMUSR MISC. ITEMS 12-09-2003 - Laserfiche WebLink

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What Causes Power Outages Auto accidents • How can hot weather affect power systems.? Human error Utility maintenance 1% (prea ranged) •What causes momentary interruptions? Momentary interruptions,while annoying,are 1 unavoidable.When a tree limb falls on a wire,sensing Unknown i equipment will break the circuit for a split second. This break prevents the system from major damage and actually helps prevents outages. Animals - , contacting wires Weather •What causes rolling blackouts? 12% reLated On occasion,demand exceeds the amount of elec- •7% tricicy that can be produced or delivered.To prevent II `" --- " """. ' the whole system from being damaged,electric com panies will shut down one substation at a time,usu- ally for a short duration,until demand subsides. Source:Edison Electric Institute 1999 Reliability Report(Survey of 62 shareholder-owned utilities) English said. to become increasingly unreliable, elegantly and intelligently plan for Transmission system abuses Macias said. Upgrading generation construction of new power genera- would not be new. "The industry — the business Calpine is about — tion. Consumers will have incentives knows where the bottlenecks are," produces real, hard benefits. to invest in solar power or fuel cell said Patrick Lavigne, NRECA "We're 90 percent cleaner than technology to lower their energy spokesman. "The problem is that old plants and 40 percent more costs when system-wide energy where the bottlenecks exist there efficient," Macias said. prices soar. I are opportunities to make money." "The business of electricity move� Turning transmission assets Conclusion moves away from the bulk com- over to transmission-only compa- Kurt Yeager, the president of modity business," he said. nies will guarantee that the cost of EPRI, the Edison Power Research Clark Gellings, EPRI vice presi- upgrading the grid is properly allo- Institute, in Palo Alto, Calif., has a dent of power delivery and mar- cated, experts said. Why? vision of a digital power grid. His kets, said today we are saddled with When vertically integrated utili- organization is behind the back-of- "1950s technology that, with some ties faced the cost of investing sig- the-envelope estimate that it would exceptions, hasn't seen modern- nificant sums in transmission, they cost $100 billion to upgrade the ization." balked. They did not want to grid, with under half of it dedicated For instance,now it takes 50 sec- impose those costs on their cus- to transmission and the balance onds to assess the system.It should tomer base, when the benefits of earmarked for the distribution net- take less than 1 second,he said. "We improved transmission would flow work, which is closest to end-users. need time-stamped, real-time data." to other companies and their cus- "While the number sounds like Gellings said that it will take four tomers, said Delgado of American a big number, it is really an invest- years of all out research and devel- Transmission. ment in the economy," he said. opment to develop the technology Some utilities as well as gen- Over roughly a decade, the needed to modernize the grid. crating companies applaud the mechanical power delivery system Currently, 65 utilities contributed renewed push for RTOs. must be digitized to carry "smart about $90 million a year for R&D "Stronger regional planning and electrons" bristling with informa- for power delivery technologies. control is the answer," said tion instead of the "dumb elec- That must be ramped up to $250 Calpine's Macias. tricity" used today to power the million, he said. However, while much of the country. "We are four to five years away attention now is fixed on upgrad- In a digitized power delivery sys- from having all the technology we ing transmission, it would be a mis- tem, today's metering technology need to be put in place," Gellings take to fail to ensure that there are would be replaced by a "two-way said. "Putting it out would take 10 adequate generating resources, portal." Both the power users and years. It will be a massive effort." Macias said. As many as 25 to 30 the suppliers would be capable of While the cost would approach percent of the generating units communicating in real time, Yeager $100 billion, the savings and bene- operating today were built prior to said. Once suppliers fully under- fits could dwarf that sum. the Vietnam War and they promise stand power demand,they can more "We're losing $119 billion a year 16 1 4th Quarter 2003