Wind, the Beginning of the End of Oil Generated Electricity

[unhappycamper]

Wind, the Beginning of the End of Oil Generated Electricity
09/21/07 · 9:20 pm posted by Chuck Kleekamp

Abundant wind power, with no fuel cost, is destined to replace the most expensive source of electrical generation - and that is from oil fueled power plants. Allow me to explain. In New England, unlike the rest of the country, oil generated electricity plays a large but diminishing role. Almost a quarter of the installed capacity of all power plants here use oil as fuel <1>.

Understanding how electricity is dispatched on the grid is crucial to the explanation. The Independent System Operator called ISO New England, based in Holyoke, is responsible for the reliable operation of the power system by dispatching power plant production and providing a fair wholesale market to sell and buy power.

Dispatch is regulated by a day-ahead hourly bid stack with offers from merchant power plants arranged from lowest bid to highest. The unit of trade is the megawatt-hour (MWh). That's a thousand kilowatt-hours, a unit more familiar to most of us and enough to run a modest home for about two months. As the New England load for each hour is matched with offers, a "clearing price" is established by ISO at the point where the expected load exactly meets that level of offers. All plants offering power below the clearing price are allowed to dispatch (inject) their power onto the grid. Those above, are not. This assures the lowest cost for all consumers. Since power cannot be stored on the grid, the load must be exquisitely balanced with power dispatched at every moment.

What is not perceived by most of the public is the fact that this so called "clearing price" is paid to all providers of power that get dispatched. This means for example, a power plant owner who offers power at $40/MWh for a period when the clearing price becomes $80/MWh, that owner will be paid $80/MWh as will all others whose power is dispatched.

Six years ago the cost of oil and natural gas were roughly equivalent in price per unit of energy, with coal at about half that. Since then, oil and gas have dramatically increased by a factor of roughly four with respect to the price of coal. Knowing the efficiency of generating plants <2> one can calculate the cost of fuel alone to generate electric power. For oil fueled plants it's now at least $93/MWh <3>. For modern natural gas plants, about $48/MWh <4>. And for coal plants, some $18/MWh <5>. It's obvious who's making the most profit as who is being squeezed.

The impact of more costly oil has been to dramatically diminish production from the region's large oil generating plants. For example, the oil-fired Canal Plant in Sandwich (1,120 MW) had a capacity factor (actual production divided by maximum possible production) of 58 percent in the late 1990s consuming some 8 million barrels of oil a year and producing around 6 million MWh. Incidentally, that oil consumption rate is equivalent to almost two days production of all the oil wells in the continental United States for this one power plant in our back yard.


Rest of article at: http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/Footnotes

[razzleberry]

1. who writes this garbage?

oil fuels very little of the electricity in the US.

other countries contries continue to choose oil
for electricity

[suziedemocrat]

2. The article only talks about New England.

"In New England, unlike the rest of the country, oil generated electricity plays a large but diminishing role."

I still don't know if it is true, but they weren't talking about the US, just New England.

[GliderGuider]

3. Here's some data on oil used for electricity generation in he USA

from http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat4p1.html

Consumption (thousands of barrels):

1994: 183,618
1995: 132,578
1996: 144,626
1997: 159,715
1998: 222,640
1999: 207,871
2000: 195,228
2001: 216,672
2002: 168,597
2003: 206,653
2004: 209,508
2005: 211,256

It doesn't look like the overall use of oil is declining that strongly (or at all). This is small potatoes compared to coal, though - the USA uses an average of a billion tons of coal a year for electricity. That's over 20 times more than oil.

Given its high cost and low market share, some oil-fired generation would seen a likely candidate for replacement by wind power, especially in windy places like New England.

[NNadir]

4. It depends on the spinning reserve requirement, but wind can reduce dangerous

fossil fuel use for sure.

Spinning reserve is the generators kept operating to address sudden spikes in demand or the tripping of a power plant somewhere on the grid. Of course, on gusty days with intermittent, the wind itself is the tripping power plant. If the spinning reserve is oil or gas, the wind doesn't do much.

The way around this is to have a broad array of wind farms over a broad geographical area, or to situate wind plants in places where the wind is known to be relatively constant and subject to reliable forecast.

The best place to situate wind is where there is access to hydroelectricity. Turning off the turbines and letting reservoirs fill is a de facto storage system. The Danish system is like this: Denmark ships its wind generated electricity at night, during times of low demand, at bargain basement rates to Norway and Sweden, and the hydroelectric plants are feathered down along.

Denmark is a small country, but I think it demonstrates some of the possibility of wind, although enthusiastic adherents are overstating what it can do.

After rising through most of the late 1990's and early 2000's, Danish gas consumption has, in the period between 2002 and 2005 stabilized at a peak usage and actually fell slightly in 2005.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tablee3.xls

Coal use in Denmark is as follows:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/RecentCoalConsumptionBtu.xls

Summing info from Denmark, and adding info on renewable production there, http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls and converting everything to exajoules, we see that Denmark's use of the dangerous fossil fuels coal and natural gas peaked in 1996 at 0.54 exajoules and then generally declined, with a recent spike in 2003 that represented the 3rd highest use of the dangerous fossil fuels coal and natural gas in the past 25 years.

I wouldn't expect wind to show up much on macroscopic scales of energy use in most places, and it looks tiny when you use real numbers in exajoules in Denmark until you recognize that you must multiply by 3 to reflect the fact that there is little loss of energy to heat with wind. Thus the 0.0362 exajoules of wind energy produced in 2005 is converted to 0.109 exajoules. Then wind looks quite impressive, representing about 1/3 of the energy produced by dangerous natural gas in Denmark, although Denmark is a trivial country in the climate equation. (The world energy use has risen to 488 exajoules per year as of 2005.)

Although Denmark could not care less about phasing out dangerous fossil fuels - they are an officially anti-nuke country - they have done pretty well at cutting the growth of dangerous fossil fuel use in their country. They have special circumstances, but still, they've done something about climate change rather than nothing.

Overall Denmark's over all use of the dangerous fossil fuels natural gas and coal are only 102% of what they were in 1990 and only 138% of what they were in 1980. While the 138% figure may seem upsetting, it's actually better than many other countries you look at.

Wind is not something where one size fits all, but it can do good things when coupled to other climate change gas free forms of energy, the largest of which, by far, is nuclear energy.

If wind managed to rival hydroelectricity someday, that would be a good thing.