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Friday, July 4, 2008
827 - Could Wyoming run out of elecricity?
Water, water every where, nor any drop to drink. – from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Despite its reputation as the energy breadbasket of the western hemisphere, is it possible that Wyoming people would someday soon find themselves without electricity?
Can you imagine people in Wyoming suffering power shortages as soon as next summer?
Projections by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation have the people of the west enduring brownouts and blackouts possibly by next year because there is not enough power. This study can be accessed on the Internet at: www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/pubs/LTRA2006.pdf.
Across the nation, demand is projected to rise 40 percent by 2030 and the amount of power plants coming on line is down to almost none. The Global Warming folks have successfully managed to shutter the construction of new coal-fire power plants in the USA.
It is easy to agree that global warming is occurring. But what are we going to do when the lights go off?
Wyoming people have always smugly felt that since the coal is here and the power plants are here, well, heck, we will not have to worry when the power goes off in other parts of the country.
Not so. When we have no ownership interest in the power generation facilities, it looks like we have little say as to who gets the power.
Our multi-state utilities have the same obligation to their customers in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, etc. as they do to their Wyoming customers.
Rob Hurless is the governor’s advisor on energy, is a former publisher of the Casper Star-Tribune and is former member of the Public Service Commission. He says:
“If you are talking about rolling brownouts or rolling blackouts . . . most utilities have what is called a reserve margin built into their system and watched by the Public Service Commissions. These reserve margins are generation margins, which are designed to handle ‘normal’ peaking demand events like a spell of hot or cold weather. If the reserve margins have been allowed to deteriorate from a normal range of 10-15 percent then the service territory could be at risk of a rolling brownout.
“Often utilities can predict when these might occur and ask customers to cut back on their electricity consumption. That may be effective enough to avoid shutting anyone`s power off.
“The next stage in the cycle is to `shed load`. In some areas of the country like California, a number of the utilities have agreements with large customers that call for the customer to shut down or curtail their consumption when the utility calls for load shedding.
“In the event that simple notification and load shedding are not sufficient to manage the grid successfully then the utility would be forced to resort to rolling brownouts to keep the entire grid from crashing in a cascading type event.”
Sorry Rob, but this scenario does not sound that comforting.
The NERC study predicts brownouts and blackouts in Texas and other parts of the country next summer but what surprised me is that areas of the West were also predicted for 2009 to 2011. Is that us?
Here is what Mr. Hurless had to say to that:
“With respect to outages, I have not seen the report you are referencing. What I have seen is that our reserve margins are falling as we fail to build generating capacity to keep up with demand. But I haven`t seen anything that says we will definitively have outages by 2011.”
His final comment:
“My guess is that the entire Rocky Mountain Power system would operate as a unit as far as sharing the pain across the entire service territory. And of course the utilities and the commissions want to avoid the possibility of outages altogether.
“By way of numbers, Wyoming produces roughly 6,000 megawatts of power of which we export 3,000. Of the remaining power used internally, the residential sector would use about half in our homes and half would be used by the industrial sector.
“The entire residential load is about 1,500 megawatts. That is the equivalent of about the output of 3/4s of a Jim Bridger or Laramie River Station or about two Dave Johnson plants,” he concluded.
I have always advocated the state should get involved in the ownership of power generating facilities, although the constitution clearly prevents this until new laws change it.
But what an amazing situation it would be if Wyomingites would soon find themselves sitting in a sea of energy production, much like the thirsty ancient mariner, drifting in an ocean of electrical generation, with power, power everywhere but none that we could claim.
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