At the end of April the California Independent System Operator issued it's "2008 Summer Loads and Resources Operations Preparedness Assessment", an extensive overview issued every year in the Spring to acess the load and generation requirements for high, hot, days of summer in the Golden State.
Among other things, it presents a concise (albeit about 30 pages long, but all online), factual, graph-laden report on the issues the CAISO has to deal with in meeting our summer demands. One can learn an awful lot of how a grid function and what are every conceivable issue when maintaining the grid over a large region, especially as it relates to generation, generation sources and capacity factors.
An entire university course could be taught around this document. It would be a multi-disciplinary course, reaching across collage quads to encompass finances, economics, engineering, meteorology, hydrology, and English writing skills.
On to serious issues and the reason for today's Diary: wind. We don't do a lot of wind in California, at least not yet. We will, down the road. But for now, not a lot. But what there is in terms of nameplate capacity is carefully analyzed by the CAISO. Here is what they say:
"Wind generating facilities are the fastest renewable resource to install and interconnect to the power grid. Wind generation presents enormous benefits as well as significant operational challenges. Wind generation energy production is extremely variable, and in California, it often produces its highest energy output when the demand for power is at a low point. During some periods of the year, wind generation is hard to forecast because it does not follow a predictable day-to-day production pattern.
Typically, during the summer, wind generation peaks when the total system load is low and is at its lowest production levels when the total system load is high."
My colleague in nuclear advocacy and fellow nuclear blogger, Charles Barton wrote the following summerizing this part of the report:
"Furthermore the reports shows that monthly average capacity factor of wind during periods of peak demand will reaches its maximum in January at 25%. The average monthly peak demand capacity factor for the other 11 month is under 20%. The monthly peek demand capacity factor for wind is under 10% four months a year and is only 2% for 2 of those 4 months. Despite its truly terrible performance California investors plan to add more than 4,000 MW of new name plate wind generation facilities, despite the worthlessness of such facilities to meet peek electrical demand, The only reason why investors put money into such facilities is because electricity produced by them is subsidized by the US Government. Because California needs reliable electricity all of the wind generators must be backed up fossil fuel burning generations plants, that must be constantly kept online burning fossil fuels in case the wind would drop. As a method of fighting global warming building more windmills in California is about as useful as licensing rickshaws in Los Angeles would be."
Could Charles be too hard on wind? Maybe, maybe not. The report graphically shows the summer months in a line graph. If one scrolls down to Figure No. 5. in the above linked report, you will see that the average 2007 generation for all of the wind farms in the ISO jurisdiction. It shows little red diamonds at the time of how much wind is produced at peak. The short answer is very, very little. The longer answer is that on a daily basis, when we actually need the extra power, during the peak, wind for that time of day is often less than 10% of the potential capacity factor. It picks up later in the evening when it is not needed.
Now the tax write off and subsidy Charles talks about is a Federal issue. But much in this state, a state by the way controlled lock, stock and barrel by the Democrats despite the faux-Republican as governor, helps further along in wind power as it's currently much in vogue among Democrats who feel they have to wear their environmental badge on their lapels. ...but again, as Charles noted, all these fossil plants have to be either kept steaming to back up this wind or, they keep adding gas fired particulate generating CO2 spewing "peaker" units that are supposed to run at "peak time" but in reality run about 6 hours a day or longer and, around the clock if need be in the summer time. So much for cutting down on CO2 production...
So...what is the answer. In California (albeit not necessarily in windy North Dakota), the first thing is to stop investing in tax subsidized and seemingly useless wind power. The CAISO web site shows what is the minimum base load of the state (for the CASISO that's about 80% of all generation in the state, the rest being municipal utility districts or irrigation districts that don't fall under the area of control) is about 21,000 MWs. As the load climes toward the peak of 40,000 MWs, more power is taken from thermal plants going up on load, more hydro power, more combustion gas turbines and the stable and reliable 4400 MWs from the states four nuclear reactors which provide this load for a steady 24 hours.
Clearly, 16,000 of these base-load 21,000 MWs could be garnered from nuclear energy, from about 12 new reactors depending on size. We could eliminate all the thermal plants with such a nuclear base, and cut down CO2 emissions by a tremendous amount, far better than wind could ever hope to...because if the nuclear plants come online, we can actually shut OFF the thermal gas plants AND the thousands of MWs of coal produced power owned by the Dept. of Water in Los Angeles, which has 'captured' coal plants in Nevada but correctly, are part of the states energy mix. Gone. Poof!
To do this the Democrats are going to have to cross the aisle and embrace the energy perspectives of the conservative Orange County Republican Chuck DeVore, who, unfortunately, seems to be about the only politician who understands these issues (even if he's wrong on every other political question from the perspective of the Democratic Party). It means being REAL environmentalists and not the knee-jerk anti-nuclear hand raisers they have been in the past.
Si se puede..it can be done. Some Democrats are beginning to turn...progressive on nuclear energy. This is a good thing.
David Walters