Bills Unpaid, Power Is Cut to Province in Philippines

All residential, government and corporate accounts in the province, Albay, south of Manila, lost power at noon on Tuesday. An estimated 160,000 households went dark, hospitals turned to emergency generators and much commercial activity ceased.

The Philippines has struggled for decades to reliably generate, supply and manage electricity, grappling with a welter of power companies that have merged or disappeared into others. Blackouts and cutoffs remain common in remote and poor areas.

The government has worked to make the power system more efficient through a variety of privatization measures, handing broad responsibility to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines, created in 2008. But some local power companies have been mismanaged, troubled by corruption and burdened by disputed debt from earlier incarnations. Power supply remains unreliable in many parts of the country, and politically connected clients often leave their bills unpaid with impunity.

The National Grid Corporation, with the cooperation of the Energy Department, appears to be taking a new hard line on unpaid bills. In early July, the city of Olongapo, north of Manila, narrowly averted being disconnected over unpaid debt.

Power was restored to Albay on Wednesday at 5 p.m. after Carlos Jericho L. Petilla, the energy secretary, called an emergency meeting of national and provincial power officials, and the local power cooperative agreed to pay the overdue amount for June of about $440,000 within five days. Local officials also agreed that the 100 customers with the highest unpaid balances with the local cooperative, many of them businesses connected to local or national politicians, would remain disconnected.

Mr. Petilla said Wednesday afternoon that power to the province could be cut again if the local cooperative did not pay its bill for July by the Aug. 25 due date.

He said that a long-term solution was being sought, but that the debt was complex, having accumulated over more than two decades.

Edcel Lagman, who represents Albay Province in the Philippine House of Representatives, called the power cut a disaster.

“We are used to devastations brought about by typhoons and volcanic eruptions, but this will be the first time a man-made disaster such as this hit our province,” he said.

Local officials have proposed drawing on a provincial disaster relief fund to help pay the debt, but national officials said it was unclear if this was legal.

Veronica Moran, a worker at the Tyche Boutique Hotel in Legazpi, the provincial capital, bemoaned the disruption after the power went off on Tuesday. “The city is very dark,” she said. “This is disrupting business for everyone.” She said her hotel had had limited use of credit card machines and computers and had been able to use backup generators only part of the time.

“Our guests have been very understanding,” she said. “They know this isn’t our fault. This is the whole province.”

Daisy Armadio, who works at a diabetes clinic in Legazpi, said generators had saved the day.

“We pay our bill on time, but we are still disconnected,” she said. “This is a big problem, but we can manage.”

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Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell

But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of trash-to-gas technology in the United States: incineration is polluting, and the capital costs of new plants are enormous. Gasification systems can expend a tremendous amount of energy to produce a tiny amount of electricity. Up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth the trouble.

Mike Hart thinks that he has solved those problems. In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel. The FastOx is now being prepared for delivery to Sierra Energy’s first customer: the United States Army.

Ethanol has long been promoted as an alternative fuel that increases energy independence, and federal law requires the use of greater amounts of it. But most ethanol in this country is produced from corn or soybeans, and many people worry that the mandate is pushing up food prices. Ethanol produced from trash — or agricultural waste, as others are trying — would allay such concerns.

Ineos Bio, a Florida company, announced last month that it had produced ethanol from gasified wood waste, using a method that it expects to be commercially viable, and KiOR Inc. will make one million to two million gallons of diesel and gasoline this year from wood waste at its plant in Columbus, Miss., according to Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association. Mr. Hart said Sierra Energy’s technology should be complementary with the Florida company’s; the FastOx turns all municipal waste, not just wood scraps, into a gas that Ineos Bio could then transform into ethanol.

The FastOx gasifier is the brainchild of two former engineers at Kaiser Steel, patented by the grandson of one of them and commercialized by Mr. Hart. “It’s a modular system that can be dropped into any area,” Mr. Hart said, “using waste where it’s produced to make electricity where it’s used.” Once it’s off the ground, he said, “garbage will be a commodity.”  

From concept to construction, the story of the FastOx is of one fortuitous accident after another. And while Sierra Energy has not yet proved to be a successful company — it will be a long while before your garbage is shoveled into a FastOx — its system has become the first waste-to-energy technology acquired by the Defense Department, which paid $3 million for it through an environmental technology program. (The California Energy Commission, which supports renewable energy development in the state, also gave Sierra $5 million, to cover the portion of Sierra’s costs that the Pentagon couldn’t.)

The military is looking for ways to reduce its oil consumption, and to make it easier to supply the front lines with the fuel it uses in all its vehicles and generators. “These days, the supply lines are in the battlefield,” said Sharon E. Burke, the assistant secretary of defense for operational efficiency plans and programs. “And we consume a lot of fuel, which makes us a big target.”

MIKE HART got into the energy business by way of a train. In 1993, he bought the Sierra Railroad, a small freight and tourism line in Northern California. During the California blackouts of 2001, he had an idea: “As the lights were going out, I realized every one of my locomotives creates 2.1 megawatts of electricity,” he said — enough to power many hundred homes. “It’s a rolling generator, and inexpensive.”

The train-as-power-generator idea never really left the station, but it got Mr. Hart thinking about alternative energy. Then, as part of a settlement after a fuel spill from one of his trains, he promised to convert his trains to nonpolluting biodiesel.

Biodiesel, however, proved hard to find, and Mr. Hart started looking for new ways to source it. In 2002, he was asked to judge an annual business plan competition called the Big Bang, at the University of California, Davis. That’s where he met Chris Kasten.

Mr. Kasten came to the competition with an idea to use a modified blast furnace to turn waste into fuel. His grandfather, Bruce Claflin, a retired chief industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, Calif., had given him the idea.

Kaiser used blast furnaces to make steel, and Mr. Claflin and a colleague, John Jasbinsek, were tasked with finding “a way to make the blast furnace more efficient and less polluting,” said Mr. Jasbinsek, who is now 86.

Like all blast furnaces, Kaiser’s emitted a flue gas out of the top. It occurred to Mr. Clafin and Mr. Jasbinsek that this gas might have value. The two came up with the idea of injecting oxygen, instead of the atmospheric air that steel makers had always used, to create the chemical reaction that heats the inside of the furnace. This would cut pollution while raising the energy content of the flue gas — in essence, giving the steel maker a second product. But pure oxygen made the system too hot, so they added steam. This gave the furnace a third product: hydrogen, which can be used to produce electricity in fuel cells.

After Kaiser decided to close the Fontana plant in 1983, workers were told to toss all demolition debris into the blast furnace. It was then that Mr. Jasbinsek and Mr. Claflin realized that the furnace could take garbage, too. “No matter what they put in, the furnace melted and gasified it,” Mr. Kasten said. This meant a potential fourth revenue stream — from taking municipal waste that would otherwise go to landfills.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 25, 2013

An article last Sunday about a Sierra Energy gasifier system that the Army will use to turn trash into energy referred incorrectly to a product of the system. It is hydrogen and carbon monoxide, together known as “syngas,” for synthetic gas; the system does not produce “synthetic natural gas.” The article also referred imprecisely to Fort Hunter Liggett, a training base in Monterey County, Calif. At more than 165,000 acres, it is not a “small” base.

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Cut Emissions? Congress Itself Keeps Burning a Dirtier Fuel

But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf.

The plant, which provides heating and cooling to the sprawling Capitol campus — 23 buildings that include the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court and Congressional office buildings, in addition to the Capitol building itself — is operated by Congress, and its transition to cleaner energy sources has been mired in national politics for years. But the failure of Congress to modernize its own facility also raises questions about the Obama administration’s ability to limit emissions from existing power plants when it has not been able to do so at a government-run facility so close to home.

The office of the architect of the Capitol, which oversees the operations of the plant, first moved to end the use of coal there in 2000 but was turned back by resistance from powerful coal-state senators who wanted to keep it as the primary fuel. The effort was revived in 2007 as a central part of the Green the Capitol Initiative, led by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time. The effort was defunded in 2011 after the Republicans took control of the House.

By then the plant had reduced the amount of coal in its fuel mix to 5 percent, down from 56 percent in 2007. But it made up the difference primarily with diesel fuel oil because, as the architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, told a Congressional panel in 2008, converting the plant to burn natural gas exclusively would have required a modernization costing $6 million to $7 million.

At the time, the plant was spending about $2.7 million a year on fuel oil, about twice as much as it might have cost to produce the same amount of energy using natural gas. The plant remained below its capacity to burn natural gas, according to a 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office, and it continues to burn diesel fuel oil, which, in addition to being much more expensive, is a significant source of emissions.

Some critics say officials at the power plant are purposely choosing to burn dirtier fuel, as a political statement.

“We worked to figure out a way to get around the issue of coal,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. “But it is a futile effort until you get rid of the Republican majority. They do not believe in the word ‘green.’ ”

A review of public records and interviews with city and federal officials suggest that the root of the problem is a lack of enforcement by regulators and insufficient oversight from Congress.

Although the power plant is required to submit emissions reports to the District of Columbia’s Department of the Environment, which coordinates enforcement with the Environmental Protection Agency, and to apply for operation permits for new devices, records show that both agencies have failed to ensure that the power plant is in compliance.

E.P.A. officials with jurisdiction over the plant said that the agency did not have the capacity to inspect all facilities that got operating permits under the Clean Air Act, and that it relied heavily on partners like state and local energy agencies to make sure facilities were in compliance with their permits.

But district records show that the city has regularly failed to ensure that the plant is operating legally. In 2011, members of the city agency’s Air Quality Division discovered that one of the plant’s main boilers had exceeded the 10 ton-per-year limit for nitrogen oxides, which can cause severe breathing difficulties, by more than 20 tons per year since 2000.

“Emissions limits are meaningless if there is not adequate testing to ensure that they are being met,” Mike Ewall, the founder and director of the Energy Justice Network, a grass-roots organization advocating clean energy, wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to the city agency.

Donna Henry, a spokeswoman for the city environment agency, said the city had had difficulties finding records to clarify the plant’s emission history.

The chairmen and the ranking members of the House and Senate committees that oversee the power plant declined to comment, as did the office of the architect of the Capitol, often referred to as A.O.C.

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On Rooftops, a Rival for Utilities

Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power. At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry.

According to the Energy Information Administration, rooftop solar electricity — the economics of which often depend on government incentives and mandates — accounts for less than a quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s power generation.

And yet, to hear executives tell it, such power sources could ultimately threaten traditional utilities’ ability to maintain the nation’s grid.

“We did not get in front of this disruption,” Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. “It may be too late.”

Advocates of renewable energy — not least solar industry executives who stand to get rich from the transformation — say such statements are wildly overblown. For now, they say, the government needs to help make the economics of renewable power work for ordinary Americans. Without incentives, the young industry might wither — and with it, their own potential profits.

The battle is playing out among energy executives, lawmakers and regulators across the country.

In Arizona, for example, the country’s second-largest solar market, the state’s largest utility is pressuring the Arizona Corporation Commission, which sets utility rates, to reconsider a generous residential credit and impose new fees on customers, months after the agency eliminated a commercial solar incentive. In North Carolina, Duke Energy is pushing to institute a new set of charges for solar customers as well.

Nowhere, though, is the battle more heated than in California, home to the nation’s largest solar market and some of the most aggressive subsidies. The outcome has the potential to set the course for solar and other renewable energies for decades to come.

At the heart of the fight is a credit system called net metering, which pays residential and commercial customers for excess renewable energy they sell back to utilities. Currently, 43 states, the District of Columbia and 4 territories offer a form of the incentive, according to the Energy Department.

Some keep the credit in line with the wholesale prices that utilities pay large power producers, which can be a few cents a kilowatt-hour. But in California, those payments are among the most generous because they are tied to the daytime retail rates customers pay for electricity, which include utility costs for maintaining the grid.

California’s three major utilities estimate that by the time the subsidy program fills up under its current limits, they could have to make up almost $1.4 billion a year in revenue lost to solar customers, and shift that burden to roughly 7.6 million nonsolar customers — an extra $185 a year if evenly spread. Some studies cited by solar advocates have shown, though, that the credit system can result in a net savings for the utilities.

Utilities in California have appealed to lawmakers and regulators to reduce the credits and limit the number of people who can participate. It has been an uphill fight.

About a year ago, the utilities pushed regulators to keep the amount of rooftop solar that would qualify for the net metering program at a low level; instead, regulators effectively raised it. Still, the utilities won a concession from the Legislature, which ordered the California Public Utilities Commission to conduct a study to determine the costs and benefits of rooftop solar to both customers and the power grid with an eye toward retooling the policy.

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Battery Seen as Way to Cut Heat-Related Power Losses

Such disruptions have plagued utilities for years: how do they keep extra electricity on hand and ready to go, avoiding the need to cut the voltage in stressed neighborhoods and lowering the risk of blackouts?

Now, several utilities, including Con Edison, National Grid and the large European utilities Enel and GDF SUEZ, have signed up to fine-tune and test what they hope could lead to an answer — a battery half the size of a refrigerator from Eos Energy Storage, the company said Tuesday. If the testing goes well, the batteries hold the promise of providing storage that until now has been unaffordable on a large scale.

“Energy storage is no longer an idea and a theory — it’s actually a practical reality,” said Steve Hellman, Eos’s president. “You’re seeing a lot of commercial activity in the energy storage sector.”

Part of the appeal is economic: utilities could buy power from centralized plants during off-peak hours, when it is cheaper, and use it to feed the grid at peak hours when it is typically more expensive. That could also relieve congestion on some transmission lines, reducing strain and the need to spend money upgrading or repairing them. In addition, batteries could help integrate more renewable sources like solar and wind into the power grid, smoothing out their intermittent production.

“Energy storage in general has been kind of a holy grail for utilities — a lot of the generation and demand is instantaneous,” said Joseph Carbonara, project manager in research and development at Con Edison, who is managing the Eos program. “The utilities have always been looking to buffer that.”

Utilities and institutions across the country, many with grants from federal or state energy departments, are testing energy storage technologies. Con Edison and the City University of New York are using a different zinc-based battery from Urban Electric Power to help reduce the school’s peak energy use as part of a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority program. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric is studying sodium-sulfur batteries that can store more than six hours of energy. And Duke Energy is working with lead acid batteries from Xtreme Power that are linked to a wind farm in Texas.

At the same time, there are a host of start-ups racing to develop different technologies for a wide range of applications, and already there are some large-scale batteries tied to the grid. But the technology has generally proved too expensive for widespread adoption.

Eos says it has gotten around that problem. Its battery relies on zinc, a relatively plentiful and cheap element. The company projects that its cost will be $160 a kilowatt-hour, and that it would provide electricity cheaper than a new gas power plant built to help fulfill periods of high demand, Eos executives said. Other battery technologies can range from $400 to about $1,000 a kilowatt-hour.

“They’ve got a cost factor that makes it economically viable to use their batteries,” said Troy DeVries, director of research and development at Con Edison. He added that the batteries did not contain toxic chemicals, making them more appealing for use in a congested city like New York.

In recent years, utilities have had to find creative ways to contend with surging demand during heat waves. Con Edison, for instance, has used generators to support electric substations and, from its central command station, has shut off central air-conditioning units in thousands of homes and businesses. The utility has even canceled Little League night games in Staten Island to save the energy that the field lights would use.

The battery project is still in its early stages, with the company collaborating with each utility to complete its prototypes with an aim of having some up and running next year.

Eos plans to work with the utilities to test small-scale versions of the batteries and how they connect to different power grid systems. The eventual goal would be to develop a battery the size of a cargo container for use on a commercial scale.

Testing on a small scale is necessary, said Michael Oster, the Eos chief executive, because the companies are trying to sell a new technology to a traditionally conservative industry.

“We’re getting that industry involved early — we’re understanding their pain and understanding their needs and getting them comfortable with the technology,” Mr. Oster said. “They need it badly enough that they’re willing to take the risks but also to join in mitigating those risks with others.”

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As Worries Over the Power Grid Rise, a Drill Will Simulate a Knockout Blow

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.

They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to participate.

“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. “We really want to go beyond that.”

One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.

“If we fail at electricity, we’re going to fail miserably,” Curt Hébert, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Mr. Harrell said that previous exercises were based on the expectation that electricity “would be up and running relatively quick” after an attack.

Now, he said, the goal is to “educate the federal government on what their expectations should or shouldn’t be.” The industry held a smaller exercise two years ago in which 75 utilities, companies and agencies participated, but this one will be vastly expanded and will be carried out in a more anxious mood.

Most of the participants will join the exercise from their workplaces, with NERC, in Washington, announcing successive failures. One example, organizers say, is a substation break-in that officials initially think is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB drive to upload a virus into a computer network.

The drill is part of a give-and-take in the past few years between the government and utilities that has exposed the difficulties of securing the electric system.

The grid is essential for almost everything, but it is mostly controlled by investor-owned companies or municipal or regional agencies. Ninety-nine percent of military facilities rely on commercial power, according to the White House.

The utilities play down their abilities, in comparison with the government’s. “They have the intelligence operation, the standing army, the three-letter agencies,” said Scott Aaronson, senior director of national security policy at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of investor-owned utilities. “We have the grid operations expertise.”

That expertise involves running 5,800 major power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, monitored and controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades. Some utilities use their own antique computer protocols and are probably safe from hacking — what the industry calls “security through obscurity.”

But others rely on Windows-based control systems that are common to many industries. Some of them run on in-house networks, but computer security experts say they are not confident that all the connections to the public Internet have been discovered and secured. Many may be vulnerable to software — known as malware — that can disable the systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving their human operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical parameters. Experts say a sophisticated hacker could also damage hard-to-replace equipment.

In an effort to draw utilities and the government closer, the industry recently established the Electricity Sub-Sector Coordinating Council, made up of high-level executives, to meet with federal officials. The first session is next month.

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Appeals Court Blocks Attempt by Vermont to Close a Nuclear Plant

“The nuclear power industry has just been delivered a tremendous victory against the attempt by any state to shut down federally regulated nuclear power plants,” said Kathleen Sullivan, a lawyer for Entergy, which owns Vermont Yankee.

The court found that states are “pre-empted” from regulating safety by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which made safety a federal responsibility. The Legislature had sought to shut the plant by denying Entergy a “certificate of public good” that is required for all power plants. But the court said Vermont was unpersuasive when it said that the reasons for the denial were that the reactor was too costly and unreliable, and that closing it would encourage the development of renewable energy from wind or wood.

In hearings and floor debate, Vermont legislators referred often to the idea that they could not legislate over the safety of the plant, which is on the Connecticut River near the Massachusetts border, and would have to find other reasons to close it.

“Vermont tried to escape the prohibition by saying, ‘Oh, no, we were really trying to encourage energy diversity,’ ” Ms. Sullivan said.

The court also found that because the reactor operated in a competitive market for electricity, Vermont could not close it because it was too expensive.

The appeals court struck down one finding by the lower court, related to the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause, that would have given Entergy the ability to seek reimbursement from Vermont for its legal costs.

The state has not decided whether to appeal, said Christopher Recchia, the commissioner of the Vermont Public Service Department, which represents consumers before the body that regulates electricity rates. It has also not yet issued the “certificate of public good,” he said.

“We’re still moving forward, and obviously we have been focusing on the areas that the state does have jurisdiction over,” he said, including environmental issues and the economic impact of employment at the plant.

Sandra Levine, a senior lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit group that entered the case as an ally of the state, said the court should not have looked at what motivated the lawmakers.

“The legislation speaks for itself,” she said.

But because the appellate judges reaffirmed the ability of courts to examine the record and divine the real reasons for state actions, it could be relevant in New York, where the governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is seeking to close the Indian Point reactors, which are also owned by Entergy, on the Hudson River in Westchester County.

New York is appearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on whether the two operating reactors there should be allowed 20-year extensions to their initial 40-year operating licenses. But it is also seeking to close the plants by imposing new limits on the use of water from the Hudson.

Other states have made it difficult for reactors to build additional storage for their nuclear waste; several have banned the construction of reactors until the nuclear waste problem is resolved.

While the court decision on Wednesday appears to keep Vermont Yankee safe from local political pressure, financial analysts say that it and other reactors have become far less profitable because the price they get for their electricity has fallen.

Entergy recently announced that it would cut 30 jobs, out of 650, at Vermont Yankee by the end of the year.

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