New Tools for Keeping the Lights On

Now, a decade after the largest blackout in American history, engineers are installing and linking 1,000 of those instruments, called phasor measurement units, to try to prevent another catastrophic power failure. When the work is done, the engineers say, they will have a diagnostic tool that makes the old system seem like taking a patient’s pulse compared with running a continuous electrocardiogram.

Gilbert C. Bindewald III, a program manager at the Energy Department, which has spent about $200 million to encourage their installation, said the instruments were “shedding light on the science that’s occurring behind the scenes, within the grid.”

Phasor measurement units work by measuring the rhythm of current at different points on the power grid. Readings at every point within each of the three North American grids — one covering the eastern two-thirds of North America, one covering the West, and one covering Texas — are supposed to be basically the same. If the measurements differ, it can be a sign of imminent collapse. When the current is flowing properly, phasor measurement units record normal readings — about as exciting as “watching paint dry,” in the words of Peter K. Lemme, a senior electrical engineer at the New York Independent System Operator, which runs New York’s grid. As Mr. Lemme spoke, he looked at a real-time display of phasor measurement units across the state.

But then he replayed New York records from an afternoon three weeks ago when a capacitor, a device that helps maintain voltage, suddenly failed at a substation near Utica. In response, measurements taken at an electrical substation near Rochester registered an enormous shock on a graph. In Leeds, south of Albany, the disruption was considerably milder. The disturbance gradually petered out, like a playground swing that slowly comes to rest.

If that glitch had been large enough to threaten a statewide power failure, the new devices could have alerted the engineers to the impending crisis and given them time to react, for example, by shutting down a part of the system to avoid cascading power failures. Tracy A. Flippo, the vice president for transmission operations at the Tennessee Valley Authority, said the devices could provide “precursor information” before a collapse.

The hope is that they could help prevent or at least limit a large-scale blackout like the one that happened a decade ago.

In 2003, as northern Ohio ran short of generation and transmission because of a combination of neglect, mismanagement and human error, circuit breakers took major transmission lines out of service. The power failure then cascaded across 600 miles, eight states and Canada. New York, Cleveland and Detroit went dark, as did Toronto and sections of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts. In New York office buildings were evacuated, thousands of commuters were stranded, and hospitals were flooded with patients suffering in the stifling heat.

“Somebody in Ohio could have recognized that we either need to raise generation or shed load,” said Richard Dewey, senior vice president of the New York Independent System Operator. Or, he said, New York could have seen trouble coming and insulated itself. The two units scrutinized after the blackout, one in Detroit and one in Cleveland, showed the strain.

Other changes to the grid should help, too. The federal government, for example, has given an industry group the authority to set standards. That group, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, has levied substantial fines against companies that failed in tasks like trimming trees or testing equipment. Untrimmed trees and improper procedures for testing equipment have caused widespread power failures in recent years.

Joel deJesus, a former director of compliance enforcement at the corporation, said that in his view the large fines had been effective. “Wrists have been slapped pretty hard,” he said.

The network of phasor measurement units offers a technological advantage.

So far hundreds of phasor measurement units have been installed across the country, including 48 in New York.

Before then, the operators of the New York grid had only scattered data points within the state. For years they have been mostly blind to the grid outside New York, receiving only a few readings from devices at the borders with New England, Quebec, Ontario, and a region that includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

But by the end of 2014, officials at the Energy Department said, they anticipate that all 1,000 phasor measurement units will be in operation and linked to one another. The next step, they said, was to figure out how to better present the flood of data to human operators in a useful way.

“The question is, How do we cue them to an event that a computer might be able to see coming?” said Mr. Bindewald of the Energy Department. Initially data will be integrated into computer displays, and later it may be used to set off automatic protective actions that would prevent or limit blackouts.

Experts argue that such a system could easily pay for itself. The 2003 blackout cost billions of dollars in lost economic output.

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An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About

“It was my last year to do it,” she told me, “so I literally would just carry around a notebook and write down any annoyances, because that would be an opportunity to solve a problem and have an invention.” An admitted “professional Googler,” she’d been researching all day on her computer when she decided to pack it in for the night.

“I was just standing in my room,” she said, “wrapping up my laptop charger and trying to fit it into my bag and suddenly it occurred to me: Wow, this is so archaic. Why are we using these 20-foot wires to plug in our quote-unquote wireless devices?”

“See past old paradigms” is one of those cheesy riffs one might hear from an innovation expert working the business speakers’ circuit. Yet here it was, a question that inched just past what was simply accepted: Why, in a wireless age, do we still have electrical wires?

As Ms. Perry soon learned, there are very good reasons that we don’t beam electricity through the air. Though you can transmit the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, there are problems. “I realized that anything on the right half of the spectrum was too dangerous to beam,” she said, “and anything on the left half of the spectrum that was closer to radio was either too inefficient or tightly regulated by the government.”

So she started looking elsewhere and came upon piezoelectricity — a form of charge that is created in certain crystals and ceramics when vibrated. If you have seen Internet assertions about T-shirts “that charge your mobile phone while you wear them,” or about boots on the ground literally creating the charge for a soldier’s radio, you are familiar with the idea of piezoelectricity. Those applications rely on something that’s already in motion.

And here’s where the second eureka happened — enabling her to see how she might build a device to wirelessly charge a battery in a cellphone or a computer from across a room.

“How do I create vibration in the air without actually moving something?” The answer came instantly — it was almost like a stoner’s aha: “Sound is vibration in the air.”

Sound frequency “is basically how many cycles per second air is being pushed through a space,” Ms. Perry says. “We have little hairs in our ears that vibrate in response to sound. We interpret that change in air pressure as sound. But sound is something that exists outside of our head. Literally, it’s just air particles moving in an arranged fashion.” So was it possible to deploy sound waves that humans couldn’t hear or feel, in order to charge a phone?

Nothing in her training prepared her for this kind of research. She was an astrobiologist, after all. She was just 21 and had spent the previous two summers interning at NASA.

So she did what most everybody else does. She clicked on Wikipedia. She started with the “ultrasound” page, then “acoustic.” Soon enough, she was reading academic papers at the forefront of various disciplines.

Her idea, she discovered, meant marrying the fields of sound, electricity, battery technology and other subspecialties. “It was such a multidisciplinary idea,” she said, “and everyone in each different department basically told me that there was basically no way that you could get past all the hurdles.”

She kept running into the same genre of problem. “I was working with a couple of different people at the beginning who would say there was no way to get this high-power sound over this distance without creating shock waves,” she said. “Of course, I would have my 10-minute panic attack and think the whole thing was over. Then I would do some research on my own, and figure out how to achieve high-power sound without creating shock waves.”

Afterward, she said, “I would go back to that person and he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that should work.’ ” Each expert seemed to dwell in his own private silo, so that whenever she crossed from one discipline to another, she would run into the same wall of constricted thinking.

Even after winning attention at a D: All Things Digital conference, where she transmitted power an impressive three feet using piezoelectrical technology, she still couldn’t attract start-up money.

“After being rejected by literally hundreds of investors — maybe not hundreds, maybe not literally — but lots of investors,” she said, she decided to research who had financed “crazy things,” and wound up gaining the attention of Peter Thiel, the former PayPal entrepreneur whose Founders Fund provides venture capital for unusual ideas.

The Idea will offer an occasional look at the origin of business notions.

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Intermittent Nature of Green Power Is Challenge for Utilities

Except when they aren’t allowed to spin at their fastest. That has been the case several times in the farm’s short existence, including during the record July heat wave when it could have produced enough much-needed energy to fuel a small town. Instead, the grid system operator held it at times to just one-third of what it could have produced.

“We were being told to turn on diesel-fired units that are very expensive and dirty and told to ramp down what is renewable, cost-effective energy for our customers,” said Mary Powell, chief executive of Green Mountain Power, the utility that owns and operates the wind plant. “We should go with the sources that can have the highest value, especially during peak times.”

It is not the first time the grid system operator, ISO New England, which operates in six states, has cut back energy from the farm since it began operating at the end of last year, or from others in the region, including some in Maine and New Hampshire. Other windy states and regions like Texas and the Midwest have experienced similar cutbacks, known as curtailments.

But the recent Vermont episode, which set off a debate among government officials, the New England grid executives and the wind farm producers, highlights a broader struggle taking place across the country as utilities increasingly turn to renewable sources of energy. Because energy produced by wind, for example, is intermittent, its generating capacity is harder to predict than conventional power’s. And a lack of widely available, cost-effective ways to store electricity generated by wind only compounds the complex current marketplace.

Moreover, although the wind industry has been growing for decades, it is still relatively new at operating large-scale wind farms, so it is often only once a farm is up and running that some of the problems emerge, developers say.

And those problems are likely to grow. Last year, wind power was the most prevalent source of new energy capacity — 43 percent of overall generation installed — while its price neared an all-time low, according to a recent report for the Department of Energy by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A number of factors can trigger curtailments in wind output, including reducing the danger to bats or birds flying around the spinning blades. But more commonly, regional grid managers, who must match demand and supply instantaneously, call for a reduction in wind power when more energy is produced than the system can safely transport, they say.

Indeed, in New England in recent months, the grid system operator has cut back power from wind and hydroelectric plants several times, generally, its representatives say, because they were making too much electricity. New wind farms are frequently located in sparsely populated areas or along mountain ridges where there has not been a need for transmission lines with a robust carrying capacity, officials say.

In addition, it is more difficult to properly synchronize wind’s fluctuating power flow with a system built for the steadier electric stream that fossil fuel plants tend to produce.

“As these wind turbines are built and interconnected, they’re interconnecting to local transmission lines, and for the most part they can produce electricity and inject it onto the system,” said Ellen Foley, a spokeswoman for the grid operator. “But there may be occasions where they may have to be backed down or curtailed because of the limitations of the line — it’s literally the size of the line.”

The fear, she said, is that a surge in energy could overload and shut down the wires, leading to a drop in voltage on the system that could spread blackouts through the region and to other parts of the country.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 21, 2013

An article on Thursday about challenges affecting renewable energy producers misstated the estimated costs to the Vermont Electric Cooperative under production curtailments at the Kingdom Community Wind farm, ordered by ISO New England, the area’s electric grid operator. The cooperative estimated that the curtailments would cost the cooperative about $1.5 million this year; the estimate did not apply to last winter.

The article also misstated, using information provided by the cooperative, the ownership structure of Kingdom Community Wind. It is owned by Green Mountain Power; it is not “co-owned” by Vermont Electric Cooperative, which shares in the cost of running the wind farm.

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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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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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Intermittent Nature of Green Power Is Challenge for Utilities

Except when they aren’t allowed to spin at their fastest. That has been the case several times in the farm’s short existence, including during the record July heat wave when it could have produced enough much-needed energy to fuel a small town. Instead, the grid system operator held it at times to just one-third of what it could have produced.

“We were being told to turn on diesel-fired units that are very expensive and dirty and told to ramp down what is renewable, cost-effective energy for our customers,” said Mary Powell, chief executive of Green Mountain Power, the utility that owns and operates the wind plant. “We should go with the sources that can have the highest value, especially during peak times.”

It is not the first time the grid system operator, ISO New England, which operates in six states, has cut back energy from the farm since it began operating at the end of last year, or from others in the region, including some in Maine and New Hampshire. Other windy states and regions like Texas and the Midwest have experienced similar cutbacks, known as curtailments.

But the recent Vermont episode, which set off a debate among government officials, the New England grid executives and the wind farm producers, highlights a broader struggle taking place across the country as utilities increasingly turn to renewable sources of energy. Because energy produced by wind, for example, is intermittent, its generating capacity is harder to predict than conventional power’s. And a lack of widely available, cost-effective ways to store electricity generated by wind only compounds the complex current marketplace.

Moreover, although the wind industry has been growing for decades, it is still relatively new at operating large-scale wind farms, so it is often only once a farm is up and running that some of the problems emerge, developers say.

And those problems are likely to grow. Last year, wind power was the most prevalent source of new energy capacity — 43 percent of overall generation installed — while its price neared an all-time low, according to a recent report for the Department of Energy by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A number of factors can trigger curtailments in wind output, including reducing the danger to bats or birds flying around the spinning blades. But more commonly, regional grid managers, who must match demand and supply instantaneously, call for a reduction in wind power when more energy is produced than the system can safely transport, they say.

Indeed, in New England in recent months, the grid system operator has cut back power from wind and hydroelectric plants several times, generally, its representatives say, because they were making too much electricity. New wind farms are frequently located in sparsely populated areas or along mountain ridges where there has not been a need for transmission lines with a robust carrying capacity, officials say.

In addition, it is more difficult to properly synchronize wind’s fluctuating power flow with a system built for the steadier electric stream that fossil fuel plants tend to produce.

“As these wind turbines are built and interconnected, they’re interconnecting to local transmission lines, and for the most part they can produce electricity and inject it onto the system,” said Ellen Foley, a spokeswoman for the grid operator. “But there may be occasions where they may have to be backed down or curtailed because of the limitations of the line — it’s literally the size of the line.”

The fear, she said, is that a surge in energy could overload and shut down the wires, leading to a drop in voltage on the system that could spread blackouts through the region and to other parts of the country.

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What were the key energy commodity price trends in 2012?

Last Updated: January 18, 2013

Energy commodity price trends varied widely during 2012. This article provides an overview of key energy commodity price trends in 2012.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration based on Bloomberg, L.P.
Note: Price changes are derived by taking the difference in prompt contract price for each commodity between January 1 and December 31, 2012. This method allows for comparisons of different commodity classes on a consistent basis. PRB Coal is Powder River Basin Coal. CAPP Coal is Central Appalachia Coal. WTI is West Texas Intermediate, a benchmark for both physical and financial crude oil pricing located in Cushing, Oklahoma. RBOB Gasoline is a kind of gasoline based on a reformulated blendstock for oxygenate blending (RBOB).

Coal and mid-continent crude oil (WTI) led energy commodity price declines in 2012. Natural gas was the only key energy commodity with a significant price increase when comparing January 1 to December 31. Heating oil, Brent crude oil, and wholesale gasoline (RBOB) ended 2012 close to the level at which they started the year(see graphs, right side).

In 2012, average prices for crude oil and petroleum products were largely close to the 2011 averages, with some fluctuations throughout the year. Natural gas prices declined through the early portion of 2012 but then increased in the early fall and winter. Prices for Central Appalachian (CAPP) and Powder River Basin (PRB) coal declined at the beginning of 2012 and remained significantly below the average levels of 2011.

This article provides an overview of a series of related articles (see Today in Energy, 2012 Briefs) on energy market trends in 2012. To ensure comparability among commodities, the prices shown here reflect near-month contracts of futures prices. Most other articles in this series focused on spot market trends. Some key findings from these articles include:

Crude oil and petroleum products

Brent crude oil averaged $111.67 per barrel in 2012, edging past last year's average price of $111.26 per barrel and marking the second year in a row that the global oil benchmark averaged more than $100 per barrel.West Texas Intermediate crude oil averaged $94.05 per barrel in 2012, down slightly from $94.88 in 2011. The annual average price gap between Brent and WTI reached $17.61 per barrel, up from the 2011 level of $16.38.The national weekly average pump prices for gasoline and diesel fuel during 2012 set record highs of $3.62 and $3.97 per gallon, respectively, and marked the second year in a row that the average price for either transportation fuel failed to drop below $3 per gallon during any week.

See related article – Today in Energy, January 10, 2013 and January 11, 2013

Natural Gas

Average, spot natural gas prices were lower compared to 2011, however both futures and spot prices increased in the latter half of the year.Natural gas prices were generally uniform across the country, except when residential and commercial demand peaked during the colder winter months. During these periods, pipeline constraints into the Northeastern United States led to increased separation of the average natural gas wholesale (spot) prices at major hubs in New England and New York above the average spot price at Henry Hub.

See related article – Today in Energy, January 8, 2013

Electricity

Average, spot, on-peak wholesale electricity prices were lower across the United States and largely followed the trend in natural gas prices. Several short-term price spikes occurred during the summer months in several U.S. regions as electric demand increased to meet summer air-conditioning load.

See related article – Today in Energy, January 9, 2013

Coal

Wholesale (spot) coal prices across all basins fell during the first half of 2012, with steep declines in Powder River Basin (PRB) and Eastern basins, before stabilizing in the latter half of the year.Record exports of both thermal and metallurgical coal helped offset declines in consumption in the power sector.

See related article – Today in Energy, January 14, 2013

Natural Gas Liquids

Daily spot prices for natural gas liquids (NGL)–ethane, propane, normal butane, isobutane, and natural gasoline–were generally down in 2012. Ethane and propane, the lower-priced NGL, experienced the largest percentage declines relative to 2011 average prices. Prices for natural gasoline, isobutane, and normal butane more closely track oil prices.

See related article – Today in Energy, January 15, 2013

A futures market is a trade center for quoting prices on contracts for the delivery of a specified quantity of a commodity at a specified time and place in the future. Futures markets reflect price expectations rather than current prices. The 'near-month contract' reflects the most immediate price expectation.

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