No blackouts expected this summer amid San Onofre closure

[kristopher]

No blackouts expected this summer amid San Onofre closure
Published: June 10, 2013
By David Sneed — [e-mail]

Operators of the state’s electrical grid say they are not expecting disruptions of electrical service as a result of the permanent closure of San Onofre nuclear generating station.

“We are not predicting any blackouts or brownouts,” said Steven Greenlee, spokesman for the California Independent System Operator in Sacramento. “We are working with the utilities and state agencies to develop a plan for replacing that power.”

Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2013/06/10/2541566/san-onofre-blackouts-power-supply.html#storylink=cpy

While the local nuclear acolytes will automatically say coal is going to be the main replacement, that is highly unlikely. Due to a 2006 law forbidding municipal and investor owned utilities from signing new contracts for out of state coal, California's energy mix is only 8% coal (3% in state 5% imported) and that number is set to decline as LA has passed a law to phase out coal completely by 2025 (they currently get 44% of their power from coal).

The state mandates at least 33% renewables by 2020 and they still need significant capacity to meet that goal.

The worst aspect will be some natural gas, but the RPS mandate of 33% renewables will weigh heavily in investment decision-making.

This is shows the trends fairly well:

Total System Power for 2011: Changes from 2010
In 2011, Total System Power for California was marginally higher by half of a percent from 2010. The two primary reasons are the ongoing recession and continued mild temperatures. The effects of the recession resulted in a peak demand that was 5 percent less than the forecast. As for temperatures, they were lower than normal during the spring, near normal temperatures during the summer, and above normal temperatures during both the fall and winter.1 By design, California's electric generation system delivers electricity quickly to match peak air conditioning load conditions in the summer.

In-state generation declined by 2.4 percent in 2011 however net imports from the Northwest and Southwest combined made up for the difference. In particular, energy imports from the Northwest in 2011 increased by 42.7 percent due primarily to an increase in hydroelectric generation resulting from higher precipitation in the Northwest. Between March and May 2011, Oregon and Washington experienced their wettest periods in the last 116 and 117 years respectively.2

With the conversion of Mt. Poso Cogeneration coal facility to a biomass plant complete, the in-state coal category showed a slight decline from 2010. Mt. Poso Cogeneration is about 10 miles north of Bakersfield.

Large hydroelectric generation, a category based on nameplate capacity of 30 megawatts (MW) and larger, showed a significant increase of 24.8% for in-state generation. This coincides with California experiencing one of its wettest years. After three relatively dry years, statewide precipitation during the 2010 Water Year (ending September 30, 2010) was 105% of average. Precipitation during the 2011 Water Year (ending September 30, 2011) was 135% of average, and runoff was 146% of average. Though January 2011 was remarkably dry, the months of March and May were extremely wet with peak snowmelt in early July. As a result, in-state hydroelectric generation in 2011 was 127% of average compared to 101% in 2010.

Generally, when snowmelt and runoff is plentiful, California's hydroelectricity is less expensive to purchase than electricity generated by plants using natural gas-fired generation. Therefore, usage of natural gas-fired generation is reduced ("displaced&quot . This is especially so during the spring and fall months and during off-peak summer hours (afternoon and early evening hours). Wind generation increased in 2011 reflecting the continued siting of new wind projects in the state. Solar also saw some increase as commercial-scale systems came online in 2011.

Reporting requirements for Total System Power are limited to projects rated at 1MW and larger. Because most solar photovoltaic (PV) systems on residential households and businesses are less than 1 MW, data on them is not collected. As more installations of solar PV and other "behind the meter" distributed generation technologies take place, consumption of power delivered by utilities will continue to decrease. Whether to exclude these smaller systems from the Total System Power summary may need addressing in future, if the aggregate capacity and energy of such small systems becomes a significant portion of the state's generation mixture.

1 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/13
2 http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/13

More at http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/total_system_power.html

See also
Los Angeles Bans Coal Power
Coal Free by 2025

By Jon Carter
Friday, March 22nd, 2013
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/los-angeles-bans-coal-power/3209

[JDPriestly]

1. San Onofre -- right near the beach and in earthquake country.

That is a recipe for disaster sooner or later.

[kristopher]

2. There are much more worrisome issues than just the location.

The operators have demonstrated all of the negative traits we associate with corporate greed. You might not have seen the coverage of the real reason they closed the plant when they did. This post contains an excellent discussion of what happened and I highly recommend it. Baggins also affixed his seal of approval by engaging in one of his patented "I'll derail the thread by nitpicking irrelevancies in the most annoying way possible" anti-comedy routines.

Southern California Edison's Problems Ensnare Entire Nuclear Energy Sector

The nuclear energy sector has taken a blow now that Southern California Edison has decided to permanently close its troubled nuclear plant. Safety is a key concern. But so is honesty and transparency.

<snip>

...two letters that have recently surfaced. They show that Southern California Edison had knowledge of the “vibrations” and their potentially “disastrous” results on nuclear operations.

Specifically, the utility’s then-plant manager penned two letters in 2004 and 2005 to its vendor, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries . Disruptive vibrations were occurring and causing tubes to prematurely wear out. That could cause radiation to leak, the manager had said, which is exactly what happened to one of the reactors in January 2012. The company decided to temporarily shut down both units at that time.

<snip>

In the final analysis, Craver says that maintaing the plant while also buying replacement fuel to meet the electricity needs of customers would have become non-economical at year-end. And with no plan in sight for a re-start of its one healthy unit, the company decided to pull the plug last Friday. Coincidentally, that decision came just a few days after the 2004 and 2005 letters became public. The generators were actually installed in 2009 and 2010, before the leak in 2012....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2013/06/11/southern-california-edisons-problems-ensnare-entire-nuclear-energy-sector/

original thread here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112746534

[kristopher]

3. More good information to understand SONGS

Sad Saga of San Onofre Nuclear Is Good News for Renewables


The two-reactor nuclear facility, 78 percent owned and entirely operated by Southern California Edison (SCE), went on-line in 1983-1984 and was taken offline in January 2012 after detection of radioactive steam leaks.

The leaks were determined to be from prematurely worn steam generator tubes that had been part of renovations done by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on the 1,172-megawatt SONGS Unit Two in January 2010 and the 1,178-megawatt Unit Three in January 2011. (The SONGS Unit One, started up in January 1968, was decommissioned in 1992 due to wear.)

<snip>

The extent of the failure was revealed when nuclear watchdog Fairewinds Associates used Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) data to assess the “replacement steam generator plugging" stopgap measure used at San Onofre and other nuclear plants. It concluded that SCE “plugged 3.7 times as many steam generator tubes than the combined total of the entire number of plugged replacement steam generator tubes at all the other nuclear power plants in the U.S.”





When SCE parent Edison International (EI) reported its Q2 2012 financials, the reason it wanted a quick restart became clear. Its stock price had dropped 43 percent, reported EI CEO Theodore F. Craver, and Edison Mission Energy (EME), its other major subsidiary, was in financial trouble.

More at: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Sad-Saga-of-San-Onofre-Nuclear-is-Good-News-for-Renewables?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=Headline&utm_campaign=GTMDaily

[kristopher]

4. kick.

[PamW]

5. What's the "marginal" breakdown.

kris,

It's really not instructive to tell us what the nominal mix of power sources are in California.

What we really need is the breakdown of the replacement power for San Onofre.

That power doesn't have the same breakdown as the nominal mix. If we are "maxed out" on our use of hydro power, since it is one of the cheapest; then we can't use hydro power to replace the San Onofre power because we are already "maxed out" on hydro.

If you look to see where the actual replacement power to make up for the deficit due to the San Onofre outage; you will find that the replacement power came to California from Wyoming, where coal was used to provide the replacement power.

PamW

[kristopher]

6. Natural Resources Defense Council on what SONGS means to the Grid

Without SONGS, California still has more than enough capacity to meet their needs:

In order to keep the lights on, the ISO needs to have more generation available than consumers are expected to use. This is known as a “reserve margin,” and the California Public Utilities Commission requires the utilities to plan for a 15% cushion. And the state already has more power plants than we need to pass that test. This summer, the ISO expects to easily exceed that margin under normal conditions, and to still avoid rolling blackouts even under extreme conditions (like if a lot of power plants go down unexpectedly at the same time customers’ demand is unusually high).




Source: ISO (Note: SP 26 and NP 26 are roughly Southern and Northern California, respectively)

As you can see the problem presented by the shutdown isn't having enough capacity to meet demand.

So why, in 2012 when SO shut down, did they need to pull 2 retired natgas generators (450MW) out of retirement in nearby Huntington Beach?

Blame it on a grid designed around centralized generation. The gaping hole in the system left by the shutdown of a large centralized source of generation causes a lot of problems besides the loss of ability to meet demand.

...the grid needs the “voltage support” SONGS used to provide.

Since a major part of the Southern California electric grid was built around SONGS, it is a lot harder for the transmission grid to remain stable without the plant operating and providing that voltage support. This all gets very technical fast, but the important thing to know is that there are different ways to provide voltage support (and they don’t all require burning fossil fuels at a power plant). So even though one might expect the state to fill the hole left by SONGS with more dirty power plants, this year the state is taking a better and cleaner approach.

So what happens now?

...(Huntington Beach - k) is instead being converted into “synchronous condensers,” which provide voltage support without onsite emissions. (The synchronous condensers operate like electric motors and use a small amount of energy from the grid in the process.) Other emissions-free efforts to fill the hole left by SONGS include installation of capacitors and upgrades to a local transmission line so that if the line has a problem, only part of it goes down instead of the whole thing.

<snip>

The Public Utilities Commission should continue to build on the great start made this year by requiring utilities to fill the gap with efficient and clean resources by:

making the electric grid more resilient through transmission system upgrades;
adding renewable resources in different geographic regions to take advantage of the different times when they’re available; and
avoiding new generation through more aggressive efforts to help customers:
improve the efficiency of their homes and businesses;
reduce consumption during costly “peak” periods; and
use clean on-site generation like solar panels.

Information courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dwang/replacing_songs.html