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No, in fact that would be you (note other than a couple federal references, the following analysis includes only the PJM-area [PDF], the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest of the country):

“[T]he MOPR appears to be based on an idealized vision of markets free from the influence of public policies. But such a world does not exist, and it is impossible to mitigate our way to its creation. ...
Given the pervasiveness of public policies that support resources, I believe the MOPR has proven to be unworkable in practice.”
-- Chairman Bay [of the FERC], concurring, ISO-NE & New England Power Pool Participants Comm. (2017)

All energy resources receive federal subsidies
–can have a similar impact on markets as state subsidies

–Fossil has received 65% of federal support to date versus less than 3% for wind

Additional state subsidies

Standard Attainments
* Portfolio standards include:
– Coal: mine methane (PA, IN); waste coal (PA); advanced coal (IN, PA, MI)
– Natural Gas (IN)
– Nuclear (IN, OH)
– CHP & Cogen (OH, NC, IN, MI, OH)
– Landfill gas (DC, DE, IL, MD, MI, NC, PA, VA)
– Waste-to-energy (MD, MI, IN, NJ, OH, PA)
– New, retrofitted or repowered generating facility (OH)
– Waste from animal, ag operations (DE, IL, IN, MD, OH); industrial energy recovery (IN); paper and wood industries (PA)

Appropriations
* State funding for coal (KY)
– R&D funding
– Mining workforce development and job training
* Tax breaks
– Review is complex, limited in scope
* OECD assessed 3 states within PJM
* Tax breaks for coal, petroleum, natural gas (KY, PA, WV)
* OH
– tax breaks for natural gas, coal, all fuels
* PA
– tax credits for waste coal generation and natural gas infrastructure
– Indicates conventional energy may be a significant beneficiary of tax breaks

Appropriations
* Tax credits/other incentives to attract/retain industries
– Coal: Clean Coal Power Operations ($550m, KY, 2008); Kentucky Syngas ($250m, KY, 2007); Duke Energy ($204m, IN, 2006; Cash Creek Generation ($150m, KY, 2008); Secure Energy Inc. ($85m, KY, 2011)
– Petroleum: Marathon Petroleum ($186m, MI, 2007; $78m, OH, 2011)
– Natural gas: Dominion Resources ($506m, MD, 2013)

Appropriations
* Fossil fuel transportation subsidies
– Road damage from heavy trucks, many trips, remote extraction sites
– Complicated assessments, infrequently done
* Coal: $240m/year in KY (Konty and Bailey 2009); totaled $4b in WV (McIlmoil et al., 2010)
* O&G: No PJM state data, but likely big in some parts. Detailed review of TX found damages in excess of $2b/year (TxDOT)

Regulation
* Zoning and access to public lands
– PA: lots of O&G on public lands; no access yet for renewable projects
– PA, NC, OH: bigger setbacks required for large wind and solar projects than for O&G

General comments
* Quick survey indicates subsidies pervasive, diverse, burdensome to fully inventory
* Significant subsidies for fossil
– Portfolio standards can include coal, methane from coal mines or landfills, nuclear, or biomass
– Tax exemptions
– Favorable rules for fossil development on public lands
– Transport subsidies to remote coal or oil fields
* Non-discriminatory approach to MOPR likely infeasible, benefit questionable, unclear it fixes underlying problem

That's not necessarily according true according to PJM. PJM is, per FERC:

The PJM Interconnection operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the reliability of its transmission grid. PJM provides open access to the transmission and performs long-term planning. In managing the grid, PJM centrally dispatches generation and coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or part of 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia) and the District of Columbia. PJM’s markets include energy (day-ahead and real-time), capacity and ancillary services.

PJM was founded in 1927 as a power pool of three utilities serving customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In 1956, with the addition of two Maryland utilities, it became the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, or PJM. PJM became a fully functioning ISO in 1996 and, in 1997, it introduced markets with bid-based pricing and locational market pricing (LMP). PJM was designated an RTO in 2001.

Per PJM's Capacity Construct Senior Task Force:
* All energy resources receive federal subsidies
– can have a similar impact on markets as state subsidies
* MOPR does not examine whether existing resources have previously benefited from subsidy
* State actions like a prompt siting decision or a favorable zoning exemption may provide more economic benefit than a subsidy

* Federal policies
– Fossil has received 65% of federal support to date versus less than 3% for wind

* Portfolio standards include:
– Coal: mine methane (PA, IN); waste coal (PA); advanced coal (IN, PA, MI)
– Natural Gas (IN)
– Nuclear (IN, OH)
– CHP & Cogen (OH, NC, IN, MI, OH)
– Landfill gas (DC, DE, IL, MD, MI, NC, PA, VA)
– Waste-to-energy (MD, MI, IN, NJ, OH, PA)
– New, retrofitted or repowered generating facility (OH)
– Waste from animal, ag operations (DE, IL, IN, MD, OH); industrial energy recovery (IN); paper and wood industries (PA)

* State funding for coal (KY)
– R&D funding
– Mining workforce development and job training
* Tax breaks
– Review is complex, limited in scope
* OECD assessed 3 states within PJM
* Tax breaks for coal, petroleum, natural gas (KY, PA, WV)
* OH – tax breaks for natural gas, coal, all fuels
* PA – tax credits for waste coal generation and natural gas infrastructure
– Indicates conventional energy may be a significant beneficiary of tax breaks

* Tax credits/other incentives to attract/retain industries
– Coal: Clean Coal Power Operations ($550m, KY, 2008); Kentucky Syngas ($250m, KY, 2007); Duke Energy ($204m, IN, 2006; Cash Creek Generation ($150m, KY, 2008); Secure Energy Inc. ($85m, KY, 2011)
– Petroleum: Marathon Petroleum ($186m, MI, 2007; $78m, OH, 2011)
– Natural gas: Dominion Resources ($506m, MD, 2013)

* Fossil fuel transportation subsidies

Except that out there they still have to deal with PJM. Both PEPCO and various Exelon/Constellation owned utilities all go through them so I don't think there are really any economies of scale that can be gained at this point.

Well said. The North American power grid was built out as needed, where needed... in every instance adding just enough spare capacity to accommodate Summer or Winter peaks without alarming long-term investors. Few redundant interconnects. There was no Central Planning Committee deciding how much redundancy may be required, and especially no paranoid engineering on what are essentially un-protectable fragile spans of infrastructure. As with most other modern systems its very existence relies on human restraint.

Which is why only the dreariest of personalities are attracted to the "terrorist alarm industry" where people stay up nights brainstorming all the various things terrorists could do... so terrorists don't have to. They share their findings to an excitable tabloid press and hold conferences, tongues lolling and eyes rolling back as they receive a congratulatory 'pat' on the head for proclaiming the latest "thing" that terrorists could do. In the place of the Cold War excess we now have a behemoth DHS arm of the government who considers the US as its enemy. Every penny spent on it has been wasted.

The real problem --- if in fact there is one --- is that so many are engaged in this paranoid (but fun for them!) pastime of pointing out vulnerability to potential social malfeasance and so few have been engaged in advancing technology in ways that may alleviate all kinds of threat. This means the harnessing and producing of more energy, not less.

Sorry! To all of you in the US who are pushing for micro-grids of wind and solar as a 'plus', it is not. It is a drain, a bad idea, and dangerously stupid. You are being isolationist and foolish, advocating the most expensive and ultimately disastrous options a time when half of all Americans have no savings whatsoever. As if the greatest industrial power the world has ever known should scale back to some quasi-medieval level of energy consumption. As if grid would be made 'better' by introducing countless points of failure (foreign made) devices. Yeah, let's take power generation outside shall we. During the first continent wide hard Winter freeze a hundred million might die from this Darwinian experiment. Meanwhile your ridiculous dreams will bankrupt us all. Every penny spent on it has been wasted. What stark clinical madness! Your own children will not forgive you this frankly 'hippie' level of denial, which has persisted for decades.

The only way out of this mess is to create wealth the old fashioned way by the creation of something that did not exist before. A relatively few massive energy sources that are completely self-contained, defensible, protected from the elements, stock enough fuel for weeks or months or years, and help to decrease the corporate and personal cost of living. Some have heard me say it all before: put a national priority on grid scale DC-AC tech, build overlapping HVDC loops across the country to feed the legacy grid, and above all, feed those HVDC loops with nuclear energy --- yes, fission --- in ways that are proven and new ways we already know can be done.

FRANKLY, everything else, including the mass distribution of fragile natural gas pipeline networks, are shit solutions.

(the following is a repost but relevant to this discussion)

Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in prog

Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in progress [2013].

Note that NERC's Compliance and Enforcement process is voluntary. This means no one's going to jail for failure to implement these measures... and there are many in the industry who prefer it that way. We have witnessed the growth of the Department of Homeland Security way past its original mandate. Indeed there is a slow motion power grab in progress.

If you distrust large corporations and the consortiums they form then you're already suspicious. But few can argue that the grid is not resilient or well designed. In most cases frequency and voltage give operators all the feedback they need. But it has not ever been shut off completely, and the electrical equivalent of post-9/11 'ground stop' is neither practical nor possible to test black start capability... NERC does do regular computer simulations of country-wide restarts.

So if you are fortunate to live near one of the ~7,304 operational power plants in the United States (for example) and know some people who work there, you might pose these questions:

Has your plant participated in EOP-005 drills?
Has there ever been a country or region-wide drill where procedures are acted out in real time?
Do you feel the time presently devoted to this scenario is adequate, and plans are in place?
Do you have confidence that the grid could be restarted successfully?
Are there any 'old school' approaches to this problem you feel are not addressed or trained adequately?
To what extent are these black start procedures reliant on computers and functional computer networks?
What kinds of grid-wide inter-plant communications are in place for coordination when the grid is down?
Would any coordination efforts rely on carrier networks (telephone, cell, Internet) being up?

The very first BBC episode of Connections The Trigger Effect explores how we have become reliant on modern technology without needing to understand its intricacies, and uses the Northeast Blackout on November 9, 1965 and peoples' reactions to illustrate this.

If Black Start should fail or become delayed indefinitely, National Geographic: American Blackout is a documentary that dramatically explores effects of an extended grid outage. It is a tame outage -- no Winter freeze or volcanic ash --- with cyberattack as its rather specious scenario. At present the operational controls of power plants are diverse and there is a great deal of manual control, and a coordinated attack could only target the grid monitoring systems and communications between plants.

This keeps coming up. The effects of an electromagnetic pulse and a solar storm are completely different. EMP is a big RF pulse with a risetime in the nanoseconds. This is a risk to input transistors connected to external wiring. Twisted pair, coax, and small mobile devices are relatively immune. Fiber optics are totally immune.

Solar storms induce DC voltages across long distances of conductive landscape. This is a risk only to transformers with grounded center taps connected to long transmission lines.

Here are the PJM power grid emergency procedures for geomagnetic events. They had to be implemented for a day two years ago. Almost nobody outside of power grid operators noticed.

The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.

In the real world, they're not. Here's the current CAISO output graph for all of California (which is 800 miles long and has a wide range of climate zones, with wind farms hundreds of miles apart) in the last 24 hours. Max wind generation today: 3600MW. Min: 300MW. That's over a 10:1 ratio. Checking PJM (the power grid for the northeastern US), today's max was 3200MW. Min: 900MW. About 3.5:1. Most days, those ratios are around 4:1.

So you still need a lot of natural gas plants that can be started up when the wind fails. Understand that load varies about 3:1 over the course of a day, in a predictable way, with peak load in midafternoon. Solar power output matches air conditioning load very nicely. Wind, not so much.

The price of bulk power goes way down late at night. Once in a while it goes negative for an hour or two. This happens on PJM when load is low, Ontario Hydro has excess water they're running through generators, the nuclear plants are running smoothly and don't want to shut down, and the wind turbines are getting good wind. The hydro and nuclear guys have a slow response time, so they'll pay to generate power rather than shut down for a few hours. So the wind guys, who can stop in a minute or two, drop out rather than pay. The turbine blades go to zero pitch and feather, the brakes come on, and the turbines slow and stop.

Ah, the "markets will fix everything" (but didn't read the linked article) types.

Wholesale electric prices did rise, to about $950/MWH, for about half an hour around 5 AM EST this morning. That didn't last long. It's now around $150/MWH. The price goes up and down by a factor of 3 or so in a normal 24 hour cycle.

There's hedging going on in power, natural gas, and weather. But it doesn't affect the amount of generating capacity online on an hour by hour basis.

Read PJM 101 to understand how this works. Electric power in the PJM region is normally driven entirely by markets. However, PJM grid control in Valley Forge, PA can order "non-market actions" to keep power on, and generating companies (which are not all utilities) are obligated by their contracts with PJM to obey those instructions or pay huge penalties. PJM doesn't do this often. Yesterday and the day before, though, were bad days. Both days, there were Max Emergency Generation alerts . The longest was from 19:19 EST on Thursday to 08:45 Friday. That's because some generating capacity was down, and peaking plants had to be used to make up capacity. That's part of what peaking plants are for.

Wind power didn't help. Wind power was at a low when power was most needed. Even with wind farms spread over many states, wind power in the PJM area goes up and down over a 4x range.

(Sometimes power is really cheap. The price can even go negative. Load varies over about a 3x range during a normal day, and around 2-5 AM, it's at minimum. All the plants that burn fuel shut down first. Much of PJM's power comes from Ontario Hydro, and when they have too much water in their reservoirs, they have to let some out through their generators. So they continue to produce power even if the price they're being paid briefly goes below 0. Adjusting the output of nuclear plants is slow, and they'll also sometimes generate even if it costs them. The wind farms usually prefer to shut down rather than pay, and so, late at night, sometimes the giant wind turbines feather their props and slow to a stop.)

The last time someone got wound up about this on Slashdot. And, last time around, I linked the PJM power grid training document on geo-magnetic disturbances. They know about the Carrington Event. They know all about the problem in 1989, which happened on their system and damaged some transformers.

The problem shows up as DC current on long AC lines, because voltage at "ground" differs across points hundreds of miles apart. This can damage transformers. So they have DC current monitoring in place at some key points on their system. Corrective action is taken when "DC measurement of 10 amps or greater measured at Missouri Avenue in Atlantic City and/or Meadow Brook Station near Winchester Virginia". Some long-distance lines have to operate at reduced capacity. Some generating plants are told to reduce output. Others have to crank up to compensate.

Medium sized disturbances of this type happen a few times a year (more at the high point of the sunspot cycle). Only one warning so far this year, on June 29th. April 11, 2010 was the most recent disturbance event that required that action be taken. The warning came in from NOAA's Space Weather Center, and people in power grid control centers (the US has seven) reconfigured the power grid to prepare for it.

And now for the reality check. The power grid for the northeastern US is run by PJM, from a control center in Valley Forge, PA (and a backup center elsewhere). Their public PJM Dashboard shows what's going on in the generation system and high-voltage transmission grids. (Retail power distribution is handled by local power companies.)

So what's going on? Just normal stuff. Load right now is 89 gigawatts, just 1% above forecast. No storm-related emergencies. A few routine problems - the 138KV line between Jay and DeSoto is out, and system voltage is running slightly high, so some switching actions were taken. No alerts from FERC or DHS. Spinning and standby reserves are above normal, in case of trouble. Some substations that normally run unattended have been staffed and sandbagged. About 3 gigawatts of extra power plant capacity are idling on standby, just in case, with another 6GW standing by to start. Wind power is looking good today. Right now, there's far more generation capacity available than load to use it, which is typical for mid-day in fall. (The peak is during the summer air-conditioning season.)

PJM's public statement notes that some nuclear plants might shut down due to high winds, but they expect to have enough reserves to deal with that.

Most trouble is on the distribution side, from trees falling on power lines in residential areas. Tornadoes can take out high tension towers, but the wind speeds for this hurricane aren't high enough to do much of that. This is mostly a coastal flooding problem.

Fair enough.

It's being done in the U.S. as well. Also known as pumped storage or pumped hydro.

No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).

Well, no. The actual figure used by planning is 13% of nameplate for peak hour 6 to peak hour 9. (Solar is planned at 38% of nameplate.) Lots of studies are on-going to understand how to forecast wind power much more accurately based on wind plant telemetry and other meterological data. Right now day ahead accuracy has a mean error of around 15%. Hour ahead is much better - about 2%.

That said, yes, it's still a challenge. But batteries aren't the only solution - storage comes in many forms, e.g. CAES, flywheels (at least until the manufacturer goes bankrupt like Beacon recently did), etc.

And to the guy who responded that we have a grid that can move lots of power around - yes, but it's subject to constraints (e.g. thermal limits), and building new transmission is awfully expensive. Wind is a problem in that it's locationally constrained, so you can't necessarily build it close to your load.

That said, on the east coast, we are currently a net west-to-east power system (i.e. power is generated in the western part of the ISO's territory and moved to the eastern part where it's needed), but that has the potential to change with significant amounts of off-shore wind being planned.

It's still expensive, but once you're up and running your fuel cost is, well, how much do you pay for wind? Coal, on the other hand - yes, traditionally cheap, but so many plants are retiring in the next three years due to prohibitive costs associated with retrofitting your plant to meet the new EPA regulations.

As people have already pointed out, it's not a one size fits all approach. You need a mixture of coal, nuclear, biomass, wind, solar, etc.

Just checked the PJM dashboard, which shows what's going on for the power grid in the northeastern US. They haven't put up a Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning for this event.

NOAA predicts a maximum A index of 25 and a maximum K index of 3 at low latitudes, 6 at high latitudes (Canada, roughly). PJM says they issue an alert when there's an A index of 40 or above or a K index of 5 or above. K=6 and 7 level events aren't serious problems; trouble occurs around 8 and 9.

The last event that caused a blackout was in 1989. Since then, more monitoring gear has been added and plans made for when this problem occurs. The basic effect is that the solar wind induces DC currents in the earth, causing a huge ground loop between distant grounding points. This causes DC current to flow through AC high tension lines, which heats up transformers and causes some confusion in measurements. Those DC currents are constantly monitored. When DC flows are observed, the AC currents on the line have to be reduced to prevent transformer overheating. It's an operational problem, but not a disaster.

(If you're really interested in this topic, here's the PJM training presentation that covers solar and magnetic disturbances. This is the perspective from the people who operate the power grid. "When solar magnetic disturbance is confirmed, Salem 1 and 2 units will reduce to 80% power and Hope Creek to 85% power...")

Just checked the PJM dashboard, which shows what's going on for the power grid in the northeastern US. They haven't put up a Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning for this event.

NOAA predicts a maximum A index of 25 and a maximum K index of 3 at low latitudes, 6 at high latitudes (Canada, roughly). PJM says they issue an alert when there's an A index of 40 or above or a K index of 5 or above. K=6 and 7 level events aren't serious problems; trouble occurs around 8 and 9.

The last event that caused a blackout was in 1989. Since then, more monitoring gear has been added and plans made for when this problem occurs. The basic effect is that the solar wind induces DC currents in the earth, causing a huge ground loop between distant grounding points. This causes DC current to flow through AC high tension lines, which heats up transformers and causes some confusion in measurements. Those DC currents are constantly monitored. When DC flows are observed, the AC currents on the line have to be reduced to prevent transformer overheating. It's an operational problem, but not a disaster.

(If you're really interested in this topic, here's the PJM training presentation that covers solar and magnetic disturbances. This is the perspective from the people who operate the power grid. "When solar magnetic disturbance is confirmed, Salem 1 and 2 units will reduce to 80% power and Hope Creek to 85% power...")

Here's what the PJM Control Center (which controls the electricity grid for the Northeastern US) has to say:

74015 Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning 01/23/2012
17:55 PJM - RTO As of 17:50 hours, an SMD warning of K-indices of 6-9 possible or greater is in effect beginning at 07:00 and will continue for the next 24-36 hours after arrival hours. PJM will issue any SMD events or extended warnings posted on the RCIS by MISO St. Paul via the PJM All-Call.
Additional Comments: NYISO has posted an RCIS message indicating expected intensity levels of K6 - K9, however, NOAA has only issued an alert of level K4. PJM will continue to monitor NOAA's alerts and update as necessary.

So PJM is aware of the problem, but they're not seeing any effects yet, and they haven't issued any contingency or emergency actions. The K scale is semi-logarithmic, and it's strange to see such a huge variation in predicted values. They can handle up to a K-7 without much problem, and a K-8 with preparation. A K-9 may cause real trouble.

Here's PJM's training presentation on solar storms. The basic effect is that DC voltages are induced into transmission lines, which causes resistive heating in transformers (worst case, melting them, as happened in 1989). Where trouble occurs is affected by geology and ground conduction, and the trouble areas are known. There are preventive steps that can be taken. It's an interesting read, although if you're totally unfamiliar with where electricity comes from, you may need to go to the PJM training site and read "PJM 101" first.

That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level.

Generation management doesn't require that kind of ramp rate. Read How PJM Operates and Dispatches, especially slide 7, for the ramp rates in the biggest power grid in the US. Ramp rates for generation and load are measured in minutes, not seconds.

That's the generation side. For the load side, see Demand Response Load Management. PJM requires 5-minute response to load regulation signals. PJM (which operates the wholesale grid) sends those signals out to their connected utility companies, who then send out signals to their loads that are prepared to receive them. If the utility is able to cut their load as requested, they get a payment. The whole system is normally run as an economy, driven by price signals. However, most pricing and scheduling decisions are made a day ahead. (The awful deregulation model of an auction every half hour tried in California is not used.)

If you want to understand the power grid, PJM has training material.

That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level.

Generation management doesn't require that kind of ramp rate. Read How PJM Operates and Dispatches, especially slide 7, for the ramp rates in the biggest power grid in the US. Ramp rates for generation and load are measured in minutes, not seconds.

That's the generation side. For the load side, see Demand Response Load Management. PJM requires 5-minute response to load regulation signals. PJM (which operates the wholesale grid) sends those signals out to their connected utility companies, who then send out signals to their loads that are prepared to receive them. If the utility is able to cut their load as requested, they get a payment. The whole system is normally run as an economy, driven by price signals. However, most pricing and scheduling decisions are made a day ahead. (The awful deregulation model of an auction every half hour tried in California is not used.)

If you want to understand the power grid, PJM has training material.

That's probably 4 second data. Not granular enough to provide meaningful information at that response level.

Generation management doesn't require that kind of ramp rate. Read How PJM Operates and Dispatches, especially slide 7, for the ramp rates in the biggest power grid in the US. Ramp rates for generation and load are measured in minutes, not seconds.

That's the generation side. For the load side, see Demand Response Load Management. PJM requires 5-minute response to load regulation signals. PJM (which operates the wholesale grid) sends those signals out to their connected utility companies, who then send out signals to their loads that are prepared to receive them. If the utility is able to cut their load as requested, they get a payment. The whole system is normally run as an economy, driven by price signals. However, most pricing and scheduling decisions are made a day ahead. (The awful deregulation model of an auction every half hour tried in California is not used.)

If you want to understand the power grid, PJM has training material.

The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.

Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.

This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable, and not in a useful way. Peak demand and peak wind output are unconnected. Averaging wind over a large area doesn't help much. Look at the current wind power output on the PJM dashboard. See it varying over a 4:1 range in 24 hours. Then look at the PJM renewables map, showing all wind installations in the PJM area, which stretches from Illinois to the Atlantic Ocean, and Pennsylvania down to Virginia.

The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.

Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.

This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable, and not in a useful way. Peak demand and peak wind output are unconnected. Averaging wind over a large area doesn't help much. Look at the current wind power output on the PJM dashboard. See it varying over a 4:1 range in 24 hours. Then look at the PJM renewables map, showing all wind installations in the PJM area, which stretches from Illinois to the Atlantic Ocean, and Pennsylvania down to Virginia.

To understand wind power, look at the wind map of the United States. Wind turbines aren't useful unless the average wind speed is in the 8 m/sec range and up. Note the huge high-wind area from the Texas panhandle up to Canada. That's where Pickens wanted to operate. Good place for wind turbines, but no nearby place that needs the power. So some long transmission lines were needed. The problem is not that "regulators" wouldn't let Pickens build transmission lines. It's that he wanted governments to pay for them. See Pickens' testimony before Congress. He wanted eminent domain powers and tax credits for high-tension lines. Back in 2009, though, he couldn't raise the $2 billion needed to build them.

Those wind charts come in much finer detail. Look at the California wind map. There are four really good wind areas in California, and they all have large wind farms operating. There's room for further expansion out at Mojave, but the other three sites are essentially full. Those are all successful operations, because they're reasonably near big loads.

Also, the Pickens claim that collecting wind power over a large area would provide significant base load capacity may be bogus. See the live data for the PJM grid. (This brings up a big Flash application showing what the power grid for the Northeastern US is doing. Switch one of the panels to "Wind Power" and set the scale to "All Data".) Within a 3-day period, total wind power for the entire Northeast US can range over an 8 to 1 range. That's from real, operating wind farms.

This is Slashdot. There are many self styled experts here. Some know what they're talking about. Many do not. Tread with care.

Right.

You have some things going for you here. First, your problem is controlling water and sewerage plants. Those don't need to be connected to external systems. In contrast, power grid control systems do, because there are financial systems which interconnect to the operational systems. (Read PJM 101 to get a sense of what that's like for the nation's biggest power grid.)

Second, your system isn't that big. You probably have only one control center. The problems of securing a system with one control center and a hierarchical structure have been worked out. Distributed systems are much tougher.

Third, you're doing a new system, and can do it right. The big problems are with legacy systems that have built-in security holes.

Fourth, help is available. Sandia has a center for SCADA security, funded by DOE and Homeland Security.

Finally, if there's trouble, it will probably involve an employee. That's been the case in existing incidents. Make sure that there's no one person with the keys to everything.

It's a big problem. Grid operators are concerned about "dispatch ramp rate", the rate at which power sources can be ordered to increase or decrease output. Ramp rate from idle to full power is minutes for gas turbines, tens of minutes for hydro plants, and hours for coal plants.

Live data on this is available. Here's PJM's dashboard, with the details of the power grid in the northeastern United States. Once the dashboard (a Flash program) comes up, pick one of the graph panes, and use the drop-down menu at the upper left of the window to select "Wind Power". At the lower right of the pane, use that drop-down menu to select "All Data". The green line is total, actual wind power output for the entire PJM control area. Note that today's low is about 80MW, and today's high is about 925MW. That's how variable wind power is; over a 10:1 range in a single day. That's not just one wind farm. That's the entire northeastern US. It's not a big deal for PJM, though; their peak load today is about 130,000MW. Wind power is not yet a significant fraction of their capacity.

Wind power is not "dispatchable"; the control center can't call for more output. Current thinking is that power grids can tolerate maybe 20% to 30% wind power, maximum. There will be periods of low wind, even over very large geographical areas. Huge reserves of "dispatchable" power are needed to back up the wind turbines. Typically, that comes from natural gas fueled turbines. The backup power isn't needed very often, so the capital cost of the equipment per kilowatt hour produced is high.

Residential systems usually don't have heat storage, but larger systems, with chilled water, often do. Some even make ice at night when power is cheap, to be melted during the day. It would be helpful to have a few hours advance notice of a hot period, so that the system could chill down an insulated water tank for use later.

Power companies generally have a load curve planned a day ahead. That info is available; here's PJM's dashboard, which tells you far more than you ever wanted to know about the power grid for the northeastern United States. (Load right now: 55,292 megawatts. 1,896 megawatts of that is wind power. Spinning reserves are 2,274 MW. Current trouble report: "As of 09:30 hours, a Non-Market Post Contingency Local Load Relief Warning of 11 MW in the Rachel Hill area of FE (PN) has been issued for Transmission Contingency Control. Post Contingency Switching: Open Roxbury at Shadegap, Close Threesprings at Shadegap, open Curryville at Claysburg, open Snakespring at Bedford North." Tomorrow's estimated peak is around 71 gigawatts, expected at 17:30 hours.) The estimation system uses historical data and weather reports, plus bid info from really big users. So one can plan a day ahead if your HVAC system has heat storage.

Routine control is exercised by financial means - all the players submit bids, which have a time range, a low output and price, a high output and price, and a ramp value. The control center crunches on these and decides who generates how much power. Large power buyers can bid, too; they have the option of saying how much they'll cut their load as the price rises. A big data center might choose to be a market player. When there are troubles, the control center can take "non-market actions", like the one above, but most of the time, the outstanding bids determine who does what.

California went too far in deregulation, and had electricity auctions every half hour at one point. There were brokers and dealers who were pure speculators, and this affected live power operations in real time. That caused so much churn that there were blackouts. So now, bids are for a day ahead, and the matching of supply and demand is algorithmic. All this data is public, to keep the markets honest. That's why PJM offers such detailed data about their power grid.

It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.

Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.

Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.

If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.

One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.

Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.

It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)

It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.

Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.

Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.

If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.

One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.

Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.

It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)

It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.

Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.

Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.

If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.

One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.

Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.

It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)

This is the Slashdot-misunderstood version of the Wired dumbed-down version. Here's some of the more serious stuff.

Wind Operations Dispatching Training: This is the grid system operator's view of wind power.

There's a lot going on. Since electricity deregulation, the power distribution companies don't own much generation capacity. They buy power from generating companies. So there's a market system and contracts in place. The contracts are now more long-term; the "auction every half hour" scheme California had for a few years is out of favor. Now, the planning horizon is about one day.

There's a whole series of PJM online courses, and if you go through some of the basic ones, you'll be able to talk about electric power intelligently.

This is the Slashdot-misunderstood version of the Wired dumbed-down version. Here's some of the more serious stuff.

Wind Operations Dispatching Training: This is the grid system operator's view of wind power.

There's a lot going on. Since electricity deregulation, the power distribution companies don't own much generation capacity. They buy power from generating companies. So there's a market system and contracts in place. The contracts are now more long-term; the "auction every half hour" scheme California had for a few years is out of favor. Now, the planning horizon is about one day.

There's a whole series of PJM online courses, and if you go through some of the basic ones, you'll be able to talk about electric power intelligently.

PJM does this already,

http://oasis.pjm.com/drate.html

Give the electric companies 2 choices: Fix your own damn shit with your profits or we fix it and lease it back to you or nationalize you.

Sure there are people that are going to bitch because they're used to their handout. But handouts aren't going to help anyone. Make everyone work.

It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than handing it over to a bunch of people who managed to already lose $700b.

[0].M-F you live in work housing or you work 4 - 10s or 7 on 7 off.

I hate to ruin your rant with what we call "facts", but the grid in the United States is not owned by private companies that you can just boss around from your ivory tower of uninformed tripe. It is an amalgamation of state-run and multi-state entities called ISOs (Independent System Operators) that both contract and coordinate with the transmission agencies in concert with privately-owned and state-owned generation assets to produce consistent and reliable power. A grid, in the strictest sense of the word, is a series of transmission lines, owned by multiple companies, that are interlinked and under the complete autonomy of the ISO. Nothing happens without the permission and direction of the ISO or FERC (and NERC as its enforcement arm). The grid is aging, but since the ultimate authority to direct replacement lies with both federal, state, and multi-state agencies, who precisely in your little world bears the fiscal burden?

May I suggest for your education:
http://www.ferc.gov/
http://www.nerc.com/

And for ISOs:
http://www.ercot.com/
http://www.caiso.com/
http://www.nyiso.com/public/index.jsp
http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp
http://www.midwestiso.org/home

Find the one that serves your area, and berate them with your uninformed bile since you obviously understand all of this better than anyone else.

Or do you?

I also work in the power industry. Check it out for yourself.

Front page of CAL ISO. Or, if you want to see the largest grid in the world for load, PJM is in Pennsylvania. Go to eTools, Login, and look for the eData Guest Login. See lots of pretty graphs, and look for the button that says Load.

These loads are very well understood, and some extremely clever guys work on some pretty high demand computer systems to predict the exact load on each ISO/RTO grid for every hour of every day of the year, all subject to weather and other inputs.

Nuclear is currently under $0.015/kWh, so I would say that there's quite a ways to go for Photovoltaic to become competative. As soon as it is, PV should start appearing in the bulk energy markets around the country. The fact that it's not even in long range planning queue (going out 8 years) of the largest market in the country, that means that the utilities themselves don't believe the technology is evolving fast enough to be competative any time soon.

spending $50M for underground and for sake of argument 0 for maintenance of the same period.

First you are working under the assumption that if you put anything in the ground, it is preserved perfectly forever. You will *never* put something in the ground and do 0 maintenance on it for even 5 years. Ask anyone who works in a NAP, or does fiber work how many times a month they have to do maintenance because of anything. Backhoes, trees, and vermin as stated in a previous post, have an odd way of breaking things that is left under dirt.

There is no market for power distribution. If you are dissatisfied by the reliability of your electrical grid, you cannot switch to a competitor's grid. The owners of the grid will charge you the cost of running the grid plus as much as they can get away with over that.

Just for research check out and dig through the following:
http://www.ferc.gov/ Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission
http://www.nerc.com/ North American Electric Reliability Council
http://www.pjm.com/ PJM Regional Transmission Organization
http://www.midwestiso.org/ Midwest Independant Transmission System Operator, Inc.

The most amazing thing about the electrical grid is that it works at all. And indeed most of the time it works well when compared to, say, Iraq. But although it works in routine cases, it does not work in even moderately exceptional cases, such as peak demand for air conditioning. And it certainly does not work to address problems like the California power crisis of several years ago.

It is only amazing that something that is watched over by the government is able to function as efficiently as the Electric Grid, other than that standards and policies and procedures out the rear are in place to ensure that the lights stay on. Also, as someone else already said to you, the situation in California was staged specifically to line the pockets of officers of a Public Utility.

Looking forward two to three decades, the electrical grid is probably the single most important piece of infrastucture to improve

The grid is being upgraded on a regular basis. It is known that the US is power hungry (in the electic sense here) and Utilities are working almost daily to get funding, and zoning, and laws to build more distribution sites. Bureaucracy is a slow, tedious process.

First off, despite what Enron did, the State of California dug itself into a hole because of NIMBY. There was little or no plant construction in California during the 1990s, a time when the population boomed. It was impossible to get permits for new plants and most new construction was tied up in courts over environmental issues. When the crunch did happen, Enron and others wrongly exploited California, but not at all in the way that has been oversimplified by the press or even the idiot Ralph Nader types.

California, because it had not built enough power plants, was importing power from other states.

In order to import power you have to have your own power system suitably balanced. It's not like you put electrons on trucks and wheel them in. To do this, you offer financial incentives to buy or sell power at various points on the grid. To this day, PJM does this on the east coast and you can actually check it out here PJM LMP pricing

Also, you have to adequate transmission rights to get the power in.

So what Enron did was rather clever. First, they had better software than the California ISO for determining grid imbalances and so they scheduled power deals to manipulate the grid. Import power in the north, export it in the south, boom there is an imbalance, and you can sell the power you exported back to the state for a lot of dough. Then, they would also go and buy up transmission rights into the state (which is actually pretty cheap), and then play games at peak times.

The amazing thing about the whole thing is that gaming California's stupid grid managers WAS LEGAL. That's right. Enron didn't do -anything- wrong by screwing the state of California. The state made its rules for its market place and Enron exploited them, but California should not have made those rules to begin with. To cap it all off, California deregulation stripped utilities of the ability to pass variable costs to consumers. So, if the price of electricity shot up, it should have shot up for consumers as well, and guess what, people turn their air conditioners down, and there is no power crisis. But oh no, California made it so that the utilities could not recover the costs and so they had to sell power at a loss, and all the utilities in California went bankrupt, and Enron made a mountain of money, legally.

The thing that got Enron into trouble was that they were lying on their financial statements, and for that, the company is now bankrupt, her executives are either on trial, and the accounting firm that certified those statements no longer exists.

" If deregulation is so friggen great then where is the cheap electric? Why can my Village sell me electric for $0.04/kWh with their regulated municipal power authority (while paying their workers Government rates and with Government benefits) when my girlfriend (who lives a whole two miles away) pays $0.14/kWh for electric supplied by a company that is supposedly part of the free market (a company that pays their employees crap and outsources their call center/billing functions to India)."

Further more, if municipals were truly better, then it should have been the Canadian Power authorities or ConEdison that recognized the problem and cut Ohio off of the grid, thereby preventing this whole problem. But they didn't. Instead it was a private company outside of Philadelphia that helps maintain the grid that recognized the issue as it was happening and isolated it further. In fact, they said in a news story that they practice the very type of blackout event twice a year. They do this because they have a responsibility to their shareholders, and their customers and know that screwing either of them is not good business.

Yes, a company like Enron can game the system, and screw a lot of people, but I think we can honestly recognize:

1. Enron is the exception, and not the norm. Not many companies operate like Enron did, or was as unethical they were.
2. I think we can all agree that unethical behavior, ignorance, and incompetence are not limited to private corporations, but government agencies, municipal authorities also exhibit those human qualities.

btw, nice strawman, mentioning outsourcing while talking about a deregulated power company. sure to get a raise, but can we keep the logical fallacies to a minimum please? thanks

Your fears are born of ignorance; have no worry.

Environmental Issues are not self-regulated; "fortunately" (tongue-in-cheek) we have the government to police it for us. Bulk power generators are very regulated on emissions, even to the point that generators will take outages for "opacity" indicating they have reached their "pollution credit" limit and can't generate electricity anymore.

Market Monitoring, however, is self-regulating, and so far has proven to be a critical source of improvement. They are tasked with finding market power issues, and defusing them so noone has unfair advantages over any other players. For the east coast players, PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE... California ISO used to have one, until they dismantled their market, not sure what happened to it. S.E.Trans (~4 states in SouthEast) agreements fell apart. ERCOT (Texas) is pretty well along (I seem to recall a market overhaul brought on by recommendations on local pricing), and MISO was going to start a market, but after the blackout decided to delay theirs... and the rest of the country is barely ready to de-regulate.

I fear more about the regulated utilities, because they operate in a closed fashion, socializing the cost of their problems over all their customers, and preventing outside entities from building improvements in their systems...

The blame will be put onderegulation and lack of government oversight.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already tracks "space weather". Check out this Primer for a good introdcution about what we already know.

Why is this important? Whenever the Earth's magnetosphere is hit by a solar storm, the change in magnetic field induces a DC ground current in the metal in the earth. For most applications, this has no effect. For the bulk power grid, this is significant -- this DC current seeps into the grid through ground taps, and can damage AC systems. Because the (very) high voltage equipment depends on (very) low currents, these fluctuations can be enough to damage transformers and cause problems on a state-wide scale.

That's nice in theory, but totally inpractical. Basically, you'd have to sync both ends of the data transmission with frequency, except that the grid frequency is not a constant, and unpredictable...

The 60Hz frequency standard in the US is a "desired" point... everything, from turning on a blender at home, to firing up your local steam generator for the morning ramp, has an effect on the grid, from a minute twitch to a big swing. If there is more demand than generation, the frequency slows down as energy is sucked out of the grid; likewise, overproduction of electricity causes the frequency to speed up. Now, it takes many many MWatts to make a change, because so many loads & generators are wired in parallel, but it's still possible.

There are many companies operating in parallel across the USA (abbreviated RTOs & ISOs) that work to balance the supply & demand of electricity every second... we track the frequency (graph here) in an attempt to balance the whole thing out, by calling on more generation when the frequency is low, and telling the to back off when it is high...

Now, as far as sending data by modulating the AC wave, the problem here is the "scrubbing" effects of Transformers. The premise behind high voltage transfer of electricity is to use transformers to step up the voltage & lowering the current. Lower current equates to less heat loss, so you can send the energy more miles for the same loss. Now, the problem is the magnetic core does not have a good frequency response when converting E to M to E again... they're designed for a low frequency after all. So, you end up with every transformer removing all of the high-freq. oscillations.

There is ISO New England (http://www.iso-ne.com/) that does New England.
New York ISO http://www.nyiso.com for New England
PJM Interconnectionhttp://www.pjm.com/Who handles Penn/New Jersey/Maryland
Mid West ISO (http://www.midwestiso.org/ which does most of the Mid West.

And others (You can find them at http://www.iso-ne.com/industry_links/..

These are just SOME of the players. The Grids are ALL connected (through one another). ISO New England regularly sells/buys from New York and Onterio. NY sells/purchases from PJM, etc.

There is always concern because of the growth in home electronics over the past few years; I'm definitely guilty of adding to the demand... Last summer caught us by surprise, not because of lack of generation, but because of reactive power modeling errors, but that event, not to mention Y2K, made us take a hard look, and all of our models are correct to the best of our knowledge.

As to the NIMBY phenomena, I point you to our Queue A map as to where new (planned) generation is scheduled to be built in our zone. Its a double-edged sword; everyone wants the electricity, but noone wants the plant in their county.. But if you put the plant too far away, then you have the added problems with transmission...

Other ISO's:

California

New England

New York

Keep in mind that the CNET article was entirely about CalISO (which is only a few years old and not as developed yet as the east coast) which is only one piece of the entire puzzle. And I'm sure "HomePower" thanks you for the free advertisement, but I hope next time you at Slashdot try to cover the other angles in the story first, other than the pop-answer. Rememeber, one Nuclear plant generates over 1100 MW of power, thats 1,100,000,000 Watts, or about 167,000 times the output of the lead article on HomePower, and those people are the exception, not the rule.

-- Scott

Oh, btw, if it gets back to me, I'm not an official representative of PJM LLC. Thats what Customer Relations is for.

There is always concern because of the growth in home electronics over the past few years; I'm definitely guilty of adding to the demand... Last summer caught us by surprise, not because of lack of generation, but because of reactive power modeling errors, but that event, not to mention Y2K, made us take a hard look, and all of our models are correct to the best of our knowledge.

As to the NIMBY phenomena, I point you to our Queue A map as to where new (planned) generation is scheduled to be built in our zone. Its a double-edged sword; everyone wants the electricity, but noone wants the plant in their county.. But if you put the plant too far away, then you have the added problems with transmission...

Other ISO's:

California

New England

New York

Keep in mind that the CNET article was entirely about CalISO (which is only a few years old and not as developed yet as the east coast) which is only one piece of the entire puzzle. And I'm sure "HomePower" thanks you for the free advertisement, but I hope next time you at Slashdot try to cover the other angles in the story first, other than the pop-answer. Rememeber, one Nuclear plant generates over 1100 MW of power, thats 1,100,000,000 Watts, or about 167,000 times the output of the lead article on HomePower, and those people are the exception, not the rule.

-- Scott

Oh, btw, if it gets back to me, I'm not an official representative of PJM LLC. Thats what Customer Relations is for.

There is always concern because of the growth in home electronics over the past few years; I'm definitely guilty of adding to the demand... Last summer caught us by surprise, not because of lack of generation, but because of reactive power modeling errors, but that event, not to mention Y2K, made us take a hard look, and all of our models are correct to the best of our knowledge.

As to the NIMBY phenomena, I point you to our Queue A map as to where new (planned) generation is scheduled to be built in our zone. Its a double-edged sword; everyone wants the electricity, but noone wants the plant in their county.. But if you put the plant too far away, then you have the added problems with transmission...

Other ISO's:

California

New England

New York

Keep in mind that the CNET article was entirely about CalISO (which is only a few years old and not as developed yet as the east coast) which is only one piece of the entire puzzle. And I'm sure "HomePower" thanks you for the free advertisement, but I hope next time you at Slashdot try to cover the other angles in the story first, other than the pop-answer. Rememeber, one Nuclear plant generates over 1100 MW of power, thats 1,100,000,000 Watts, or about 167,000 times the output of the lead article on HomePower, and those people are the exception, not the rule.

-- Scott

Oh, btw, if it gets back to me, I'm not an official representative of PJM LLC. Thats what Customer Relations is for.