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New England Burns Jet Fuel To Keep Lights On
First time accepted submitter inqrorken writes "During the recent cold snap, New England utilities turned to an unconventional fuel: jet fuel. Due to high demand for heating, natural gas supplies dropped and prices skyrocketed to $140/mmBtu and prompting the Mid-Atlantic RTO to call on demand response in the region. With 50% of installed generation capacity natural-gas fired, one utility took the step of running its jet fuel-based turbines for a record 15 hours."
You mean, Kerosene? I guess Jet Fuel sounds cooler though.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Maybe the editors could edit?
So this wasn't an equipment failure requiring a backup, but just market price fluctuation: The cost of natural gas per Watt generated went above the cost per Watt of the fuel for the backup generators, due to the high demand for natural gas as demand rose as temperatures fell. Sounds like Econ 101.
1. Why didn't the wholesale electric prices rise in tandem with the gas price to keep generation economical? Capped by fixed residential rates?
2. Why didn't the generators use the derivatives market to hedge against spikes in gas prices so they'd be able to keep buying as demand/price rose?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
In recent years there has been a movement to quickly shutter "old" power plants that run on fuel sources like coal, oil and other less environmentally friendly fuels and totally replace them with natural gas plants. Natural gas has come way down in price also which helps force that along. But what happens when supplies of natural gas either radically go up in price or become limited due to some other distribution problem? It's a good thing that they had these peaking units ready at the standby along with a sufficient amount of fuel.
Where I live (Minneapolis) a number of the local coal power plants have been completely converted to natural gas. There is still one large coal-fired plant though north of town (Xcel Energy's Sherco) that is not viable to convert to natural gas at this point and still runs on coal. Sherco was the quintessential baseload coal fired power plant cranking out 2400MW through three units. It has now be relegated to being a peaking unit for the most part, turned up and down as necessary. Recently one of the three turbines violently shattered, had to be rebuilt and was offline for many months. Sherco is the kind of power plant that was meant to be fired up and ran continually for a couple of years without downtime and without significant variation in the throttling/output. I can only speculate but I don't think that treating it like a peaking plant and constantly varying the output is good for it... and a number of other similar power plants around the country.
During peak load, the utility ran peaker plants. This isn't unusual.
Now, running a high cost peaker for 15 hours, that's noteworthy.
I wonder if "First time accepted submitter inqrorken" comes from a warm climate; I remember that the facilities managers at a national park near where I lived would price out fuel oil, diesel, and Jet-A for oil-burning home heat in the employee housing every hear. The prices fluctuate based on a lot of factors, including refinery over-runs, gluts and shortages based on transport industries, etc., so while it was unlikely, it wasn't unheard of for Jet-A to be the cheapest option.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
NE is violently opposed to building any energy infrastructure.
For instance the Weaver's Cove LNG terminal proposal in Fall River, MA was ultimately shot down because regulators believed there wasn't enough demand for natural gas in NE, despite the region having one of the highest prices for natural gas in the country. Apparently price is not an indicator of demand.
Fall River is also in the process of shutting down a coal power plant (which the local residents are apparently dancing with glee over, despite the two huge cooling towers they made them build recently) , which is presumed to be replaced by natural gas capacity elsewhere in the region.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And too cheap to meter! Oh, and there's trillions of barrels of oil RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, and, and .... cold fusion and biofuels!
Or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's clever, they've saved the budget and jet fuel is a good clean burn when used with turbines. That's why they use it in jet's!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
We only capture half of the natural gas produced in this country and worse around the world.
SR-71 = JP8
Well, they should get off their fannies and do something about this whole ridiculously resilient ridge that's keeping it from raining at all this winter in California (and is possibly related to the arctic conditions elsewhere...?) Damn it, you just can't trust the military industrial complex to do ANYTHING right. Where are the supervillains when you need 'em?
I see your tinfoil hat is in proper working order.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sounds like an excuse to bust out the extraordinarily high price cap. First shut down the coal plants, then free up prices. Newly minted fortunes. Thanks, Obama the careless.
Jet fuel is Kerosene or a Naphtha-kerosene blend and its a byproduct of making more refined fuels such as gasoline and diesel there is nothing special going on here just slash-dot sensationalism
I suspect this peaks demand was not due to electric lights but rather to electric heaters which would have been in high demand due to the cold weather. Dark is normal for New England at this time of year. It has been a colder for longer this year.
to jet somewhere warmer like sunny OZ. http://www.weather.com.au/
I wonder what will happen next year, after Vermont Yankee is shut down and the grid loses 2 GW of base load?
Also, anyone have any statistics on wind production over the same period?
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Partly, too, with miserable weather causing cancellation of flights, the demand for Jet-A drops off, so the millions of gallons of Jet-A at the local airport become worth more as power plant fuel.
A 747 when fully loaded holds 50,000 gallons (about 300, 000 lbs.. 1/3-1/2 the take off weight). A major international airport with a couple or 300 hundred departures a day is going to go through millions of gallons/day. At LAX, there are pipelines from the nearby Chevron El Segundo and ExxonMobile Torrance/Wilmington refineries.
With the exception of "wierd" jet fuels, Jet Fule (Jet-A, JP-8, whatever you call normal jet fuel in your country) is a "wide cut" kerosene. That means that it's got a larger range of molecular weights than kerosene or diesel fuel. Many jet fuel blends also have added anti-fungal and ice-inhibiting agents. The generators are almost certainly jet fuel, not a narrow cut kerosene, since it's cheaper, and for a turbine (particularly a large, fixed installation) the properties of diesel fuel aren't helpful.
I hate headlines like this. Jet fuel and high heating prices? Why doesn't anybody put on a sweater any more? I live in the inland PNW where it stays below freezing for several months each year, and my heating bill is around $20 per month....
If you can't handle the cold, shut up and move down to Florida or southern California where you belong.
I live in Maine. Originally for the south midwest. VERY south midwest. That said, from what I've seen up here, in Maine, New Hampshire, Mass. there's so much waste in heating going on that with proper backing of several billion and a 10 year plan, I could double that money redoing select pre-40's buildings into modern energy efficient levels.
Where I live, its costing $400-500 a month right now in heating oil. That will likely go through March, somewhat into April. Getting on a yearly contract for heating oil, is the preferred method, since you're locked into a per gallon price. I won't be hear that long, so not happening. Not complaining, just my situation.... So, it's month to month on oil, or whever we need it. There is natural gas here, which the stove runs off of. That's it though. That's the ONLY use for natural gas where I live. In the south, nat. gas is used for stove, and water. Yes! My hot water runs off fuel oil! Absolutely absurd! Looking around, it would be VERY trivial to throw in a nat. gas water heater and integrate the piping for hot water if you wanted to switch between the two.
Let's forgoe that idea for a moment though. Let's look at inline electric water heaters. Energy efficient, on demand. VERY good idea, IMO. This building is from the 20s or 30s. Updated to modern standards? Yea right. The wiring looks to date back to some time between the 40s to 50's. Possibly earlier. There are 5 circuits for the 3 bedroom 1200ft apartment where I live. Only 1 outlet is grounded in the entire apartment, and that's for the regrigerator. So, can we put an inline water heater in? NOPE! No GFCI plugs anywhere. Fixing the hot water, requires fixing the electric.
It isn't even about keeping the lights on where I am though. It's ALL about heating. In my apartment, there's MAYBE 1 or 2 lights on at any given time. Seldom more than that ever. The main power draw is 3-4 computers, and a refrigerator. That's it.
Heating is all non-electric here. And that's the problem! They gone from heating using, or not using in my case, electric from fuel oil. Did they bother to redo any insulation? HIGHLY doubtful. Where I live, the majority of people rent. The property owners? Some blue collar worker looking to make a few dollars on a 2nd building. Upgrades? This apartment was lucky enough to get double paned windows this past winter. Wow. That must have been a hellacious oil bill before they got put in.
The real problem here, is you have all these old buildings from that early 20th, that haven't been looked at from an energy footprint standpoint. Millions of buildings! Here's the kicker. They'll likely be used for at least another 30 years. Probably longer. What are the odds that someones going to do a cost benefit in modernizing their 2nd house, when it would put them further in debt for the remainder of their lives. They won't. What does it say about the US in general, when you have millions of very energy efficient homes, and no one doing cost benefit and offering up incentives? Well, if they are offering up incentives, I sure haven't seen or heard anything about it.
Here's the choice as I see it: Either you improve a whole bunch of homes that are sorely out of date from a modern energy efficiency position, and evaluate fuel oil vs. electrical for heating and hot water needs in New England, or you do nothing. In the event you do nothing, more and more of your money overall, goes to oil and the coal plants, that could have gone to updating infrastructure that would otherwise continue to be stagnant. My bet? No change. People apparently don't like change and improving things in this country. I do, and I tell as many people about it as possible. Why? Cause why not? No one else seems to want to discuss it.
Due to high demand for heating, natural gas supplies dropped and prices skyrocketed to $140/mmBtu
Off-topic question: Do these people actually invent new units of energy for each application?
Wikipedia
A BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound (0.454 kg) of liquid water by 1 F (0.56 C) at a constant pressure of one atmosphere.[1] As with calorie, several BTU definitions exist, which are based on different water temperatures and therefore vary by up to 0.5%.
The unit MBtu or mBtu was defined as one thousand BTU, presumably from the Roman numeral system where "M" or "m" stands for one thousand (1,000). This is easily confused with the SI mega (M) prefix, which multiplies by a factor of one million (1,000,000). To avoid confusion many companies and engineers use MMBtu or mmBtu to represent one million BTU.
Somebody must have thought really long and hard to come up with that stuff.
Here is a secret. Jet Fuel is KEROSENE.
I can burn "Jet Fuel" in my cheap garage kerosene heater.
Honestly Journalism is getting worse and worse these days, it seems that the only thing you need to be a journalist is to dress like a hipster and not have any ability at all to do research or have any education about the subject.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why do we let these eco-terrorists even live so far north where they have to burn up all the world's fuel? It's not like any of these people are actual lumberjacks who need to live there. They might as well be eating spotted owls on rye bread with mayo!
Seriously, we need to move to thorium reactors for main systems, along with EOS energy for providing on-demand need.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The coal-fired electric generating plants will eventually all be shut down (thanks, Obama!); nuclear is never going to be accepted (or done right); natural gas is going to go through the roof when most of it is being used to generate electricity; and oil is considered a nasty fuel. Solar and wind may be nice, but they're years away from being able to supply our energy needs.
You better hope the Earth is getting warmer because that's the only thing that will keep you from freezing your ass off.
Satisfied now? Are you going to enjoy living in the 13th Century? I'm laughing my ass off. Ye fools!!
The whole area around New England and the state itself are virulently anti-energy. Vermont banned fracking even though they have no recoverable natural gas reserves; they did it just to make a headline. New England might have a deposit in the Hartford Basin, but we'll never know because just like its neighbors New England is also well on its way to banning recovery. New York has managed to inflict record gas prices on itself this month.
So shiver in the dark as far as I'm concerned. Shut off your extravagant kerosene turbines and rely on those offshore windmills you hate so much. Next summer maybe you can dam up a few dozen more Canadian rivers and preclude this little drama next winter.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
There was a story yesterday about life being the best way matter found for thermodynamics second law. Humain activity this is an improvement over general life: we burn as much energy as we can. And now a jet fuel, which obviously cost more to produce than conventional fuel.
Preserving environment was not easy, and now we have thermodynaics second law against us.
Burning Jet fuel is just the beginning..
Historically, it's not uncommon for some New England colonies not to make it through the winter.
Natural gas when stored, is liquefied. This has the added bonus of being extremely safe, as the thermal inertia of liquefied natural gas means that only the very top layer will gasify and burn.
It's a frequently used source of power to cover high peak loads in a lot of places. Expensive as hell to run but the capital costs are relatively low and the lead time to implement it is short. So a lot of places have it but only fire it up,when the peaks go very high.
When I was in power generation the state network had three jet engines set up like this to cover peak loads (in addition to the older jet engines which were reserved as emergency backup generators for when a power station was isolated, shut down, and something needed to supply the juice to get to coal conveyers etc moving).
They didn't get used much after some pump storage was implemented.
Move to India in a decade and you may get that. Otherwise file it under bullet trains as a technology that isn't going to happen in the USA no matter how good it is.
The nuclear lobby killed it because they saw it as a threat to interests that depended on Uranium.
38 tomorrow, 40-44 over at least the next week.
Sorry, wrong units for the audience. 100F tomorrow, 111F Tuesday.
[Slashdot, why you not do ° anymore!]
well i lost my geek card so i obtained a membership in tinfoil hat association instead
Ya, that happens. If you ever need it adjusted, I do them at very reasonable rates. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
So the stuff old Rockefeller had shipped to China a 120 years ago, and made a huge fortune from, to fuel the given away lamps was actually "Jet Fuel"?
Making all his chinese consumers think it were plain kerosene. Tricky John...
Is the news that they had to turn on the prepared additional generators,
or that the generators were gas turbines (a very common solution),
or that gas turbines need gas turbine fuel?
Obvious things are obvious.
... I can solve New England's problems without even try-ing ...
Jet fuel is to kerosene roughly as sirloin is to beef - I.E. one is a specific product with specific requirements, the other is a broad family. Only an uneducated fool would go "they're all meat but sirloin sounds cooler".
Kerosene is broad family of closely related products, and the stuff you're thinking of (for home heating, camping lanterns, etc...) is generally only refined/controlled within fairly broad limits. Jet fuel is refined to a specific standard, closely controlling the flash, smoke, and autoignition points, the energy available per liter, etc...
Seriously, why don't we just hibernate during winter months? If there was a way for people to hibernate this all of this would be a non-issue.
What *should* be scary but is being ignored by the larger public is how utilities are increasingly running "peak load" assets as if they were "base load" assets. To wit, combined-cycle turbine plants are not usually designed for continuous operation like this; they're designed to be brought online during peak load *only*. Base load assets like coal and nuclear carry the non-peak loads. The peak load assets are going to have much more intensive maintenance costs if they keep running them like this, leading to higher prices for consumers and the ugly potential for brownout/blackout when these peak load assets break down unexpectedly.
Disclosure: I'm a tech consultant working with TVA right now, and this info comes direct from people who run these assets. We *need* more base load assets like coal and nuclear, but government regulations are making that extremely difficult. Indeed, we're having to *shut down* coal plants due to new government regulations, further stressing an already-fragile national power infrastructure. Thank god we're *finally* building some new nuclear assets (TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2, and Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4) but we need to be doing this on a much larger scale to meet growing demands for power. Conservation will only take you so far; at some point -- a point I think we passed some years ago -- you must expand capacity to keep your system fault-tolerant.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ships only have two fuel holds: marine diesels and JP5. Also, those engines are leased by the navy, and possibly by the power plants, and considering maintenance costs it only makes sense to use the recommended fuel type. In a pinch you could use a lower grade fuel but if you do that for too long you get a crust that forms on the turbine blades which then results in dismantling the engine and replacing the blades. Considering that the engine is within the bowels of the ship and would require cutting holes through the deck plates to remove them, you use actual JP5 for an aircraft. It just doesn't make sense not too.
If it is sunny and cold, perhaps the state can install more solar power plants. That might help save fuel during the day, for power generation at night.
According to wikipedia, for 2012, they had only 207MW of grid-connected PV in Massachusetts. Seems might be nice to scale that up to 1GW when they can.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Why not just go solar? I don't understand why they keep ignoring green alternatives.
I don't really know how much $140/mmBtu is. I do know that if Americans complain it's still cheap to us Europeans and I also know that Americans tend to waste a lot due to poor insulation.
Here in NY - base load is comprised of hydro, nuclear and natural gas. Coal was once a major part of the base load but now makes up about 9% of base load now - and is on the decline thanks to Obama and the state with a number of coal plants either idle, mothballed or in the process of bring demolished. Wind/solar make up about 3% of the state's base load now.
There's a 1.7MW peak load oil burning plant on the shore of Lake Ontario in Oswego that has been fired up this week - usually doesn't run more than several days out of the entire year. Once upon a time, it was a base load plant when oil was cheap... they would bring oil in primarily by ship with railroad tracks as a backup route for when the St. Lawrence Seaway would shut down for the winter. The tracks to the plant's tank farm a few miles away are still in place, but grade crossings are all paved over and hasn't seen a train in at least 15 years.
Sorry, armchair expert, but I'll take personal observation over Wikipedia any day. The mention of a specific turbine should have been a bit of a clue.
There are of course newer turbines built especially for the purpose since they are a lot cheaper than new aircraft engines, which is what you've quoted, but that still makes up only a small percentage of the total. There are a lot of perfectly good aircraft engines that were attached to retired aircraft which are now in service generating electricity every now and again. Since they typically run well below the power output that was required for takeoff they last for many years. Of course they may only run for a couple of hundred hours or less in a year, so engines from the 70s are still around. As backup generators there are still a non-trivial number from the 1950s in service.
Some Av-Gas is leaded....which they do not like to advertise
Most oil-fired home furnaces state that they can be run on "Not Heavier Than #2" or "#1 or #2 fuel oil (diesel fuel)". #2 is usually much cheaper and more energetic/gallon, unless there's a shortage as there is now. I've had to run to the gas station and grab a few 10's of gallons of diesel to tide me over until the delivery truck could get to my house (this was the old stinky non-low sulfur diesel, not the new clear bluish kind). I could've used kerosene (#1) if no #2 was available.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You are nearly there - now apply that to yourself and this post of yours:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4712855&cid=46076971
Looks a hell of a lot like "shut up you're wrong because I say so" with a twist of a flawed appeal to authority to me - especially since it didn't say how widespread they are.
Now I suggest you read the long post you've written yourself and consider that post of yours I linked in that context. Especially that cartoon you linked. You've been hell bent on trying to prove me wrong ever since I casually added a few notes on turbines to your uncertain post replying to icebike.
It's not my problem that you can't take a comment about wikipedia alone being less than an informed source. It is my problem when you decide to start playing oneupmanship and get very insulting about it. "Now about your expertise" - as they say "them's fighting words".