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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.
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
Sheesh! A quick Google search tells us that iRTO is the Really Terrible Orchestra.
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.
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?!
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.
Regional Transsmission Organization. After the deregulation of the bulk electric system, these companies are given the responsibility of monitoring high voltage transmission reliability. They commonly are also Independent Service Organizations, which operate regional wholesale electric markets.
to jet somewhere warmer like sunny OZ. http://www.weather.com.au/
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.
Actually, the Northeast is home. While shale gas has brought a ton of jobs to the region, and has helped to limit energy costs (just look at European residential electric rates!) we're using it in a blundering fashion. The point here is that we can't just switch everything over to the current wonderfuel - there are other articles, from the polar vortex earlier this year, that report that the Northeast's gas pipeline capacity was maxed out. As ever, we've got to be smart.
SR-71 = JP8
No, the Pratt & Whitney J58 engines of the SR-71 ran on JP7, a fuel specially made for those engines and that aircraft.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Actually, the Northeast is home. While shale gas has brought a ton of jobs to the region
Living in the fatted area, "a ton of jobs" is industry codswaddle. The jobs are mostly subcontractor type jobs, and as soon as they are done in your area, those jobs disappear. It's only reasonable, you need a fair number of people to drill the wells and bring them online. After that? almost no one. In my area, it was about 2 years. There have been some sad stories about idiots who thought they were long lasting jobs. I recall one form a restaraunt owner who was shocked. She saw dollar signs, then had to lay off most of her staff. The field workers stopped coming in when they left. A friend took a job in th egas fields, then bought a house, despite my pleas that he not. He lost his job before hte first payment was due.
So yes, you can take the job if you absolutely need to, but never fool yourself that it is not very, very short term.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Burning Jet fuel is just the beginning..
Historically, it's not uncommon for some New England colonies not to make it through the winter.
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.