An Opportunity for Underground Electricity Transmission?

Electricity transmission is a significant barrier to ramping up renewable capacity. The New York Times published a story this week about Texas where the Public Utility Commission has struggled to site 2,300 miles of new transmission lines. Much of the battle revolves around citizens unhappy with the prospect of lines degrading the quality of public and private property. Utilities are also constrained and looking to avoid costs associated with circuitous routing and permitting.

Controversies over electricity lines always leave me envious of the Germans. In Germany, a country that stands near the top of world rankings for total wind capacity, distribution lines are mostly underground – a considerable factor in mitigating localized power outages caused by downed trees. Destruction of infrastructure during WWII explains why Germany has a more modern and reliable electricity system compared to the US. Germany is also exploring underground transmission options through a pilot project near Bremen. Historically avoided due to premiums on installation and maintenance, underground transmission lines may be a solution to overcoming stateside NIMBY battles.

What exactly are the barriers to placing transmission lines underground? An operational barrier, emphasized by the American Transmission Company, is the fact that electricity transmission creates heat, which must be dissipated for safe and reliable delivery of power. While air is a much more effective medium for heat transfer relative to soil, releasing heat into the atmosphere is a waste of a valuable resource. If heat is released into the soil, however, the challenge of heat dissipation may be an opportunity for efficient heat capture. Capturing electricity transmission waste heat is a concept I’ve not heard about. Geothermal heating and cooling, a process that uses convection and heat pumps to capture ground warmth, is the obvious comparison.

There seem to be opportunities for coupling underground transmission development with heat capture, or combined transmission and heating. Namely, a chief inefficiency in the electrical grid, unused electrons, can be transformed into a revenue generating tool as heat is captured and sold to customers. This benefit alone may be enough to overcome the cost barriers associated with placing transmission lines underground. On the other hand, it seems like a bad idea putting fluids in close proximity to an electrical current. An additional concern is infrastructure requirements (I.e., electrical and fluid piping) under the principle of placing people close to heat sources to minimize heat loss, but away from electrical currents to minimize health risks.

I believe that is as far as my hair-brained idea should go without consulting experts. What are your thoughts? Has this concept been introduced before?

An End to Fossil Fuel Subsidies?

Simon writes each week on international issues relating to energy policy.

Among the most recent grand ideas to emerge in the pre-Copenhagen scrum is this from the US administration. President Obama has thrown his backing behind a plan to ban all government subsidies of fossil fuels, everywhere in the world.

It is a plan with considerable merit. New forms of electricity generation are constantly called on to prove themselves economically - a difficult enough task without their fossil fuel competition receiving both implicit and explicit subsidies in many countries.

However, fossil fuel subsidies are used to achieve a variety of policy objectives, and their removal will leave governments having to work out how to replace them. In the developing world, especially oil-producing countries, though they distort consumption patterns, they can be a more effective way of transferring wealth to the population. After all, in nations bedeviled by corruption, the choice is often not between cheap fuel and other government services, but between cheap fuel and embezzlement. In non-producing LDCs, subsidized fuel is not a perk for the very poorest, but can facilitate simple entrepreneurial activity - being able to run a tractor to improve land's productivity or have a generator so a factory no longer depends on unreliable municipal electrical utilities.

In the developed world, meanwhile, programs such as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) in the US or Britain's Winter Fuel Allowance program, fuel subsidies are a standard form of redistribution to the poor or elderly. Abandoning these programs risks leaving vulnerable communities bearing the brunt of switching to more efficient energy production.

Meanwhile, the tax breaks, competition protection and generous regulatory environments that western governments offer for a variety of industries, including oil and gas exploration and drilling, electricity generation and utilities could all come under pressure from the new agreement.

I think the idea is a good one - removing government subsidies for big business and polluting fuels is a necessary step towards leveling the marketplace for energy production and nurturing the next generation of energy solutions. However, as with almost all the big ideas in energy these days, the political obstacles are going to be large, with influential industry and citizen groups both being affected. Having resolved the question of what to do, it'll be interesting to see how to make it happen.

Moores Mill Road Follow-up

On Friday I promised an explanation for the strange behavior of the power lines on Moores Mill Rd. Basically what happened was a malfunction at a transformer substation that is in charge of stepping down the voltage from 34 kV to 14 or 7 kV. The smaller transformers that are hooked onto the telephone poles then perform the subsequent voltage drops before the electricity makes it to homes, where it is finally stepped down to 120/240 V. So rather than delivering electricity at 7 kV (around that) to the transformers, they were getting inputs at 34 kV, the highest voltage considered to be distribution-grade electricity (above that is transmission). One by one the transformers were overloading and exploding (partially due to the insulating oil that is used inside them), and then the electricity would reach the next transformer in sequence.

Friday YouTube Treat

Good morning energy blogosphere. My post today will be short and sweet. Yesterday I visited a BG&E distribution training center (where they train the people who go out into neighborhoods to put up or repair electric wires). Besides being a national leader in smart grid pilot programs, they have a really well-oiled training system. They show this video to all of their trainees to let them know what happens when multiple things go wrong:

I'll let you mull it over this weekend on what might have caused such a light show, and post an explanation on Monday.

Field Trip to Calvert Cliffs

Today I had the great opportunity to visit Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Facility on the Chesapeake Bay. Besides being a really interesting bit of engineering (the two pressurized water reactors use 2.3 million lbs/min of bay water for a heat sink, keeping temperature difference between intake and output below 10 F), it gave me pause to think about where baseload power in this country is headed.

Calvert Cliffs Units 1 and 2

Source: http://www.me.psu.ac.th/~smarn/pplant/Nuclear/NPP3.htm

The two reactors currently produce about 1750 MWe together (and with a capacity factor of over 100, they are producing at full capacity most of the time besides scheduled maintenance), and provide power to 20% of Maryland homes. Constellation and Areva are in the process of licensing a new unit which would produce 1600 MWe alone, a truly massive reactor. They even have land reserved for reactor #4 when it becomes economically feasible.

When I got home from the field trip, my dad sent me this article about the future of coal power and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). One quote caught my eye: "Without a breakthrough on coal plants, it may be impossible to meet emission limits climatologists say are needed." Since I had just gotten back from standing on the working floor (it was about 115 F) of two massive turbine generators (one by Westinghouse and one by GE) powered by nuclear reactors, I thought the author had left out a rather important piece of the pie, that is, the fact that nuclear power provides 20% of electricity in the US virtually carbon-free, and that plant operators and residents near these plants are chomping at the bit for the NRC to let them build more.

So will it be coal with CCS or a nuclear renaissance that gets us out of trouble? Obviously the question is not that simple, and I believe that any real attempt to stem the tide of climate change will take large amounts of both. I'll end this post with some questions and see if I get some interesting comments:

• I saw the football-field sized area for dry cast storage for the spent fuel rods while I was there. Eventually it will fill up, but plant employees hope that Yucca Mountain will be open for business before it does. Harry Reid says over his dead body. So a permanent and central repository for spent fuel, necessary or not? Or is that point moot since it isn't going to happen?
• Will there be sufficient transmission lines in place to move electricity from new reactors to markets?
• Does CCS require a regulatory body similar to the NRC to ensure safe operation of storage sites?
• Does anyone seriously think that renewables alone could supply all baseload electricity to the US in the next 20 years? (Apparently John Edwards does)
• What are your impressions on President Obama's commitment to nuclear energy?