CA: The energy crisis (continued)

Electric power dispatchers for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the nonprofit agency that runs much of the state's electric grid, anxiously gathered in the afternoon hours in the control center in Folsom last Monday.

The news was not good. Unseasonably hot weather was rapidly shrinking margins between demand and available power. The demand was rising faster than anticipated in Southern California, and, although power plants had been ordered earlier to ramp up their production levels, they could not keep pace. As a result, a critical transmission line was in danger of becoming overloaded. CAISO was forced to order Southern California Edison to initiate a 20-minute rolling blackout involving some 70,000 customers in an effort to prevent the failure of the key transmission line potentially yielding far worse impacts than a rolling blackout.

...and, the population of California also grows all the time, 500 to 1200 new housing units (apartments, houses, whatever) per week.

California short of 800,000 homes
by Jim Wasserman
For millions of Californians, housing is the cross they must bear for living here. There simply isn't enough of it. For nearly 20 years, California's home-building industry has lagged behind the state's population growth. Every year it builds about 140,000 new places for people to live. And every year that's 80,000 short, say state housing officials. As builders have fallen more than 800,000 homes behind demand, according to state estimates, only one in three Californians can afford a median-priced home of more than $250,000. Average home occupancy rose from 2.8 to 2.9 people, revealing that human closeness is becoming a way of life. Nationally, the average per household is 2.6 and falling.

There also needs to be more prudent use of water, because in California, water=electricity. The hydro projects which provide the electricity also provide LA's drinking water and agricultural irrigation (irrigation is typically tenfold the domestic use of water, but indispensible in a modern society, particularly one that chose to build in the desert).

The water has to be pumped out of the reservoirs into the top of the pipes and/or canals that run downhill to the inhabited coastal areas. The less that has to be pumped, the less that has to go over the dam to produce the electricity to pump it, and the higher the reservoir levels stay. The higher they stay, the less has to go through the turbine because of the height of the fall.

It's obvious that the reservoirs and canals should be covered, with something nice and cheap like that blister pack used to cover swimming pools and wrap parcels for mailing.

Rotting vegetation in hydroelectric dams stokes global warming
by Fred Pearce
The report comes just as engineers are arguing that dams should qualify for support as a "clean" technology under the Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997. The commission will report its findings later this month at a meeting in Bonn to discuss the Clean Development Mechanism, a key part of the Protocol aimed at reducing carbon emissions worldwide. One surprise finding is that organic matter washed into a reservoir from upstream generates much of the greenhouse gas. The decay of forests submerged when the reservoirs fill up creates "only a fraction" of the gas. This means that the emissions don't disappear when the flooded forest has rotted away, but may continue for the lifetime of the reservoir.
Environmentalist's plan would drain Lake Powell
David Brower, the first paid executive director of the Sierra Club, is proposing to drain 186-mile-long Lake Powell, saying it would save water and restore red rock desert and hundreds of spectacular slot canyons. Brower made his pitch recently during a presentation of a film showing the majesty of the area before the dam was completed upstream from the Grand Canyon in 1963. The loss of power generation from Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, could be more than offset by energy-conservation measures, and more water would be available because less would evaporate, he argued. Under Brower's proposal, the dam would stay in place and would be used again only when Lake Mead filled with Colorado River silt, a process that he estimated would take 150 to 200 years. In the meantime, much of Glen Canyon -- a place Brower describes as the most beautiful on Earth -- would be exposed once again. Katie Lee visited Glen Canyon every year from 1954 until the gates were shut. She is bitter about the loss. "This is an excellent idea," she said of Brower's proposal. "But there is an even better idea. Just get rid of the problem, which is the dam itself." Some 4 million people visit the lake for boating, fishing, swimming and camping.
State's dams are high and dry
by Mike Barber
The lake hasn't been this low since 1968, when it filled in behind the Mossyrock Dam. It's 10 feet lower than the record set in 1977, and the water level is dropping farther every day, creating both a natural marvel and a potential economic disaster. In this unusually dry winter, Northwest utilities must wring more power from their usually reliable storage batteries, hydroelectric dams with reservoirs that once seemed inexhaustible. In most years, Washington utilities would simply buy power from California, which usually has a surplus this time of year. Mossyrock Dam, at 605 feet the state's tallest hydroelectric generator, looks much the same from either side these days. No water cascades down its face. Considered full at 778 feet above sea level, the gauges behind the dam fell to 656 feet this week. The dam's twin 150,000-kilowatt turbines are generating less than half capacity. To keep up with demand, the Bonneville Power Administration that oversees Columbia River hydroelectric power last week said it would have to run the system extra hard to avoid a 1,000-megawatt shortfall in the Northwest -- where Seattle alone uses about 1,100 megawatts at all times.
Los Angeles "bouncing" due to water storage
by Jeff Hecht
Groundwater being pumped by Los Angeles city authorities is causing deformations up to five times as large as the seismic movements monitored by geologists. Gerald Bawden of USGS compared a series of elevation profiles compiled by satellite-based radar at different times. He found that a 20 by 40 kilometre region was moving up and down by between 10 and 11 centimetres each year. Bawden figured out that the annual motion is caused by city authorities buying up water and storing it in underground aquifers in preparation for the dry summer months.
In the heart of Hoover Dam lies a powerful tale
by Richard Nilsen
The more popular and cheaper short tour of the dam parades visitors past the giant humming generators that produce power for a large part of the Southwest. When the dam was completed in 1935, underbudget and ahead of schedule, it promised "a new era of prosperity and development in the Southwest," as one contemporary publication put it. It was the largest dam in the world when it was built. It is 726 feet high, from bedrock to top, with a 45-foot-wide road along the 1,244-foot length of its top rim. It weighs 6.6 million tons and is more massive than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Behind it sits enough water to supply 2,000 gallons to every person in the world. Its 17 turbines generate more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.
Down in Motown
by Peter Fairley
July/August 2001
A gritty section of Detroit surrounds one of the city's oldest electric power stations. But the technology that Detroit Edison is installing at the Frisbie substation is pure 21st century—underground superconducting cables that can transmit immense currents of electricity with near perfect efficiency.

While increasing energy demands are putting more and more stress on the nation's long-distance power transmission network, cities are suffering their own version of electric gridlock; in many locations, underground transmission lines are fast reaching capacity and are literally burning up. Superconducting cables, like the ones being installed in Detroit, could safely triple the power moving through existing conduits, avoiding the need to dig up the streets—even making room for fiber-optic communications lines.

The Frisbie demonstration marks a milestone in electricity know-how—one of the first commercial applications of high-temperature superconductors. These ceramics, first fashioned by IBM researchers in 1986, now transmit alternating currents with nearly zero resistance at temperatures as high as -139 °C (the materials can be cheaply cooled to that temperature using liquid nitrogen). In contrast, conventional copper cables dissipate as much as 10 percent of the power they carry because of resistance; that lost power escapes as heat, which limits just how much juice can flow before the cable melts.

In order to fight the battle, one has to know where it is. A bunch of blue jean wearing rich jerks want to tell all of us to do without so we are too poor to kick them out of power. That has to change.

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