Hi portage,
Thanks for the followup on the Cal ISO conundrum. Do you or does anyone else on the thread have a URL to direct me to regarding the technical aspect of the article, i.e. Grid managers aim to keep the system running at a frequency of 60 hertz. It normally fluctuates between 60.01 and 59.99 hertz, Detmers said. Last Thursday, it fell to 59.93 hertz.
Blackouts can begin when it gets down to 59.65 hertz, he said. Every loss of 1,000 megawatts costs the system .10 hertz, he said.
A substantial drop in frequency can cause widespread outages that can take days to fix, he said.
To maintain balance, the ISO must keep supply and demand within 117 megawatts, Detmers said. Last Thursday, the system slipped more than 1,100 megawatts out of balance for more than 10 minutes and was as much as 1,500 megawatts off.
www0.mercurycenter.com
This isn't exactly the best management of the system, as far as I am concerned. In the good old days, the utes were required to keep spinning reserves at 17% on an annualized basis and were never to allow the balance to get anywhere near the critical stages that we seem so insanely to see as prudent today. The gaming of the system is obvious, allowing spinning reserves to "average" or "baseline" too close to demand only exacerbates the possibility of gaming the system. Comments welcomed.
[[Aside: A note on Netiquette - It's great that you provided the URL for the MercNews article, it allowed me to read the more interesting technical detail. A further refinement that we us on some threads here at SI is to use the bracketed <Snip>partial text body<End Snip> to alert the reader that there is more detail in the story that isn't included in the thread post. This is quite often useful to know, as it was in this case. Thanks. ]]
[[Aside II: I non-concur, it is class warfare. <w> It is, however, not being perpetrated by the lumpen proletariat class that is usually dismissed as the aggressor in the war. ]]
Finally, David Freeman, Senior Energy Advisor to Gov. Gray Davis, was just interviewed by Kym McNicholas of www.energynewslive.com. It was a fascinating glimpse at the real world of power trading and FERC's illegal irresponsibility under Hebert as well as California DWP's ability to master the spot market. I highly recommend that anyone interested, check out the video library at ENL later today or tomorrow for the archived interview file. Mr. Freeman is quite possibly the most knowledgeable player on the public's side in this whole fiasco. He has my greatest admiration.
Best, Ray :) |
