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Pastimes : The California Energy Crisis - Information & Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel G. DeBusschere who wrote (819)	8/8/2001 12:00:48 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1715

Hi Daniel, You raise some interesting issues. Let me state that in general terms, I am in complete agreement with the premise that in the 21st Century, much greater power reliability will be required for our electronic/information infrastructure. This will trump issues of cost, which in any event, we've discovered isn't as transparent as we might have thought, in view of the rebates that the utilities are paying to California consumers who've drastically curtailed their demand (those who've cut use of juice by more than 20% YoY). Thus, distributed generation, i.e. having a multiplicity of smaller generation stations, closer to the end users is the preferred solution for reliability, and the best way to prevent the stanglehold of market power of a cabal of gluttonous traders. Today, the grid operates at about three 9's, on average. That being uptime of about 99.9%. This is completely unacceptable for server farms, colocation centers and other critical applications such as semiconductor manufacturing, biotech, agricultural processing or in the health care industry. What I am disputing is the notion of gigantism in the distribution of electricity and suggesting that the generation of electricity needs to become more local and not less so. One must be familiar with the history of the electricity generation industry in order to understand that the choices that have been made, have been largely done so because of the influence and political power of the IPPs and the Utes. AB 1890 is a difficult document to read, but if you do read between the lines, it was designed to frustrate the sensible notion of large industrial electrical users in California that they ought to be able to co-generate electricity at their plants, be it a paper mill, steel mill or glass or whatever. The bill, the creation of the utility's lawyers, by and large, said that the industrial user would only have two choices. Generate their own electricity and cut their ties to the grid, or buy power from the utilities. The most sensible solution, that large industrial users become in effect competition for the utilities by selling back surplus power into the grid was denied by fiat. So, when it comes to these supergrids, they are only being suggested, IMO, because they further increase the stranglehold of the big utes and IPPs on the system. Not because of the supposed and stated goal of providing greater reliability as they spin. Transmission lines have been and will continue to be a very weak link in the chain to providing electricity to users. But it means that a concentrated capital-intensive plant located in some remote corner of the country can become very profitable for a small clique of vendors. The problem, of course, is that we see exactly how this small cabal of co-conspirators operate once they have achieved market power. They game the system. This is why I'm adamantly opposed to the supergrid solution. It provides way too much opportunity for the power traders to game the system, which,(in the more diffuse generation scheme that I believe is a more suitable development), becomes far less likely, with price stability being achieved at some slight cost to efficiency. [[Sidebar: Much of what I've discussed here is presented in greater detail in a .pdf file called "The Power Chip Paradigm" by Peter Huber and Michael Mills at www.powercosm.com. It is no longer available on their website. If you, or anyone, sends an email address via PM, I'll be happy to get a copy out to you. :) ]] So, to summarize, I'm opposed to the corporate monarchist's view that gigantism is good. The creation of the supergrids only serves their purposes, which is gaining more of a stranglehold on the market at the expense of the rest of us. The eyewash about reliability is just that. Spin and nothing more. Best, Ray