Energy Efficiency Matters

Greetings from the ASME Power 2010 Conference in Chicago.

A quick overview of the keynote speech:

Ed Tirello once again lit up the audience with great commentary on the status of the industry. He talked about a number of things, including what all the keynote speakers seemed to agree with: the lack of a US Energy Policy is hampering the ability of the industry to move forward. And while he did state outright that he’s “not an engineer” and tended to “make things up” (which garnered many smiles from the audience), his views bring some insights into the issues which our industry will be facing in the near future.

Richard Knoebel spoke next, providing some numbers to the CO2 sequestration issue – including some potential costs of adding carbon capture & sequestration (CCS) to new coal and gas power plants (noting in some cases it will double the capital costs of installing new generation assets).

Stephen Kuczynski stepped up next to speak of his company’s experiences with operating nuclear facilities – and some of the steps they’re taking to keep their fleet operating safely and reliably. One item I noted – was their program of promoting “assertive engineering”. In other words, if an engineer sees something that needs fixing – he/she should not let politics or the companies quarterly stock price get in the way of seeing that it gets fixed, and fixed correctly.

In light of the BP disaster, I can only imagine how many engineers were told to be quiet in light of the costs and schedule delays which would have occurred in order to do things right. In the case of nuclear power, where there have been accidents in the past, engineers – and others – are encouraged to take personal responsibility for the equipment around them, to make sure avoidable accidents don’t happen in the future. I encourage us all to apply that same confidence and assertiveness to all our projects.

The final speaker was Gregory Snyder, who covered some of the future-thinking options of integrating renewable energy and electric cars into the grid.

All the speakers provided great information that is of great interest to the industry. Thank you to ASME for bringing this group together and providing a venue for their presentations.

The ASME Power 2010 Conference is coming up next week (July 13-15, 2010).

I’ll be going early to take the steam turbine performance class on Monday (7/12/10), presented by Gary Golden (EPRI), James Wieters (SCANA) Dr. Simon Hogg (Durham University) and Robert Scott (Alstom). It got rave reviews last year, so I’m really looking forward to attending.

I’ll also be presenting a paper this year:

An Experience with PTC 70 – Ramp Rates

The presentation is in Session 13-4 (Performance Test and Performance Monitoring Techniques) on Wednesday afternoon, July 14, 2010. I hope to see you there.

If you’d like a copy of the final paper and/or the presentation slides, drop me a note (performance@t2e3.com). I’ll get them posted here after the conference, as well.

If you have any experiences with determining ramp rates for your facilities that you’d like to share – I’d love to hear from you.

How do you determine your ramp rates?

Do you run a dedicated test to collect data, or do you use ‘normal’ operating data as the basis?

An interesting article on electric cars and net greenhouse gas emissions (during operation) can be found at EnergyDSM.com.

What I don’t see them taking into consideration, is the manufacturing costs of the car. So, as long as you’re comparing the gas-only new car versus an electric version you’re OK. But, I think you’re still better off just running your existing car for another 100k miles, even if it gets pretty poor gas mileage.

The article includes some interesting charts on the regions mix of power generation across the US. I was surprised to see that TVA’s Hydro production does not have an appreciable impact on the SE generation mix. Here in Washington, BPA’s hydro is still the main source of electricity in the region.

Another note of interest was the amount of power still generated with oil in New York and Florida.

This isn’t exactly about power plants, but it does go to show what good warranties and thoughtful maintenance practices can accomplish.

See the video: Rachael’s Comet, “Chariot”

From the GlobalSpec Newsletter:

Amid all the hand-wringing over Toyota’s recalls, one 90-year-old woman proves that a car can last almost indefinitely if you take care of it, reports Growing Bolder. Rachel bought her 1964 Mercury Comet new and has put every one of the 540,000 miles on the vehicle. She wisely purchased lifetime warranties on many of the parts, which has yielded no-cost replacement of three sets of shocks, seven mufflers, and 16 batteries.
(www.globalspec.com)

A colleague recently asked a very important question:
How often should instruments be calibrated?

Many sites have requirements for calibration on certain instruments – such as fuel flow meters used for emissions reporting. But what about the rest?

Any sensor – temperature, pressure, flow, etc. – which provides input into your control system should be monitored regularly for accuracy. Things such as compressor inlet temperature, compressor discharge pressure and exhaust temperature – to begin with – all play a part in the load control of every type of gas turbine.

Annual calibrations are normally a good starting point – they provide you with a baseline for how each instrument changes over time. Reviewing these calibrations will give you a better understanding of how the working environment is impacting each sensor. In certain high stress applications – such as compressor discharge pressures on peaking units – calibrations and instrument adjustments may be needed more frequently than once a year. In low stress environments – such as cooling water temperatures – annual may be more than needed. But, if you lower the frequency of calibrations to less than annually, you may need to adjust your low-level alarm points to more readily catch instrument drift failures.

Please share how often you calibrate your site instrumentation here – I’d love to hear what your policies are. Do you calibrate all sensors or just a select few? Annually? Semi-annually (i.e. during each spring and fall outage)? Or “as needed”?

Do you utilize software tools, such as pattern recognition, to adjust your instrument calibration schedules?

I look forward to reading your replies.

There’s a heated debate occuring in a LinkedIn discussion – about where our investment dollars should go – Should they go to Conservation programs or new Clean Generation?

The whole discussion can be found here.

One very interesting item which was shared today – was a press release about a pilot test program by PG&E which installed SmartAC thermostats at 2,000 residences. Results showed that the utility could shave approximately 0.65 kW of load for each residence. Not much you say? When you consider they have 135,000 potential participants in the plan… that can add up to nearly 88 MW of peak load shaved – allowing the utility to avoid construction of new peaking power plants – which sit idle most of the year in anticipation of the next heat wave.

The article shared can be found here.

More about the SmartAC program from PG&E can be found here.

Two Weeks to PowerGen 2009 in Las Vegas, NV USA.

I’ll be there!

If you’re also going to be there, and would like to meet for lunch or around the exhibit hall or sessions, drop me a note or voicemail (see the T2E3 website for contact info). I haven’t lined up which sessions I’ll be attending yet – pending getting the full conference agenda – but you can bet if there are papers dealing with finding efficiency improvements, I’ll be there.

If you have any recommendations on vendors to visit in the exhibit hall – I’d be interested in hearing what those might be as well. The exhibit hall is HUGE, so I try and map out a plan for my “must see” vendors in advance.

I hope to see you there!
Until then – I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving!

The word of the month is apparently Consistency.

I keep hearing about how consistency makes everything better. Communication, accounting, sales & marketing, diet, exercise… the list goes on.

So, let’s add another one:

Consistency makes for a better Performance Monitoring Program.

How?

If you are consistent in looking at (i.e. monitoring) the performance of your equipment every Wednesday morning – then you’ll start to intuitively know what the answer should be. You’ll recognize when the pattern varies from the norm much faster than if you only occasionally look at performance – sometimes once per day, other times just once per month. Small variances can easily be missed.

If you are consistent in your Performance Monitoring efforts those small variances become more obvious as you become more comfortable looking at the data. Keeping small variances in line with a water wash or an instrument calibration is a lot easier than fixing a large problem – or even finding a large problem if more than one instrument has drifted outside the expected range of operation.

When multiple data readings are suspicious, it’s a lot harder to determine the true measurements. If you can catch one bad data point at a time, large problems become less frequent – or so obvious that you’ll know when maintenance needs to get involved – immediately!

How consistently are you monitoring your performance?

Very interesting news article came in today’s Energy Central Daily. The source article is from the Maine Press Herald: ‘Amazing’ turbine may be tested off Maine.

A large 2.3 MW wind turbine is being contemplated for a location off the coast of Maine at water depths more than 650ft deep. It would be anchored with three tethers – but otherwise would simply float. Amazing.

Hopefully they wouldn’t lose too much energy through the six miles of transmission lines across the ocean floor. But, then again, the stability and strength of the winds out on the ocean may more than make up for any extra losses.

During the ASME Power 2009 conference, keynote address, Pat Themig (VP of Generation at PNM Resources) referred to a story on NPR: Dude, Where’s My Cap-and-Trade?

Being a fan of NPR myself, I had to go read it. It’s a light hearted primer on Cap-and-Trade, and some of the issues which may come up in determining who gets CO2 permits, what they cost, and how they’ll be traded. Well, actually, it doesn’t really go into that much detail… but it was a fun read anyway.

The other Keynotes were Dr. Jeffrey Nelson of the Solar Technologies Dept at Sandia National Labs and Ed Tirello, the managing director and senior power strategist at Berenson & Company.

Mr. Tirello discussed Cap-and-Trade a little, but mostly to mention that there is no current policy. People in DC are doing a lot of talking, but have been unable to put down a policy for any real discussions. There are still too many questions on how to handle certain things – such as emergency situations. Do you offer emissions ‘forgiveness’ during emergency situations – such as fuel shortages during winter when natural gas plants have to burn oil in order to allow the gas to go to priority customers for heating purposes?

Dr. Nelson, speaking as a scientist, had good things to say about the future of solar power. Sandia National Labs are working on using solar power to make liquid fuels as well as electricity. Recent DOE reports also indicate that the cost of electricity from solar generation will drop to competitive levels in the next 3 to 10 years.

10 years may seem like a long time to wait for competitive renewable sources, but we have a lot to do between now and then to get the infrastructure and policies ready. We’ll need a robust infrastructure in place before renewables become cost-effective if we want consumers to be able to take advantage of them. It would do no good to have cheap residential solar panels, if utilities are not able to connect them all to the grid.