You are currently browsing the Gas & Diesel Generators weblog archives for February, 2008.
29. February 2008 by admin.
An army of backup power generators sits idle on thousands of building rooftops and commercial properties across the province – enough hidden power generation to displace two or three coal plants.
It’s a reserve army rarely called into service, springing into action only when massive blackouts hit or lightning plays havoc with local power lines.
But a new program introduced by the Ontario Power Authority, called Demand Response 3 (DR3), could call those generators into service during the 1,600 hours a year when the province needs them most – when the dirtiest of power plants are typically fired up or when coal-fired electricity is imported from the United States.
“There are in the area of 2,000 megawatts of these generators available across the province, a lot of that within downtown Toronto,” said Robert Desnoyers, co-founder and vice-president at Mississauga-based Safety Power Inc.
“We’ve got those generating assets sitting out there strategically, and they’re located exactly where this province needs them most.”
Currently there are eight companies, called “aggregators,” that have applied to participate in the DR3 program. An aggregator signs up as many owners of backup generators as it can, then strikes a single contract with the power authority guaranteeing that, when asked, a certain amount of backup power generation can be switched on.
The power authority is willing to pay an attractive price for that predictability. The owner of a one-megawatt generator could earn tens of thousands of dollars by participating, though the aggregator will take a cut. Aggregators that have registered so far include Direct Energy, Rodan Energy and EnerNoc. It’s expected that a new Enbridge-Toronto Hydro venture will also sign up.
But participation comes with a hitch. The Ministry of Environment proposed a new regulation last month that would allow the non-emergency use of backup generators, but only if they complied with strict emission guidelines.
“These limits will assure that emissions from generator sets are similar to those from natural gas combustion turbines,” according to the policy document.
Consultation on the proposal ends March 1.
The problem is that most backup generators run on diesel fuel, so the environmental gains of calling one dirty fuel into service to replace another is questionable.
Safety Power and its rivals, including Mississauga-based Gal Power Systems, sees huge opportunity in retrofitting old diesel generators with emission-control technologies, the cost of which will be covered through the DR3 program.
“We maintain that with some technology added to the generators we can demonstrate a diesel generator could meet or exceed emissions criteria,” said Desnoyers, explaining that the equipment used is a type of catalytic reduction device.
“Because the revenue stream is as good as guaranteed revenue from the power authority, getting the capital for these upgrades is not going to be a challenge.”
Over time, it’s hoped that diesel generators will be replaced with more efficient, cleaner natural gas generators. If enough of these machines can be called into action when needed, some argue it could delay the need to build a new natural gas plant in Toronto.
“The concept is very important,” said energy consultant Marion Fraser, president of Fraser & Co. “In 2007, there were 62 hours where we exceeded 24,000 megawatts in the province.”
She said it makes more sense to use an existing fleet of backup generators than to build one or two natural gas plants to handle peak periods. “It’s not the only answer. But it’s an important component (along with conservation) of the demand-side resources that we need to harvest.”
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26. February 2008 by admin.
As many as 3 million people are affected, the state says.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that the two Florida Power & Light nuclear reactors at its Turkey Point power plant 30 miles south of Miami automatically shut down. Two other power plants farther north, the Crystal River reactor and St. Lucie twin reactors, in the state continued to operate, although officials at those two facilities noticed the grid disturbance.
The outage was caused by a transmission substation that failed, said Todd Brown, a spokesman with the state Public Service Commission, which regulates investor-owned utilities in Florida. The substation was fed with electricity generated by the nuclear-powered Turkey Point plant owned by Florida Power & Light.
Once the substation stopped working, the two nuclear units at Turkey Point automatically shut down, Brown said. “If there is anything good to come of this, it is that the system worked the way it was supposed to,” Brown said.
The outages have no connection to terrorism, Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner said.
The two Turkey Point units, opened in 1972 and 1973, generate 1,400 megawatts of electricy, enough power to supply the annual needs of more than 450,000 houses. The units are on Biscayne Bay, 24 miles south of Miami, just east of Homestead.
“There are no safety concerns. The reactors shut down as designed,” said Kenneth Clark, a spokesman at the NRC regional office in Atlanta in a telephone interview.
He said both reactors continued to have offsite electric power. He said two coal-burning power plants at Turkey Point also shut down.
Florida’s electric network lost nearly 10 percent of its output thanks to the blown substation in South Florida, said Sarah Rogers, president of the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, a Tampa association that tracks power production in the state.
That decrease came during a time of reduced consumption because of mild weather, reducing the possibility of more extensive outages, she said.
Utilities throughout the state were cleared to increase production and bring back generating units that tripped off by 3 p.m. The only company experiencing issues was Florida Power & Light, which had to make up for the two nuclear units that remain off line because of the bad substation that triggered the statewide outage.
FP&L is handicapped, Rogers said, because a number of large utility lines feeding its system are not in use because of routine maintenance.
There are reports of outages in Orange, Lake, Seminole, Volusia and Brevard counties, as well as both coasts from Miami to Jacksonville and Naples to
The power outage in South Florida rippled across Florida as a brownout, or drop in power flowing through the grid that connects all utilities.
The State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee has activated to a Level 2, partial activation, in response to the current power outage in the state. Currently there are approximately 3 million persons without power, state officials said.
Locally, schools, businesses and intersections are without power this afternoon.
That left 11,438 customers, mostly residential, without power for between two and 20 minutes, Becht said. The utility has about 250,000 customers.
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26. February 2008 by admin.
HOUSTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - A widespread electric blackout affecting South Florida has been controlled and power is being restored, a spokeswoman for an agency that oversees the high-voltage network of transmission lines said on Tuesday afternoon.
Linda Campbell of the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council said preliminary reports showed that a problem at a substation in Dade County led to the loss of a transmission line and the shutdown of power plants owned by Florida Power & Light, a unit of FPL Group.
About 2,500 megawatts of generation was lost, she said, triggering an emergency program designed to cut power consumption to keep the overall electric system in balance.
“The load-shedding program worked,” Campbell said.
Power is now being restored slowly by utilities across the state, she said.
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26. February 2008 by admin.
Power outages are cascading through many parts of South Florida, with Florida Power & Light and others reporting blackouts in portions of Miami, Doral, Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Miramar and Boca Raton.
Many traffic lights are not working and nine accidents were reported in Miami-Dade County between 1:04 p.m. and 1:26 p.m. Police agencies were dispatching officers to as many intersections as possible.
The lights flickered off at several South Florida hospitals, which had to switch to generator power.
“We had a blip here and the generators kicked in immediately,” Jackson Memorial Hospital spokeswoman Lorraine Nelson said.
Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and Baptist Hospital in Southwest Miami-Dade reported similar situations.
A spokeswoman for FPL said the company was investigating the extent and cause of the problem.
In one part of western Pembroke Pines, the outage began about 1:15 p.m., but service was restored within about 10 minutes.
The service failures came during an unusually warm February day in South Florida, with temperatures reaching near-record highs. At 1 p.m, Miami and West Palm Beach reported a reading of 84 degrees; it was 83 degrees in Fort Lauderdale.
Some air conditioning companies reported summer-like levels of service calls.
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20. February 2008 by admin.
AN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. crews Tuesday afternoon were investigating the cause of a power outage that darkened the homes of an estimated 6,700 customers in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond District for about three hours. Power was restored to nearly all of the customers by 2:10 p.m., according to PG&E spokesman Joe Molica. The outage began at about 11:15 a.m. According to Molica, three power lines went down within a four to five-block radius in the area of Balboa Street and Geary Boulevard. Investigators’ early assessment was equipment failure and not weather, he said.
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9. February 2008 by admin.
Some Islanders endure week without power
AN ICE STORM early in the month turned power poles in the picturesque coastal community of Malpeque (about 20 minutes east of Summerside) into firewood and many homes were without power for close to two weeks.
The local high school in Kensington (about a five-minute drive away) opened its doors to the community on several occasions, allowing students and their parents to enjoy a hot meal and a shower.
The storm clearly brought the community together. Neighbours who had generators helped out those who didn’t. Crews from Maritime Electric, which supplies power to the province, worked around the clock trying to get the lights back on and life back to normal.
They were assisted by crews from utilities throughout the region.
All Islanders whether they found themselves in the dark or not certainly prayed that the outage would be the worst of the season. However, they found out this week those prayers would go unanswered.
The work week began with freezing rain and soon the province was in the grip of a silver thaw.
While the ice-covered trees and power lines may create the backdrop for the perfect winter picture, there is nothing pretty about the havoc it causes.
Remember the ice storm in Quebec and Ontario 10 years ago? A silver thaw was the major cause. The army was called in at Toronto as were linemen from P.E.I.
The ice on the line gets heavy and often takes down the lines and the poles with it.
By Monday night, much of Prince County (the western portion of the province) and the Hunter River-Rustico area, which is about a half hour west of Charlottetown, were without power.
Linemen were working around the clock but their efforts were hampered by the weather. The freezing rain continued making travelling hazardous. Maritime Electric hired a helicopter to survey the scene and pinpoint problem areas, but with limited success until the weather improved Thursday.
The headlines in the province’s daily newspapers screamed: “Ice Storm 08.” The papers were filled with stories about how people were coping in the dark.
The Red Cross and Emergency Measures Organization set up shelters and volunteer firemen made a special effort to look in on seniors, bringing them needed supplies and taking them to shelters.
The spirit of hospitality and compassion Islanders — and indeed, all Maritimers — are famous for was very much in evidence.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced that if the army was needed this time, as was the case in Quebec and Ontario, it would be there. As the week wound down, troops at CFB Gagetown were on standby — a phone call from Premier Robert Ghiz would have had them heading for Confederation Bridge.
Children in the western part of the province had no school all week. Students in the eastern part headed back to school Wednesday, but were sent home in the afternoon when a problem at a substation knocked out power to most of Charlottetown and eastern P.E.I.
At one point in the day, Maritime Electric estimated only five per cent of its customers had power.
The local CBC supper hour show did its entire show Wednesday in torrential rain and high winds, just yards from repair crews in the Hunter River area. By the end of the hour-long broadcast, the host and weatherman looked like drowned rats.
Utility spokesman Kim Griffin appeared with them and had little good news for those still without power. She told them not to be surprised if their lights weren’t on before you read this column.
About the only blessing is the calendar has now turned. Those overworked linemen, and indeed all Islanders, are hoping that means winter has now passed the halfway point. Everybody has their fingers crossed that it was the worst half.
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