[NCLUG] Re: "Green" power

[John L. Bass]

S. Luke Jones wrote:
> As I remember, many utilities offer power at negative cost for large 
> industries that can commit to using a lot of power at night. Another 
> solution is to use power to pump water upstream back up behind a dam 
> (treating a reservoir as a battery) (with attendant accelerated 
> erosion in the river downstream from the dam). This seems 
> counterintuitive, but is the result of generation in large plants like 
> Rawhide that take two weeks to spin up or down, but use in small 
> appliances like air conditioners, clothes driers, and ... energy-star 
> computers that people put to sleep when they're not in use.
>
> Any discussion of electricity conservation is -- well, not 
> meaningless, but pretty shallow -- if it doesn't consider baseload 
> generation and time-of-day factors.
Having family in this industry (Canyon City plant), has given me some 
insight into this industry to spot BS. So I called the RawHide plant and 
talked with some of their engineers.

The main base load generator is coal fired, and provides something over 
200MW peak capacity. That unit they carefully temp cycle, and can be 
brought online in about 2hrs if warm (short maintenence shutdown) to 
about 12hrs if dead ice cold in the winter after an extended outage. The 
have 5 natural gas peak load generators, ranging from 65-128MW, which 
can be cycled online from cold in about 20 minutes.

The coal fired generator has a useful load range of about 35-100% of 
peak rating, and the gas fired units a useful load range of about 
60-100% of peak load rating.

They laughed, as did I, at the suggestion that any generation station 
sells power at a net loss.

I hope this corrects the FUD and grossly missleading post above.

John