Electricity Power Plant and Demands
Posted under Energy, Industry, Power Source
The traditional, vertically integrated utility incorporating generation, transmission, distribution, and customer energy services is in the beginning stages of what could prove to be quite revolutionary changes. The era of ever-larger central
power stations seems to have ended.
The opening of the transmission and distribution grid to independent power producers who offer cheaper, more efficient,
smaller-scale plants is well underway. Attempts to restructure the regulatory side of utilities to help create competition among generators and allow customers to choose their source of power have been initiated in a number of states, but with
mixed success.
And, partly due to California’s deregulation crisis of 2000–2001, the customer’s side of the meter is being rediscovered and energy efficiency is enjoying a resurgence of attention.
On the customer side of the meter, the power business is beginning to look more like it did in the early part of the twentieth century when more than half of U.S. electricity was self-generated with small, isolated systems for direct use
by industrial firms. Many of those systems were located in the basements of buildings, which were heated by the waste heat from the power plants.
Those old steam-powered, engine generators used for heat and power have modern equivalents in the form of microturbines, fuel cells, internal-combustion engines, and small gas turbines. Using these technologies, customers are rediscovering the economic advantages of on-site cogeneration of heat and power, or tri-generation for heating, electric power, and cooling.
In addition to economic benefits, other motivations helping to drive the transition toward small-scale, decentralized energy systems include increased concern for environmental impacts of generation, most especially those related to climate change, increased concern for the vulnerability of our centralized energy systems to terrorist attacks, and increased demands for electricity reliability in the digital economy.
For comparison, some examples of power demands of typical end uses are also shown. While the power ratings of some of the distributed generation options may look trivially small, it is the potentially large numbers of replicated small units that will make their contribution significant.
For example, the U.S. auto industry builds around 6 million cars each year. If half of those were 60-kW fuel-cell vehicles, the combined generation capacity of 5-year’s worth of automobile production would be greater than the total installed
capacity of all U.S. power plants.