Further to last Friday’s post re: hybrid coal-biomass plants, today private equity firm Energy Investors Funds (EIF) and developer NTE Energy announced a joint venture to develop, build and operate large hybrid renewable and natural-gas fired power plants in the United States. The announcement called hybrid plants a way to generate “sustainable sources of clean electricity at a lower cost.”
The joint venture intends to build gas-fired plants that also use solar, biomass and other renewable technologies. While the companies didn’t reveal any specific projects in development, they did promise announcements of new projects in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama to come in “the near future.”
By targeting the renewable-challenged Southeast, the joint venture might be positioning the company to help such utilities as Florida Power & Light, Progress Energy and Southern Company to meet pending federal renewable energy standards without taking the politically unpopular steps of sending ratepayer dollars out of state to buy renewable power or renewable energy credits.-Michael T. Burr
Amid a torrent of news about clean-tech projects and developments, three coal-fired power projects in the Great Plains and Mountain West seem to be bucking the trend — in part by getting on the green bandwagon.
In the first example, Minnesota-based G&T cooperative Great River Energy announced plans to develop a $300 million cellulosic biorefinery to be built on the site of its 99-MW lignite-fired Spiritwood cogeneration project, now under construction near Jamestown, N.D. The Dakota Spirit AgEnergy biorefinery would use agricultural waste to produce three products: ethanol, lignin and molasses. The C5 ethanol would be sold in wholesale markets, while the molasses would be used as a livestock feed adjunct and the lignin would be burned in the Spiritwood boiler. Great River Energy is negotiating with Inbicon of Denmark, which developed a similar biorefinery in Denmark.
In a second example, Black Hills Power Corp. began commercial operations at its $247 million WyGen III plant in northeastern Wyoming on April 1. The 110-MW plant started up 24 months early, according to company officials. It will burn Wyoming coal to provide power to customers in western South Dakota and parts of Wyoming and Montana. Black & Veatch served as project engineer.
Black Hills Power sold a 23-percent interest in the plant to the city of Gillette in mid-March for $62 million. Last April MDU Resources acquired 25 percent of the plant. Rate cases are proceeding before regulatory commissions in all three states to finance the project’s costs.
And in the third example, on March 8 the Wyoming Supreme Court upheld an air-quality permit the state’s Department of Environmental Quality issued more than three years ago for Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s 385-MW Dry Fork Station near Gillette. Environmental groups sued to stop construction on the $1.3 billion plant, challenging the validity of the state’s air permit, and also questioning whether the G&T cooperative selected the “best-available control technology” as defined by the Clean Air Act when selecting the plant’s pulverized-coal boiler design. Sargent & Lundy served as architect-engineer.
Although the Wyoming high-court ruling is a major victory for the Dry Fork project, it still faces a federal legal challenge led by the Sierra Club in U.S. District Court in Cheyenne.
News about electric vehicles (EV) has been coming fast and furious in the past few days.
For instance, on March 30, Nissan announced the sticker price for its Leaf EV — $32,780 before government incentives. (Early in March Nissan said it would ramp up the global production capacity for the Leaf from the current reported 50,000 to 500,000 units a year in 2012.)
The next day, Ford and Microsoft announced they were teaming up to integrate smart charging into Microsoft’s Hohm energy management system. Microsoft says Hohm will help drivers to determine the best time to charge their vehicle. “Ford and Microsoft will deliver a solution that will make it easier for car owners to make smart decisions about the most affordable and efficient ways to recharge electric vehicles, while giving utilities better tools for managing the expected changes in energy demand,” stated Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.
And the same day, Ford was providing test drives of its new Transit Connect commercial van, which the company says will use $2 to $3 worth of electricity to cover its 80-mile range, compared to $12 to fuel the gasoline version of the same van over the same range.
But as interesting and important as those developments were, they overshadowed another announcement on April 1 (no fooling) that ultimately might have much broader ramifications. Namely, in its supremely wonky, pocket-protected style, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) re-designated its arcane-sounding standard, P1809, with the even-more arcane designation “P2030.1.”
Ho hum, right? Actually, not so much.
By re-designating P1809 — which was IEEE’s “draft standard addressing electric-sourced transportation infrastructure” — the organization officially moved its work on EV standards into the realm of the smart grid. It might seem subtle, but it’s a major shift in focus for EV technology stakeholders worldwide. IEEE is developing P2030.1 for use by utilities, manufacturers, infrastructure developers and end users, and thus arguably is creating the technical roadmap for EVs to roll onto roadways—and plug into utility systems—around the world.
“We believe this move will foster a more coordinated, integrated relationship between [IEEE’s EV and smart-grid standards efforts], sparking new smart-grid technology innovation and development,” stated Siri Jodha Khasla, chair of IEEE’s Standards Coordinating Committee.
IEEE’s announcement comes at an opportune time in the smart-grid standards process. These standards have advanced significantly in the past year, and in recent months the U.S. federal government has taken a leadership role by forming a governing board for the U.S. Commerce Department’s stimulus-funded Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), under the auspices of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
John McDonald, who chairs the SGIP governing board and serves as general manager of marketing for GE’s T&D division, told Fortnightly magazine in a phone call on March 31, “We [NIST’s SGIP] are looking at priority action plans for electric vehicles. It’s something we’re discussing right now,” he said. “And at GE we’re looking at Japanese standards, as part of our work to develop smart-charging technology.”
McDonald pointed out that smart-charging standards might get a significant boost sooner rather than later, as EV drivers begin causing pain for utilities in a highly localized way.
“While the overall penetration rate for EVs will be low for some time, there’s growing fear in the utility industry about pockets of high density,” he said. “You’ll find an affluent subdivision with higher penetration rates than other areas. All these folks will plug in at the same time and the distribution transformers serving those homes will get overloaded.
“Pad-mounted and overhead transformers weren’t sized to handle the load of electric vehicle charging,” he explained. “And they’re designed to have a nighttime cooling period. If we’re charging a bunch of EVs at night, transformers won’t be able to cool down enough, and during the day they’ll blow up or burn out.”
Such pain points will prompt utilities to accelerate plans to install smart-charging infrastructure — and that makes EV integration standards all the more timely. “Once the vehicles start rolling out in certain areas,” McDonald says, “smart charging will come to the forefront almost as quickly as the cars do.”-Michael T. Burr
Microsoft says Hohm will help drivers to determine the best time to charge their vehicle. “Ford and Microsoft will deliver a solution that will make it easier for car owners to make smart decisions about the most affordable and efficient ways to recharge electric vehicles, while giving utilities better tools for managing the expected changes in energy demand,” stated Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.