Alternate Energy Advocates need to Get Real

Electricity is today, by almost any standard, a requirement for modern life.

A nation-wide system of unrelated companies makes electricity, a product that cannot be seen, stored or stockpiled and gets it delivered to every corner of the nation through a series of wires connected by thousands of different companies, 24 hours a day for 365 days a year.

This product reaches the customer at the exact moment that the customer wants it- even when the customer doesn’t know they want it. If too much electricity is delivered, things start melting. If too little electricity is delivered, things start melting. This is not like gas for your car. There is no gauge showing a low tank so you can head to the filling station. This is a product that most homeowners only think about when it isn’t there or when the price goes up.

The back bone of the electric power generation system consists of thousands of power plants spread across the country. Most are located strategically near urban load centers or sources of fuel. Usually, sources of fuel, like coal or wind or hydro power, are nowhere near urban load centers.

Base-load fossil fuel is stockpiled allowing power plants to schedule power production to meet anticipated loads. When power plant schedulers get it right, nobody notices. When they get it wrong, rolling brown-outs or black-outs inspire months of government investigation and reams of customer hate mail focused on those utilities that left them in the dark or melted their ice cream. Wholesale power suppliers pay various contract penalties for being short on generation delivery if they under produce or waste electricity and ratepayer’s money if they produce more than is needed.

Because of the ability to schedule these base-load fossil fuel systems, they are called “dispatch-able”. Schedulers dispatch power at varying levels targeted every thirty minutes to meet your electricity demands. They do it based on formulas that consider historic loads, predicted weather conditions and anticipated load growth. Wind and solar energy are not “dispatch-able”.

Based load power plants have an excellent track record of meeting the nation’s needs. As a whole, they achieve an astounding 80% production output that combines with back-up power generation and regional inter-connections to provide electricity at your house almost 100 percent of the time.

Renewable power production facilities have a track record of 25% output. As renewables become more plentiful and spread over wider geographic areas, this “production” factor will improve. Increased reliability through diversity has long been a goal of renewable energy advocates. The Rocky Mountain Institute is one group supporting this concept. Their recent research in the July 2008 issue of their Solution Journal describes how that might come about.

Utilities, have historically appeared to drag their feet about including wind and solar power into their generation portfolio. This is not because they dislike clean power, but because they feel like a 25 % production track record does not meet the needs of their customers. From their perspective, every kilowatt of wind or solar power generation must be backed up with equal base load generation to cover the 75% of the time renewable resources fail to deliver power. In a business dedicated to reliable power at the least cost, the expense of supporting renewable energy means building redundant base-load coverage.

Until customers get “real” about alternate energy expectations there will always be conflict between customer expectations and utility’s ability to deliver.