By Lawrence D. Willey

This past year witnessed some of the most dynamic changes yet in the evolving power generation scene. Demand for electricity, led by the vibrant North American economy, remains strong globally. The European Community is beginning to show signs of increased demand that require planning for new generation capacity. From all indications, the rest of the world continues to fill out existing capacity and will follow with new generation needs.

Balancing reserve margin and introducing new power generation have become even more challenging in light of an increasing array of market dynamics. These include de-regulation with price caps, site approvals, environmental regulations, transmission bottlenecks and capacity issues, nuclear retirements, and the increasing role of distributed power.

The year 2000 began an unprecedented rise in the number of gas turbine power projects in the United States and the activity will continue at least into the near future.

It appears that the European Community will experience its significant rise in gas turbine installations during 2003 and 2004. European plants have additional requirements, including compliance with European Union directives, third-party certification, grid codes, and power plant noise reduction programs.

Manufacturers of power generation equipment have long recognized the importance of systems-level considerations for their respective prime movers. The surge in market dynamics accompanying new electric power generation growth points to the importance of applying this systems approach to the complete range of generation and delivery processes.

For example, the interaction and dependencies for a part with its assembly can be represented by a compressor blade and its attachment to a rotor. These subassemblies, in turn, are part of a component called a compressor, which is only one piece of the turbine-generator train. At each level, there is a system that falls into a larger system.

Not long ago it was complicated enough for vendors of power generation equipment to consider the entire prime mover as a system. The overall facility design and integration was usually done exclusively by a power plant design or an architect-engineering firm.

Many of the successful new power projects today break away from this practice by including close collaboration among all of the stakeholders in the project, from the plant owner to the regulators and even the end users.

The ultimate goal is for end users to have the reliable electric power they need, at a price worth paying, produced from a fuel safely, without harm to the environment, and delivered by infrastructure that plant owners and their stockholders find to be a worthwhile investment.

200 amps and holding

In the United States during the 1940s and '50s, the typical residential service entrance was 60 amps, replacing the original 30-amp standard. The 1959 National Electrical Code changed that to a minimum of 100 amps for most homes and recommended 200 amps for electrically heated or large homes. The 200-amp service is the standard today and is unlikely to change for the near future.

Even if a family were to turn on every electric device in a typical home, the load would approach only about half of the 200-amp service capacity.

With plenty of room to grow, some of the recent additions to the typical consumer electricity demand include video games, DVD players, and computers. For example, a typical personal computer draws about 360 watts and is scarcely noticed until put into context. Based on unit sales data over this past year from InfoTech Trends, PCs calculate to nearly 8 gigawatts of new load, or better than 1 percent of the entire electric power demand in North America. A sobering thought is that this is equivalent to about 26 new 300-megawatt electric power plants.

From the perspective of a system analysis, there will be a continual edging up of the demand for electricity from sources that may not always be obvious. It's well within the ability of consumers to draw more. Even with ongoing improvements in energy efficiency and conservation, the future is likely to bring further increased demand as well as increasing expectation for reliable and high-quality electricity.

The blackout of November 1965 left 30 million people in the dark across the northeastern United States and in Ontario, Canada. In an effort to prevent this type of blackout from happening again, electric utilities formed the North American Electric Reliability Council in 1968 to promote the reliability of electricity supplies for North America. The council, or NERC, reviews the past for lessons learned, monitors the present for compliance with policies, standards, principles, and guides, and assesses the future reliability of the bulk electric systems.

Last year marked a turning point when the U.S. Senate passed S.2071, The Electric Reliability 2000 Act. Although it won't be considered by the 107th Congress until later this year, NERC is proceeding with preparations to become the legislated body known as the North American Electric Reliability Organization.

In essence, members of the organization contend that voluntary compliance is no longer considered adequate to ensure reliability. Rules are required to harmonize previously voluntary electric power generation, transmission, and distribution standards.

There are a number of grid codes throughout the world today. Perhaps the best known is the United Kingdom's National Grid Code. These codes typically require off-frequency operation and recovery capability in case of system load disturbances. In the case of the United Kingdom, there is even a requirement for maintaining a prescribed level of generation output for under-frequency events.

For the manufacturer of power generation equipment, off-frequency operation requirements can pose challenges to the capabilities of parts and components. For transmission and distribution, there are local areas in the United States that can be bottlenecks and can affect the dynamics of the load in the network. A systems-level approach is required, first to the interconnection and responses of the generation equipment to the grid, then to the inner workings of the prime mover and subsystems to accurately assess capability for grid code compliance.

View From the Gas Well

The Energy Information Administration was created by Congress in 1977 and is a statistical agency of the Department of Energy. According to EIA's current projections, the United States will need a net 393 GW of new capacity (excluding cogenerators) from now until 2020. The forecast takes into account plant retirements and increased imports from Canada and Mexico. This is equivalent to 1,310 new plants with an average capacity of 300 MW over the next 20 years, or about 66 plants added every year.

It appears that the European Community will install significant numbers of gas turbine facilities, such as the Delesto 2 plant in Holland, in 2003 and 2004.

The current North American net operable capacity (including independent power producers) is nearly 860 GW so that the projected capacity growth due to the new U.S. power generation alone is up nearly 46 percent to 1,253 GW by 2020. Of this new capacity, 92 percent is projected to be combined-cycle or combustion turbine technology, including distributed generation capacity, fueled primarily by natural gas.

The decline in rigs drilling gas wells has reversed, from the 1999 low of fewer than 500 to almost 900 today, in the expectation of new demand from gas turbine installations. Conservation and improved efficiencies throughout the production chain are being given high priority because of the recognition that natural resources will eventually run out. Most sources put the halfway point in consumption of the world's oil and gas reserves between 2015 and 2030, so there's still some breathing room for developing large-scale alternative, synthetic gas fuels.

Of all the considerations within the macro system view of electric power generation, fuel is the most troubling. In order for the process of designing and commissioning new plants to move forward, it has to be assumed that the fuel will always flow. It's reasonable that a small part of every energy sector and its respective resources should be applied to develop the technologies and plans needed to address the issue of fuel.

Deregulation Means What?

The word "deregulation" seems to be used these days in the media to describe one of the reasons that some areas of the United States are short on electricity. However, deregulation, by definition, is the removal of legislated controls from a process so that it may develop in accordance with free-market principles.

California, for example, is now better understood to have a fatally flawed "deregulation" scheme because it still limits what utilities there can do and preserves some parts of the old regulatory framework. Prices for electricity are still mandated by Assembly Bill 1890 of 1996. Utilities are forced to buy power at the spot-market price and to resell to consumers at a lower frozen rate. At last count, the state's two major utilities were more than $12 billion in debt.

In fairness, not all of California's woes can be blamed on the botched deregulation plan. The number of residents in the state nearly doubled during the decade of the '90s, yet there weren't any new major electric power projects installed. Miles of red tape to obtain project site approvals and difficult environmental permitting are among a number of other problems that round out the California crisis.

However, there are plenty of success stories, including Pennsylvania and Texas. In Pennsylvania, for example, competition has saved consumers $3 billion so far on their electric bills, while at the same time utilities are still managing to turn a respectable profit.

Many point out that free markets and ingenuity are what created the electric power industry and returning closer to these roots is the right thing to do. Reliable electric power requires that systems requirements are identified and allowed to be optimized unencumbered by inflexible rules if timely progress is to be made.

Good News Not Widely Known

The United States enjoys dramatically cleaner air today than it did 30 years ago, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. According to the EPA's National Air Quality and Emissions Trends Report for 1998, a table listed the decline in national average concentrations of certain air pollutants over the period from 1989 to 1998. Among them were carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide, both down 39 percent, and nitrogen dioxide, down 14 percent. PM10, particulate matter up to 10 micrometers, had decreased by 25 percent. According to the report, "Air quality concentrations are based on actual measurements of pollutant concentrations in the air at selected monitoring sites across the country."

Yet, local permitting becomes tougher with each new project proposed. The lion's share of new projects are fueled by natural gas, and that technology has reached the practical technical limit of emissions control. Further efforts at reduction would yield minimal results and prove very costly.

The bigger picture is that, for natural gas power projects, everyone would benefit from a systemwide view that recognizes the emissions advantages over solid or liquid fuels. The level of effort required to permit and comply should reflect the difference. A change would also allow agencies to shift their attention to the improvement of older plants fueled by solids or liquids.

It's generally recognized that collectively we're transitioning from dirty solid fuels to liquid.

Inclusion of startup and shutdown emissions in the air permit for gas turbine power projects is reasonable, but should be in terms of pounds per event for NOx and CO, and not require particle matter measurement or accounting, because the combustion of methane (the major component of natural gas) doesn't produce carbon soot and associated particulate.

The startup and shutdown emissions constitute only a few percent of the overall yearly emissions for a typical combined-cycle power plant. For peaking installations using simple cycle combustion turbines, the startup and shutdown emissions will be a greater percentage of the yearly totals.

Today's cleaner air is due, in part, to the regulation and compliance of power plants starting in the 1970s. Natural gas as the preferred electric power generation fuel also plays an increasingly important role—and it's reasonable that the effort for environmental permitting should be changed to recognize this powerful driver.

Probably the most important recent development to shape electric power solutions is distributed generation. While not a new concept, it is increasingly recognized as the important ace in the hole for supplying power in areas where it is tough to obtain approval for larger conventional power plants, where there is transmission capability or limited expansion potential, and where enterprises require the highest reliability.

New York City is an example of restricted transmission, as reported recently by the Capital Region Times Union, a newspaper in Albany, N.Y. Because of how the grid is built, only a limited amount of electricity can be transferred inside city limits.

To solve the problem, power officials plan to install ten 44-MW gas turbine generator sets fueled by natural gas. They would be situated at six existing substations inside city limits and are slated to be ready this summer.

Chicago has been using distributed generation since 1998; 70 diesel generator sets were located at substations in the city to help meet summer peak demand. Five trailer-mounted GE TM2500 turbine generators producing more than 100 MW of peaking power were used last summer in Chicago. The list of examples is expanding. Ohio has more than 150 applications pending for diesel generator sets to be located at 14 state substations.

According to some estimates, 10 to 20 percent of new power will be in distributed installations by 2010. Similar to the computer industry's evolution from centralized mainframes to networked PCs, the smaller grid-connected generator is seen as a major solution. Distributed generation, renewable resources, and other new tech- nologies are vital to the systemwide view of the electric power industry.

The "wellhead to consumer" approach is a systems analysis that is continually changing. Using rigorous Six Sigma methodologies that include inputs from all persons involved in the industry, electric power solutions will continue to be developed and refined.

The manufacturer of power generation equipment that applies the most flexible and multiscale systems-based approach to creating, transmitting, and delivering electricity to end users will help the United States and the world meet the challenges ahead. Consumers will enjoy the reliable electric power they need, at a price worth paying, produced safely, without harm to the environment, created from fuel and delivered by infrastructure that power plant owners and their stockholders find to be a sound investment.

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