Previously: Bad News
We lost Howie last week.
Last time I wrote about him, I had not actually met him, but over the holiday he came in to visit the dispatchers and service crews. Although he was in a wheelchair, he was all smiles, wearing a Santa hat and delivering cookies. This is in line with everything I had ever heard about him.
Folks are pretty low here, but the lights must stay on, and so the show goes on.
Although the Fleet division will not go along with re-numbering Truck 579, we're retiring the call sign in Dispatch anyway. Whoever we promote to inherit Howie's old ride will be heard on the radio as Truck 584, because 579 is 10-7 and retired.
Rest in peace brother Howie. As I can see from those around me, you will be missed, and we'll take care of keeping the lights on from here.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Smart Grid, Part 1 - First Tell Me About LMP
I already know this won't be brief. No matter how much I say I'll try to keep it short, I can't. I talk too much and over-explain everything. Having accepted that, I sleep OK at night at peace with who I am.
With that out of the way....
Why do we need a "smart grid"?
If you've been following me for a while and have read the tutorials, you know the basic truth that AC power is generated exactly as it is consumed, with no practical storage applications. As demand goes up, frequency drops, and power plants increase output to match demand, and vice-versa. It is fluctuating every second. Thankfully, the smoothed out impacts of millions and millions of people turning lights and toasters and Blu Ray players on and off don't amount to much instantaneous fluctuation relative to the size of the interconnected grid. If you were trying to run a power grid of only five houses with a plant just barely big enough to do it, and they all happened to turn on a bunch of stuff at once, everyone would see a big dip and maybe low voltage damage - assuming it didn't trip the generator outright.
Following demand is not an efficient game. During high demand periods, power plants with expensive fuel sources have to run to keep supply up, raising the aggregate cost of power. During low periods, only the cheapest units run, lowering the aggregate cost, but when coal plants run below efficiency (usually under 80% or so), they create more pollution relative to power produced. Running thermal plants up and down every day for years wears them out, as the boilers and systems fatigue and break down from being heated and cooled over and over and over again. Overall energy costs go up not just from fuel costs, but repair and maintenance costs.
Despite real-time hourly changes in energy prices based on what power plants are running at that time of day, almost everyone at the consumer level pays a flat per-kilowatt hour charge for electricity. This is tricky for power companies, as they need to make their rate case with magic math that figures out how much revenue will be coming in based on which hours their systems are used and what energy costs actually are, with hopes that they get enough money to run the thing, but not so much that the consumers scream foul. It is frankly very easy to screw this up, and a couple of disastrous power market days with real-time energy prices increased by 1000% or more can take years for a company to recover from with their rate case locked-in usage fees.
The first step towards efficiency is to get all power companies in a large area to cooperatively control their power plants instead of playing the hourly market game. The Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), a quasi-governmental reliability agency with authority over a huge footprint of power companies in the midwest, was the first to do this on a really large scale. Their coordinated control concept was based on a model called Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP).
Don't let these acronyms scare you, I'll try to keep it simple.
Let's say you have a self-contained power system with four power plants and no ties to the outside world. Your transmission lines are overbuilt and there are no restrictions on power flows anywhere in your system. Your customers pay for their electricity based on hourly usage instead of a flat round-the-clock average cost. Your power plants use different fuels and therefore have different costs. You run the cheapest unit until it reaches capacity, and then start the next cheapest unit. When #2 peaks, you start the third unit, etc. Figuring out your hourly energy costs are easy, it's basic math based on how much was produced from each plant for any particular hour, and everyone in your system is charged the same thing for any particular hour.
In this model, location means nothing. Pricing is flat across all areas by the hour. The wrinkle that screws everything up is constraints on the electric transmission system.
Back to the same model. Self-contained system with four plants, one in each quadrant. But this time, the transmission lines between the quadrants do not have unlimited capacity. As long as no lines are at their limits, the flat hourly pricing works fine. Let's say the cheapest unit is in quadrant 1. Now, as long as demand is low, that cheap unit can supply everyone fine, but as the day picks up, demand in quadrant 2 rises to the point that if the cheap unit in quadrant 1 keeps going up to cover, the power line between them will overload. Since the cheap plant cannot supply the demand in quadrant 2, the next-cheapest plant somewhere else will have to come online to make up the shortage.
At this point, you have locational marginal pricing, based on transmission (transportation) constraints. Back in quadrant 1, energy stays cheap, and only the people in quadrant 2 who did not have the foresight to increase their transmission line's capacity have to pay the averaged costs of what they could get from the cheap plant and the remainder they had to get from somewhere else. It's no different than living next to a bakery and getting cheap donuts, but over the hills where they have a small bakery that can't keep up and they can't ship enough donuts in from elsewhere on the only dirt road into town, the value of a donut logically goes up.
Now, the MISO did exactly this, back in about 2003 or so, but on a GRAND scale. Covering all or parts of 11 U.S. States and the Canadian Province of Manitoba, with 35 power companies owning transmission assets and another 98 companies owning generation and/or serving load, they coordinate over 130,000 megawatts of energy generation from hundreds of power plants. In real time, pulsing power plants to move up and down to live within the cheapest-power-possible-to-where-you-are LMP model every few seconds.
How do they set prices? The generation owners bid the units into the MISO system, with costs based on output. They even have allowances for efficiency bandwidths, so you can say your power plant costs 'x' from 200-400MW, 'y' from 401-475Mw, 'z' 476-510MW, etc. The MISO super AGC computer sees real-time demand across their entire footprint, determines when generation needs to increase, and finds the next cheapest unit anywhere in their entire area to go up. Except that the MISO super AGC computer also knows what the real-time flows on all of the transmission lines are, and knows how moving any generator up or down will impact every transmission line. So it doesn't just grab the next cheap unit in the stack, it grabs the next cheap unit that can increase without overloading any power lines anywhere else.
This creates hundreds of pricing bubbles in the MISO footprint based on LMP restrictions. The MISO super AGC computer measures consumption at thousands of points on the system and knows which power company is the consumer at every given point. Knowing how much energy you used at any given consumption point every hour, and knowing the energy cost in that bubble for that hour, it is no great leap to figure out what to charge you for the energy based on your usage at all of your consumption points. So, in effect, the MISO "buys" the energy using cheapest-possible source from the bidding process and influenced by the LMP model, and then sells the energy back to the members with pricing based on their usage and location, keeping a cut to operate their massive bureaucracy.
This effectively killed the hourly power market in MISO, as it completely ended the hourly guessing game. Your units ran if you priced them low enough to get picked up and had transmission availability out of your system, and you know you always got the cheapest energy possible that was offered. If your costs seem too high, build more power lines into your system or help your neighbors build lines that will help you get more cheap stuff. The day of the energy trader making hourly deals like working Wall Street ended in MISO.
It was gigantic gain in efficiency, as you no longer run your own units up and down to meet only your local demand. Cheap units run pretty much full power all day, and the load increases and decreases at scales large enough that it is unlikely that the stack will land on any one unit and run it up and down for hours. Increased demand flies through the stack quickly enough that your unit running at minimum waiting get picked up gets the signal to go to full and then stays there for hours.
MISO is not the only one playing the LMP game in the U.S., but they are the largest and did it best first (though not without some noteworthy hiccups worth another post another day). And while efficiency was vastly improved, it did not address any of the problems of meeting demand when things really go bad on the system, or how to manage the somewhat uncontrollable "green power" resources such as wind and solar. They still flex the system to work around those, and stress the system when a big contingency hits somewhere. MISO's LMP manages generation pretty well, but what it doesn't really do at all is manage the other side.... it doesn't manage load. Imagine how much nicer it would be if you could prevent donut riots on the other side of the hills by magically influencing how badly those people wanted donuts on any particular day? That is the foot in the door for the Smart Grid.
Another post, another day.
So..... did any of this make sense?
With that out of the way....
Why do we need a "smart grid"?
If you've been following me for a while and have read the tutorials, you know the basic truth that AC power is generated exactly as it is consumed, with no practical storage applications. As demand goes up, frequency drops, and power plants increase output to match demand, and vice-versa. It is fluctuating every second. Thankfully, the smoothed out impacts of millions and millions of people turning lights and toasters and Blu Ray players on and off don't amount to much instantaneous fluctuation relative to the size of the interconnected grid. If you were trying to run a power grid of only five houses with a plant just barely big enough to do it, and they all happened to turn on a bunch of stuff at once, everyone would see a big dip and maybe low voltage damage - assuming it didn't trip the generator outright.
Following demand is not an efficient game. During high demand periods, power plants with expensive fuel sources have to run to keep supply up, raising the aggregate cost of power. During low periods, only the cheapest units run, lowering the aggregate cost, but when coal plants run below efficiency (usually under 80% or so), they create more pollution relative to power produced. Running thermal plants up and down every day for years wears them out, as the boilers and systems fatigue and break down from being heated and cooled over and over and over again. Overall energy costs go up not just from fuel costs, but repair and maintenance costs.
Despite real-time hourly changes in energy prices based on what power plants are running at that time of day, almost everyone at the consumer level pays a flat per-kilowatt hour charge for electricity. This is tricky for power companies, as they need to make their rate case with magic math that figures out how much revenue will be coming in based on which hours their systems are used and what energy costs actually are, with hopes that they get enough money to run the thing, but not so much that the consumers scream foul. It is frankly very easy to screw this up, and a couple of disastrous power market days with real-time energy prices increased by 1000% or more can take years for a company to recover from with their rate case locked-in usage fees.
The first step towards efficiency is to get all power companies in a large area to cooperatively control their power plants instead of playing the hourly market game. The Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), a quasi-governmental reliability agency with authority over a huge footprint of power companies in the midwest, was the first to do this on a really large scale. Their coordinated control concept was based on a model called Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP).
Don't let these acronyms scare you, I'll try to keep it simple.
Let's say you have a self-contained power system with four power plants and no ties to the outside world. Your transmission lines are overbuilt and there are no restrictions on power flows anywhere in your system. Your customers pay for their electricity based on hourly usage instead of a flat round-the-clock average cost. Your power plants use different fuels and therefore have different costs. You run the cheapest unit until it reaches capacity, and then start the next cheapest unit. When #2 peaks, you start the third unit, etc. Figuring out your hourly energy costs are easy, it's basic math based on how much was produced from each plant for any particular hour, and everyone in your system is charged the same thing for any particular hour.
In this model, location means nothing. Pricing is flat across all areas by the hour. The wrinkle that screws everything up is constraints on the electric transmission system.
Back to the same model. Self-contained system with four plants, one in each quadrant. But this time, the transmission lines between the quadrants do not have unlimited capacity. As long as no lines are at their limits, the flat hourly pricing works fine. Let's say the cheapest unit is in quadrant 1. Now, as long as demand is low, that cheap unit can supply everyone fine, but as the day picks up, demand in quadrant 2 rises to the point that if the cheap unit in quadrant 1 keeps going up to cover, the power line between them will overload. Since the cheap plant cannot supply the demand in quadrant 2, the next-cheapest plant somewhere else will have to come online to make up the shortage.
At this point, you have locational marginal pricing, based on transmission (transportation) constraints. Back in quadrant 1, energy stays cheap, and only the people in quadrant 2 who did not have the foresight to increase their transmission line's capacity have to pay the averaged costs of what they could get from the cheap plant and the remainder they had to get from somewhere else. It's no different than living next to a bakery and getting cheap donuts, but over the hills where they have a small bakery that can't keep up and they can't ship enough donuts in from elsewhere on the only dirt road into town, the value of a donut logically goes up.
Now, the MISO did exactly this, back in about 2003 or so, but on a GRAND scale. Covering all or parts of 11 U.S. States and the Canadian Province of Manitoba, with 35 power companies owning transmission assets and another 98 companies owning generation and/or serving load, they coordinate over 130,000 megawatts of energy generation from hundreds of power plants. In real time, pulsing power plants to move up and down to live within the cheapest-power-possible-to-where-you-are LMP model every few seconds.
How do they set prices? The generation owners bid the units into the MISO system, with costs based on output. They even have allowances for efficiency bandwidths, so you can say your power plant costs 'x' from 200-400MW, 'y' from 401-475Mw, 'z' 476-510MW, etc. The MISO super AGC computer sees real-time demand across their entire footprint, determines when generation needs to increase, and finds the next cheapest unit anywhere in their entire area to go up. Except that the MISO super AGC computer also knows what the real-time flows on all of the transmission lines are, and knows how moving any generator up or down will impact every transmission line. So it doesn't just grab the next cheap unit in the stack, it grabs the next cheap unit that can increase without overloading any power lines anywhere else.
This creates hundreds of pricing bubbles in the MISO footprint based on LMP restrictions. The MISO super AGC computer measures consumption at thousands of points on the system and knows which power company is the consumer at every given point. Knowing how much energy you used at any given consumption point every hour, and knowing the energy cost in that bubble for that hour, it is no great leap to figure out what to charge you for the energy based on your usage at all of your consumption points. So, in effect, the MISO "buys" the energy using cheapest-possible source from the bidding process and influenced by the LMP model, and then sells the energy back to the members with pricing based on their usage and location, keeping a cut to operate their massive bureaucracy.
This effectively killed the hourly power market in MISO, as it completely ended the hourly guessing game. Your units ran if you priced them low enough to get picked up and had transmission availability out of your system, and you know you always got the cheapest energy possible that was offered. If your costs seem too high, build more power lines into your system or help your neighbors build lines that will help you get more cheap stuff. The day of the energy trader making hourly deals like working Wall Street ended in MISO.
It was gigantic gain in efficiency, as you no longer run your own units up and down to meet only your local demand. Cheap units run pretty much full power all day, and the load increases and decreases at scales large enough that it is unlikely that the stack will land on any one unit and run it up and down for hours. Increased demand flies through the stack quickly enough that your unit running at minimum waiting get picked up gets the signal to go to full and then stays there for hours.
MISO is not the only one playing the LMP game in the U.S., but they are the largest and did it best first (though not without some noteworthy hiccups worth another post another day). And while efficiency was vastly improved, it did not address any of the problems of meeting demand when things really go bad on the system, or how to manage the somewhat uncontrollable "green power" resources such as wind and solar. They still flex the system to work around those, and stress the system when a big contingency hits somewhere. MISO's LMP manages generation pretty well, but what it doesn't really do at all is manage the other side.... it doesn't manage load. Imagine how much nicer it would be if you could prevent donut riots on the other side of the hills by magically influencing how badly those people wanted donuts on any particular day? That is the foot in the door for the Smart Grid.
Another post, another day.
So..... did any of this make sense?
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
YouTube Love
Just as I wondered if anyone ever bothered to read my ramblings, lo and behold I find some visitors arriving from.... YouTube?
Sure enough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rd1RB6Nv1I&feature=g-all-u&context=G2685341FAAAAAAAAAAA
So, if you just stumbled in here after following Charlie's advice, the two posts he is most likely referring to are over a year old, and can be found at these links:
Why wind power is not the (only) answer
And Now, More Wind!
There's other power grid stuff mixed in here and there on the blog if that's your thing. Just click the "power company" tag at the bottom of this post to filter the rest of the clutter out.
I promised a few posts ago to talk more about this topic, I haven't forgotten. There are developments in the area of load management related to the "smart grid" (use that in Dilbert Buzzword Bingo). Conceptually rather brilliant, even practical, but expensive and slow to be implemented because power companies can move pretty slow. Stay tuned.
Thanks, Charlie.
Sure enough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rd1RB6Nv1I&feature=g-all-u&context=G2685341FAAAAAAAAAAA
So, if you just stumbled in here after following Charlie's advice, the two posts he is most likely referring to are over a year old, and can be found at these links:
Why wind power is not the (only) answer
And Now, More Wind!
There's other power grid stuff mixed in here and there on the blog if that's your thing. Just click the "power company" tag at the bottom of this post to filter the rest of the clutter out.
I promised a few posts ago to talk more about this topic, I haven't forgotten. There are developments in the area of load management related to the "smart grid" (use that in Dilbert Buzzword Bingo). Conceptually rather brilliant, even practical, but expensive and slow to be implemented because power companies can move pretty slow. Stay tuned.
Thanks, Charlie.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Call Grumpy
I'm the only seriously active firefighter in my part of the district, and living so close to Station 51 means when either rig rolls out of there, my voice is pretty much always the one on the other end of the radio.
When you've served this long in one place, the people in your neighborhood get to know you either by direct contact or word of mouth for both good and bad moves. Still, it surprises me sometimes how it comes about.
My father-in-law works in fleet management for a large transportation outfit a few hours from here, and was hundreds of miles from home at a business function, chatting casually with the regional safety manager for his company. Somehow they got to talking about home, and the safety guy mentioned that he lived in the same county that we do.
"Oh really," my father-in-law said, "my daughter lives around there, on Lower Valley Road."
"You don't say," said the safety guy, "I live right about there, too."
"Yeah, her husband is a firefighter there and usually runs out of the station up the road from you."
"Oh, you mean Grumpy and Mrs. Grumpy? You're telling me he's your son-in-law??"
The way it was told to me, the conversation went on with the safety guy saying nice things about us and how he and his neighbors appreciate both that I run so many calls for the neighborhood and that Mrs. Grumpy helps that effort by being awesomely supportive.
I've actually never heard of the guy. Never responded to his house. Point taken, though, that your reputation precedes you one way or another. It was a really nice thing to hear about.
========
So last week I took in a middle of the night call for a medical emergency. The address was familiar, as the guy has had a few medical issues in the past, but I hadn't been there since 2009. I walked in and said "Hey Barry, it's Grumpy from the fire department, been a while since I've seen you, what's going on this morning?"
I heard the wife's voice in the dawning of comprehension as she said "You're Grumpy??"
Seems Barry was suffering stroke symptoms, and while he seemed to be bouncing back from what I assume ended up being a TIA, he was at that moment still struggling to speak clearly. As I put him on a high flow NRB and collected vitals while awaiting Medic 97, his wife explained that she woke up when he was acting strangely. The only thing she was able to make out before deciding to call 911 was "Call Grumpy." She had no recollection of my name, and was thoroughly perplexed. Now it made sense.
When Barry was fearfully struggling against the fog of a stroke, of all the things he might have wanted to say, it was my name that he punched out in his plea for help.
I am seriously and substantially honored and humbled at how that played out. I'm just a small cog in the big machine, but point taken that when the chips are down and the people call us, our arrival leaves a powerful impression for good or bad.
Reputations and impressions last a long time. Carefully ensure that you are investing in making the right ones.
Barry's home again and made a full recovery according to what I heard. I'll have to go by and see him this week. I am, after all, the neighborhood beat fireman, and should know my people.
When you've served this long in one place, the people in your neighborhood get to know you either by direct contact or word of mouth for both good and bad moves. Still, it surprises me sometimes how it comes about.
My father-in-law works in fleet management for a large transportation outfit a few hours from here, and was hundreds of miles from home at a business function, chatting casually with the regional safety manager for his company. Somehow they got to talking about home, and the safety guy mentioned that he lived in the same county that we do.
"Oh really," my father-in-law said, "my daughter lives around there, on Lower Valley Road."
"You don't say," said the safety guy, "I live right about there, too."
"Yeah, her husband is a firefighter there and usually runs out of the station up the road from you."
"Oh, you mean Grumpy and Mrs. Grumpy? You're telling me he's your son-in-law??"
The way it was told to me, the conversation went on with the safety guy saying nice things about us and how he and his neighbors appreciate both that I run so many calls for the neighborhood and that Mrs. Grumpy helps that effort by being awesomely supportive.
I've actually never heard of the guy. Never responded to his house. Point taken, though, that your reputation precedes you one way or another. It was a really nice thing to hear about.
========
So last week I took in a middle of the night call for a medical emergency. The address was familiar, as the guy has had a few medical issues in the past, but I hadn't been there since 2009. I walked in and said "Hey Barry, it's Grumpy from the fire department, been a while since I've seen you, what's going on this morning?"
I heard the wife's voice in the dawning of comprehension as she said "You're Grumpy??"
Seems Barry was suffering stroke symptoms, and while he seemed to be bouncing back from what I assume ended up being a TIA, he was at that moment still struggling to speak clearly. As I put him on a high flow NRB and collected vitals while awaiting Medic 97, his wife explained that she woke up when he was acting strangely. The only thing she was able to make out before deciding to call 911 was "Call Grumpy." She had no recollection of my name, and was thoroughly perplexed. Now it made sense.
When Barry was fearfully struggling against the fog of a stroke, of all the things he might have wanted to say, it was my name that he punched out in his plea for help.
I am seriously and substantially honored and humbled at how that played out. I'm just a small cog in the big machine, but point taken that when the chips are down and the people call us, our arrival leaves a powerful impression for good or bad.
Reputations and impressions last a long time. Carefully ensure that you are investing in making the right ones.
Barry's home again and made a full recovery according to what I heard. I'll have to go by and see him this week. I am, after all, the neighborhood beat fireman, and should know my people.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Charlie Foxtrot
Engine 54, Engine 21, Engine 51, Medic 97, traffic accident.....
This is in the middle of 54's area. 21 will come from the north and I will come from the south in 51, to meet at the scene if 54 still needs us.
The next update has a chilling effect.
Rollover and over an embankment, six patients, some ejected. However, dispatch does not actually know where the scene is. The call came through Hazzard County 911, and Mayberry FD is already looking for it on their side of the line along with the Mayberry ambulance service.
The place they dispatched us to is associated with info that Hazzard County gave our dispatchers regarding a cell phone ping. But then our dispatchers mention a road name that was in the conversation that is nowhere remotely near where we've been sent. In addition, the caller is apparently one of the patients, and is describing terrain in no-man's land way down south that fits with the alternate possible location.
54, 21 and the medic will continue to the original scene to check, but the new spot is now behind me and closer to Mayberry. I divert to the new location, which will make me drive back right past Station 51, and flop from our TAC channel over to the Hazzard County channel to see what they know. Not much, except that the Hazzard County ambulance is already on scene asking for assistance yet no one seems to quite know where they are or how to interpret their directions. Units are scrambling to communicate on our TAC channel, Hazzard County's dispatch channel, and a shared inter-op channel that we should all be using but not everyone has access to. This in addition to the fact that we're on the fringe of radio coverage for any of these channels.
54 and 21 arrive, UTL. 21 returns, and 54 starts my way with Medic 97 right behind them.
I arrive at the end of the world, where roads stop having reliable names. A couple of Mayberry units are there. The Mayberry Chief hustles up to me to let me know a second Hazzard County ambulance just went by them a few minutes before, but they don't know where it went.
Seriously? You didn't think of following the medic if it seemed to know where it was going? Oh well, this is their call, we are the mutual aid, so I tell the MFD Chief that we have another engine on the way and ask how we can help.
He gives me a blank stare for a half second, and then as if he didn't hear me, he asks me where the call is at and what we want them to do.
We have thus descended into Charlie Foxtrot status.
We thought it was their call, and they apparently thought it was our call. No one has Command, no one knows where the ambulances are, and everyone is scattered on three radio channels.
Cue the Southwest Airlines catchphrase: Wanna get away?
We are - in our present literal location - technically in our district by about 15 feet, though the roads into no-man's land head mostly into Mayberry territory. This could be anyone's call. But OK, I can take it.
Now with a reliable starting place to work from, I managed to get enough information from the ambulance to guess where they are, and with that, we're off into darkness.
After about five miles of that we come over a rise and find an ambulance coming toward us. Great, are we ALL lost?
No, as it turns out, this medic has two patients aboard. The other Hazzard medic has one patient aboard and is coming up behind them. There were never more than three patients, they are all loaded, and there is nothing left to do. They thank us for showing up, and off they go to the hospital.
You could just sense the deflation of everyone's adrenaline when I got on the radio and told everyone to just go home.
So, what happened?
True to past performance, massive communication breakdowns between 911 agencies. Hazzard County 911 gave our dispatchers an address near a cell phone tower in our area, and the other road names out of our area carried no meaning and were ignored. We got sent to the tower. The tower.
Too many radio channels, with too many people talking on them. The Command vacuum empowered everyone to chatter until confusion reigned.
The first unit on scene failed to initiate Command. The first officer on scene also failed, as did the first Chief. It should never have fallen to me as first-arriving M/A representative to recognize that and try to fill it.
We're not perfect, I make plenty of mistakes, but this Charlie Foxtrot was worse than usual, and oh-so-preventable with basic communication skills.
It could have been worse, I guess. Argh.
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