Typhoon Neoguri threatens western Japan's already weak grid

Clint Richards in The Diplomat: Japan has been preparing for Typhoon Neoguri since last weekend, and on Tuesday it began battering Japan’s southernmost Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa and its 1.2 million people. The typhoon will be one of the biggest many parts of southern and western Japan have seen in decades, with Commander James Hecker U.S. Air Force’s 18th wing in Kadena saying Neoguri will be the biggest typhoon Okinawa has seen in 15 years. As Okinawa and Kyushu prepare to take the brunt of what was until Monday categorized as a “super typhoon,” local infrastructure will be pushed to its limits, especially in Kyushu, where the area is saturated from heavy rains last week.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency has issued an alert for Okinawa’s main island, and local officials have advised 480,000 people to evacuate to local municipal buildings. Waves are expected to reach as high as 14 meters, with sustained winds of 198 km (123 miles) per hour and gusts up to 270 kph (168 mph), the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane in the North Atlantic Ocean. Neoguri is forecast to drop 80 millimeters of rain an hour in Okinawa, according to the meteorological agency.

The Typhoon is expected to reach Japan’s westernmost main island of Kyushu by midday on Wednesday, with sustained winds still at around 200 kph. The sheer size (if not strength) of Neoguri’s storm front is being compared with Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the U.S. east coast in 2012. The projected path of the typhoon is expected to cross Nagasaki on Kyushu’s east coast, which saw 20 centimeters of rain on Thursday (a 50 year record), while parts of
Kyushu saw 25 centimeters of rain on Friday. The heavy rains have continued on Monday, and this high level of saturation puts large population centers on the island, like Nagasaki, at risk of floods, landslides, and possible power outages.

The storm is expected to track eastward along the main island of Honshu, as it weakens before reaching Tokyo Thursday afternoon....

Typhoon Neoguri on July 7, 2014, from NOAA

US electrical grid on the edge of failure

Jeff Tollefson in Nature: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse.

That is according to a mathematical study of spatial networks by physicists in Israel and the United States. Study co-author Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, says that the research builds on earlier work by incorporating a more explicit analysis of how the spatial nature of physical networks affects their fundamental stability. The upshot, published today in Nature Physics, is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse1.

The electric grid, which operates as a series of networks that are defined by geography, is a prime example, says Havlin. “Whenever you have such dependencies in the system, failure in one place leads to failure in another place, which cascades into collapse.”

The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. Havlin says that this outage is an example of the inherent instability his study describes, but others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world.

“I suppose I should be open-minded to new research, but I'm not convinced,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates.”...

Transmission pylons at sunset in north Texas, shot by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Paying for climate change adaptations and grid resiliency

Christine Hertzog in the Energy Collective: Climate change adaptation plans to harden our electrical infrastructure will be unavoidable and expensive.  The grid needs to be upgraded anyway, as pointed out in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Report Card discussed in last week’s article.  It is a momentous opportunity to re-architect our electrical grid to last another 100 years....

But the numbers are huge.  The ASCE report estimates that we’re underinvesting in the distribution grid by $57 billion.  That’s a number based on simply updating existing grid infrastructure.  That doesn’t take into account the hardening of the grid – which includes asset relocation, resiliency strategies such as distributed energy resources (DER), and upgrading infrastructure to withstand extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Utilities can develop short- to long-range plans to upgrade infrastructure, but they don’t have unlimited budgets, and sometimes regulatory policy limits their range of actions.  All of the grid investments discussed in this series will take serious money.  Right now, the only answer is that it comes out of the pockets of ratepayers or taxpayers at the local level.  But adapting the grid for climate change reasons isn’t always caused locally.  It’s a nationally shared responsibility because of our use of fossil fuels.

So how do we fund the multi-billion investments needed to adapt our electrical infrastructure to climate change?  Here is my suggestion:

Create a federal Grid Resiliency State Revolving Fund program to fund projects. The US government now funds drinking water infrastructure projects for publicly- and privately-held water agencies through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program, governed by acceptance criteria and guidelines regarding project qualifications.  A similar model could work for grid resiliency projects responding to the negative impacts of climate change.  State involvement helps ensure that funds are targeted to the infrastructure projects that reduce the most grid vulnerabilities caused by climate change...

POWER LINES AT THE P.H. ROBINSON GENERATING PLANT, shot by Jim Olive, EPA photo from 1972

Climate change will force extensive changes to US power grid

Christine Hertzog in the Energy Collective: A recently released report from the US Department of Energy (DOE) details the impacts of climate change on our energy grid (electricity, oil/gas pipelines, etc.), and it is a sobering read.   Titled the “U.S. Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” the DOE report should be thought- and action-provoking for utilities executives, regulators, and us ratepayers.   If you considered Smart Grid policies and renewable energy technologies are disruptive to utility business models and bottom lines, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners convened a couple of sessions during their recent summer conference that focused on climate change adaptation planning and critical infrastructure protection – mostly focused on electricity, but vulnerabilities plague natural gas and transport fuel systems too.  Ratepayers will see these terms pop up more often in the agendas of public utility commissions and city/state/regional planning groups as policy makers and utilities identify all grid infrastructure that is at risk from more extreme weather occurring more often – one of the primary fallouts of climate change.  Each state will have unique and unavoidable impacts.  Once grid vulnerabilities are identified, these weak points will need to be prioritized for upgrading, replacement, relocation, or other “hardening” projects.  (Hardening means strengthening against specific threats – usually cyber or physical in nature.)

Superstorm Sandy offers an eloquent illustration of the magnitude of the problem.  The storm inflicted severe infrastructure damage to a significant portion of the Northeast.  It produced a 9 foot storm surge that overwhelmed parts of New York City – and climate change will continue to produce more precipitation in this region in the future, increasing the likelihood of similar impact devastation potentials.  Grid infrastructure was crippled throughout the region, and it took weeks to restore power to all affected businesses and households.... 

...Just in case Midwesterners were thinking that climate change has no impact on their electrical grids, consider the case of the springtime flooding of the Missouri River in 2011 that inundated the Ft. Calhoun nuclear power plant. This historic flood won’t be historic in the future.  It will be routine as climate change increases winter/spring precipitation.  The local utility already passed a 6.9% electricity rate increase to pay for plant repairs estimated to run $200 million.  It’s likely that these repairs aren’t covering future projects to reduce the facility’s vulnerability to more floods occurring with greater intensity and regularity...

Three pylons (in Canada, as it happens), shot by Immanuel Huybrechts, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Texas grid expects to set June power record again in baking heat

Reuters: The Texas power grid expected demand Tuesday to break the June peak record for a second day in a row and urged consumers to continue cutting back on power use to avoid straining the system as much of the state broils under triple-digit temperatures.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator for most of Texas, forecast peak demand Tuesday would reach 66,415 megawatts (MW), easily surpassing the June record set Monday of 65,047 MW. Before Monday, the June record was 63,102 MW set last year.

The state's all-time peak use was 68,379 MW set in August last summer during a protracted heat wave and drought. Real-time power prices briefly exceeded $100 per megawatt-hour Monday afternoon. Next-day power prices for Tuesday traded between $165 and $175 per MWh.

The extreme heat hit Sunday when the mercury reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas, the three biggest cities in the Lone Star State, prompting residents to crank up air conditioners. Triple-digit highs were forecast for several more days this week, with several high enough to set records, AccuWeather.com forecast...

A road sign in Notrees, Texas, public domain

Blizzards push southeastern Europe energy grids to limits

Oleg Vukmanovic and Maja Zuvela in Reuters: Blizzards and ice-laden power lines in southeastern Europe pushed gas and electricity networks near to breaking point Wednesday as consumption soared, while some western countries scrambled to prevent similar breakdowns.

As electricity cables buckled under the weight of ice and snow in southeastern Bosnia, where some 15,000 customers were left in darkness, Serbia warned of a "possible collapse" of its energy system as record-breaking demand stretched the power grid near its technical limits.

Serbia's government adviser for energy issues, Petar Skundric, said the Balkan nation should reduce power consumption by 10 percent "to avoid problems and possible collapse of the energy system."

"In only a week's time Serbia has broken six historical records both in consumption and production of electricity," Skundric told reporters. "The system is operating at the very border of its technical capabilities, and we should do our best to reduce both consumption by at least 10 percent from the current level and production by around some 500 MW," he said....

A snowflake, shot by NOAA