The POWER Podcast

Using Data to Improve Power Plant Operations. Power plants have an abundance of data. Temperatures, pressures, flows, and various other parameters are all monitored constantly to ensure plants are operating properly. However, a lot of data is not used to its fullest extent. With the right tools, data can be more-thoroughly analyzed and findings can be acted upon to improve efficiency and catch asset deterioration before equipment fails. David Thomason, industry principal of Global Power Generation with OSIsoft, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. OSIsoft offers several solutions for the power industry that help utilities ensure reliable and stable system operation. “What we’ve seen is kind of an evolution of what we’re calling layered analytics,” Thomason said. “You really want to be able to monitor the health of your assets in real time. So, it’s kind of a movement from periodic conditioned assessments around equipment and assets, and move to a more online condition monitoring.” Thomason mentioned an innovative solution that has been implemented at the Itaipu dam in Brazil. The facility is using a real-time data system to scrutinize the structural integrity of the dam. He said there are “key blocks within the hydroelectric facility” that were instrumented with sensors that can detect movement. The system allows operators to monitor the health of the entire structure. “It’s such a cool use case that I really wish I could see this expanded across multiple places, of course, multiple hydro dams, but also even things like tunnels and bridges,” he said. In another example, Thomason said several power companies around the world are incorporating parameters such as depth and density of snowfall into water inventory calculations to allow better day-to-day decisions and optimize hydro resources. “This is that whole concept around using data and information in ways people really weren’t planning to use in the past, but being able to have it available to help them to make those types of decisions,” said Thomason.

What Can You Do with a Superconductor? A Lot! [PODCAST] What is a superconductor? One definition says, “a material that can conduct electricity or transport electrons from one atom to another with no resistance.” “At the base physics level, what a superconductor does is it moves a lot more power per unit volume or per unit weight, so you have a very high energy-dense material that can move lots of power,” Daniel McGahn, CEO of American Superconductor (AMSC), explained as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “So, from a very simple standpoint, we can move transmission-level power at distribution voltage simply with the energy density.” AMSC is a global energy solutions provider serving both the power grid and wind industries. “Everything we do revolves around resiliency—either of the grid, infrastructure, or of Navy ships,” McGahn said. “We do a lot of grid interconnection of wind to the grid. We do voltage support within the grid. We do voltage support for large industrial consumers of power, things like mills, mines, and semiconductor fabs—all large instantaneous users of power. We have a solution for them to be able to protect the grid from their operations,” he said. The focus of AMSC’s grid business is really on “trying to move power with a purpose,” McGahn explained. What that means is AMSC technology can interconnect substations on the distribution side to allow them to work as one. This allows a very small conduit to be used under city streets in the urban core. “So, it’s not really a power cable, it’s more like an extension cord or a long bus bar that connect two physical assets that exist,” McGahn said. “When we look at multi-point connections throughout the city, we have the potential to double if not quadruple the overall resiliency of that urban system.” AMCS has done work with Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. “What we see are very similar vanes of need. The first one is we need to bring more infrastructure into the urban core. We don’t have access to land. It can be quite expensive to do it. And our idea is, ‘Why don’t we untrap and unleash the trapped capacity that already exists within the system and have it work more like a multi-point network,” said McGahn. “Most of the things we do on the grid really revolve around hardening, bringing more resiliency, bringing more leverage of existing capacity. And we’re trying to do that in a way where we don’t extend the cyber footprint of the system,” he said. AMSC’s technology is also being used on U.S. warships to counter minefield threats. Many mines are activated by sensing a change in magnetism, which can be caused by a ship passing through the water near them. World War II technology utilized copper degaussing coils to reduce magnetic signatures, but a lot has changed since that time. McGahn said ships now go a lot faster. Furthermore, threats today tend to be concentrated in shallower water and sensors have become more sophisticated. The Navy realized new solutions were warranted. “They’ve invested around $30 million of development money. We’ve done full qualification. We’ve done tens of thousands of hours at sea on multiple different ship platforms and we just recently—at the end of last year—converted that into a full order and instruction to deliver a complete system for the first ship. And the second ship, we announced earlier this calendar year,” McGahn said.

Engineering a World-Class Gas Turbine. GE introduced the F-class gas turbine to the power industry nearly 30 years ago. Since that time, more than 1,500 F-class machines have operated for more than 54 million hours. With available outputs ranging from 51 MW for a GE 6F.01 simple cycle unit to more than 1,000 MW for a 3x1 7F.05-based combined cycle plant, the F-class is a versatile workhorse around the world. Don Brandt, former manager of GE gas turbine engineering, has been called the father of the F-class, but he is hesitant to accept all the credit. “I can’t express enough the number of people and the skills—the broad skills—that made that F machine a success,” Brandt said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “Just the little thing like the rolling of a thread became critical to the success of the F machine, because if that thread broke, you lost the continuity of the rotor, the rotor would vibrate, the machine would shut down, it wouldn’t be a success.” During the interview, the 87-year-old Brandt reminisced about his career with GE. He joined the company in 1963 and quickly found his calling in the gas turbine business. From working with slide rules and computer punch cards to high-tech design using finite element analysis, Brandt has seen it all. Yet, what impresses him the most is the teamwork required to produce revolutionary gas turbines. “It wasn’t me. It was hundreds of people doing really creative things,” Brandt said. “And that’s still true. I went down to Greensville this past spring to see the 9HA.02 prototype. They were gracious enough to bring me down there. And the work that those people are doing down there—the individuals, manufacturing, materials, design, you name it.” Brandt is proud not only of the work he did, but also of the industry he supported. “The gas turbine business has really accomplished a lot to the betterment of society, and I gotta tell ya’, that thrills the livin’ daylights out of me.”

Large Public Power Systems Are Evolving. The power grid is changing across the U.S. More distributed energy resources are being added every day. That brings challenges for power utilities, but also opportunities. John Di Stasio, president of the Large Public Power Council (LPPC), which represents 27 of the largest locally governed and operated not-for-profit electric systems in the U.S., was a guest on The POWER Podcast and discussed how the changes are affecting his organizations members. As large infrastructure developers and asset owners, the LPPC’s members are uniquely affected by certain policies in Washington, D.C. Di Stasio, who previously served as general manager and CEO of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) from June 2008 through April 2014, said his group has been focused on tax, infrastructure, cybersecurity, environmental regulation, electrification, and grid modernization initiatives. Di Stasio noted that the U.S. power grid was originally designed as a central station system with one-way power flow from generators to consumers. “Now, we’re looking at much more distributed generation potentially, and also the fact that two-way power flow provides some additional opportunities and capabilities for consumers, also some additional complexity,” Di Stasio said. He suggested the benefits of digitization should be taken advantage of, which could allow a communications or digital network to be incorporated on top of the grid’s physical network to allow more interoperability. “I think a lot of that’s already underway,” he said. However, “it’s very hard to do something like that on a top-down basis given the fact that the grid is designed and operated differently all over the United States,” Di Stasio said. “My argument would be you should start with the building block of local distribution grids and actually build from the ground up rather than the top down in order to modernize the grid in the most effective and kind of no-regrets fashion, if you will.” DiStasio noted that distributed generation is becoming more prominent not only in states like California and New York, where there have been strong policy pushes to develop distributed resources, but also throughout other regions of the U.S. “The economics warrant that these kind of investments get made all over the country, and I’m seeing that as a significant change than maybe just a decade ago,” he said. Concerning cybersecurity, Di Stasio said, “We need good practices. We need good principles. We also need flexibility and we need significant coordination.” He noted that with more interoperability and more devices on the grid, more surfaces for entry exist, but he suggested advances have been made to protect industrial control systems, and a lot of “best practice sharing” is taking place across industry sectors.

Renewable energy and battery storage are hot topics in the U.S. today. Lawmakers throughout the country debated various new energy policies during the 2019 legislative session. Nevada is among the states leading the way forward. Several new laws were passed in the state that will affect power companies and consumers for years to come. Curt Ledford, a Nevada-based attorney who is a partner with Davison Van Cleve PC, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. Ledford’s practice is focused on utility, administrative, corporate, cooperative, and regulatory law, as well as general matters affecting energy developments, generation facilities, renewable energy, and Nevada’s utilities. On the podcast, Ledford touched on several legal and legislative developments that occurred recently. Among the topics were changes to Nevada’s fundamental utility ratemaking structure and changes to the state’s open access for large customers. He also elaborated on an update to the state’s renewable portfolio standard, which requires 50% of Nevada’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2030. In December, the Nevada Public Utilities Commission approved NV Energy’s proposal for the state’s largest-ever solar energy investment, six new solar energy resources totaling more than 1,000 MW, as well as 100 MW of battery storage capacity. Ledford talked about the company’s commitment to double its renewable energy by 2023.

Nuclear power advocates suggest there are many benefits associated with nuclear energy. They point to high-paying jobs; billions of dollars in economic activity for plant-hosting communities; and secure, reliable, baseload electricity. But the most-important benefit of nuclear power may be that it emits no greenhouse gases, and therefore, does not contribute to climate change. According to Nuclear Matters, a national coalition that works to inform the public and policymakers about the benefits of nuclear energy, nuclear power is playing an essential role in the U.S.’s clean energy future. The group says nuclear power accounted for more than 55% of the country’s clean energy generation in 2018, and phasing nuclear energy out would create devastating environmental impacts for the world. Carol Browner, former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator and former energy and climate change senior advisor to President Obama, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. Browner, who currently serves on the Nuclear Matters Advocacy Council, said, “Air pollution is a major burden to human health, and electricity generation is a major source of air pollution. The burning of fossil fuels contributes to air pollution, obviously, contributes to climate change. Nuclear energy, or nuclear electricity generators, do not emit significant amounts of air pollution, and so, as companies and states look at closing existing nuclear facilities, the likelihood is that those will be replaced, at least in the short term, with fossil fuel-burning facilities, and that means more air pollution and more climate change challenges.” As an environmentalist, Browner has long advocated for renewable energy, and that hasn’t changed. “I support much more wind and solar. I hope to continue to see that industry grow. It has grown significantly and it continues to grow,” she said. But with climate change top of mind, Browner believes nuclear power has a place in the energy mix too. “I also believe that the climate change crisis is real. That we need to act responsibly. We need to act immediately. And taking a source of clean energy, of carbon-free energy—nuclear power—offline and replacing it with fossil fuels simply doesn’t make any sense. There are deaths associated with the fossil fuel burning. There’s the climate crisis. And so, what we need to do is maintain those facilities,” she added. Can climate change be stopped? “I am perpetually optimistic that my generation will not be the first to leave to our children and our grandchildren an environmental problem that they can’t solve. The clock is running. We need to get moving. But I’m also encouraged because I see lots of states stepping up. I see cities stepping up. And just today, we see an announcement from Ford, Honda, Volkswagen, and the BMW company that they have reached an agreement with the state of California on more-efficient cars and cars that produce less greenhouse gas emissions,” Browner said. “So, I think there are reasons to be optimistic.”

Reversing Climate Change with Nuclear Power. According to the Energy Impact Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research institute focused on deep decarbonization, CO2 emissions “must go net-negative by 2040, globally across all energy sectors” to begin countering climate change. The only way it sees to accomplish this is to “produce energy inexpensive enough to make carbon negative fuels that compete with fossil fuels on a global market without tax or subsidy,” and it says nuclear fission is the only energy source that can match cost, deployment, and timeline constraints. Bret Kugelmass, managing director of the Energy Impact Center, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. He elaborated on his group’s thesis and offered a path forward. “I think the problem that often goes unacknowledged is that even if you went net-zero emissions across the globe in every single sector—agriculture, industry, heat, electricity, transportation—that wouldn’t be enough to stop climate change,” Kugelmass said. “The real challenge toward solving climate change is to remove all of the existing emissions as well—get us back to the levels that we had in 1750, under 300 ppm—only then are you going to prevent climate change. “If you look at the problem from that perspective, the only energy source that has a small enough carbon footprint to totally account for its lifecycle emissions is nuclear energy,” said Kugelmass. “The one issue is how do we build them cheap and fast, and how do we create an ecosystem of stakeholders, whether they be construction companies, customers, utilities, governments, whoever it is, that is focused on that one thing?” Kugelmass asked. He said the Energy Impact Center has worked with universities, the Department of Energy, utilities, and think tanks to develop partnerships dedicated to solving the issues.

Lithium-Ion Batteries: Costs Down, Benefits Up [PODCAST] The price of lithium-ion batteries has plummeted over the past decade. Battery pack prices averaged $1,160 per kWh in 2010, according to BloombergNEF, but they dropped to $176 per kWh last year, and experts suggest they could be less than $100 by 2024. Tony Cooper, general manager of Green Cubes Technology’s Motive division, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. He explained why prices have been coming down. “Basically, the production capabilities—the production process—I think that’s the number one driver in bringing down the cost of lithium [batteries], economics of scale. The other thing though, it’s not just the production, it’s also the process of getting the raw materials. So, the production process of mining, the production process of refining those minerals, and then also, of course, the production process of making the cell, even to making the battery pack. I mean, all of these processes are being refined,” Cooper said. “And the quality’s there, because it’s all highly automated—everything is precision measured—so, nowadays, you’ve got great quality of cells coming out at a huge rate,” Cooper added. Although Cooper suggested it’s getting harder and harder to optimize the production process for battery cells, he said there is still room for improvement in systems. “There’s lots of things that can be done to keep improving from a system-level efficiency,” he said. Repurposing lithium battery packs offers value for the power grid. Although electric vehicle (EV) battery packs reach a point in which they are no longer suitable for use in cars, the packs still have great capacity for purposes in which space is not a limitation. Mercedes-Benz Energy, for example, has incorporated EV battery packs into the electric grid at several sites. “Second life is a huge thing for lithium,” Cooper said. “With lithium, you have a very good end of life or cycle life, where it’s very linear. It doesn’t have a waterfall, where just all of a sudden it stops working like lead-acid. It’ll really be very linear. So, a pack that has 50% capacity has a lot of energy that can be put into applications which don’t require small spaces or have room for them.” The benefits of lithium-ion over lead-acid batteries are quite significant too. Cooper noted that one of the biggest benefits revolves around maintenance. Lithium-ion batteries require zero maintenance. “And we really mean zero maintenance,” Cooper said. “Lithium batteries take no special side operations. No one’s needed there to tighten bars down, water, or anything like that. It’s really zero maintenance, so it’s a huge benefit.” Another benefit is energy savings. Cooper said charging lithium-ion batteries can save 20% or more compared to lead-acid, and there’s also greater efficiency during discharge. Lithium technology performs better in cold-temperature operations. Cooper said lead-acid batteries can lose up to 50% of their capacity when temperatures drop to freezing and below, while lithium still operates well. Furthermore, heaters can be effectively placed on lithium-ion batteries, as there is less mass to warm. Another drawback of lead-acid batteries is that they can leak acid and release hydrogen gas, whereas lithium designs are sealed and clean.

How to Monitor and Predict Operational Performance with Digital Analytics. Power plants are capturing operational data in ever-increasing amounts. However, analyzing all the data can be challenging. A number of tools are available that can help. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, two experts from one technology provider explain how big data can be analyzed to identify trends and create actionable information to solve production issues. Their company’s solution allows users to troubleshoot problems, and monitor processes and assets, in real-time, so operators can make better decisions, faster. “We want the user to have a really good springboard to be able to jump into analytics,” said Nick Petrosyan, data analytics engineer with TrendMiner. “If you’re going to be doing some type of analytics or you’re troubleshooting something in your process, it’s usually because one of your KPIs [key performance indicators] are off. So, we would like to have those KPIs somewhere very easy for them to access and see, so that they start doing more analytics in their day-to-day job, and troubleshooting and solving more problems.” Petrosyan said there are more than 30 power plants across the U.S. connected to TrendMiner and the tool is paying dividends. As one example, he mentioned a plant that was experiencing a decrease in efficiency over time, but it had been hard for operators to identify the cause due to the wide range of variables involved. “The first thing we did was we flattened the dataset with regards to ambient temperature, using TrendMiner’s big data searches,” Petrosyan said. “So, finding periods where ambient temperature was relatively stable and wasn’t varying a whole lot—that you’re able to do in TrendMiner in a matter of seconds—and then from there you can start to layer these really stable periods in terms of ambient conditions on top of each other and start performing comparison analytics.” Petrosyan said different plant parameters were then added and compared to see what besides efficiency had changed over time. “The first thing we confirmed was that efficiency was actually changing, and then we were able to find something very, very subtle in their process, a malfunction in their air supply system that was causing this decline in efficiency,” he said. “Once we were able to narrow down and pinpoint the actual root cause of the efficiency decline, they were able to repair it really quickly.” Another thing Petrosyan said TrendMiner has done for customers is “fingerprint what a really good startup looks like.” The company does that by taking multiple startups that were performed well, combining them together, and generating a fingerprint of an ideal sequence. Then, when future plant startups are performed, they can be monitored against the model conditions. “They were able to really reduce the amount of bad startups that they had and reduce the frequency that their heat recovery steam system was experiencing thermal stresses,” Petrosyan said. In the end, engineers developed multiple fingerprints based on the length of time the plant had been offline, and operators could choose the appropriate model for any given situation. Thomas Dhollander, CTO and co-founder of TrendMiner, said there are generally four ways in which customers experience and quantify the return on investment for digital solutions. They are in time savings, solving unsolved cases, avoiding abnormal situations, and knowledge capturing and sharing. “The fourth one is maybe harder to quantify but strategically very important,” Dhollander said.

The natural gas industry is doing quite well and the future looks bright to many observers. “We’re at a really great moment for the natural gas industry in the U.S. Production is growing dramatically. Shale continues to provide tremendous improvements technologically, bringing the cost down and growing the production, extending access to U.S. gas. At the same time, the shift from coal to gas-fired power generation is in full swing and the U.S. is in the midst of a significant boom in LNG [liquefied natural gas] exports and is poised to see a number of approvals for the second wave of U.S. LNG projects coming up,” Alex Dewar, senior manager with the Center for Energy Impact in the Washington, D.C., office of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. But the future may not be as rosy as it seems. “There’s potential actually for a very different outcome, I think, than many expect for natural gas here in the U.S.,” Dewar said. “What we’ve noticed by looking at some of the future trends in technology and policy, and also public opinion and consumer preferences, is that there are some risks to that emerging in the not-so-far-off future.” According to a BCG report that Dewar co-authored, titled Preparing for an Abundance of US Natural Gas, the U.S. will likely experience a peak in gas demand, with consumption growth slowing from the late 2020s and plateauing by 2030. “The U.S. gas market is likely to shift from being limited by the pace of growth in supply to being limited by the level of demand,” the report says. “Our modeling estimates that U.S. gas consumption could be about 20% less in 2040 than the typical modeling suggests by the U.S. Energy Information Administration,” Dewar said. “There are some pretty big implications across the power sector—and the entire energy sector in the U.S.—if that in fact is what shapes up over the coming decades.” One reason is a push toward electrification. “I think we’re going to continue to see a push towards electrification because of both the greenhouse gas and safety issue,” Tom Baker, a partner and managing director in BCG’s San Francisco office, said on the podcast. Baker was also a co-author of the report on natural gas. He suggested that gas utilities serving consumers, especially in markets like California and New York, face significant risks to their businesses going forward and should review long-term strategies.