The POWER Podcast

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.

Power Company Business Models Are Evolving The power industry is changing and power companies must evolve to stay competitive. Many businesses are transitioning from vertically integrated, centralized utility structures to more-distributed models. JEA offers a good case in point. JEA is a not-for-profit, community-owned utility located in Jacksonville, Florida. It serves an estimated 466,000 electric, 348,000 water, 271,000 sewer, and 11,000 reclaimed water customers. Aaron Zahn, managing director and CEO with JEA, was a recent guest on The POWER Podcast. He explained some of the challenges not only facing his company, but also investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and other power providers across the country. “Whether you’re municipally owned or an IOU, ultimately, you’re in competition to make sure you’re providing the best service to the customer, because now there are disruptive providers of solar, and battery, and microturbines, and others, that don’t even fall into either of those two classes,” Zahn said. “For the last 100 to 125 years, those were the only two predominant providers, and that’s just no longer the case.” As a public utility, JEA found it hard to gauge value. It didn’t have a stock price to measure the company’s performance against, so it needed specific metrics that it could use in decision-making processes. To gain some perspective, JEA established its CCEF benchmark, which identified four basic measures of value. The acronym stands for customer, community, environmental, and financial values. “We now tie metrics to each one of them and cascade them throughout the organization and throughout the community to let people know what direction—where we are today—and actually what direction we’re headed and where we expect to be in the future. And I think that’s enabled us to have very deliberate and methodical conversations about our strategies and tactics on how to move forward,” said Zahn. JEA’s power mix has evolved over the years too. In the early 1970s, its power was predominantly produced from oil-fired generation. It shifted more toward solid fuels as the price of oil escalated. It has since added more natural gas-fired generation, and in 2008, it signed an agreement with Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) to purchase nuclear power from the Plant Vogtle expansion. There is pending litigation on the validity of that contract, however; JEA is seeking to void the agreement. One of the underlying reasons is that solar energy is seen as a more-cost-effective solution for its customers. “Today, we’ve executed 250 MW of power purchase agreements for solar at a price almost 20-plus-percent cheaper than our current cost of dispatch of our fleet. And that will be a long-term hedge for us for about 20, 25 years, and completely emission-free,” Zahn said. Zahn talked about several other changes taking place at JEA and touched on some of the company’s recent accomplishments, including a 2019 Best Practices Award in Outage Communications. The company was recognized by Chartwell Inc. for its multi-channel Restoration 1-2-3 process, which goes into effect during major storm events. Restoration 1-2-3 focuses on actions during each phase of storm restoration and acknowledges the key role customers play in efforts to restore power safely and quickly when massive outages occur.

When it comes to gas turbines, size matters. Although the market for large, heavy-duty gas turbines has been challenging in recent years, demand for industrial gas turbines—generally units with output ranging from about 5 MW to 100 MW—has been growing, according to Reed Lengel, product line manager for SCC-800 solutions with Siemens Energy. “When you really dig into it,” Lengel said, speaking as a guest on The POWER Podcast, “there’s actually been pretty significant improvements—or growth in this power band within the portfolio. Where there’s been really a decline over the last four years in the total gas turbine sales—that’s just globally, looking at all gas turbine sales—in that same timeframe, the market share of this 40 to 90 MW power band gas turbine has actually doubled.” For Siemens, its SGT-800 gas turbine fits squarely in that range. Increasing interest in industrial gas turbines has led manufacturers to invest in design improvements. New coatings, advanced cooling technologies, and additive manufacturing have spurred significant efficiency gains. Since 2015, the SGT-800’s efficiency has improved from about 56% to 58.6% in combined cycle mode, which makes it the market leader in efficiency for its power band, according to Lengel. Flexibility has also made these mid-size gas turbines popular. Rather than constructing a single large gas turbine unit, many companies are deciding to install multiple smaller units at sites. “We actually have a six on one that’s actually under construction right now,” Lengel said. (Six on one refers to an arrangement in which six gas turbines and six heat recovery steam generators are joined with one steam turbine in a combined cycle configuration.) “That’s a project that’s down in Panama,” he said. Industrial gas turbines are also good candidates for combined heat and power applications. Lengel mentioned the Holland Energy Park in Holland, Michigan—a POWER Top Plant in 2018—as a shining example of a plant that utilizes SGT-800 gas turbines for more than just generating electricity. That facility also provides heat for a snow-melt system that keeps downtown city walkways ice-free during the winter. Although Lengel said there were only 14 SGT-800 units currently operating in the U.S., it's a well-proven model around the world. “With the changes that are being seen, and I think the desire for more smaller units and distributed generation,” he said, “I think that’s only going to increase.” When asked what sectors would be the biggest buyers of industrial gas turbines going forward, Lengel said, “Looking at some of the numbers, even from the [Energy Information Administration’s] latest energy outlook that they put in just a couple months ago, the bulk chemical [industry] actually is looking to increase pretty significantly in their power needs, and more specifically, on onsite generation. So, that's one specific area that really could see some growth—in the U.S. in particular—for onsite power generation combined heat and power application.”

Control Your Own Destiny with Combined Heat and Power Systems Combined heat and power (CHP), also known as cogeneration, is the concurrent production of electricity or mechanical power and useful thermal energy (heating and/or cooling) from a single source of energy. Although it may not be widely recognized outside of industrial, commercial, institutional, and utility circles, CHP has been providing highly efficient electricity and process heat to some of the most vital industries, urban centers, and campuses in the U.S. for more than a century. In fact, Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street Station was a CHP facility when it opened in 1882—the same year POWER was first published. According to the Department of Energy, most CHP applications can reasonably expect to operate at greater than 65% efficiency, a large improvement over the typical electric-only power plant. President Obama believed so strongly in the benefits that he signed an executive order on August 30, 2012, establishing a national goal of adding 40 GW of new CHP capacity by 2020. However, the country will fall well short of that target; only 2.5 GW was added between 2012 and 2016. Bill Castor, director of business development for Siemens Energy, was a guest on The POWER Podcast. Castor gave a presentation titled “Navigating Through the Challenges of Implementing Successful Onsite Generation Solutions in a Complex Market” on April 25 during the ELECTRIC POWER Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada. He touched on some of the main points from his presentation during the podcast interview. “CHP is an entirely different animal than your typical power plant because it is so intertwined with the end user—the host—as well as impacted by the outside grid,” Castor said. He noted that CHP results in not only reliability gains, efficiency gains, and environmental gains, but it also allows end users to take control of their own destinies. “Controlling your own destiny is one of the phrases that really is attached to CHP as a driver for the potential hosts of those units,” Castor said. “The whole story for CHP has to start though with the end user,” Castor said. “You need to have that thermal host in order to make [CHP] a sensible alternative.” Castor noted that industrial solutions come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Systems range from small to large, and can utilize an assortment of technologies including gas turbines, reciprocating engines, and fuel cells, as well as incorporating control systems, electrical systems, transformers, and more. “Utilities in the past have traditionally resisted CHP coming because it tends to take large customers away from the utility,” Castor said. But that is changing. “Many of the cases that we’re looking at today involve either utility ownership and operation or at least a cooperation between the host and the utility to try to make those work,” he said.

Working with Peers Is Critical to Power System Reliability. When conversations around the power industry turn to computer hacking, more often than not experts say it’s not a question of if, but rather, how systems have been compromised. William Doering, adjunct professor in the John E. Simon School of Business at Maryville University and a director with Guidehouse—a management consulting services provider—said he has participated in various discussions on how to cleanse infection and how to ensure reliability after the fact. Speaking on The POWER Podcast, Doering said the Stuxnet computer worm and the Ukraine power grid cyberattack in 2015 should provide more than enough evidence that systems are vulnerable. “For us to think that something like that hasn’t happened yet [in the U.S.] is definitely on the riskier side of optimistic,” Doering said. “I think the level of sophistication that state-level actors provide is in many cases astounding,” he said. But even more worrisome to Doering is the fact that state-level-actor tools, which are extremely sophisticated, complex, and devastating, have been released and are now in the hands of the broader masses. “The level of disruption is really hard to gauge,” Doering said. “Building microgrids around critical infrastructure where they have the ability to do generation plus storage, and I’m not saying that that’s the only answer but … a combined portfolio of solutions, I think, provides a lot of resilience.” Doering also touched on the risks presented by electromagnetic pulse and geomagnetic disturbance events, suggesting that a combined effort is needed to harden the system. “If you have limited resources on how to prepare, selecting the appropriate level of preparation is crucial,” he said. “I don’t think any utility or even a government actor has the ability to do all of the things [necessary], so I think instead what we do is try to prioritize and understand, ‘Where do our limited resources bear the most fruit?’ ” “For me, the place where I see the most value put in is the information sharing,” Doering said. “Always be learning, always be working with your peers, be working with your vendors, identifying situations where the first thing that we need to do is question our assumptions.”

Trump Ended War on Fossil Fuels, but Focus Needed on CCS. The United States Energy Association (USEA) is an association of public and private energy-related organizations, corporations, and government agencies that helps increase understanding of the world’s energy issues. Barry Worthington has been the executive director of the USEA for more than 30 years. During that time, he has seen the association grow from a two-person, $200,000-a-year operation to an organization with 25 employees and a $10 million budget. Worthington was a guest on The POWER Podcast. He spoke about some of his group’s accomplishments over the years and explained what the USEA is concentrating on currently. “I think right now that the most important technology that we need to focus on where we’re not adequately focusing is carbon capture utilization and storage,” he said. Worthington believes people around the world are going to continue using fossil fuels for many, many years. Even if developed nations such as the U.S. and some European countries cut back on fossil fuels, places like China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and many others are going to continue to burn coal, Worthington said. “I feel that we have an obligation to help them do that in a manner that’s using the best technology—low-emission, high-efficiency technologies. If we have any hope of meeting our climate change goals, we need to be deploying CCS [carbon capture and storage] much more rapidly than what we are now,” he said. What’s holding CCS back, according to Worthington, is that the U.S. hasn’t established economic incentives to help support the technology. For perspective, he compared federal spending on renewables to that spent on CCS. “The ratio is 100 to 1,” Worthington said. “For every dollar the federal government spends on CCS, they spend $100 on renewable incentives. And the consequence or outcome of that is you’ve seen a dramatic, dramatic reduction in the cost of wind and the cost of solar, but you haven’t seen anywhere near the dramatic cost reduction in CCS. Yet, the potentials are there.” But Worthington was optimistic about what the government has been doing. He suggested the most important message the Trump administration has delivered to the energy sector is that the war on fossil fuels is over. “We went through eight years where fossil fuels were vilified as opposed to applauded. Fossil fuels have been the cornerstone of economic development all throughout the world ever since the industrial revolution. They continue to provide about 80% of primary energy supply on a global basis and we have unleashed—the administration has unleased—the fossil fuel industry,” he said. Worthington noted that the message is a marked change from the one sent by the Obama administration. “This is just a complete about-face, where you had individuals and departments within the federal government that literally—without exaggeration—literally wouldn’t use the word fossil fuels. It was like they were banned for eight years,” he said. “I think that the Trump administration turning that around and all of the ramifications that fall out of that policy decision are very profound, and I would go so far as to say we’re just now beginning to understand what kind of geopolitical value this about-face can do for the country,” Worthington said. During the interview, Worthington also touched on takeaways from the USEA’s inaugural Energy Efficiency and Supply Forum, the integration of renewables into the grid, the trajectory for electric vehicles, climate change, sustainability, the efficient use of fossil fuels, and more.