Assignment on electricity PDF

How New York City Gets Its Electricity
By EMILY S. RUEB: Adapted fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/10/nyregion/how-new-york-city-gets-its-electricity-power-grid.html
When you turn on a light or charge your phone, the electricity coming from the outlet may well have traveled
hundreds of miles across the power grid that blankets most of North America — the world’s largest machine,
and one of its most eccentric. Your household power may have been generated by Niagara Falls, or by a
natural-gas-fired plant on a barge floating off the Brooklyn shore. But the kilowatt-hour produced down the
block probably costs more than the one produced at the Canadian border.
Moreover, a surprising portion of the system is idle except for the hottest days of the year, when already
bottlenecked transmission lines into the New York City area reach their physical limit. “We have a system
which is energy-inefficient because it was never designed to be efficient,” said Richard L. Kauffman, the state’s
so-called energy czar, who is leading its plans to reimagine the power grid.
It’s like a mainframe computer in the age of cloud computing, Mr. Kauffman added, and with climate change,
the state has to “rethink that basic architecture.” But how does it work now?
Cranking Out Power
In 1882, heaps of black coal were hauled by
horse-drawn wagons to the Edison Electric
Illuminating Company of New York’s
powerhouse on Pearl Street in Lower
Manhattan, where “jumbo” steam-powered
engines (named after P. T. Barnum’s elephant)
spun generators. These created electricity,
which traveled to homes and businesses within
about one square mile, illuminating drawing
rooms without the use of a match for the first
time.
A few years later, a hydroelectric station on the
Niagara River using Nikola Tesla’s designs and
equipment supplied by George Westinghouse
helped turn Buffalo into an industrial force.
Today hundreds of plants, mostly privately
owned, pump out power. Each one varies in its
cost to build and operate, how much power it
can produce, how quickly and how efficiently.
Unlike other states, which do not have access
to such a diversity of resources, New York has
a full menu of options.
Coal, the original fuel, is on the way out. The state has announced plans to close the remaining plants or
convert them to natural gas, which is currently cheap and plentiful. In 2015, 64 plants that use natural gas
produced almost half the electricity in the state, said the New York Independent System Operator, a nonprofit
that runs the state’s grid and power markets.

Four nuclear plants accounted for about a third of it. Though disposing of nuclear waste remains a concern, the
state wants to subsidize nuclear plants upstate because of the steady, carbon-free power they provide. But
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s recent decision to force the closing of the Indian Point power plant in suburban
Westchester County has raised questions about the state’s ability to meet its clean energy goals and how it will
make up for the energy the plant provides.
In New York there are 180 hydroelectric facilities, which produced 19 percent of the state’s electricity, and
which remain crucial to clean power production. By 2030, Mr. Cuomo wants half of the electricity consumed in
the state to come from renewable sources produced here or imported from places like Canada and New
England. According to the latest figures, less than a quarter of the electric energy produced in New York came
from renewables.
While there are tens of thousands of residential and commercial solar energy systems, only one utility-scale
solar photovoltaic power plant is included in the Nyiso’s estimates of solar production.
Large-scale wind has had more success, and the state is pushing for more; about 30 wind farms are planned
upstate. And the state recently approved the nation’s largest offshore wind farm, which could power 50,000
homes on Long Island by the end of 2022. A second site near the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens is in the
works but is years away. Fddxa q`````````
The cost of building wind and solar plants has fallen, but these power sources are intermittent. Until more
storage is plugged into the grid, like batteries or pumped hydro plants, which pump water into reservoirs to
store power for later use, other generators must be available to supplement solar and wind power.
A standard part of the electric arsenal are generators called “peakers,” which are needed to keep the grid
reliable but might run only a few days a year. New York City has about 16 such plants, mostly around the
waterfront, which spring into action on the hottest days of the year or if transmission lines or power plants
upstate malfunction. Some sit on barges, and all are designed to switch on quickly. The trade-off for the rapid
response is usually higher costs and carbon emissions.
As a result, customers pay for plants and wires that “a lot of the time are hardly used,” said Mr. Kauffman, the
energy czar.
The entire system was designed to meet demand extremes and handle the worst-case situation.
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\\\\\\\\\\The Delicate Art of Balancing the Grid
Inside a $38 million control room near Albany, a team of seven employees of the New York Independent
System Operator is always on duty, monitoring electricity zooming through the state’s grid and coming in from
and out to neighboring grids.
Nyiso (pronounced NIGH-so) is one of 36 entities responsible for the Eastern Interconnection, one of the
country’s three main grids extending from the Rockies to the East Coast in the United States and
Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia in Canada.

Unlike water, electricity can’t be stored in a bucket. While batteries are improving, most electricity is used the
instant it is created.
The team constantly calculates how much power is needed and which plants can produce it at the lowest cost.
Every five minutes, a computer system directs plants to dial up or scale down production to ensure enough
electricity is available to keep the lights on without overloading transmission wires. If the system is out of
balance or the flow of electricity is destabilized, it can damage equipment or cause power failures.
Operators undergo psychological evaluations to ensure they can handle stress, and they spend weeks every
year inside simulation labs preparing for a hurricane or cyberattack. Still, the No. 1 enemy is tree branches, as
Gretchen Bakke pointed out in her book, “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy
Future.”
In 2003, the country’s worst blackout started with a sagging power line in Ohio that shorted out after touching a
tree branch. A series of human errors and a computer problem plunged about 50 million people into darkness
from New York City to Toronto and cost the United States economy about $6 billion.
Jon Sawyer, the chief system operator for Nyiso, said that today, computer systems receive 50,000 data points
about every six seconds, and operators monitor regional activity on a 2,300-square-foot video wall. Mandatory
reliability standards have been put in place for the thousands of entities involved in the operation of the
country’s electric systems.
The biggest daily variable is weather. Storms can flood equipment, and bright, hot days can cause
transformers to overheat and customers to crank up air-conditioners.
Leaning on solar and wind means a greater dependence on weather, just as weather patterns have become
less predictable. Nyiso has developed sophisticated tools using climate data to predict how much power each
wind farm will generate and to find ways to balance the system if the wind suddenly dies down, Mr. Sawyer
said. It is working on methods to track cloud cover and other conditions that affect the output of solar panels.
Transmitting Power Efficiently
The system’s backbone is the 11,124 miles of high-voltage lines running overhead and underground that carry
electricity to local utilities. Unlike water pipes, transmission lines are not hollow, and they can overheat or shut
down if too much power flows through them.
Since most power is generated in less populated areas, certain lines that carry it downstate during times of
peak demand can become gridlocked. Nearly 60 percent of the state’s electricity is consumed in the New York
City area, where only 40 percent of it is made. “New York is the poster child for congestion,” said Bill Booth, a
senior adviser to the United States Energy Information Administration.
To get around bottlenecks, grid operators may turn on more expensive or less efficient generators closer to
where the demand is. Think of it as paying more for a carton of milk at the bodega next door than at the
supermarket 12 blocks away.
The state is prioritizing projects to bring more power downstate from wind farms and hydro plants. The need is
even more urgent with plans to close Indian Point as soon as 2021, as it supplies about one-fourth of the
power consumed in New York City and Westchester County.