+ Interview: American Electric Power & The Grid – Part II

This is part II of our interview with George Bjelovuk, a project manager at American Electric Power (AEP). Mr. Bjelovuk has been involved in several AEP initiatives that would apply new technologies and business models to help reduce the need for new power plants. You can check out part I here.

Distributed Energy Resources & Storage

Now that I knew a little more about the consumer business and behavior issues, arguably the most important ones, I had another question. George had alluded to energy storage in our initial correspondence. I was very interested in that because it’s an area around which a group of designers (like us!) might come up with some interesting concepts. It seems like if people had storage, it could help the peak demand problem. Is it possible that if a fair number of people had electric storage capability at their house, it could prevent needing to build a new power plant somewhere?

“It absolutely could. In fact, we had a team of folks looking at distributed energy resources, and they looked at seven or eight areas of distributed technologies in general. They looked at nearterm and long-term impacts. Large-scale energy storage, and when we talk about large scale, we’re talking about substation sized, megawatt class batteries. These have been used by Japanese utilities for decades. Japanese utilities generate a lot of electricity from wind [I didn’t know that], and the intermittent nature of those resources required the Japanese to develop large-scale storage capabilities.

We’ve partnered with a company called NGK that’s a manufacturer of these large-scale batteries. We’ve deployed the first megawatt class battery in North America near Charleston, West Virginia. We installed it in a substation to prove that we could use the battery as sort of an arbitrage device to reshape the demand on that substation during seasonal peaks.

AEP/NGK 1.2 Megawatt Sodium-Sulfur Battery Installation

Think about a 10-megawatt substation. As demand grows in an area and gets close to 10 megawatts, the utility may have to initiate a capital project to either replace that equipment or add additional equipment. At some times, the station may be under extreme load, but the majority of the time, the station is significantly less loaded. What we wanted to show was how we could install some kind large-scale battery storage in that substation and charge that battery up at night or other low load periods. When the load in that territory exceeds the substation capacity, we discharge the battery for several hours to get use through that peak period. We’ve successfully demonstrated the use of a large-scale battery in that application.

We have three more batteries on order from NGK that we’re going to deploy in 2008, demonstrating three other concepts for large scale energy storage.

We think that in the near term we’re going to see six to ten megawatts a year of this large-scale energy storage appear in our system. Our chairman set a goal of 25MW of these NaS batteries by 2010, and challenged us to think about how we may have 1,000 megawatts of storage from other, emerging technologies in the not so distant future. It won’t be just mass energy storage; it may include injected compressed air, or other emerging kinds of energy storage.”

Combining Emerging Technologies

Another technology we’ve been evaluating is fuel cells, where we’ve been able to take a source of natural gas and convert it to electricity. The issue with fuel cells is they don’t like to be variably operated. A onemegawatt fuel cell likes to just get started and generate one megawatt of load in a stable, balanced manner forever. In reality, customer demand is erratic, changing by time of day and seasonally, hour by hour. So the challenge for the fuel cell manufacturers is how to build a fuel cell that can operate with this variability. What would happen if you married a fuel cell with a megawatt class storage device that would allow you to run that fuel cell continually, but the combined system of the fuel cell and storage device could meet the ever changing demand from our customers? So it’s been pretty fascinating watching some of these technologies emerge and how they might be integrated with one another: batteries, super capacitors, fuel cells, and micro turbines.

Another scenario we’ve evaluated is the micro grid concept. There’s some legislation that just passed in Connecticut that would allow tax-increment financing for those who would choose to create small community or industrial park-sized generating stations and allow them to separate themselves from the electric system during periods of transmission congestion or high utility generating costs. And they would get tax-abatements and incentives for setting up those kinds of systems. It will be an interesting future state if instead of having large centralized 1,000 megawatt generating stations; we have 1,000 places in your system with a 1 megawatt generating station. It turns the current system upside down and makes one think differently about how things are today.

I thought that was an especially fascinating scenario, thinking back to my interview with energy consultant John Robbins. John commented that the highest recycling rates in the Cincinnati area are in the local area around the main Rumpke refuse landfill in northwest Hamilton County. It’s human nature to pay more attention to things closer to home. If there’s a power plant with in a few blocks of everyone, it probably would make them think about their energy usage and reduce it.

The Challenge for Design

“Maybe. Think about a role for industrial designers in the future. What we really need from designers., I have this conversation with my wife at the dinner table. She asks what are you going to make me do, since I don’t know exactly how I use electricity. What behaviors from me are you going to look to modify in order make our house use less electricity? How will the introduction of products into the home have to be different in the future, in order to advance some of the concepts we’ve been talking about?

If you talk to the appliance manufacturers (and we’ve had an open dialogue with a number of them), they all want to reduce the net energy consumption of their devices. The Energy Star program, if you find one rated higher than another, in absolute terms it means one device will use less than another one because of the way it’s designed or operated.

This whole implication of the time of day or seasonal usage is one that even the appliance manufacturers have struggled with. So in the future maybe it means building home automation systems. I understand that at CES in Las Vegas this year, one of the key areas was the emergence of home energy management systems. These would enable consumers to control the energy consumption of their homes by turning certain devices on and off during certain times of the day.

Imagine there’s a panel on your refrigerator that shows what’s going on in your whole house from an energy management standpoint and gives you the ability to make certain changes in your use or scheduling. Like when you heat your water, or maybe pre-cooling your home. This concept of keeping your house at a steady state temperature may get challenged in the future, and maybe a better outcome is some variability based on peak usage profiles. You can pre-cool your house and let that mass of cooler air ride you through the peak time when pricing is higher. Those are the kinds of things that people need to think about in the product industry, and help advance some of these objectives. I think there will be a much more open dialogue in the future about this.

This concludes our two part interview with Mr. Bjelovuk. This has been very informative for me as an energy consumer. It’s given me more insight into how our utility rates impact me, the utility, and the environment.