In the meantime ... transmission improvements

With all the moderate knashing of teeth regarding the proposed regulation of carbon dioxide by the EPA (WAY past time, in my view) and giving the responsibility for reduction to the states to work out, this recent article in the Alaska Journal of Commerce caught my eye.   Maybe what the State of Alaska will kick in more money for upgrading tie lines and then require GVEA to mothball a coal fired power plant?   Or maybe, not mentioned in the article, Aurora Energy would convert to natural gas?  That would go a long way toward cleaning up downtown and still serve the core areas with district heat, but would certainly change the dynamic especially as far as steam goes.

Readers may recall reading about the various $900 million in recommended transmission improvements in a report from the Alaska Energy Authority.  It didn't include proposed trucked natural gas in its projections, but is still draft.

And with all the spare capacity in the railbelt, there doesn't appear to be any crying need for Susitna.

So many moving parts.

Notification system progress

I had a meeting with Mike Wright and Lynn Thompson at GVEA today to discuss (at long last) price signaling and member notification. Mike laid out a case where GVEA's fuel balance, especially once Healy 2 comes on line, doesn't really demonstrate a need to balance peaks most of the time. Demand varies from roughly 120 mw in the summer to 210 mw in the winter.

Our supply is: Baseload resources

Healy 1 - coal - 25mw capacity - .065/kwh

Healy 2 - coal - 50 mw capacity - price TBD once operational in 2015 or 2016 but likely about .105

Aurora - coal - 23 mw on a 25 year remaining take-or-pay contract, ending 2031 - about $.06/kwh

Load following (i.e. flexible on/off and capacity adjusting)

South Central economy natural gas - up to 78 mw - $.095-$.115 - across the Northern Intertie

North Pole expansion plant (LM6000) - oil (new contract with Petro Star), 65 mw capacity - $.26 kwh, but only .16 kwh in co-generation mode

North Pole 1 and 2 - oil - Qty 2 60 mw - $.25/mwh - no cogeneration and older so more expensive

Zender 1 and 2 - oil - Qty 2 x 18 mw - $.30/mwh

John Brown formerly Chena 6 - $.60/mwh - located in Delta, only used in emergencies

Renewable sources

Bradley Lake, hydro, 24 mw capacity, $.05/kwh - cycled base upon need

Eva Creek - wind - 24 mw capacity, $.00 (no cost)/kwh, sometimes can't use as other baseload resources already covering.

The look above, once we have Healy 2 on line, is that except in the deep winter, we won't be taking much natural gas from Anchorage as it runs about the same price as Healy 2 is expected to.
All this being said, there are other reasons to have a notification system.

One of the challenges and opportunities is that GVEA's contact info on members is way out of date, especially as far as cell phones and email. This would be an opportunity to get updated. Perhaps this could be a MAC job?

GVEA might consider an inexpensive notification system such as FNSB Air Quality Dept is now rolling out (3rd party alertmedia.com , a Nixle like service) with an in-house Google form to sign up. Notifications could be for a variety of reasons: outages, price signaling, board and annual membership meetings, RCA hearings, etc.

I was told that GVEA is anticipating spending $300,000 in a future budget to upgrade their outage notification system with lots of bells and whistles. Maybe this is way too much? As it is now, it appears that Facebook offers more information about outages in progress than any other form of communication.

So we will see where this goes.