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[October 10, 2003] -
If you could choose where the electricity you use at home came from, where would it come from? Inexpensive power from a coal plant? Reliable natural gas? Clean wind power? Before you decide you should know, and may have already guessed, that the decision isn't that easy. Statewide's Bill Kelly reports in a two-part series on Nebraska energy reliability and alternatives.
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ENERGY RELIABILITY:RealPlayer | QuickTime
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Transcript of Energy Alternatives | ||
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Transcript of Energy Reliability
[Bill Kelly Reporting] Everybody needs it these days Every business and every home plugs in and turns on and draws off of Nebraska's electrical power system. The amount we use has been pretty stable for the past ten years and so has the price. It is a product like few others because customers not only care about the price but about the reliability of the supply and even how it is made... how raw fuel is converted t eletricity for use in their homes.
The state's utilities... public power districts and municipally run systems... crack out the kilowatts by converting them out of coal, nuclear power, natural gas and the push of water in hydro-electric plants. There are also a small but growing number of wind turbines in the state. The utilities can also buy it from other electric utilities if the generators in this state aren't keeping up with demand. It's an amazing complex system, that most customers probably take for granted. Nebraska Public Power is the state's largest utility. In the coming year's its managers and board of directors will be deciding how to spend millions...even billions... to build the next generation of electric power plants.
[Bill Fehrman - Nebraska Public Power District, CEO] Well certainly with the recent northeast blkackouts, energy supply and transmission has become the topic of the day and of course at NPPD we've been able to maintain our five thousand miles of transmission lines and our power plants such that we haven't had any significant incidents in the state. But that does not mean we can sit back and not continue to plan.
[Bill Kelly] Coal may be the one of the oldest ways to make electricity, but it remains the most reliable in Nebraska as well. It's the reason NPPD's two coal fired plants are the foundation for the utilities generating system.
[Fehrman] We in fact have on the lowest delivered costs of fuel to our power plants in the United state. So that gives us a very unique and competitive advantage for our customers.
[Bill Kelly] The price of coal remains reliable as well. Nebraska sits right next door to some of the largest coal fields in world in Wyoming...a days trip away for the freight trains that make never ending round trips to the Gerald Gentleman plant in Sutherland. Two full freight trains a day will be burnt here...up to 8 million tons a year. From the coal yards the baseball sized lumps of coal are put through pulverizers until its ground to a fine dust. That highly flammabale grit is sprayed onto boilers turning water to steam and the steam spins turbines that create the electricity. What's left from the furnaces is routed towards the smoke stacks, but first it passes through filters in a huge room filled with equivilent of vacuum cleaner bags. The cleaned air vents out. NPPD boasts about well it cleans up after coal and meeting federal air quality standards.
[Fehrman] The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency have very stringent limits on air emissions and we have very comprehensive data collection systems that make sure that we are meeting all of the air systems we are supposed to meet.
[Bill Kelly] None the less, burning coal creates carbon dioxide... which studies indicate increases the effects of global warming... Nitrogen Oxide... the cause of most smog... and Sulphur Dioxide which brings on Acid Rain.
[Jon Traudt, conservation consultant, Health & Energy Co.] The thing about burning coal is not onoly that it causes pre-mature death in thirty thousand Americans ... ten times that died in New York form terrorist action. Ten times each year. The pollution from coal reduces crop yields. Those crops that do grow pull up some of those pollutents, the heavy metals, and they end up in the food chain.
[Bill Kelly] In Nebraska, like the rest of the country, coal reigns as the least environmentally friendly of the fuels used by Nebraska utilities, even with the considerable improvements cleaning up what comes out of the smoke stacks.
[Duane Hovorka, Wildlife Federation] I would have to say we are not doing enough yet. Still we are meeting the federal standards. Its not a question of meeting the standards. It's a question of whether those standards give us enough protection for our environment. Again, I would have to say we are not doing enough. That's the trade for customers... low cost and reliability versus some realy concerns about health and the environment. It's what Nebraska Public Power heard from its customers when it brought together a group for advice on what souces of fuel they should use to generate electricity.
[Bill Kelly] It's a cleaner fuel that will burn in NPPD's newest plant... natural gas. This will be, according to the utility, an efficient and environmentally friendly electric plant.
The new facility will only be turned on for only about one out of every three days during the year. The same is true of the Natural gas powered Canaday Station near Lexington. So if gas is so good, why use it so rarely? These plants are, by design, fired up only when demand for electricity is the highest... like those hot summer days when everyone has the AC on.
They can come on line fast, just like a gas stove. Pipelines bring the fuel in underground and its fed straight into boilers, creating steam to turn the generators on site. Only about 15% of NPPD's power comes from natural gas, and for a reason.
[Fehrman] The price of gas is like a yo-yo. It moves around aa lot In fact that is the exact advantage of coal over natural gas. While coal is a stable price fuel, gas is ranging a dollar or two dollars a BTU a day. The cost of natural gas has gone through the roof lately. Supplies are tight and nature can only produce so much more.
[Traudt] So the truth is we are running short. We may never run out. Warren Buffet may have no trouble heating his house but what about the rest of us? Can we afford that? Fehrman: This is an incredibly vital issue for us and the whole industry has to work on what our long term options will be.
[Bill Kelly] So if it's the most expensive fuel around, why build a new gas powered plant in Beatrice? NPPD wants to control th source of its electricty. Currently the utility goes out of state to purchase nearly one out of every five of the MegaWatts used by homes and businesses.
[Fehrman] By using natural gas as a fuel, we can fire those generators and have them on line very quickly and because of that we can off set our risk in the market.
[Bill Kelly] Again, the customers NPPD brought together this summer struggled with the balance of cost and reliability.
There is another source of course. The Cooper Nuclear Plant could supply a little over a tenth of the electricity for NPPD, but problems with maitenence and federal regulators have limited the plants effectiveness. The utility promises it will get it all in line, and while it may make some environmentalists go pale CEO Bill Fuhrman even sees nuclear energy expanding.
[Fehrman] Nuclear power is something that is internal to the United States. We are not dependent on others for that fuel source. But yes it has its challenges that I believe we can overcome. Yes fossil fuels will run out. The challenge is when and can we be well prepared for when that happens.
[Bill Kelly] For those with lingering doubts about coal and gas and nuclear, there is another option some advocate that rarely is included in discussions about the future of electric power... much more aggressive conservation measures.
[Hovorka] If you look at it in a different way that what those people are buying is a warm house in winter and a cool house in summer and cold food in their refridgerators and if we can supply that in a way where we cont have to produce the energy but can provide the benefit at the end, it's a different way of looking at the benefit you are providing.
[Bill Kelly] The idea would be to find ways to use less electricity that would not have a huge effect on the way people live their daily lives.
[Hovorka] The world is changing and its time to look at a different way of doing business and if its cheaper to buy out those old inefficient motors than create the electricity to keep it running that is the way to go.
[Bill Kelly] There are of course the new technologies... that are really old technologies coming of age... wind, and sun and methane from natural sources. We'll talk more about those next week.
For STATEWIDE, I'm Bill Kelly
Transcript of Energy Alternatives
[Bill Kelly/Reporting] It is an impressive sight along Nebraska's most western border. The grouping of wind turbines spinning outside of Kimball isn't large compared to many in the United States, and across the world. It is however, the largest in Nebraska, producing enough energy to power 2000 homes at a time. It is likely to be just the beginning. After years of caution or indifference from the state's public power utilities, Nebraska has decided alternative, or renewable energy may be worth a look.
[Duane Hovorka/Wildlife Federation] We have a lot of potential for renewable energy, and we think it's really time for Nebraska utilities, publicly-owned utilities, to step forward and say the public good means we really need to invest in those strategies.
[Kelly] Few any longer doubt the need for new energy sources. The most popular things we burn to make electricity - the fossil fuels, like coal, oil and natural gas - won't last forever. As those fuels get in short supply, everyone pays a higher price for their electricity. Plus, burning the stuff almost always causes environmental and health problems even as good faith efforts are made to clean it up. Wind power advocates can't figure out what's taking Nebraska so long.
[Ed DeMayo/Wind Energy Consultant] Wind is an excellent choice for Nebraska. You have tremendous wind. An U.S. Department of Energy ranking of all of the states in the country ranks Nebraska number six, out of all. The state with the greatest amount of wind for many years now has been California. It ranks 17th. Nebraska has twice the wind energy potential of the entire country of Germany.
[Kelly] There are good places and even better places to locate wind farms in the state. Studies have shown the best sites line up along Nebraska's northern border and in the southwest corner. Once you locate the best place, the technology these days is pretty basic.
[DeMayo] It's really basically a large pinwheel. Once you blow on a pinwheel it turns. A wind turbine is in principle that simple. Having said that, though, the job of making the machine perform efficiently is a very sophisticated and very complex mechanical and physical problem. And it's to a large degree been solved.
[Kelly] When Nebraska Public Power took a poll of its customers, the response stunned managers. Over 90 percent said, "Yes, give us more electricity generated by the wind."
[Bill Fehrman/CEO, Nebraska Public Power] It's very surprising, particularly when we went through the day and we educated everybody at the event on what it was, and what it meant and how it works and what it would cost. And even though it was a higher cost kind of generation they were still very supportive of it.
[Kelly] NPPD and a handful of partners cautiously got into the wind business in 1998 by erecting a pair of wind turbines near Springview. Five years later the utility appears ready to do even more. That's not only because its customers want it, but because other electric systems outside Nebraska will buy it, making wind a revenue source.
[Fehrman] With the cost efficiencies of wind turbines that we're starting to see in the market, we'll be able to convince our board with a very strong business case that building this wind farm is the right thing to do.
[Kelly] Wind energy not only competes with the old fossil fuels, it is a lot cheaper in some cases. Compare it to coal. The two NPPD coal plants crank out a Megawatt of power for between 16 and 30 dollars. A new wind farm would fall right within that range, 24 bucks a megawatt. The big down side, the wind doesn't always blow, and utilities need reliability. Advocates say that should never be a reason not to add wind to the mix of energy sources.
[DeMayo] In order to have a reliably operating electric power system you have to have a mix of generating technologies. And something like wind can't do it all by itself. Coal can't do it all by itself either because coal plants like to run steady and the output of a power system has to go up and down.
[Kelly] Could pigs and cows replace coal? No. But their waste could at least be recycled to supply electricity for their own confinement operations. More utilities and power consumers are using animal waste, or garbage and the like, to create methane gas that fires electric generators.
[Chris Henry/Extension Service Engineer] We started working with digester technology back in the 70s. It's an old technology. Some of the first digesters got a bad name because they failed, and as the engineers learned we did a little better job of designing them and making them work.
[Kelly] At the Excel beef processing plant in Schuyler, Nebraska, the methane from its wastewater treatment plant is enough to fuel one of the three boilers on-site full time. Everything from animal waste, blood and other organics from a million animals a year decompose in the covered lagoons right next to the plant.
[Henry] Two products you're going to get from a digester. You get some pretty good odor control. It's going to destroy, what a digester does is it destroys the volatile solids and the ammonia in the manure and creates methane from it. You get methane and carbon dioxide and saturated gas, and you run that through an internal combustion engine and it generates electricity.
[Kelly] With a little bit of cleaning, the gas can go right back to the plant for burning in a boiler. A dairy or hog confinement operation can do much the same thing on a smaller scale. It's a reliable source of fuel, but also too costly to use to power homes and businesses routinely.
[Chris] It's not economic in Nebraska. We have very inexpensive energy - our producers pay between 6 and 7 cents per kilowatt hour. Where it does work and where producers are using it are in areas where you're paying a lot more, maybe 10, 12, 15 cents per kilowatt hour, and there you're able to recapture the investment.
[Kelly] Collecting and burning methane provides a major advantage: it cuts back on the smell from large livestock operations. It's one reason Nebraska Public Power may provide subsidies to operations installing the biomass burners, even if the cost is high and the energy output limited.
[Fehrman] This is an area where the Nebraska Public Power District can come in and partner with these operations and help solve and environmental issue for them, which will allow them to maintain their operations in the state of Nebraska, solve an environmental concern and then use the methane to generate electricity. So we see it as a win-win for everybody.
[Kelly] Larger hog and cattle operations can make some Nebraska towns a lot of money. It's also making a few of them a little anxious. There are concerns that the utilities support of methane generated power will encourage the growth of big livestock and the other problems it can bring.
[Hovorka] Certainly if this is part of an effort to try to expand the concentrated livestock operations in Nebraska, then I think we'd be pretty wary of it.
[Kelly] The other renewable energy sources, from solar to burning corn, don't seem to be gaining any traction in Nebraska. The technology isn't there yet to make them affordable. But for a state with lots of wind and lots of animal waste, the alternatives do seem rather obvious. For Statewide, I'm Bill Kelly.