This article carries on from the previous “Introducing Distributed Generation”. It will attempt to describe a history of the power distribution industry, and thus set a context for some of our current predicaments. The article is in a two part series, with the second part describing some of the challenges that we currently face as a result of historical set-up.
The history of the formation of such an industry is important to foster an understanding of the current situation. The electricity industry, as with most industries dependent on heavily capitalised infrastructure, seems to result in technological advances becoming less important than issues surrounding market access. Thus in theory, a piece of wondrous technology could be devised, yet if the existing technology was very expensive to install, and was intended to be long lasting, the odds are that innovation will generally fail to make strong inroads.
The history of Distributed Generation (D-G) is essentially one of the power distribution industry as a whole. The first few decades of the electrical age were actually focussed around employing D-G technology. As seen in the previous article introducing D-G, the Pearl Street station in Manhattan opened by Thomas Edison used a localised approach and serviced around 50 customers on the island. However, the reasons for employing D-G was simply due to technological limitation – the power plants were localised in their scope because there was simply no further reaching technology to service great areas and transmit electricity across the landscape in the way we think about it now. Over the next few decades, this was to change.
The first large generators appearing as manifestations of how we currently regard “power stations” were in the form of hydro-electric dams in the United States. Hydropower as a concept is nothing new, and has been used for centuries. The Greeks used water wheels to grind wheat into flour more than 2000 years ago. In the early 1800s, American and European factories used the water wheel to power machines.
In the late 19th century, the force of falling water was used in a different way – to generate electrical power. The first hydroelectric power plant was built at Niagara Falls in 1879. The Niagara and St. Lawrence River projects, as well as the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams were all built in this period and were able to make use of a natural resource, turning rushing water into electricity. However, these phenomenon, whilst large and powerful, were not localised – and thus the power was required to travel down hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines to the “load centres” – those demand areas that needed the electricity.
In the following decades, many more hydroelectric plants were built. At its height in the early 1940s, hydropower provided 33 percent of the United State’s electricity.
But by the late 1940s, the best sites for big dams had been developed. Inexpensive fossil fuel, such as coal and oil also entered the picture in a stronger capacity. Coal has played a major role in electrical production since the first power plants that were built in the United States in the 1880's. However, the earliest power plants used hand fed wood or coal to heat a boiler and produce steam in reciprocating steam engines which turned generators to produce electricity, being replaced in 1884 by the more efficient high speed steam turbine. In the 1920s, the pulverized coal firing was developed, bringing advantages that included a higher combustion temperature, improved thermal efficiency and a lower requirement for excess air for combustion. At that time, these plants could make electricity more cheaply than hydro plants. Soon they began to underprice the smaller hydroelectric plants. These numerous coal-fired steam generating plants were often built at the site of large coal deposits, utilising the natural resource at its source, and delivering the end product (electricity) down the lines to the customer. In the 1940s, the cyclone furnace was developed. This new technology allowed the combustion of poorer grade of coal with less ash production and greater overall efficiency.
Presently, coal power is still based on the same methods started over 100 years ago, but improvements in all areas have brought coal power to its economic status as the “inexpensive” power source used so widely today. It wasn't until the oil shocks of the 1970s that people even showed a renewed interest in hydropower.
By 1965, the vertically integrated utility industry in the United States was relying on the transfer of power from one regional system to another for reliability as well as economic purposes. That power may have been cheap, but the transmission system that had evolved was not as robust and reliable as many presumed. On November 2 of that year, it took only twelve minutes for a failure at a power facility in Canada to trigger a cascade of electric system failures down the East Coast of the US, eventually affecting 30 million people over an area of 80,000 square miles, and resulting in increased regulation of the nation's transmission facilities by the Federal Power Commission (now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission).
Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, high capacity transmission systems were built by various utilities throughout the United States to serve their own territories. At first, lines were built to transport energy from large base-load plants to urban load centres serving each utility's customers. As the various utilities expanded by buying or merging with other utilities, longer transmission lines were added to allow centrally-generated power to flow throughout a utility's service area. For reliability reasons, a number of neighboring utilities interconnected their transmission networks in order to support each other's systems. Eventually, power reliability pools were developed as a number of large utilities interconnected their systems providing for improved reliability and some economic benefits. A resultant by-product was the development of a limited wholesale power market between utilities.
Today, industry observers are concerned that the electrical infrastructure, which evolved under the old regulatory regime, will not function as well in the free market as advocates of competition would have us believe. These observers predict a period of higher power supply costs and coupled decrease in reliability well into the future.
The next article in this series will describe further some of these current conundrums, and how D-G can be employed as a useful tool to solve them.
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