Creep Fatigue Interaction Is Wrecking the Grid

More Chaos is Not Better

Unpredictable. Random. Variable. Unreliable. Chance. Uncertain. High-Entropy. Disordered. Capricious. Volatile. Inconstant. Aberrant. Haphazard. The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Modern Chaos Theory (the “butterfly effect”) owes its very existence to Edward Lorenz’s compter-aided study of the weather. There is hardly a more chaotic system than the weather.

The electric grid is a wonder of collective human invention, creativitivity, efficiency, and hard work—from Ohio’s Thomas Edison, to New York’s George Westinghouse, to Croatia’s Nikola Tesla—to my own Croatian ancestors who came to Butte, Montana to mine copper: Electrification transformed the world.

The electric grids we share provide ultra-efficient, on-demand energy service. If you have not seen Professor Ruzic's (@EnergyProf) magnificient lecture, I recommend considering this lecture (for even more, take a look at Dr. Ruzic’s Energy Academy):

Supply Chain Management

For well over 100 years, Sears Roebuck & Co dominated consumer product sales, marketing, and distribution. Sears invented efficient supply chain management on a national scale, with a combination of mail order and retail stores, nationwide.

Yet, today Sears is bankrupt and Walmart is worth some $392 billion. The secret of Walmart’s success: Ultra-efficient, cutting-edge, low-cost Supply Chain Management. It was the Walmart “just-in-time” supply chain management that killed Sears. Walmart now finds itself wrangling with Amazon for the most efficient supply chain management system.

Imagine Anything More Chaotic than the Weather

The science of Weather shows that, by definition, it is a chaotic system. To be sure, it has energy, but it presents in highly unordered and chaotic ways.

Now imagine what would happen to Walmart if the Government mandated that Walmart adopt chaotic supply chain management, based on the weather, in order to Save the Planet and Change the Climate.

Electric grids have their own supply chain--generation resources. Prior to the time that politicians and Greenwashers such as Google foisted Chaos into grids, their supply chains were predictable, ultra efficient, low-cost, and stable (left). After Chaos, not so much (right).

More wind and solar generators means more variability in generation. Because electrical energy is a service, this means that Firm Power resources must be available at all times to fill the gaps. In an electric grid, Reserve Margin = Supply capacity – Peak Demand ÷ Peak Demand. The more Chaos in the supply chain, the more reserve margin. As the proportion of Chaotic Generation on the electric grid goes up, the need for reserve margin goes up.

System engineers are now projecting that the required reserve margin on the grid by 2040 will need to increase from about 15% to 300%.

Reserve margin is On Call service, the epitome of inefficiency. It is either un-used or, more likely, poorly-utilized. Imagine Walmart having to maintain 300% more standby inventory in its warehouses. Higher carrying costs; more spoilage of inventory; more warehouses; more trucks; more employees; more at-risk capital deployed; higher costs; lower profits.

Reserve power costs are not a distant, future issue. ERCOT, the grid operator in Texas, has announced an additional $1.5 Billion in costs to ratepayers for On-Call, fuel-based capacity also known as Reserve Power. So much for wind and solar being cheap.

It Even Gets Worse - Chaos is Literally Destroying Our Power Plants

In addition to reserve power requirements, variability in generation resources is placing extreme stress and premature wear and tear on Firm Power resources. This is because the Firm Power resources are required to turn off and on very quickly. This is known as ramping. The more wind and solar connected to a grid, the more ramping that is required. This is called the Duck Curve and it keeps going up over time. The need for ramping keeps going up because the grid is increasingly exposed to the weather. Ramping and cycling literally wrecks Firm Power resources faster than their design life.

Introducing Wind & Solar Chaos into the electric grid has resulted in entirely new and foreign vocabulary, such as Equivalent Forced Outage Rates or EFOR, which sounds neat, tidy, and normal. New EFOR records are almost celebrated.

The PJM Manual 22 has scores of new, neat and tidy-sounding acronyms that did not exist before Chaotic Wind & Solar generators were grafted into our shared grid: Words like Equivalent Forced Derated Hours and such. It all sounds so normal & engineering-ish.

In a recent Literature review on point, the authors state that Chaotic Wind & Solar “generation may change rapidly during a short time; therefore, the trend to use the generators that have quick start-up and shut-down time is obvious.”

One way to present Chaos (extreme variability) is this radial diagram from Ontario’s grid. Blue is nuclear power; red is wind.

This is Chaotic Energy. It wreaks havoc on generators, that have to chase the load like a fluffle of rabbits. Behold Chaos:

Continuing:

Every time a power plant is turned off and on, the boiler, steam lines, turbine, and
auxiliary components go through unavoidably large thermal and pressure stresses, which cause damage. This damage is made worse for high temperature components by... creep-fatigue interaction.

The power engineers keep having to invent new vocabulary: Creep Fatigue Interaction. New models. New engineering. Reduced efficiency. Higher cost. More carbon. Lots more carbon. Shorter plant life. Grumpy lenders and investors. CHAOS is the best word.

Let's just look at California's natural gas generators as reported by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC). Solar Chaos means reduced efficiency, more wear & tear. More carbon. More cost. Shorter plant life. Higher tariff rates. Did I mention more Carbon?

Back to WECC & Chaos: "Fatigue is a phenomenon leading to cracking and possible fracture (failure) when a material is under repeated, fluctuating stresses. In a fossil power plant, such fluctuating stresses result from large transients in both pressures and temperatures."

"The worst of these transients typically occur during cyclic operation. Because base load fossil units are designed to operate in the creep range, they experience increased outages when they are additionally subjected to cycling-related fatigue."

Believe it or not, Chaos is synergistic: "The term creep-fatigue interaction suggests that the two phenomena (creep and fatigue) are not necessarily independent, but act in a synergistic manner to cause premature failure."

If a power generation plant "is now suddenly dispatched to operate at 50 starts per year, it may take only 2 to 6 years to cause component failures." Any idea how much new Carbon it takes to manufacture such components? It starts with mining....

[engineers are so boring]: "critical components will eventually start to fail. Shorter component life expectancies will result in higher plant [EFOR] and/or higher capital and maintenance costs to replace components at or near the end of their service lives."

"As a power plant ages, the equipment degrades even though it is maintained and inspected and is unable to perform as well as brand new equipment. It becomes necessary to upgrade or replace degraded equipment to 'new condition.'" Imagine trying to finance a new plant!

A practicing engineer recently contacted me to warn about ISOs like PJM denying requests by generators to go offline for critical maintenance. Why? There’s already so much wind & solar chaos on the grid that the distributors can’t afford to let the firm generators go offline or they’ll risk blackouts. That’s what Equivalent Forced Outages are for! No sense doing preventative maintenance when the politicians have decided to run the generating fleet into the ground anyway. If you think this sounds like France, you’d be right.

I urged him to write about this himself since he's the one with the "inside baseball" expertise--even offering to publish it anonymously. So far, he has not. This is the best I can manage without some helpers. Nobody seems to want to talk about it. Best I can do is propose a Union of Concerned Systems Engineers.

How 'bout a Union of Concerned Systems Engineers?

Lifecycle Assessments?

All of this leads me to a few final questions. How many "lifecycle assessment" studies supporting CA rooftop solar considered the directly-caused Carbon impacts on the generating plants, including early equipment replacements or additional Reserve Power costs? Slick & shiny but missing a few data points. When California pulled the plug on rooftop solar, did the PSC consider the billions in direct economic impacts rooftop solar has caused in the generation markets? Not one cent. They were just worried about transmission freeloading, not the forced outages of lowly generation plants.