WI Utility Takes Coal Plant Offline Thanks To Flooding, Makes More Money Buying Grid Power Instead

[hatrack]

Science deniers love to wax poetic about the joys of “baseload” coal fired power plants – most of which are old, creaky, and polluting as hell. Nature, in the form of climate-fueled flooding on the Mississippi, has provided a useful test of that notion.

LaCrosse Tribune (Wisconsin):

Dairyland Power Cooperative took its coal-fired power plant in Genoa offline at the beginning of June to avoid fuel shortages caused by the lack of barges carrying coal up a flooded Mississippi River. Instead, the La Crosse-headquartered cooperative is purchasing electricity from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator Inc. market to make up for the power normally produced by the plant in Genoa, said Phil Moilien, Dairyland’s vice president.

EDIT

However, Dairyland reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration that its fuel cost $27.28 per megawatt-hour in 2017. And it costs about $17 per megawatt-hour to run the power plant, based on EIA modeling. Altogether, that’s a combined cost of about $44 per megawatt-hour to produce electricity at a coal-fired power plant such as Dairyland’s. By comparison, it costs about $32 per megawatt-hour to buy power from the grid, according to MISO market figures from June 2018.

When the cost of operating a plant exceeds the market price, it’s likely Dairyland could have saved money by buying power in the MISO market instead, said Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative. Catalyst collects federal data and builds open-source tools to analyze utility information. In other words, Gosnell said, “this seems like an expensive plant to run.” And while Dairyland saves money on fuel costs by buying from the grid, it spends about $14 per megawatt-hour to keep background operations going at the plant, even if the turbine isn’t churning to make power.

EDIT

https://climatecrocks.com/2019/06/17/irony-alert-coal-plant-shut-down-due-to-flooding-utility-saves-money/#more-56042

[progree]

1. In case people think electric utility engineers and dispatchers are dotards

who had some kind of "oh wow" moment, I never thought of that, durrr durrr durr

When at NSP (now part of Xcel) in the 1970's-1990s, we used a computer model (called a unit commitment program) to model our generation and purchase and sales-to-other-utilities operations and options. We were always, always evaluating the cost of purchased power when considering whether to run our generators (and sales to other utilities options too). The dispatchers were constantly on the phone making deals with other utilities. I'm sure they did and do the same thing at Dairyland Power Coop, a neighbor of ours electrically.

And no, by the way, we didn't stupidly shut a generator down when it would cost more to bring it back online then was saved while being down. The unit commitment programs factor in shutdown and startup costs and the cost of operation at all generator loading levels. And minimum up time and minimum downtime constraints.

Edit -

A utility has to meet customer load demand every second, minute, and hour etc., and the price of purchased power varies dramatically with time of day. One can't judge from some average cost of generation and purchases over a multi-month (or even multi-hour) period to draw conclusions about whether a utility is operating in the most economic fashion. (Our own generating costs on both a total dollar and $/MWh basis also vary dramatically -- the most efficient and lowest fuel cost generators are committed first, and as the load builds, less cost-efficient generators are put online. And generators have rising incremental cost curves so that as a generator increases it's power output, each additional MWh costs a little more than the last one).

[progree]

2. As for what happens when generation is insufficient to meet the load

unless the imbalance is rectified some way some how (by shedding load if necessary, and quickly enough), the system collapses.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=126176