ABNY Talks - How Does New York City Get Its Electricity?

I am a reporter at The Times and I write a column called New York 101 which explains the city's machinery like how we get mountain water in our taps and why the roads are always under construction and I also wrote about the power grid which is the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century it's also the world's largest machine and one of the most eccentric illogical inefficient and least understood machines in the world and it's about to be reinvented in New York City does anybody know where it was established good yes Dan on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan Thomas Edison built the country's first permanent central power station it's a it's a parking lot today but back in the 1880s there were six thirty ton dynamos named after PT Barnum circus elephants that essentially spun mechanical energy into electricity and the original network covered less than a square mile of lower Manhattan and when it went live in 1882 it delivered electricity to about a hundred customers of the Edison Electric illuminating company of New York including the New York Times back then electricity was a luxury and it was made locally and the only devices that were plugged into it were light bulbs and today light bulbs are a tiny fraction of what we use electricity for and practically every corner of the country is blanketed by the grid but what is the grid so it's more like a complex system that generates transmits and delivers electricity and there are dozens of entities that all must work in sync to operate it so at a very high level there are three main parts first power is generated at a power plant then it passes through transformers where the voltage is boosted so less power is lost in transmission so it can travel over long distances and then finally it enters what's called a distribution network which is operated by your local utility company or content if you live in Manhattan so when you plug in your phone or your laptop or turn on your microwave that electricity coming out of your socket might have been generated hundreds of miles away at Niagara Falls or it could have come from a natural gas fire plant on a barge in Brooklyn so there are hundreds of power plants in the state mostly privately owned that make power from six main sources and each plant varies in its cost to build and operate and how much power it can produce and how quickly and how efficiently does anybody know what this is I heard it Ravenswood good it used to be called big Alice and used to be owned by Con Ed now I think it's owned by TransCanada but this is a gas fired plant on Long Island City and it's one of about 60 in the state and that produce about half of the electricity that's made in New York so a flood of cheap natural gases completely transformed the electric industry it's brought down carbon emissions and it's also made a tougher for other plants to compete like nuclear this is Indian Point this is one of four nuclear plants in the state and together they produce about a third of the electricity that's produced here which is a lot these plants are aging and and you know disposing of nuclear waste is still an issue but they're essential because they are able to produce a tremendous amount of steady carbon-free power and so while the state and governor comer wants to shut down Indian Point they want to subsidize the the plants that are that are state so this is Niagara Falls and because of New York's rivers and lakes we have the ability to generate about 20% of our electricity from hydroelectric plants which are clean and provide clean and renewable power and the first one was built on Niagara Falls actually around the same time that Edison was building his power plant here on Pearl Street and today we have about a hundred and eighty of them and we've produced more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains about three percent came from wind and the governor is pushing for more especially offshore where the wind is stronger and steadier and so in a few years New York could have the largest offshore wind farm or it's in the works that could power about 50,000 homes on Long Island and there's another site that is being that's in the works in near Queens and then there are more that are that are planned for upstate but the thing about wind is that it's intermittent and so you can't control it with a switch so so when the wind dies down other generators have to be ready to sort to step in does anybody know what this is yes for Cayman so this is this is this is a photovoltaic plant out at the Brookhaven laboratory in Long Island and it's the largest on the East Coast and you know there are tens of thousands of solar panels that on rooftops and buildings but there is not a lot of momentum to build more plants like this because it takes up so much space and and like wind you know you can't command the sunshine and then and there's also no cheap and or effective way to store this energy for later so about 1% of our power is made with coal you know electricity generation is still one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States but the carbon footprint of New York's electric industry is actually decreased by more than 40% in the last three decades and so and that is because most of the plants have been shut down because of emission restrictions but also because they couldn't compete with cheap natural gas plants so the few remaining coal plants will be mothballed or converted to natural gas like this one this is in Newberg so who decides which power plants are switched on or off this happens at the New York Independent System Operator called nice Oh and they're the nonprofit entity that manages the grid plans for its future and also administers these wholesale power markets that that operated in both real-time and for the day ahead so each day nice Oh says ok how much power they need to say that they need like throughout the day and these power plant operators bid into this marketplace with how much power they can make and it will cost and at what time and then a computer system picks the lowest bidder and every five minutes it signals to which plants to dial up or scale down production so an important thing to remember about electricity is that it's not like water and you can't store it in a bucket ok so what is being made and what is being used has to be balanced essentially instantaneously so and if there's too much power going through the system it will destabilize the grid and damaged equipment or cause outages so inside a cavernous room and a 38 million dollar control room near Albany there's a team of operators that's always on duty and they're like air traffic controllers and they are monitoring where the power is going throughout the system where it's being placed and you know how it's moving through the transmission system and it's called balancing the grid and someone described it to me as juggling while on a trampoline and so people inside this control room you know they undergo psychological evaluations to make sure that they can handle the stress and they train inside simulation labs you know for a hurricane or a cyberattack but day to day the biggest variable that they've got to worry about is the weather so on a bright sunny day like today more people will be cranking up their air conditioner and so they need to make sure that more generators are you know online to make sure that people stay cool but when a thunderstorm rolls in you know they're tracking lightning strikes and wind gusts which can damage equipment but it can also affect the output of wind farms for example and so if a wind farm starts cranking out too much power other plants need to be dialed down to balance the flow so so it's also important to know that new york's grid does not operate in isolation it's it's plugged into a patchwork of interconnected grids that that stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean so as the grid grew from it's like tiny little you know square in Laura Manhattan that now you know there were some rational geographic boundaries that were set like the Rocky Mountains that set the Western interconnection in the eastern interconnection but there were political contingencies too Texas is ready to secede and so you know it's tempting to think that such a large system would be more stable but there are thousands of entities across the country that have to coordinate and work together essentially to team electricity which is essentially that's like Wild Thing and that is that can be unpredictable that we are trying to channel through this system and so you know while cyberattacks are you know very real threats there's there is another enemy does anybody know what that enemy is tree branches was anybody here in 2003 so the center that the country's worst blackout that where 50 million people lost power from Toronto to New York was traced to a utility company in Ohio that had like cut back on his tree trimming budget and so it was a hot August day the power line sagged in the heat and shorted out after touching a tree branch and but the utility was in the process of upgrading the software on its system and so they didn't get the warning signals until it was too late so and by then you know a tsunami of electricity went thrashing about knocking out power lines and equipment which you know in their design and to shut down if too much electricity is flowing through them like a like a fuse in your home but it took days to pinpoint the outages and restart this equipment and so this blackout was was really a wake-up call about the fragility of the grid and our dependence on electricity so you know it caused a visible dip in the country's GDP for that year and it cost about six billion dollars so this is New York's system and it's also built for the worst-case scenario and also to keep the lights on in Times Square and your air conditioning so air conditioners going even on the hottest days of the year how many of you were running your air conditioners last night everybody so so New York City is like a giant straw and and the grid is essentially built to feed New York City and it uses more than half the state's power but we can only make about 40% of it because power plants were relocated or moved or built in in the western and northern parts of the state now we have to rely on transmission lines to bring this power to New York City but what happens on really hot days when everybody's sticking their heads inside their refrigerators certain high voltage lines that carry power downstate can get congested and so when that happens operators at night so we'll have to switch on a plant that's closer to where the power is needed it's like that that could be more expensive and less efficient so it's like it's like paying more for a carton of milk at the bodega around the corner than walking the 12 blocks to get the you know to the supermarket and so the plants that they switch on are called peaker plants and there's about 16 of them sort of sitting idle around New York City some of them are floating on barges and they're only used a few days of the year and they're designed to switch on really quickly but the trade-off for that rapid response is usually the higher cost and more pollution so once that power comes zooming down the transmission grid how does it get to your socket that is con Ed's job and they maintain the network that delivers power to nine million people in New York City in Westchester no matter how many people want to plug into the grid come hell or high water but this last mile or these last these last miles from of the transmission system to your house is probably even more complicated than state's grid and it's getting even more complicated with climate change and and how customers are plugging into it does anybody have a solar panel on their rooftop no well if you did you would be feeding back to the grid and so Kannan used to have to worry about squirrels and and you know flooding and and maintaining its own grid where power was flowing one way now they've got to worry about power that's coming out of your house and and they've got to figure out how to pay them for that electricity and and how to manage the flow of electricity that's now going to ways and also how their system can communicate with the devices that you've got on your side of the meter like fuel cells or or solar panels that the that the utility it doesn't control so what does the grid of the future look like the grid of today has been compared to a mainframe computer in the age of cloud computing and now New York wants to make the grid cleaner more resilient and more efficient but what does that mean one of the ways that they want to make the grid more efficient is by shortening the distance between where power is made and where power is consumed which might involve installing rooftop solar or batteries or virtual power plants closer to where power is needed and the other big piece of this is energy efficiency or getting people like us to use less so more smart appliances will be linked in to your smart meter that will then talk to the utility or Con Ed and delay you know your laundry until demand is lower like in the middle of the night so if we use less power that and/or have the means to prove our own power locally or store it for later then we will need fewer peaker plants and the other equipment that's just sort of sitting around for most of the year but the more devices that we plug into the grid and the more we rely on intermittent sources of power like wind and solar the less secure and more volatile the grid becomes so you know the grid is this like aging lumbering system and it's not going to you know transform with the flip of a switch parts of Edison's grid we're still in operation like 10 years ago so this is not a system that is quick change but you know the the if you know that the city or the the state has very ambitious goals to overhaul completely overhaul how utilities make money the the rules will change for grid operators for the wholesale power markets for government agencies and and for customers so it's changing faster today than it probably has since the grid was first put in the ground in the 1880s so I've thrown a lot of stuff at you but Gretchen Bakke who's a sociologist of a megillah' wrote a terrific book that really explains the socio-political dynamics that that made the grid what it is today because this is a very people driven system and so she has it an amazingly smart and insightful take on how this works if you're interested in the old stuff Jo Cunningham wrote a great book about like the origins of the grid here in the city and then the New York Independent System Operator nice puts out a report every year called power trends it's great beach reading but it also does do a pretty good job of explaining sort of the current status of the grid and where things are going thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Association for a Better New York

Views: 1,549

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Id: 3RD0wrzmlVE

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2018