FractalLP

Rick Perry probably wanted to keep the coal industry from being shutdown regardless, but the facts (2014 Polar Vortex) are on his side. The need to reimburse coal for the value it provides is well understood by all the experts at the DOE, FERC, and the ISO/RTOs. ISO-NE is deeply concerned with the upcoming retirement of several large coal units and has run into hot water for considering subsidizing them. These organizations run reliability studies to determine the impact from these retirements. They KNOW this is a problem and are trying to determine possible market solutions.

Just saying we don't need any coal shows a definite lack of understanding of the industry and the problem. I work in power system transmission, but have zero connections to either coal or nuclear. My only "skin" in the game is a deep concern for premature coal retirements based off of all the public studies which have been run.

Edit: My memory is a little foggy, but I just double-checked myself and the coal plants in ISO-NE I was thinking about were actually natural gas plants that wouldn't be impacted by loss of pipeline as they were served by a local source. If they had enough of those, you wouldn't need to keep nearly as much coal around. However, I bet they're fairly rare.

I'm not sure either. I work in this industry as a professional engineer and as a neutral party. The facts are the facts at this point. It might not fit someone's agenda though.

For anyone not in the know, Trump is merely following the recommendations of the Department of Energy regarding providing economic payments to Coal/Nuclear to value the very very real value they provide in fuel-mix diversity. I recommend reading up on "Resiliency" and the Polar Vortex event of 2014. Essentially, the east coast almost ran out of the necessary power to serve load. This is because they had gas pipeline delivery issues and much gas was being used for residential heating. Fortunately, ~80% of the Coal slated for retirement in the region was available. The DOE stated things would have been "catastrophic" without coal there.

So yes Coal is uneconomic and awful for the environment. However, it is important to recognize the value that it and Nuclear bring as they often have a minimum of 3 months of fuel on-site unlike gas, intermittent renewable, and batteries.

Check out Red language if you get the chance. It sounds like you might like.

Thank you!

The post above yours is actually correct. I didn't read it as rude either although maybe a little dismissive. If you work in this space, you quickly realize just how complex everything is as the electric grid is the largest most complex machine on planet earth. The legal, economic, regulatory, and engineering aspects of it go pretty deep.

Utilities typically own generation plants as well as the high voltage transmission lines that transport electricity to consumers which then have their voltage lowered (think of a transformer as a device that lowers pressure) before going over smaller distribution lines into your house. Long ago, competition was fierce, so utilities went to the government and asked to be regulated. This caused forced consolidation and they began to effectively serve as monopolies and make a modest return on investment each year. In those days demand was fairly easy to forecast. The utility would make sure they always had enough generation online plus some extra to cover any emergencies like a unit tripping offline. The grid worked like this for decades and costs were fairly cheap. If the utility needed to build a new nuclear plant (example) they would have to go to the state commission and get them to approve raising the rates. Now, although rates were fairly cheap, there was a push to deregulate things. In theory, markets are less efficient in some ways, but more in others such as incentivizing new and more efficient technology. Remember the regulated utility doesn't make any more money by doing research and risking new technology.

With deregulation, we moved to the RTO/ISO model where lots of utilities band together and work with an RTO/ISO. The RTO/ISO chooses which units run via optimization. It wants to find a way to serve all the customers in the region, plus provide backup power, and do it very cheaply. Remember how the utility has to keep extra units online in case one trips? By banding together into what is known as a "pool" you can save lots of money as far fewer units need to be online as backup. The RTO/ISO does this as well. It also knows the cost of each unit and chooses the cheapest ones. This is slowly forcing more costly fossil fuels to retire as they simply aren't as economical. This causes an issue as even though wind/solar is awesome, it isn't as reliable as a massive coal plant with months of fuel waiting to be used. Making sure there are no blackouts is VERY important to grid operators. The industry is scrambling to address these issues as fast as possible, but it is a tough issue. Deregulation is a weird word as utilities are still regulated, but there are now market forces coupled into it as well helping push progress forwards. I hope that helps a bit!

Your answer is good. To add to it, the large "transmission" grid usually covers extremely high voltage lines: 115 kV, 138kV, 230kV, 345kV, 500kV, 765kV and up. It is managed by both utilities and RTO/ISO organizations that manage large sections like air-traffic controllers. Distribution is typically below ~100kV and is really more in the 11kV range and managed by the utilities almost exclusively. Building new transmission lines can be ~$1 billion projects.

Just because there is a lot of green energy doesn't mean that everything is peachy. California also does a fair amount of importing as well during parts of the day with low solar. Also, just because you have solar doesn't mean everything is ok. The grid dispatcher in California (CAISO) has to make sure reliable power is available 24/7 for consumers and industry. This can be very challenging due to solar which is behind the meter (makes it difficult to forecast load) and can disappear quickly leaving you in a lurch. Vox has a pretty good video on YouTube on the infamous "duck curve" that you should watch. Essentially, you have a ton of behind the meter solar during the midday that suddenly disappears during the end of the day. It is difficult to forecast for this. You have to have other non-renewable baseload (gas, nuclear, coal, or maybe renewable like hydro)online to take the place of solar when it goes away....you're essentially paying for reliability in that case. Battery storage would work too in place of fossil fuels, but you would need a LOT of it, and we're not quite there.

The economic dispatch that CAISO runs optimizes for the cheapest dispatch to meet load and reserves like the other north American grid operators like ERCOT, PJM...etc. That is essentially the market driving things along with CPUC decisions. If you're unhappy with how California is treating renewables know that California is on the bleeding edge in this area where more has changed in the past 10 years than the previous 80.

I've never heard of numcommand before, but it looks super awesome and exactly what I need. I use Linux servers, but am forced to use Windows as my local. So first question, do you have experience with awk/gawk on Windows? Second question: What do you prefer about Awk over Python/Perl? I guess if all your analytics are fairly short it is just easier in Awk? Thanks!

How long have you been using Awk?

I've heard that quote, but realistically, that would be a huge project to write an efficient APL in P6 and as I already said, the performance wouldn't make you happy.

When I used the Dyalog APL free trial on Windows it installed a new keyboard mapping as part of the process. I think the keymapping is also on their site. It uninstalled as well I think when I was finished and uninstalled.

From what I understand, they've made millions off of the big banking clients and that is probably quite straightforward as opposed to making money off open source.

Dyalog has a web server and a fully documented SQL library.