A crash program to use small, standby diesel generators to keep the lights on.
Mark Lively is a utility economic engineer in Gaithersburg, Maryland. For more information about this, and other utility issues, visit his website at www.LivelyUtility.com.
California is short of power. Some studies predict over 1,000 hours of rotating blackouts this summer for the state’s electricity users. Yet these blackouts need not occur.
It is true, of course, that the industry cannot possibly install enough new generation to offset the power shortage before the peak air conditioning season hits in July. But what about power plants already on the ground that go largely unused? Here I’m talking about some 30 gigawatts (GW, or thousands of megawatts) of distributed generation that is already in place in California, made up for the most part of diesel-powered emergency standby generators.
Diesel fuel combustion, unfortunately, is not anyone’s vision of “green” power. It poses an environmental challenge. Even so, the electric industry ought to be able to mobilize a significant fraction of these assets. The engineering isn’t all that difficult, but the politics and economics must still be solved, before these plants can become available to offset California’s electricity shortage.