Your Source for Energy Jobs & Industry News
Landsnet owns and operates Iceland’s power transmission system and is responsible for building and maintaining a secure and reliable electrical grid. Monitoring the grid in Iceland is uniquely challenging because […]
The post Landsnet and Laki Power Tackle Severe Weather Challenges in Iceland appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a G4-level severe geomagnetic storm watch, urging the North American power grid to prepare for a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) […]
The post Severe Solar Storm Threatens Power Grid Amid Hurricane Helene, Milton Recovery appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The world is increasingly beset by severe weather events: heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires. Overall extreme events are impacting on power supply and distribution networks. Utilities are having to plan extensively about how to maintain electricity during emergencies.
One important aspect of this is ensuring that the utility can install a flexible demand response system ahead of any crisis, which can ensure a rapid load-management intervention. This can free up valuable resources for utilities, allowing them to shift those resources to other areas during large scale disasters. This article looks at three challenges in these circumstances and how to mitigate any disruption.
Severe weather usually harms the most vulnerable components of the grid: poles, lines and transformers. Customer loads need to be modulated to match reduced grid capacity until power can be rerouted or distribution assets can be repaired or replaced. This requires information about the entire grid and input from sensors located throughout.
Geographic grouping of demand response resources (at the substation level or other grid sections) can enable faster dispatch of these resources when grid assets are damaged.…
Some combined-cycle plants have two feedwater-control valves: a small startup valve with the extra cavitation-protection needed during startup and low-load operations, and a larger main valve with the high flow-capacity needed during full-load ops. This design is intended to yield a longer service life of these valves. However, as the plant ages, this design also can yield a severe modulation, or “hunting,” in these valves.
At one 10-year-old combined-cycle plant, the two feedwater-control valves started hunting violently, eventually causing a loud boom.
The entire feedwater-piping system lurched, nearly out of its pipe rack. That startled everyone in the plant, and prompted the control room operator to hit his shutdown switch, and put in a trouble call to the maintenance shop. The maintenance technician grabbed his tool bag, went to the feedwater-control station, and began troubleshooting. He noted in his logbook that the incident had occurred shortly after a plant startup, just as the feedwater-control logic was transitioning from the startup valve to the main valve.…