Chattanooga Electrical Engineering News Blog
Topics Related to Electronics and Electrical Engineering
From NPR News – Due to the arctic blast and frigid temperatures well below zero degrees, many electric vehicles (EV’s) were sadly affected. Since the frigid temperatures in the northern part of the U.S. reached levels below the EV’s normal operating temperature ranges for their batteries, the vehicles could not be re-charged or maintain a constant charge. This presented major obstacles for many Tesla owners in Chicago along with longer than expected lines for Supercharger stations.
TVA’s load growth demand forecasted is expecting over a 30% increase in power demand within the next decade. Like other utilities trending away from fossil fuel power generation due to stringent carbon emission regulations, TVA is retiring their coal-powered plants and replacing with cleaner energy generation and renewable resources.
The trend of moving away from older fossil fuel technology to cleaner generation systems is very costly. TVA recognizes this and has approved moving forward with capital expenditures of $15 billion that it will invest over the next 3 years by performing system reliability upgrades and transition into cleaner energy supply.
As coal power and other fossil fuels continue to decline as the nation’s leading power generation source, more power utilities are increasing renewable energy sources such as solar power.
Pennsylvania is replacing their planned fossil fuel generation retirements with clean solar power. The state is helping promote more jobs and job transitions for the green switch from traditional carbon emission type power generation into renewable energy resources.
With the increases in power generation retirements in both coal powered and nuclear energy plants, presents major reliability concerns to the electric infrastructure. There is over “83 GW of fossil fuel and nuclear generation” in planned retirements over the next decade that could wreak havoc on the nations power system.
NERC indicated in their “Long-Term Reliability Assessment” that this “creates blackout risks for most of the United States.”
By T&D World:
The US Department of Energy (DOE) will deploy long-duration energy storage (LDES) projects for maintaining power delivery for “10 to 24 hours or longer to support a low-cost, reliable, carbon-free electric grid. Funded in part by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, this funding opportunity will advance new renewable energy technologies, enhance the capabilities of customers and communities to integrate grid storage more effectively, increase grid resilience, and expand America’s global leadership in energy storage.
The Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced $350 million for these emerging” type projects.
Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) present major obstacles in grid reliability and protection against cyberattacks and threats. DOE states “they should be designed with security as a ‘core component.’
An attack on distributed solar or battery storage resources would have ‘negligible impact’ on grid reliability today, DOE said, but the capacity of DERs on the electric system is expected to quadruple by 2025 and the agency warned that each of those systems could be hacked.”