Legalectric

6,300 MW becomes 8,000MW?? 1,700MW more? Why? It’s because of losses!

There was an MTEP 06 meeting on April 12 that I missed because of the mold house trial. DAMN! Shoulda been there, I guess! Look at this old power point showing WoW‘s buy in on this “Midwest Transmission Expansion Plan.” Update on Transmission Planning for Windpower in the Upper Midwest

Anyway, here’s the problem: The electric industry’s been whining and crying about our “need” for 6,300MW in the REGION, that’s from the CapX2020 Techinical Report. Regular readers should know this report by heart by now, but that 6,300 figure is cited on p. 1, and then there’s that great map on p. 7 that shows 16,712MW of generation proposed for the same area:

And now they say no, it’s more — we need to build 8,000MW of generation to cover the 6,300MW we say we need. Why? It’s called losses. In the SW MN 345kV proceeding, they presumed 30% losses. Download file The 8,000MW figure to generate 6,300MW presumes 1,700MW of losses, a tad under the 1,890 if the 30% assumption were used.

Isn’t this the best damn argument you’ve ever heard for Distributed Generation? How much transmission would we have to build to transmit all this power, and how much transmission do we have to pay for, all for the joy of losing 30% in losses? So please explain to me why this makes any sense!!!!

Do you realize that 1,700MW represents the generation of all three of our nuclear plants? Monticello at 600MW and Prairie Island at 1,060?

Isn’t this the best damn argument not to rely on coal plants way out west? If we sited wind with all the gas plants, how much of that coal wouldn’t be necessary? If we sited near load, we wouldn’t have to build three new coal plants.

Who benefits from this goofy scenario?