Power Lines

• Most power lines are run at 230 or 500 kilovolts to keep currents and resistance heating losses down.
• About 10% of generated power is lost in transmission.
• California has 33,000 miles in power lines, with PG&E owning 57%, Edison 16%, San Diego G&E 6%, municipal utilities 18%, and federal 3%.
• The following is from LA Times, Jan. 31.
• Cables are 1 inch or 1 1/2 inch in diameter, on 150 foot high towers, and can deliver 500 to 2,000 megawatts.
• Cabling power lines is one tenth to one-third the cost of undergrounding them.
• The cables are made from steel and aluminum, not the heavier copper.
• They have been upgraded with thicker cables to carry more power and are near their weight limits.
• While the state is planning to increase power generation by 25%, it is only increasing transmission capacity by 5%.
• The main link between Southern and Northern California is Path 15 which can carry only 3,000 megawatts.  The 90 mile link runs through the central valley from Los Banos to Coalinga.  A 1,500 megawatt addition is being planned, to transmit more power from the new plants in Kern County.  It will cost $200 million from PG&E, and take four years for completion.
• The ISO maintains reliablility on 3/4 of the state's grid.
• FERC regulates yearly profits on power lines to 9% of investment, compared to 15% to 20% that utilities can make on other investments.
• San Diego needs a 30 mile link to Riverside that is being locally opposed.
• The Bay Area will also need a new power line by 2004.

Hydroelectric Power

• Northern California is used to getting power from the Pacific Northwest.  However, due to a lack of rain this season (the fourth driest year on record for the Columbia River and Snake River regions), the Pacific Northwest has not had much hydroelectric power for sale. Water normally saved for the summer is being used now for California from the Columbia river dams.  Normally the Pacific Northwest contributes 11% of California's power, mostly from hydroelectric.
• The Pacific Northwest snowfall is only 61% of normal, which might produce 25% less hydroelectric power this summer from this source.  Washington and Oregon get 85% of their electric power from hydroelectric.  Typically we sell them power in the winter, and they sell us power in the early summer when the runoff is greatest.
• There are nearly 700 alternate energy producers (solar, wind, biomass and cogeneration) that produce about a third of the energy bought by the utilities Edison, PG&E, and SDG&E.  Cogeneration plants use gas to provide heat, and also produce electricity.  The alternate generation cost is being reduced from 17 cents/kilowatt hour to about 9 cents/kilowatt hour.  However, this does not take into account the cost of natural gas to the cogeneration plants.

Nuclear Power

• The Bush plan is backing nuclear power (LA Times, May 19).
• The last nuclear plant in the US was built 28 years ago.
• Many US nuclear sites were designed for four to six reactors, but only operate two or three, so the sites already exist.
• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has preapproved three designs to forgo design reviews if one of those types is proposed.
• The price of nuclear fuel has declined, while natural gas has risen and hydroelectric is limited.
• The plants do not contribute to smog or to global warming.
• New pebble bed reactors with 300,000 pebbles of enriched uranium oxide covered with graphite are cooled with helium.  They are safer as they never reach meltdown temperatures and do not require containment domes.  They have not been approved by the NRC, and one will be tested in South Africa.
• On the negative side of course are the operating failures at Three Mile Island, with a meltdown but no significant radiation  release, and the meltdown and radiation at Chernobyl.
• Yucca Mountain in Nevada has yet to be built for spent nuclear fuel storage.
• Reprocessing of fuel has turned out to be risky for contamination, and a possible terrorist threat.

Natural Gas

• One half of California's electrical energy comes from natural gas.  The spot cost of natural gas has risen dramatically because the two pipelines into Southern California from the two the natural gas fields in Texas have a limited capacity.
• Interstate natural gas lines can deliver 7 billion cubic feet a day (Bcf/d) to California, while the pipelines in the state can carry 6.7 Bcf/d.
• Previously, the alternate energy sources were priced at the same rate as that of spot natural gas at the California border.
•  National Energy Information Center on residential natural gas prices nationwide.
• Your Southern California Gas Company gas bill has a daily customer charge ($0.16/day), baseline therm charges at a fixed rate ($0.90/therm in Feb. bill), and overbaseline therm charges if therms exceeded 47 therms in Feb. (varies with month).  The current cost of gas $0.66/therm is that of the gas which is purchased on the first day of each month.  The baseline charge is larger since it includes the distribution charge.
• Propane costs to rural residents have jumped from $1.20 a gallon to over $2 a gallon this year.  Propane is a byproduct of oil and natural gas production, but with higher oil prices, refineries switched from oil to propane for their own power.
• Coal bed methane currently provides 6% of the nation's natural gas.  It is extracted by pumping water out of coal beds, after which the methane is released.  Potential environmental problems are the drying up of water wells and methane and sulfur dioxide leaks.  While the North Slope of Alaska holds 35 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, it also holds 200 trillion cubic feet in the coal beds. (LA Times, March 27)
• On August 19, 2000, a fifty year old El Paso gas pipe exploded near Carlsbad, N.M.  Killing 12 people, it was the worst pipeline explosion in US history.  By increasing pressure on two other pipelines, 85 % of the 2.1 Bcf/day has been restored.
• The difference of natural gas at the source to its major destinations, as for example Opal, Wyo. to Wheeler Ridge, CA is $9.21 per million BTU, leading to a cost of $14 to $16 per million BTU.  However, the actual cost of delivering that amount of gas is well under $1 (LA Times, May 9).  The FERC will be examining this.
• Kinder Morgan Energy and Calpine Corp. plan to build a natural gas pipeline by 2003 called the Sonoran Line.  The pipeline will be able to move 750 million cubic feet a day (Mcf/d).  Calpine is committed to ship 400 (Mcf/d), enough to generate 9,000 megawatts, for 20 years.  The $1.7 billion pipeline will run from the San Juan fields in northern New Mexico to Antioch near San Francisco.  (1,000 cubic feet is about 1 million BTU.)  California currently consumes 9 billion cubic feet per day  (Bcf/d) and proposed power plants will add a need for 2.8 Bcf/d in two years. (LA Times, May 3)
• California natural gas prices have averaged $13 per million BTU this year, nearly four times the $2.71 average in the same period last year.
• The Energy Oversight Committee of the California Assembly has determined that El Paso Natural Gas and its affiliates did not use the capacity of their pipline and boosted the cost of natural gas by 500 percent in the months ending in February. (AP, May 13).  Our local congressman John Campbell did not agree with this conclusion.
• The FERC is judge and jury of the same case, which is alleged to have added $3.7 billion to the energy bill.
• The case is on the leasing of 1.2 Bcf/d on the pipelines from Texas and New Mexico to California, from El Paso Natural Gas Co. to El Paso Merchant Energy, which it owns.  That represents 17% of the interstate pipeline capacity into California.  45% of that capacity was not used, while the price has risen from $3 per million BTU to $14 per million BTU.  While other shippers sold 98% of their unused capacity, Merchant only sold 7% of its. The contract will be over at the end of May, and 30 companies will take over that capacity.
•  Response of El Paso Natural Gas
• One million BTU will serve a Southern California home for five or six days. (LA Times, May 14).
• Californians paid $6.6 billion for natural gas in 1999, $12.3 billion in 2000, and $7.9 billion just through March of this year.
• The USGS estimates that the US has 580 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.