Global Cooling: Electricity Peak-shaving Techniques to Offset Climate Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT Electricity is the “power to succeed.” However, the United States faces a hidden electricity crisis, i.e., the “power to fail.” As the economy grows at 2–3 percent per year, the total demand for electricity has grown in tandem at 2.1 percent per year over the 1994–2004 period. Inversely, however, electricity capacity margins, the percent of “spinning” supply above demand, have declined consistently over the last decade from 25–30 percent in 1992 to about 15 percent today. In fact, the Eastern Independent Power Grid, with nearly 75 percent of total U.S. electricity demand, has only a 13.9 percent capacity margin. Additionally, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) forecast in 2006 that overall electricity demand will rise 19 percent by 2015, but overall electricity capacity will rise only 6 percent. This compound total demand growth coupled with declines in utility plant capacity margins only masks the serious underlying problem: peak electricity demand, typically for summertime air conditioning, is growing at 2.6 percent per year, consistently as fast as total electricity demand. While the nation considers the need for energy independence critical due to the fact that half the nation's oil consumption is imported, the resulting economic consequences of a peak electricity shortfall would be as bad or worse, given the nation's reliance on electricity to cool, light, and power motors and computers. That is the nexus of this article: the available energy technologies and programmatic procedures to reduce electricity peaks or peak-shaving in the U.S.