Maryland Power Grid

Greetings all! It was a great day today and while running I decided I'd embellish on my post from yesterday a little bit, this will probably be a two part post to keep it short.

Yesterday I mentioned that the positioning of the solar plant in southern maryland was in a great position to support the high voltage distribution system by providing electrical energy during peak hours in the summer. By that I mean there is a high degree of correlation, yes correlation is not causation, but I'll dig up the analysis i have from previous work if necessary, to high temperatures and increased electrical usage. Specifically in summer months when both the sun is intense and the heat is as well, everyone has heard of brownouts, and that is the cause. The solar plants location would thus allow it to act as an electrical support structure, inline, that helps the source power plant absorb the excess load during that time.

To support that I did a little internet searching to find the actual map of the maryland transmission line system. The link will take you to the source, but the modified version shown below shows the solar plant location, outlined in blue.

Maryland HV Distribution Lines > 115kV

 The location is approximate, mainly b/c this is a cartoon map vs georeferenced, but gives the key points needed. The solar plant is right near a gas fired plant located on the St Mary's side of the patuxent river(the black dot at the bottom of the circle) which then drives to a substation in hughsville. The maroon lines are from the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant, primarily wired to feed the DC metro area. I drew in the arrows, showing the support directions, missing the one line leading to Southern Maryland.

There is one line missing, a 115kV line, I believe based upon counting the line isolators on the lines I run by, running to the Patuxent River Naval Base, but it may be a smaller line and I'll check that this week. This is the line that will generate the most support, other than the segment running towards the coal plant on the east side of the Potomac, where rte 301 crosses the river, primarily because the other lines are all double structured with dual generation sources, indicating a built in redundancy.

So in summary, the plant is in a great location, will help the grid in southern maryland a lot b/c we do summer brown outs on hot days, and rate limiting when necessary. In the long run this should lower costs for energy as well, once the plant is paid off, b/c of the extreme increases in the $ per kWh in the summer months as part two of this post.

Since I got going on the grid a little bit, the next post will talk a little about the US distribution grid, which will probably be a few posts as well.

Policy having some use

Being that I live in Southern Maryland, all my electricity comes from SMECO, the Southern Maryland Electric Co-Operative. Recently they started, and are nearly done with a new solar plant in Hughsville, right along 235 near the Harley store and across from Randy's Ribs. The impetus for this was the need to have at least .1% of its energy from solar sources to retain a license in the state of maryland, and this plant will now generate 5.5MW, or 0.2% of the total energy produced.  This means that the entire plant was driven by state requirements, ie policy.

The land in use was an old tobacco farm that has since been given up to feed corn production, and has been poorly maintained, being far from any local water sources or active watering, but receiving a lot of sun. My source for this is solely that i used to drive by this field every day on my way to work for 2 years before moving closer to my office, so its recent data. But in truth this field was basically wasted, and in a great location for a solar plant, so much that I've commented before to people that it would be a good spot due to the orbit of the earth around the sun coupled with the onshore flow(due to location relative to the ocean) generating clear skies in the summer, and here the summer sun is intense.

Another point would be how this will help support the local grid during the summer months, but I'll need to do a thorough analysis of the main power line routing to make this conclusion. This thought is drawn from the explosive growth in the California, MD area and the main trunk lines not coming across from the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear plant, but from DC down Rte 4 and 5 and how the summer months now require a lot of AC.

In summary, looks like SMECO came to the same conclusion and threw a solid support plant in place to mitigate both the policy concerns as well as supporting the explosive growth in Southern Maryland, while also taking ill used farmland and making it useful. Great Job!