Darrell Ross

Distance gradient where white is nearest and dark blue furthest for each grid point to its nearest power source.

Another photo of my program runnining. I converted my power source definitions so that I can turn them on and off at my leisure. The above distance plot is similar to my previous post (here). The difference is what sources exist. In this one, the sources are (top to bottom left to right) -

1. Fairhaven Power Plant
2. North East Transmission line from the Central Valley (through Willow Creek)
3. Humboldt Bay Power Plant (just under Fairhaven – kind of looks like one big plant)
4. Humboldt Redwood Company (formerly PALCO)
5. South East Transmission line from the Central Valley (through Bridgeville)
6. Southern Transmission line up the 101

I neglected to put in some of the small players in the power supply. Basically any power plant less than 1MW I have left out. While 1MW is still substantial (sometimes as much as 5% of demand), the modeling of the current situation is only to demonstrate the functionality of the model. The goal of the design is to predict outcomes with newer configurations.

EDIT: Implementing a separate distance calculation for transmission lines was simple enough. Now you can see the lines in image below.

Current Humboldt County Power supply sources.

Given specific power supply regions, this map is a gradient of distance to the nearest power supply.

I am chugging right along on my MS Thesis and I am happy to say that I am nearing the results. Above is an image of a plot produced in the program. The shape in the middle is Humboldt County. I have specified power supply sources in the general vicinity of three already existent biomass (woodchip) power plants near Samoa (Fairhaven Power Company), Scotia (formerly PALCO — now called Humboldt Redwood Company), and Blue Lake (Ultrapower 3) as well as a wind power plant (by Shell on Bear RIver Ridge), ocean wave power plant (by PG&E off the coast and north of Humboldt Bay), and solar power plant (placed in Blue Lake because I know it’s sunny there). The gradient represents distance to the nearest power supply where white is closest and dark-blue furthest. I was able to get a one-year load shape for Humboldt County recorded every 15 minutes. I also used local resources for hourly wind, wave, and solar data. This gives the model a more resonant and realistic fluctuation and makes it unnecessary for me to implement stochastic fluctuations of my own.

I am doing a 10 minute presentation about my thesis at the 2009 North Coast Student Research Conference March 26-28, 2009. For the conference, I hope to have three scenarios running –

1. current Humboldt County Power system – this will include the Humboldt Bay PG&E Natural Gas Fired plant as well as the three transmission lines we import much of our power from
2. infinite intermittent supply – this will show the patterns of the sun rising and winds and waves changing
3. realistic (relatively) intermittent supply – an attempt to meet 100% of demand using only the sources listed in the above plot.

Drop me a line sometime with comments or questions.

Well I’ve been a bit distracted. The shiny fresh blog I created feels neglected now much like most of my websites I build for myself. At least this one still feels shiny.

After over a year working full-time for Humboldt Internet, I am changing to part-time starting next week. I am excited to have the extra time to devote to my thesis and at the same time apprehensive about the loss of nearly 1/2 of my monthly income.

In the past month, I have focused on acquiring data to use for my thesis. For solar data in Humboldt County, I chose to use the hourly data gathered by the HSU Renewable Energy Student Union (RESU) Solar Radiation Monitoring Station (SoRMS). The data is available on their site here.

One RESU member mentioned that I could acquire possible useful hourly wind and wave data from NOAA so I’ve been spending a week working on that. If I can make NOAA wind and wave hourly data applicable and useful, especially in time with the SoRMS data, then I will have the three intermittent power sources for my thesis running off of real data instead of theoretical data. This would help immensely since it is a “Feasibility Study” after all.