Thesis – Preliminary Results

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.