|
40 Years of SLAC Power
By Gregory A. Loew
For more than 40 years up until January 1, 2005, SLAC enjoyed
exceptionally low electric power rates for two reasons. The first was
because of Director Emeritus W.K.H. (Pief) Panofsky’s wise planning from
the inception of the Lab to secure a long-term contract with the Western
Area Power Administration (WAPA) in Sacramento, now in Folsom. Most of
WAPA’s power came from dams around the Central Valley. Panofsky used to
call it ‘socialist power’ because it was essentially government power
stemming from the Bureau of Reclamation created under FDR. Interestingly
enough, the City of Palo Alto had a very similar deal.
The second reason SLAC got an even better deal was because we had a
large load (the linac and the other machines) which we could ‘volunteer’
to turn off in the summer when the total WAPA load exceeded its capacity
of about 1 Gigawatt. These were the famous brownouts that exasperated
many operators and physicists but saved us a bundle. For old timers, the
SLAC representatives who had to negotiate these brownouts were Ev McKeen,
now retired, and the late Larry Kral (both formerly TD). More recently,
Chris Foundoulis (TD), Keith Reynolds (TD) and Roger Erickson (AD) have
handled them.
For reference, a Gigawatt is a unit of power equal to 1,000 Megawatts
(MW). When SLAC runs everything flat-out these days, our meter in MCC
registers about 55 MW. When you are at home at night cooking a steak and
running your dishwasher, you may be using a few kilowatts. Note,
however, that when you get your electric bill at the end of the month,
you don’t pay for power but for energy measured in kilowatt-hours. A
kilowatt-hour is what you consume if you steadily use a kilowatt for an
hour (the energy consumed by thirteen 75 watt light bulbs running in
parallel). As a minimum these days, depending on where you live, the
so-called lifeline kilowatt-hours cost you between seven and eight
cents. Forty years ago, SLAC probably paid WAPA about 0.2 cents, and in
2004, about 2.5 cents! Despite the inflation, it was still socialist
power!
Actually, the maximum SLAC allocation from WAPA for a long time was
about 47 MW.
Already in the PEP and SLC days we often ran above 53 MW, and the
supplemental power was bought at a much higher rate from PG&E. The
average cost, however, was still cheap compared to the market. Another
feature which existed since the inception of SLAC was that WAPA and PG&E
had a contractual agreement whereby they helped each other. This meant
that when the WAPA dams were high, they would sell cheap power to PG&E,
and when the dams were low, PG&E would back-up (the expression in the
industry was ‘firm-up’) power to WAPA at basically the same low price.
In the mid-1990’s, DOE participated in the funding and construction of a
third 500 KV inter-tie line coming down from Oregon which enabled
California (and WAPA) to procure less expensive power from the
Northwest. The line ended in Tracy, near LLNL in Livermore and the
opportunity was seized to connect directly to LLNL. At this point, DOE
decided that we would be in a much better bargaining position if all
three DOE Northern California labs (SLAC, LBNL and LLNL) bought their
power together as a single consortium. That is exactly what happened–the
new consortium enjoyed virtual wholesale status, aggregating the three
labs’ demand, and sharing combined WAPA allocations and a WAPA purchased
power contract with a company in Portland called Pacificorp.
This favorable situation basically continued until the beginning of
2005. Around the late 1990’s, however, after deregulation when PG&E
divested itself of most of its plants and became just a power
distribution company that then went bankrupt, it advised WAPA that it
would not extend the 40-year contract and would no longer firm them up
after the beginning of 2005. With consumption up, WAPA also realized
that it could no longer provide steady power as before. A wonderful era
was coming to an end.
To prepare the three labs for this new situation, DOE and our EXETER
consultants went through all kinds of market studies. At one point,
believe or not, it looked like Enron might give us a good deal! Luck had
it that we did not go for it. The market studies went on for two or
three years until late 2003, when it was determined that DOE (with WAPA
as its buyer and dispatcher) would have to go out to the real
‘capitalist’ market for several parallel bids. This procedure, which
took a huge amount of work and negotiations, culminated last summer when
the bids came in. To hedge our bets, like when you buy a mutual fund,
over 100 MW of firm capacity for the three labs were contracted with two
groups of companies, half in the Northwest, the other half in Northern
California. The contracts span one, two, three and five years
respectively. The average rate, including the cost of transmission
provided by WAPA or the California Independent System Operator (ISO), is
now between 5 and 7 cents/kilowatt-hour—still cheaper than what you pay
at home but over twice what we paid WAPA last year! This is the reason
all of you have been hearing all this unfortunate news for the last
year.
But hold your breath. There is a rainbow on the horizon! Because of all
the rain this year, we will be lucky in late spring to still get a small
fraction of our good old ‘socialist power’ from the bulging Central
Valley dams. It will keep our rates below 6 cents for a few weeks. So we
can still be thankful to Panofsky! |
