I spent a half a week recently at a Boy Scout camp in North Carolina called Camp Raven Knob. It was a good opportunity to spend time with my two sons, and a chance for some hiking, fresh air, and R&R. Plus an opportunity to briefly visit Mount Airy, the closest town, and hometown of Andy Griffith, the actor who played Andy Taylor on “The Andy Griffith Show”.
The first night we were there, a thunderstorm came barreling through camp just after midnight, with heavy rain and high winds. Since Raven Knob is a scout camp, none of the scout tents or three-sided shelters called “Adirondacks” officially have electric service, although Scout Masters have been known to run extension cords several hundred feet, for a few necessities and some not-so-necessary necessities for themselves! However, there are facilities at the camp that make extensive use of electricity – the health center, the dining hall, the trading post, administration and meeting buildings, and the water pumps. When the storm came through, much of the camp lost power – I heard it was a transformer serving the campground that failed. It had been extremely hot in the days before the storm, and a friend that works for a utility had just reminded me that it’s not really the heat that often kills a transformer, but the through-fault or voltage surge that happens after the heat wave, when a thunderstorm comes through. That might have done the trick.
So most of the campground was without service for the next day. That meant eating breakfast and lunch in the dining hall in the dark, with no air conditioning, lights, fans, stoves, or ovens. It also meant that everyone was asked to conserve water as much as possible until the power came back on.
So how can such outages be avoided, with minimum cost to develop a solution? With the camp being in a rather rural area, I’m guessing that it is either at the end of a feeder or close to it, and the nearest substation is at a minimum of 8 – 10 miles. I’m also speculating that the closest adjacent feeder might be at least that far from the camp. Also consider that while there is some small amounts of year-round residential load close to the camp entrance, the camp is only heavily populated for about 10 weeks in the summer. Given these assumptions, could a feeder extension be done economically, to loop the camp feeder with another feeder and provide a back-up path? Probably not, if it assumed that that 5 miles of feeder are needed, at a cost of $150,000/mile. How about undergrounding the entire feeder, or parts of the feeder? Installation costs are going to prevent that. Could distributed generation be placed economically at the camp, assuming $500/kW, and a 1000 kW load, with additional fuel and O&M costs? Maybe, but still not economically justified. How about a microgrid, complete with solar panels and battery energy storage? I don’t even have to make cost assumptions there to know that won’t make sense in this particular case (unless there are some government incentive dollars!)
So what are the Boy Scouts to do? What about all the other electric loads located in rural areas everywhere, that are in the same situation? What about the millions of customers that were without power for over a week on the East Coast of the US, when a huge line of thunderstorms (a “derecho”) came through? With all the technology we have, can’t we fix this by investing more in infrastructure, or building the Smart Grid in these areas?
The answer for these electric customers – Be Prepared. For the foreseeable future, we don’t have a way to economically reach 100% reliable service, or even close to 100% reliable service, for loads such as these. Certainly there are good engineering practices that distribution organizations universally follow to improve reliability, and it could be economically advantageous in this case to apply some. But almost universally, until someone invents a wireless way to transmit large amounts of electrical power, then the distribution system will be prone to faults and customers will be prone to interruptions. And even if wireless power transmission should ever become a reality, there still may not be a way to guarantee 100% service.
So what did the Scouts do? We saw a couple of portable generators role into camp that morning. One was being pulled by a truck that had the county’s name and “emergency response” written on it. One of these generators was connected to the dining hall, to run the refrigerators and freezers. The camp served cereal for lunch, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. If the scouts thought about taking a shower (yeah right), then they would have been discouraged due to the low water pressure. I’m sure there were other things that were built into the camp contingency plans for a power outage, and that were done in this event. In short, the scouts had contingency plans for this event.
Bottom line: yes, there are infrastructure improvements and smart grid technologies that are commonly used to improve reliability. But for right now, no amount of improvements will get everybody to 100% reliability. Just like the scouts, the motto “Be Prepared” is something that everyone still needs to heed, with respect to power outages, for the foreseeable future.
