Table Of ContentElectric
Power
Generation
A Nontechnical Guide
Dave Barnett
by
Kirk Bjornsgaard
&
PennWell Books
PennWell Publishing Company
Tulsa, Oklahoma
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available on Request
Barnett, Dave and Bjornsgaard, Kirk
Electric Power Generation: A Nontechnical Guide/Dave Barnett
and Kirk Bjornsgaard
ISBN13 978-0-87814-753-3
p. cm.
Includes index
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Introduction: A Change in the Air
Notice anything different lately about your electric power? Your
lights still burn brightly. The refrigerator still keeps food cold. This sea-
son your television hypnotized you with sparkling new images and con-
tent not much different from last year. Your alarm clock still wakes you
before you have had enough sleep.
If you checked the power in a receptacle with a digital multimeter
you would find it is precisely the same old 120 Volts, 60 cycles per sec-
ond (Hertz) alternating current. The only clue might be your electric
bill. Is it a little less than last year? Maybe not.
The change of which we speak is comparable to the changes in the
telephone industry that led to the breaking up of the Bell system. It is
competition. Deregulation. A similar, very important change in technol-
ogy drives the current competition and deregulation of the electric power
industry. In the telecommunications industry, the driving technology
was the transistor, followed by integrated circuits and microprocessors.
In the electric power industry, natural gas-fired turbine
generators––essentially, jet engines directly connected to electric genera-
tors––are changing the economy of scale for electric power generation.
These gas-fired "prime movers" eliminate the middleman of the old
steam boilers to turn the generator on the same shaft, increasing perfor-
mance and efficiency. As will be seen, applying the turbine exhaust to a
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Electric Power Generation
A Nontechnical Guide
steam turbine generator still leaves plenty of steam for manufacturing
processes or heating.
The "new" technology of gas turbine generators (that has been
around since the end of World War II!) will allow reasonable environ-
mentally friendly plants to be sited where the heat of "waste" steam can
be put to good use. Burning natural gas in the air produces water vapor
and carbon dioxide (CO )––the latter a "greenhouse gas"––as combus-
2
tion products. Side reactions create nitrogen oxides (NO ) and some sul-
x
fur oxides (SO ). Once big, old fossil-fuel plants and nukes are sold to
x
recover their owners’ "stranded costs," they will economically handle the
base load electrical generating capacity year in and year out, just as they
always have.
The early promise of cheap long-distance calls, made when Ma Bell
was broken up, was offset by the sheer hassle of having to deal with mul-
tiple telephone equipment and service providers. However, Humpty
Dumpty could not be put back together again. For more than a genera-
tion, telecommunications deregulation has been a real economic advan-
tage to perceptive business and residential customers. Only in the second
half of the 1990s did the average person feel it—in the impact of cellular
phones, the Internet and World Wide Web access, pagers, and so forth.
Technological advances made these financial, life-, and work-style bene-
fits possible after deregulating and dismantling what was once thought of
as a "natural monopoly."
The economy of scale of the large fossil-fuel, nuclear-fired, hydroelec-
tric generating plant has been challenged by the moderate-sized gas tur-
bine generators that can be built on-site for a customer requiring both
electric energy and steam for manufacturing processes or for heating.
Will it take 25 years for the break-up and re-regulation of the electric
utilities into generating, transmission, and distribution companies to be
perceived as a net benefit by managers and consumers alike?
Two things are certain: there is nothing so constant as change and the
more things change, the more they stay the same.
This, then, is our adventure: how changes in technology have
changed––are continuing to change––the generation of electric power.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xii
List of Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii
Introduction: A Change in the Air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xvii
Part 1: Electricity
1. From Frogs Legs to Microwaves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
2. Generation is Energy Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Part 2: Planning and Development of Electric Power Stations
3. Classic Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
4. Technology-driven Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51
5. Fuels and Fuels Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
Part 3: Electric Power Generation
6. Prime Movers: Steam Boilers, Storage, and More . . . . . . . . . .79
7. Furnaces and Boilers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
8. Steam Turbines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93
9. Generators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
10. Fossil-fired Steam Plants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109
11. Nuclear Steam Plants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123
12. Gas Turbine Plants and Cogeneration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161
13. Hydroelectric vs. Pumped Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169
14. The Alternative Fuels: Geothermal, Wind, Solar, Tidal, and
Biomass Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177
15. The Future: Building On What’s Been Done . . . . . . . . . . . .187
Part 4: Maintenance, Operations, and Transmission and Distribution
16. Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .205
17. Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .213
18. Transmission and Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .225
Part 5: Ecological and Environmental Considerations and Safety
19. Cultural Aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .259
20. Safety First, Last, and Always . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .269
Appendix:
Net Generation from U.S. Electric Utilities by Energy Source, Census
Division, and State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .275
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .281
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Electric Power Generation
A Nontechnical Guide
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .312
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .315
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Part 1: Electricity
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Chapter 1
From Frogs Legs to Microwaves
"Everything I told you is a lie."
— Alan A. Jones, Ph.D.
Chair, Chemistry Department, Clark University
The history of science does not change even as engineers and scien-
tists add historic breakthroughs at an ever-increasing pace. Maybe that
increasing pace is the reason why high school and even college science
courses mainly teach the history of science, rather than actual science. To
a new generation born in the third millennium, the incredible technologi-
cal advances of the Twentieth Century may blur together with the series of
scientific discoveries that occurred earlier with the exploration and colo-
nization of planet Earth by European countries. Change is not politically
correct.
Atoms are not little plastic beads that snap together into molecules
like a child’s toy. Atoms are often described as mainly empty space, the
hydrogen atom nucleus compared to a baseball at home plate, with a lone
tiny electron a third of a mile away. With this image in mind, it is easy to
believe the comic book hero Flash could vibrate his molecules past those
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Electric Power Generation
A Nontechnical Guide
in a wall, or even take a shortcut through the whole Earth!
In reality, atoms are not made of white marbles for protons, gray mar-
bles for neutrons (white plus black equals gray), and black dots for elec-
trons. Whether you are in the infield, outfield, parking lot or stands, you
had better look out! Electrons move in complex orbits, at nearly the speed
of light—seemingly everywhere at once.
However, just as classic Newtonian physics is good enough for most
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) orbital calcula-
tions, the Neils Bohr model of the atom is good enough for our discussion.
Just keep in mind while the history is OK, contemporary scientists have
proven physics is a lot more complicated than our bead model and every-
thing (theoretical) we are about to tell you is a lie!
Those frog legs
This story begins in 1752 in colonial America, where (fortunately)
Benjamin Franklin survived his Philadelphia experiments with lightning.
Franklin’s work was not the last in electrostatic investigations that began
in antiquity with rubbing fur across amber rods, but it marked a departure
that would lead to practical applications and tremendous advances under-
standing electricity and energy.
In 1780 in his laboratory in Bologna, Italian physician Luigi Galvani
performed a series of experiments to determine the effect of static elec-
tricity on animal tissue. In one experiment, Galvani and his assistant
observed a dead frog’s leg twitching when stimulated by a nearby electri-
cal machine operated by another experimenter. In a fateful test, Galvani
intended to stimulate frog legs with the charge from a lightning rod
invented by Franklin. If he had hung the frog legs from the cast iron rail-
ing with hooks made of iron wire rather than brass or copper, he might
have developed the electric Hot Dogger nearly two centuries before Presto
did and never have made the discovery that galvanized the scientific
world. Even without static electricity from the lightning rod, whenever
wind caused the legs to contact the bars supporting the railing, the mus-
cles were stimulated to contract. Dr. Galvani’s "animal electricity" experi-
ments led him to conclude animal tissues contained an "electric fluid."
From the bifocal glasses we wear to the wood stoves that warm us dur-
ing cold winters, many of Franklin’s inventions are manufactured today
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Part I — Electricity
From Frog Legs to Microwaves
with only improvements in materials and methods. However, as important
as Franklin’s experiments with lightning were, they only set the stage for
Galvani and the electrical researchers who followed.
Galvani’s experiments moved knowledge of electricity beyond the
Greeks’ speculation about atoms and his contemporaries’ experiments
with static electricity. With the development of the electric circuit, science
advanced considerably and paved the way for practical applications.
Recently butchered frog muscles contracted to indicate the electric current
passing through them. The frog leg hanging by a hook made of a metal dis-
similar to the iron railing and coming into contact with the railing, formed
a battery with its terminals shorted together—the first short circuit.
Italian physicist Allesandro Volta showed that Galvani’s frog legs were
both an indicator of electric current flow and provided the electrolyte—a
vital part of a battery. The neuromuscular tissues in the legs provided the
visible response, while the salts dissolved in the blood and cells of the frog
leg were the electrolyte. While Galvani’s focus was on the legs of the ani-
mals he used, the brass or copper hooks and the railing were the elec-
trodes. He had created the first artificial electric circuit. Long before Mary
Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus in 1816,
Volta had demonstrated that living or previously living tissue was not
required for electrical experiments.
Volta developed both "dry" and wet cell batteries. Dry cell batteries
are not really dry; they use a small amount of paste-like electrolyte or liq-
uid absorbed into fiber separators. Electrodes of two distinctly different
materials, (such as carbon and tin or copper and zinc) are separated by
paper soaked in a salt solution to form the dry cell battery known as a
voltaic pile. For anyone who has taken apart the traditional "cat" battery,
the anode or positive electrode is a mixture of carbon granules and man-
ganese dioxide (MNO ) that surrounds the carbon rod, which is a com-
2
patible conducting material, rather than the electrode itself.
Volta’s battery of wet cells was called a "crown of cups." The circular
arrangement of the cells in individual glass jars merely allowed the battery
terminals to be close to each other.
Strictly speaking, a battery consists of several cells, packaged together
and normally connected in series with negative (-) terminals to positive
(+) terminals to increase the voltage output. However, single cells have
5
