PJM, the largest U.S. power grid operator, said it ordered generators to run at maximum output and bring idle power plants online immediately on Thursday evening, as it faced escalating stress from a heat dome.
PJM’s orders, detailed on its emergency procedures website, were aimed at preserving reliability as it sought to maintain power on a grid serving 67 million people across the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., regions and the world’s largest concentration of data centers.
Even before this week’s heat wave that sent temperatures soaring toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), PJM had been straining to overhaul a system pushed to the brink by surging energy consumption by data centers and electric vehicles.
If I keep doing this I’m going to be known as “that district heating and cooling guy” but combined heat and power plants are the proven solution for this… Of course it wouldn’t actually work in the US since you never nationalize natural monopolies like power or rail… Instead you have a patchwork network for operators that make the entire network as a whole drastically less efficient, less maintained, less standardized, and with constant rent seeking.
Anyways…
Absorber chillers are a proven solution for producing district cooling with CHP plants. Heat provides cooling in the summer, and heat provides warmth in the winter… CHP plants are 88-92% efficient since they make electricity with their heat first before using what’s left over for heating or cooling.
If you had a district cooling system already like Dubai, this wouldn’t be an issue…
I for one would subscribe to your district heating and cooling newsletter. I’ve long wondered about what it would look like to retrofit it into places in the US and how viable it would be.
I haven’t done the math but my gut says it would probably cost less than replacing the natural gas network (long overdue in most of the US and Canada) plus reinforcing our aging grid to support massive demand for EVs and AC units.
The answer is probably small CHP plants and soapstone thermal batteries serving smaller areas. District heating/cooling also works best with density, so downtown cores are an easy win despite the cost of trenching in new lines.
Rural areas and suburbs are likely going to stay gas, and suburbs just aren’t sustainable long term, so they’ll die a slow death this century.
As an aside, suburbs have their utilities subsidized by most municipalities (chasing more property tax revenue) so maintenance is deferred onto new builds (also helps keep new builds pricy, raising property prices, raising taxes) and eventually that utility Ponzi scheme breaks. The amount of citizens served per meter of utility with suburbs is abysmal. The only thing worse is trying to develop shared utilities for acreages…
At some point in the next decade you’ll hear of houses that are unlivable because the true utility cost will need to be paid by homeowners to overhaul their system (like a condo special assessment but you never signed up for it…) and utilities will cost more than the mortgage.
Sure, but we’ve never had a need for it before. And a lot of our stuff was built hundreds of years ago, and retrofitting is a lot harder than building an entirely new city in one go.
District heating is a lot more common and exists as a patchwork across the world in different places including the US I.e. New York has a steam district heating system (why the manholes there steam so strongly.) university campuses also commonly used it for centralized heating and cooling.
Cooling is less common but it does exist in a lot of places. Denmark has a decent amount of district chillers using heat from the city district heating system.
The big issue for north America is after WWI power stations were built at coal mines and power lines transported the power. As a result they were way too far away to act as CHP plants even if they wanted to. Europe retrofitted heat networks into it’s existing cities since it had coal closer, or you were a port city where coal arrived by ship already.
The biggest reason it’s less common is city gas (produced from coal) being used for lamp lights and then heating and cooking basically everywhere in the world at some point. We switched to natural gas in the 1970s to replace it but that same network is still doing the heating/cooking and prevented the need for a shared heat or cooling network.
With a push to renewables it’s easiest to store excess solar or wind as heat in a soapstone battery. They’re extremely cheap to make and store almost as much energy as lithium per ton, with the caveat that it can only store it as heat instead of electricity.
Having a guaranteed customer for over producing solar and wind during sunny/windy days makes renewables a lot cheaper to operate, and that heat gets to do something useful out the other end if you hooked it into a city heating/cooling system.