Saudi Arabia to Build 50 MW PV Plant

Several companies announced to establish a solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant with a capacity of 50 MW in the city of Saudi Aflaj, which will be the first utility-scale PV plant in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Quite interesting that Saudi Arabia is expecting a growth of energy demand rising by 8 percent annually and is expected to be 120 GW by 2030.

Click HERE for a news report.

During my visit of Dammam (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) this week (training on IEC 61850) I was (by chance) contacted by a senior engineer (involved in gas related automation) who walked by outside our meeting room, stopped, and asked what we were doing. We talked about this and that.

Then he asked me how we can store PV power … this led us to the situation in Germany where we have several MW scale projects that convert PV or Wind Power into gas. He was very impressed that this is happening in big scale.

Sure, we have a lot of renewable power in Germany.

What to do with all the power? Convert to gas! Yes!

Click HERE to a report on the largest system today in Hamburg (1.5 MW).

Click HERE for some explanations of the basics of power-to-gas.

The gas and heat/cooling domains will find that the IEC 61850 can be used for many applications in these areas – to benefit from the standards used in electric power systems.

Click HERE for some discussion of using IEC 61850 (UCA 2.0) for the gas industry.

More to come. Keep tuned to the IEC 61850 blog.

Wind and Solar Gas – A Challenging Storage Option

As you know, there is a crucial challenge with renewable power generation – wind and solar power are often generated during times when it could not be transported to the load centers! Usually generation has to stop – even the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. So, how to work around?

In November 2011 there was a big conference in Berlin to discuss a new way of storing energy: the existing natural gas network may become a cornerstone for a renewable energy system that provides huge storage, transport and distribution capacities that are hundred times larger than the electric power grid.

Electrons and gas? Yes!

The “SolarFuel” power-to-gas method could convert renewable electricity into CO2 neutral, renewable natural gas.

What does it all mean:

• More renewable electricity could be generated.
• Renewable natural gas stores the energy for days, weeks and months due to huge capacities in the tubes used for transportation and distribution
• Energy is accessible everywhere and at any time.

I remember that our gas utility here in Karlsruhe buried huge tubes (some 100 cm in diameter) in the 90s – this allows to transport and store more gas (volume increases to the second of the diameter). Copper wires can transport more electric power with bigger cables – but the wires do not store more electric power ;-)

The gas storage in Germany could (if full) be tapped for some 6 month!!

The new discussion is about Hybrid Grids: Electric Power, Gas and Heat. More to come soon.

One thing is for sure: We will be challenged by a steep growing demand of Information Models to be added to IEC 61850 for the many aspects of hybrid grids. UCA (the forerunner of IEC 61850) was adapted by the GRI (Gas research institute, USA) for use by gas utilities. This effort culminated in an evaluation of UCA in a gas utility environment at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, San Francisco, in the 90s.

Excerpt of logical nodes (called Bricks in UCA) from the document: Integrated UCA(TM) for Gas Industry / Volume 2: Gas Industry Device Object Models.

• Pressure monitors for inlet, intermediate and outlet gas (PMON0, 1, 2 respectively)
• First stage pressure regulating valves (PRVL0, PRVM0 and PRVH0 for low, mid and high range valves respectively
• Gate station flow monitors for low, medium and high flow rates (GSFL0, GSFM0, and GSFH0 respectively)
• Gas quality monitor (QMON0):

Click HERE for the list of 6 reports from GTI (former GRI) [2000]
Click HERE to get some more information on wind and solar gas.
Click HERE for a comparison of IEC 61850 and UCA [2004].

IEC 61850 logical nodes for the gas and heat application domain could easily be defined and (if needed) standardized.