Costs for electric-power ancillary services
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)
Ancillary-service costs comprise a substantial share - as much as 25 percent - of total bulk power costs. The cost levels and the great variation in the cost of different services suggests that additional work is needed to define each service and identify how much of it is required. Since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued its proposed rule on open-access transmission in March 1995, ancillary services have been important and controversial topics within the electricity industry. These services, many of which are required to maintain system reliability, support the basic services of production and delivering electric energy and power to customers. Nationwide, these services cost $12 billion a year. The authors recently identified, defined, and explained a set of ancillary services similar to those that FERC decided must be offered by transmission providers in their open access transmission tariffs. The seven services the authors identified and analyzed are these: (1) Scheduling and Dispatch: (2) Load Following: Use of online generating equipment that is equipped with governors and automatic generation control to track moment-to-moment fluctuations and hourly trends in customer loads. (3) Reliability Reserve: Use of spinning and fast-start generating equipment that can be fully available within ten minutes to correct for generation/load imbalances caused be generation and transmission outages. (4) Supplemental Operating Reserve: Use of generating equipment and interruptible load that can be fully available within 30 minutes to back up the ten-minute reserve. (5) Energy Imbalance: Use of generating equipment and fuel to match any hourly differences between actual and scheduled transactions between suppliers and their customers. (6) Real-Power Loss Replacement: Use of generating equipment and fuel to compensate for transmission-system losses. (7) Voltage Control: Use of generating and transmission-system equipment to inject or absorb reactive power.
- OSTI ID:
- 482527
- Journal Information:
- Electricity Journal, Journal Name: Electricity Journal Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 9; ISSN ELEJE4; ISSN 1040-6190
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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