Wednesday Week Seven

...some questions...

1. Where does Buena Vista (BV), Virginia get its (domestic) water? Where is BV? What are their water management challenges and how have they been managing those challenges? Special thanks to HB for the story!

2. Why does the discharge vary downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam?

3. Over a 24-hour cycle, when do electrical consumers consume the greatest amount of electricity? How does this affect the price of electricity? If individual electricity consumers pay a standard fixed price per kilowatt-hour (a unit of electricity measurement), who covers this short-term price volatility? What drive/controls energy use at the individual consumer level?

3. What is an energy portfolio? What does it mean to have a diverse energy portfolio? Does the USA have a diverse energy portfolio wrt electricity generation? How do we generate our electricity? How does electricity generation vary from place to place within the USA (in our examples from class from state to state)?

4. How do we change chemical potential energy, into thermal energy, into mechanical energy into electrical energy? What about gravitational potential energy? Where does water fit into the conversion of thermal energy into mechanical energy? What is the difference between a turbine and a generator?

5. What are the factors that determine the amount of power a hydroelectric plant can generate?

6. How can methods of electricity generation (coal, biomass, nuclear, hydro, natural gas, petroleum, tidal, geothermal, solar thermal, solar PV, and wind) be characterized with regard to whether or not they are controllable or predictable? From the standpoint of an electrical grid operator, what characteristic(s) is/are more valuable? From an electrical consumer standpoint, what characteristic(s) is/are more valuable?

7. What is a pump storage plant? How is it different than a "regular" hydroelectric plant? What major challenge to the electrical grid does a PSP manage?


Slides from today are on Sakai. Your assigned reading for Friday is Chapter 3: First Causes from Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert. A .pdf is available at Sakai--> Resources --> Readings --> Cadillac Desert Chapter 3 (you should have already read chapter 4).