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Welcome back. Module 19 covers the generation portion of the electricity sector. This is the second of
four models on electricity. In this lecture we will look at different power cycles and different ways to
generate electricity. So let's get started.
Now that we've introduced electricity, let's talk about generation, how we actually generate electricity.
Coal is a historically dominant fuel source for electricity. But it has been dropping recently because of
competition from affordable natural gas.
If we look over history, coal has been the leading provider of electricity all along and it has been
dropping the last few years. There was actually a record in the last years for natural gas generated
more electricity during one month, April 2012, in the first time in history, which is sort of interesting. So
really when you think about electricity, you've got to think coal. And coal and electricity are closely
coupled.
Natural gas is on the rise, coal on the decline, nuclear is staying level, the renewables are increasing.
So the mix is changing. And its diverse for electricity, but it's shifting again. The power sector's fuel mix
is much more diverse than what we use for transportation. Transportation is very petroleum heavy. By
contrast, the power sector uses very little petroleum. It's mostly coals, we mentioned, then natural gas,
then nuclear, then the renewables.
Petroleum is a small slice of our power generation. It's mostly for backup power and diesel generators.
Although there are some places like Hawaii that use a lot of petroleum for their electricity because they
don't have other resources on the island and petroleum is easier to ship.
There are different types of major power plants of different sizes in the United States. There are many
natural gas steam turbine systems, anywhere from 10 kilowatts for a natural gas turbine up to 1,200
megawatts for natural gas steam systems. Typically they're 25 to 500 megawatts apiece. Coal boilers
are typically a couple hundred to 500 megawatts apiece.
There's something like one to four boilers per power plant. There are hundreds of power plants in the
United States that are coal. Nuclear reactors have bigger systems. The nuclear reactor turbines send a

450 to 1,350 megawatts apiece. And you have anywhere from one to three reactors per power plant.
The largest reactors are at the South Texas project, which is 2.6 gigawatts in Palo Verde in Arizona,
which has the same size turbines. But it has three of them instead of two. That's 3.875 gigawatts in
Arizona.
Hydroelectric dams are the largest power plants in the world and in the nation. The largest in the US is
the Grand Cooley dam, over six gigawatts of power. And the largest in the world is the Three Gorges
Dam in China, which has over 18 gigawatts of power generation capacity.
There are several typical thermal power cycles. We use heat to make electricity. And one of the ways
you do that is with a steam turbine driven system. It's called the steam cycle or the Rankine cycle. We
use boilers to create steam. And that steam then drives the turbine, which drives the magnets to make
electricity. And we could make that steam from coal, and gas, and oil, and wood, and nuclear reactions.
There's also gas combustion turbines where we actually combust the gas. Instead of making steam, we
just burn the gas to make high temperature gas to spin the turbine. That's called a Brayton cycle, or a
simple cycle, or an open cycle. That burns natural gas directly in the turbine.
Then there's a combined cycle. The reason a combined cycle is called a combined cycle is because it
combines a Rankine cycle and the Brayton cycle. It combines a gas commotion turbine with a steam
turbine system. And I'll show you pictures of all these to explain them.
Then there's also combined heat and power, which is like a combined cycle but generates more heat.
That might be useful in places that want heat like industrial facilities. And then there's Integrated
Gasification Combined Cycle, IGCC. And I'll walk through each one of these.
The steam driven systems are particularly important. They have a typical efficiency of 30% to 40%.
They are responsible for more than 70% of the nation's electricity. It's pretty simple. You start with a
fuel. You combust it or you react if it's a nuclear fuel.
You get heat. Use that heat in a boiler to generate steam. That steam's a high pressure and high
temperature. It spins the turbine. As it spins the turbine it spins magnets in the generator to make
electricity. And the electricity goes off to the customer.
And then you have cooling water cool that steam back down into liquid water. And then you repeat the

loop. So it's a pretty straightforward process. You boil water, use the fuel to boil water, use that boiled
water to spin the turbine, then you use cooling water to cool that steam back down to water and repeat
the process over and over again.
It's very robust. It's used worldwide. It's not particularly efficient.
The gas turbine is a device like you might have seen on a jet airplane. It's pretty similar. Instead of
having a nozzle it has a generator. You have a compressor that pressurizes the air coming in to a
higher level, a higher pressure. So it compresses the air to a higher pressure.
Then you react it with a fuel in a combustion chamber to make high temperature, high pressure gases
that you then expand through a turbine. So you have high pressure high temperature gases spinning
the turbine. That turbine spins on a shaft, to spin the generator, to make electricity. And you have high
temperature exhaust gases coming out.
About a third of your energy leaves as power. In the rest leaves as hot exhaust gases. So this is
something like 25% to 35% efficient in general.
A combined cycle combines those two cycles I just told you about. It combines the gas turbine with a
steam cycle. You start off with the Brayton cycle, the gas turbine system. You compress the air. You
heat it in the combuster to make it hot. High temperature, high pressure gases that you expand through
the gas turbine. You create electricity with a generator at the gas turbine, but you still have those high
temperature exhaust gases.
If you've ever put your hand at the back end of a tailpipe, it's still hot from the back of your car engine. If
you put your hand at the back of a jet engine on a place, it's still hot. Well, the same thing is true for
these gas turbine power plants. The gases are still hot when they leave the turbine.
And you can use the heat to make steam in whats called a HRSG, or Heat Recovery Steam Generator.
Then you have steam, and you spin it through a steam turbine. So you take a steam turbine and a gas
turbine, put them together, and your overall efficiency goes up a lot. You get up something like a 40% to
60% efficiency. And you have much less waste heat [INAUDIBLE] to the environment. So this is an
improved, more efficient, more robust system.
You can do the same kind of thing for combined heat and power, where the point here is use the waste

heat to make steam if you have a customer for the heat. In the Gulf Coast area of the United States, we
have lot of customers for heat in industry, refineries and chemical complexes for example. In Denmark
they have customers for the heat just to be comfortable because it's cold in Denmark. And in Boston
you have heating districts. So if you have a customer for the heat, you can use your power plant to
generate that heat for you, then your overall efficiency goes up a lot.
Now, one thing to notice that natural gas can be used in all those cycles. Natural gas combustion
turbines, natural gas steam turbines which use natural gas boilers, natural gas combined cycles. And
you can also use natural gas combined heat and power. So natural gas is particularly flexible for all of
those.
Coal and nuclear really only go with the steam cycle. They don't go with the gas turbines or others. So
some fuels have more flexibility than others. Natural gas happens to be one that has wide range.
If you want solid fuels and you want to get a more efficient cycle, you need to do what's called IGCC,
Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. You start with a solid fuel like coal, or wood, or petroleum
[INAUDIBLE], or waste. You gasify it first in a gasification column. You drop out the pollutants at the
bottom.
The you have that gas. You clean it up, you get it ready. You can run it through a fuel cell. You can use
it to make chemicals. You can run it through a power plant and a gas turbine system to make electricity.
So when people talk about clean coal, they often mean IGCC systems. Where you gasify the coal, take
out the pollutants, you burn it through the power plant, and you can make it easy on yourself to remove
the CO2 if you want. So this is a way to get the high efficiency of the combined cycle, but starting with a
solid fuel instead of the gaseous fuel like natural gas.
If we look at the electric sector overall, it uses a diverse array of fuels and it has significant losses. If we
start with coal, natural gas, and nuclear and other fuels, the same mix as before on the left side going
to right, the end uses. The arrow on the top right shows the conversion losses.
We start within our 39 to 40 quads of energy consumed to make electricity. We lose about 25 quads of
that at the power plants themselves, just from conversion losses. And then we have the rest is electricity
at the bottom that actually goes to the end use sectors. It goes to the residential sector, the commercial
sector, and the industrial sectors.

And so we see there's a big difference between how much energy the electric sector consumes versus
how much energy it actually converts to electricity. A lot of loss along the way. And there are these little
arrows on the right side that show losses for transmission and distribution, which is about a quad. And
also for plant use, about a quad of energy is used on site at the plants for things like plant loads, hotel
loads, and also to keep the plant going.
We have a lot of blowers, and fans, and pumps at the plant that need electricity as well. So the power
plant consumes electricity as well as generating electricity. If you expand that system to include
transmission and end use, the losses become even worse. Coming back to a point we talked about
during the thermodynamic section, the efficiencies multiply. So the net efficiency of the system is the
product of all the individual efficiencies of the different components and conversions.
And if you look at the efficiency of the power plants, 35% . The efficiency of transmission's about 90%.
The efficiency of the light bulb might be 5%. It gives you end to end efficiency of 1.6%, so there's a lot of
losses along the way.
For a 100 watt bulb, it generates 95 watts of heat and 5 watts of light. The whole system gives you
1.6% of your incoming energy in the form of light. The rest is lost to the environment.
So this is one of the main points. The electricity system overall is wasteful. The amount of energy that
the electric sector consumes is about 40 quads, is much different than the amount of electricity that is
generated, which is about 4,100 billion kilowatt hours. Which is greater than the amount of electricity
that is actually consumed, which is about 3,900 billion kilowatt hours because of losses along the way.
We lose around 25 quads of waste heat at the power plant. We lose another quad in transmission. And
then we have 13 quads of useful electricity, which correlates to about 3,900 billion kilowatt hours
delivered to the end use.
About 5% of power plant generation is actually used at the power plants themselves. Power plants need
electricity to run. And here's one of the things most people don't realize. Power plants cannot start
unless the power's already on, which is kind of tricky. So you need the power plants to give you the
power. But if the power's not on, you can't operate the power plant.
So there's some power plants that are called black start rated. A black start is a process of restoring a

power station to operation without relying on external energy sources. Most power plants are not black
start capable. A few are, like hydroelectricity. Gravity always works. You just open up the gates, the
water flows, you get electricity.
So hydrologic power plants are black start capable. They can prop the grid back up. So if you have a
power outage and the power plants go down, you need to turn them on one at a time and bring them
back up, then you use things like diesel generators and hydroelectric power plants.
Once you have 10% of the total capacity for a plant, then you can turn that plant on. So some of that
power is used on site for hotel loads and for environmental scrubbing. But also as backup, as well as
black start capability.
If we're thinking about the power plants, one way to assess the power plant's efficiency is through what
we call a heat rate. A heat rate is a measure of the rate at which heat comes in, compared to the rate at
which electricity leaves the power plant. It's a unit conversion and an efficiency all combined into one.
The measure is determined by the efficiency. And the efficiency drives how much electrical energy you
get out of the plant. The outgoing electrical energy BTU equals the incoming fuel energy BTU times the
efficiency [INAUDIBLE]. And the efficiency's always less than one. This is the second law of
thermodynamics coming back to haunt us.
The outgoing electrical energy therefore is always less than the incoming fuel energy. You're going to
get less electricity out than the fuel energy you brought in. But BTU is a funny unit to use for electricity.
We prefer to use kilowatt hours.
So we can convert the BTU for the outgoing electrical energy to kilowatt hours. We know the 3,412 BTU
per kilowatt hour. And incorporate that efficiency statement to come up with what's called the heat rate.
The heat rate is the incoming fuel energy BTU, the rate at which you use heat, over the outgoing
electrical energy in kilowatt hours.
So you get a funny unit. It's a mixed unit system, and it has efficiency built in. To put some numbers on
to give you a sense of it, 10,000 is a typical heat rate. That's 10,000 BTU per kilowatt hour. And that's
for an efficiency of about 33% for a power plant.
Those heat rates get better with time, which means those heat rates get lower with time. A low heat rate

corresponds to a high efficiency. Because that means you can generate the same electricity with a low
rate of fuel consumption.
So low heat rates are better than high heat rates. And if we look at the trend over time in the United
States, the heat rates have dropped over time. Our power plants becoming more efficient. Nuclear have
stabilized. The other fossil fuel plants has dropped. And just in the last few years, primary from the rise
of natural gas combined cycle plants, a typical fossil fuel plant has a heat rate of 10,000.
A typical natural gas combined cycle plant has a heat rate of 6,000, because it's much more efficient. It
needs to buy heat at a rate that's much lower than other power plants need to buy heat. So this is very
non obvious. Heat rates that are lower are better. Efficiencies that are higher are the better. And they
go hand in hand.
Different prime movers in different fuels have different heat rates. We can look at the different fuels in
different forms. If we look at the steam generators, the team cycle, the Rankine cycle, we could look at
the heat rate. There's different colors here. Coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear all have at heat
rate of about 10,000. That's about 10,000 BTU per kilowatt hour for a steam cycle.
Natural gas turbines actually are not very efficient. They have a heat rate that's worse than natural gas
steam cycles. Petroleum turbines are even worse than natural gas turbines. Internal combustion
engines, like a big car engine or a big diesel engine, have a heat rate about the same as for the steam
system.
But it's not until you get to the combined cycle on the far right that you really get the good heat rates.
6,000, 7,000, that kind of thing. And the combined cycles are more compatible today with petroleum
and natural gas than with coal and nuclear.
So we see different types of fuels and different types of thermal cycles. And they have different heat
rates, the lower the better. So the way these efficiencies play out affects how much energy we use for
electricity generation. We use a lot of coal, just under 20 quads of coal for electricity generation in the
nation.
And we use about the same amount of nuclear and natural gas energy for electrical generation.
Nuclear and natural gas both use about eight quads of energy for electricity generation. However,
natural gas generates a lot more electricity with those eight quads. Natural gas generates about a

trillion kilowatt hours a year.

Nuclear generate about 100 billion kilowatt hours. That's because natural gas has a better heat rate. It's
more efficient because it's using the combined cycle in some places. So we use the same amount of
energy in the fuel for nuclear and natural gas but generate different amounts of electricity because of
the relative efficiencies of the power plants.
And the natural gas combined cycle power plants are particularly efficient, which means they give us a
lot of output per fuel energy coming in. So this is interesting trend to watch. There's also the capacity
factors are a measure. How much the power plants are on.
The capacity factor is a function of the reliability of the power plant, the use of the power plant, and the
availability of the fuel. In general, nuclear power plants have the best capacity factors, over 90% in
many cases. That's because they're very reliable, we design them to be used that way, and the fuel is
easy to procure and be available.
Coal has a lower capacity factor, typically around 80%. Though that's dropped in recent years because
natural gas is growing in its capacity factors. Coal is also reliable. It's designed to be used as
[INAUDIBLE] power, in the fuel is generally available.
Natural gas has a lower capacity factor because it's designed to be a peaking facility quite often. So it's
reliable and the fuel's available, but it's designed for a different purpose. However, as natural gas prices
drop, natural gas capacity factors are going up. And coal capacity factors are going down.
Hydroelectric has a capacity factor less than 50%, mostly because of its availability of the water. If you
have a heavy rain year you'll get more hydro output. If you have a low rain year, you get less hydro
output. So that's dictated by the fuel availability.
And that's the same story for wind and solar. Wind and solar, the other renewables, have a lower
capacity factor because of fuel availability purposes. We have one other line here for natural gas, which
is natural gas for things other than combined cycle. Like natural gas boilers and combustion turbines,
which are peaking plants designed to have a very low capacity factor. And petroleum also has a very
low capacity factor because it's primarily designed for backup services.
If you want to learn more, go online to the extra exercises we made. And that will reinforce what we

covered in today's module. And then I'll see you at the next lecture too. [MUSIC PLAYING]