1. SSP can take advantage of our current and historic investment in aerospace expertise to expand employment opportunities. SSP’s technologies are near-term and have multiple attractive approaches. Many thousands of STEM jobs, on inspiring work that we understand how to do is needed to bring them to practical fruition.
2. Unlike coal and nuclear plants, SSP does not compete for or depend on scarce fresh water resources. Various liquid fuels, such as anhydrous ammonia, can be created from electricity, air and sea water and moved through the same sort of pipeline system as motor gasoline. It has 111 octane, whereas corn-based ethanol has a very low octane. We have a 50 year history of making and using liquid ammonia, primarily for farming, but also as the fuel of the X-15 rocket.
3. Unlike coal, oil, gas, ethanol, and bio-fuel engines, SSP emits very little CO2, only an antenna is on the Earth (the proper term is rectenna, or “rectifying antenna”).
4. Unlike bio-ethanol or bio-diesel, SSP does not compete for increasingly valuable farm land or depend on natural-gas-derived fertilizer. Corn and other foodstuffs can continue to be a major export instead of a fuel provider.
5. Unlike nuclear power plants, SSP produces no hazardous waste, does not proliferate nuclear weapons, or provide ready targets for terrorists.
6. Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, SSP is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in endless quantities. SSP ignores cloud cover, night, storms, dust and wind. Our understanding of the magnetosphere & solar wind interaction – SSP’s GSO operating environment – has become highly mature since 1962.
7. Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, SSP does not require environmentally problematic mining operations.
8. SSP can provide true energy independence for the nations that develop it, eliminating a major source of national competition for limited Earth-based energy resources and dependence on unstable or hostile foreign oil providers.
9. SSP can be easily “exported” anywhere in the world, and its vast energy can be converted to local needs, from appliances in Asia to desalination of sea water in the American West.
10. Only SSP can provide a market large enough to develop the low-cost space transportation systems required to enable the SSP business case. We will not “drift” to SSP. As the FAA’s 2007 Commercial Space Transportation Forecast shows a declining launch market. Sunsat Corp must incentivize the orbital market fleet it needs to close the business case. SSP is the only market big enough to do this. The FAA forecasts show it won’t happen with business as usual assumptions, we need Sunsat Act.
With lower cost space transportation, many new ventures in space become possible – mining interests have been planning to mine Near-Earth-Objects (NEO), protection of space power satellites will also be needed, numerous lunar development projects become more doable. Led by a Lunar Development Authority many other opportunities open; conceivably commercial products from the Moon could be sold to Sunsat Corp. The highway to the future begins with chartering Sunsat Corp, inspiring our children with a real and bright future again.
SSP would revitalize America by showing that a multitude of space-development-related educational fields, from telerobotics to space transportation, from wireless power transfer to photovoltaics and environmental sciences, are vitally relevant to these great problems. Reduced launch costs, the key enabler, will provide unprecedented access to space and space operations beginning with clean, baseload SSP - reliable power delivery and global energy security at greatly reduced environmental impact.
Only SSP’s immense need for freight to orbit can support this vastly expanded space launch market necessary to lower the cost of the crucial space access component. The proper path to build SSP, is a new congressionally chartered corporation; we suggest calling it SunSat Corporation. Rough draft legislation chartering SunSat corporation and initiating SSP construction is shown in the Appendix.
There can be completely different definitions for power quality, depend-ing on one’s frame of reference. For example, a utility may define powerquality as reliability and show statistics demonstrating that its systemis 99.98 percent reliable. Criteria established by regulatory agenciesare usually in this vein. Amanufacturer of load equipment may definepower quality as those characteristics of the power supply that enablethe equipment to work properly. These characteristics can be very dif-ferent for different criteria.Power quality is ultimately a consumer-driven issue, and the enduser’s point of reference takes precedence. Therefore, the following def-inition of a power quality problem is used in this book:Any power problem manifested in voltage, current, or frequency devia-tions that results in failure or misoperation of customer equipment.There are many misunderstandings regarding the causes of powerquality problems. The charts in Fig. 1.1 show the results of one surveyconducted by the Georgia Power Company in which both utility per-sonnel and customers were polled about what causes power qualityproblems. While surveys of other market sectors might indicate differ-ent splits between the categories, these charts clearly illustrate onecommon theme that arises repeatedly in such surveys: The utility’s andcustomer’s perspectives are often much different. While both tend toblame about two-thirds of the events on natural phenomena (e.g., light-ning), customers, much more frequently than utility personnel, thinkthat the utility is at fault.
When there is a power problem with a piece of equipment, end usersmay be quick to complain to the utility of an “outage” or “glitch” that hascaused the problem. However, the utility records may indicate no abnor-mal events on the feed to the customer. We recently investigated a casewhere the end-use equipment was knocked off line 30 times in 9 months,but there were only five operations on the utility substation breaker. Itmust be realized that there are many events resulting in end-user prob-lems that never show up in the utility statistics. One example is capaci-tor switching, which is quite common and normal on the utility system,but can cause transient overvoltages that disrupt manufacturingmachinery. Another example is a momentary fault elsewhere in the sys-tem that causes the voltage to sag briefly at the location of the customerin question. This might cause an adjustable-speed drive or a distributedgenerator to trip off, but the utility will have no indication that anythingwas amiss on the feeder unless it has a power quality monitor installed.In addition to real power quality problems, there are also perceivedpower quality problems that may actually be related to hardware, soft-
ware, or control system malfunctions. Electronic components candegrade over time due to repeated transient voltages and eventuallyfail due to a relatively low magnitude event. Thus, it is sometimes dif-ficult to associate a failure with a specific cause. It is becoming morecommon that designers of control software for microprocessor-basedequipment have an incomplete knowledge of how power systems oper-ate and do not anticipate all types of malfunction events. Thus, a devicecan misbehave because of a deficiency in the embedded software. Thisis particularly common with early versions of new computer-controlledThe Asian Entech Power Corporation Limited is one of the fastest growing companies in the power generation sector of Bangladesh. The company won four IPP power generation contracts from the government of Bangladesh with a total capacity of 77MW (natural gas, simple cycle) in October of 2007.
All four projects are based on the Build Own Operate (BOO) model with contract duration of 15 years. Asian Entech will be supplying electricity to both Rural Electrification Board (REB) and Power Development Board (PDB) of Bangladesh through the national grid of the country. The World Bank (IFC) is the primary financier of the projects. The total cost of the project is approximately $ 55M (USD).
Three of the power plants each with a capacity of 22 MW are located in Narshingdi, Feni and Tangail. An additional 11 MW plant is located in Feni. The GE Janbacher is the supplier of the power generation sets.
Bangladesh has long been in serious shortage of power. With a population of 150 million and only 15-20 % of them being connected with electricity there exists a huge market scope for power sector. However, the present scenario encompasses the need for supplying uninterrupted power to the existing customers (Residential/commercial/industrial) with dependable power and to bring the huge segment of population that needs to be connected through electricity. The government of Bangladesh plans to add an additional capacity of 17,000 MWs by 2025.
Saiful Alam is the CEO of the company. Mr. Alam is an industry veteran with 20 years experience in the power sector. He is an electrical engineer. Prior to joining Asian Entech, he was the Executive Director at Summit Power of Bangladesh, the largest IPP in the country.
Tahzeeb Siddiqui is the managing director of Asian Entech. He is a director of Siddiqui Group of Bangladesh (total exports over $50m USD garments/textiles) as well. He has an MBA from Cornell University and an MS in political science from the University of London.
Javed Hosein is the director of finance of Asian Entech. Prior to joining Asian Entech he was a senior manager at Accenture’s management consulting practice based out of New York. Mr. Hosein holds a BS in electrical engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Cornell University.
Former foreign minister and managing director of Shasha Denim Ltd., Anisul Islam Mahmud is an investor in Asian Entech Power Corp.
INTRODUCTION
Tidal energy can be exploited in two ways: - By building semi-permeable barrages across estuaries with a high tidal range.
- By harnessing offshore tidal streams.
Source of Tidal Energy
•Gravitational mass of sun and moon pull on earth’s oceans
•Causes water to rise and fall
•Greatest range occurs when sun and moon pull in same direction (spring tide)
•Weakest when sun and moon in opposition (neap tide)
Good areas for exploiting tidal energy
Tidal range may vary over a wide range (4.5-12.4 m) from site to site. A tidal range of at least 7 m is required for economical operation and for sufficient head of water for the turbines. Hammerfest Traditional tidal electricity generation involves the construction of a barrage across an estuary to block the incoming and outgoing tide. The dam includes a sluice that is opened to allow the tide to flow into the basin; the sluice is then closed, and as the sea level drops, the head of water (elevated water in the basin) using traditional hydropower technology, drives turbines to generate electricity. Barrages can be designed to generate electricity on the ebb side, or flood side, or both.
Tidal range may vary over a wide range (4.5-12.4 m) from site to site. A tidal range of at least 7 m is required for economical operation and for sufficient head of water for the turbines. A 240 MWe facility has operated in France since 1966, 20 MWe in Canada since 1984, and a number of stations in China since 1977, totaling 5 mWw. Tidal energy schemes are characterised by low capacity factors, usually in the range of 20-35%.
The waters off the Pacific Northwest are ideal for tapping into an ocean of power using newly developed undersea turbines. The tides along the Northwest coast fluctuate dramatically, as much as 12 feet a day. The coasts of Alaska, British Columbia and Washington, in particular, have exceptional energy-producing potential. On the Atlantic seaboard, Maine is also an excellent candidate. The undersea environment is hostile so the machinery will have to be robust.
Currently, although the technology required to harness tidal energy is well established, tidal power is expensive, and there is only one major tidal generating station in operation. This is a 240 megawatt (1 megawatt = 1 MW = 1 million watts) at the mouth of the La Rance river estuary on the northern coast of France (a large coal or nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 MW of electricity). The La Rance generating station has been in operation since 1966 and has been a very reliable source of electricity for France. La Rance was supposed to be one of many tidal power plants in France, until their nuclear program was greatly expanded in the late 1960's. Elsewhere there is a 20 MW experimental facility at Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia, and a 0.4 MW tidal power plant near Murmansk in Russia. UK has several proposals underway.
Studies have been undertaken to examine the potential of several other tidal power sites worldwide. It has been estimated that a barrage across the Severn River in western England could supply as much as 10% of the country's electricity needs (12 GW). Similarly, several sites in the Bay of Fundy, Cook Inlet in Alaska, and the White Sea in Russia have been found to have the potential to generate large amounts of electricity.
Impact on the environment
Tidal energy is a renewable source of electricity which does not result in the emission of gases responsible for global warming or acid rain associated with fossil fuel generated electricity. Use of tidal energy could also decrease the need for nuclear power, with its associated radiation risks. Changing tidal flows by damming a bay or estuary could, however, result in negative impacts on aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, as well as navigation and recreation.
The few studies that have been undertaken to date to identify the environmental impacts of a tidal power scheme have determined that each specific site is different and the impacts depend greatly upon local geography. Local tides changed only slightly due to the La Rance barrage, and the environmental impact has been negligible, but this may not be the case for all other sites. It has been estimated that in the Bay of Fundy, tidal power plants could decrease local tides by 15 cm. This does not seem like much when one considers that natural variations such as winds can change the level of the tides by several metres.
Costs of tidal energy
Tidal power is a form of low-head hydroelectricity and uses familiar low-head hydroelectric generating equipment, such as has been in use for more than 120 years. The technology required for tidal power is well developed, and the main barrier to increased use of the tides is that of construction costs. There is a high capital cost for a tidal energy project, with possibly a 10-year construction period. Therefore, the electricity cost is very sensitive to the discount rate.
The major factors in determining the cost effectiveness of a tidal power site are the size (length and height) of the barrage required, and the difference in height between high and low tide. These factors can be expressed in what is called a site's "Gibrat" ratio. The Gibrat ratio is the ratio of the length of the barrage in metres to the annual energy production in kilowatt hours (1 kilowatt hour = 1 KWH = 1000 watts used for 1 hour). The smaller the Gibrat site ratio, the more desireable the site. Examples of Gibrat ratios are La Rance at 0.36, Severn at 0.87 and Passamaquoddy in the Bay of Fundy at 0.92.
Offshore tidal power generators use familiar and reliable low-head hydroelectric generating equipment, conventional marine construction techniques, and standard power transmission methods. The placement of the impoundment offshore, rather than using the conventional "barrage" approach, eliminates environmental and economic problems that have prevented the deployment of commercial-scale tidal power plants.
Three projects (Swansea Bay 30 MW, Fifoots Point 30 MW, and North Wales 432 MW) are in development in Wales where tidal ranges are high, renewable source power is a strong public policy priority , and the electricity marketplace gives it a competitive edge. Q. What are some of the devices for tidal energy conversion? The technology required to convert tidal energy into electricity is very similar to the technology used in traditional hydroelectric power plants. The first requirement is a dam or "barrage" across a tidal bay or estuary. Building dams is an expensive process. Therefore, the best tidal sites are those where a bay has a narrow opening, thus reducing the length of dam which is required. At certain points along the dam, gates and turbines are installed. When there is an adequate difference in the elevation of the water on the different sides of the barrage, the gates are opened. This "hydrostatic head" that is created, causes water to flow through the turbines, turning an electric generator to produce electricity.
Electricity can be generated by water flowing both into and out of a bay. As there are two high and two low tides each day, electrical generation from tidal power plants is characterized by periods of maximum generation every twelve hours, with no electricity generation at the six hour mark in between. Alternatively, the turbines can be used as pumps to pump extra water into the basin behind the barrage during periods of low electricity demand. This water can then be released when demand on the system its greatest, thus allowing the tidal plant to function with some of the characteristics of a "pumped storage" hydroelectric facility.
The technology required to convert tidal energy into electricity is very similar to the technology used in traditional hydroelectric power plants. The first requirement is a dam or "barrage" across a tidal bay or estuary. Building dams is an expensive process. Therefore, the best tidal sites are those where a bay has a narrow opening, thus reducing the length of dam which is required. At certain points along the dam, gates and turbines are installed. When there is an adequate difference in the elevation of the water on the different sides of the barrage, the gates are opened. This "hydrostatic head" that is created, causes water to flow through the turbines, turning an electric generator to produce electricity.
Electricity can be generated by water flowing both into and out of a bay. As there are two high and two low tides each day, electrical generation from tidal power plants is characterized by periods of maximum generation every twelve hours, with no electricity generation at the six hour mark in between. Alternatively, the turbines can be used as pumps to pump extra water into the basin behind the barrage during periods of low electricity demand. This water can then be released when demand on the system its greatest, thus allowing the tidal plant to function with some of the characteristics of a "pumped storage" hydroelectric facility.
CATEGORY - A : RESIDENTIAL LIGHT & POWER
Applicable to the electricity service through a single watt hour meter for lighting and appliances used in a dwelling place including related grounds and buildings, having sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
CATEGORY - B : AGRICULTURAL PUMPING
Applicable to the electricity service through a single watt hour meter for irrigation and drainage of the land for the purpose of cultivation, having sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
CATEGORY - C : SMALL INDUSTRIAL
Category-C is applicable to the electricity service through a single watt hour meter for small industry, where articles or substances are produced, adopted, manufactured, altered, repaired, ornamented, finished, packaged or treated from raw materials with a view to their use, sale, transport, delivery and disposal having a sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
CATEGORY - D : NON-RESIDENTIAL LIGHT & POWER
Applicable to the electricity service through a single watt hour meter for hospitals, educational institutions, religious & charitable establishments and all classes of consumers other than those specified under category A, B, C, E & J having sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
CATEGORY - E : LT COMMERCIAL
Applicable to the electricity service through a single watt hour meter for offices, trading and commercial enterprises such as shops, businesses, hotels & cinema halls, having sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
RATE : CATEGORY - F : MEDIUM VOLTAGE GENERAL PURPOSE (11 KV)
Applicable to the electricity service through energy and demand meters for all classes consumers having sanctioned load up to 5 MW, where the consumer provides his own sub-station, including transformer, high tension control, protection and power factor correction equipment.
CATEGORY - G-1 : EXTRA HIGH VOLTAGE DESA (132 KV)
Applicable to the electricity service through energy and demand meter for Dhaka Electric Supply Authority (DESA) receiving power at 132 KV.
CATEGORY - G-2 : EXTRA HIGH VOLTAGE GENERAL (132 KV)
Applicable to the electricity service through energy and demand meter for all classes of consumer receiving power at 132 KV having sanctioned load above 15 MW upto150 MW, where the consumer provides his own sub-station including transformer, high tension control, protective and power factor correction equipment.
CATEGORY - H : HIGH VOLTAGE GENERAL PURPOSE (33 KV)
Applicable to the electricity service through energy and demand meter for all classes of consumers other than REB/PBS receiving power at 33 KV, having contracted load up to 15 MW other than REB/PBS where the consumer provides his own sub-station, including transformer and high tension control, protective and power factor correction equipment.
In absence of maximum demand meter the maximum demand of the consumers’ categories G2 & H may be calculated as follows :
100% for the first 75 KW of Connected Load
85% for the next 75 KW of Connected Load
75% for the next 75 KW of Connected Load
65% for the next 75 KW of Connected Load
60% for the rest
CATEGORY - I : HIGH VOLTAGE BULK SUPPLY FOR RURAL ELECTRIFICATION OF BOARD/ PALLI BIDDYUT SAMITI
Applicable to the electricity service through energy and demand meter for REB/PBS receiving power at 33 KV, having contracted load up to 15 MW, where the consumer provides his own transformer, high tension control, protective and power factor correction equipment.
CATEGORY - J : STREET LIGHT AND WATER PUMPS.
Applicable to the electricity service through a single watt-hour meter for Municipality, WASA and Public Health for the purpose of street lighting and drinking water pumping stations having sanctioned load up to 50 KW.
