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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 11, 1978)
n Report out on energy policy THE BATTALION Page 3 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1978 Actions proposed for electric ilities in President Carter’s Na nai Energy Plan (NEP) must be efully'considered before put into bet, a team of Texas A&M engi- ers recommend. The plan includes a segment on electric utilities that contains some good ideas, but others that fly in the face of proven experience, they say. Findings are in a monograph, “Analysis of the National Energy riday day. head nter. tion, room- n will i Rm. s ,066 state ’s $1 ’axa- s did said ange n iih' ■' Do What you’ve Always Wanted To Do: Fly An Airplane! And Do It Mow With Our Special DISCOVERY FLIGHT... $10.00 Pays For Everything! If you're one of the countless numbers who have always wanted to fly an airplane, do It nowl This ad and $10.00 will put you In the pilot's seat of a Cessna. You'll actually fly the airplane with the assistance of a professional CPC flight instructor. You'll also receive valuable Instruction on the ground before and after your Discovery Flight. When you have earned your Private Pilot's license, you're eligible to enter the $300,000 TakeOff Sweepstakes. See us for complete details No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law Cessna^ Mill CENTEI BRAZOS AVIATION EASTERWOOD AIRPORT • COLLEGE STATION 846-8767 Plan: The Effects on Electric Utilities,” published in a series by the Center for Energy and Mineral Resources at Texas A&M. Governor Briscoe asked the state s major universities to analyze the NEP as a basis for state re sponse. Earlier Texas A&M studies dealt with the plan’s effects on oil and natural gas pricing, Texas ag riculture and transportation. Another is planned on financial as pects. Texas A&M engineers criticized the NEP for failing to treat electric utilities problems from “a coherent, systems point of view. ” Many of the energy proposals would have both positive and nega tive effects on electric utilities and their customers,” the group report assessed. “Only if the positive ef fects outweigh the negative should the proposed action be taken. “In some cases, the effects are not yet clearly understood and additional study is needed. In such cases, hasty legislative and adminis trative requirements to implement those proposals seem unwise,” the report adds. “The people who put the plan to gether have a limited concept of the electric utility business as a sys tem,” Dr. Alton D. Patton, one of the six experts on the team, said. “They don’t appreciate the fact that solving one problem can wor sen another, just as pushing in on a balloon at one point causes it to bulge in another,” he said. Among other actions, the NEP called for increased power pooling and utility interconnection, utility rate structure reform, use of ther mal power plants’ rejected heat for cogeneration and heating, and de velopment of advanced energy sources and energy storage technologies. Patton said that as pects of the plan “have been per turbed almost daily. It’s not now the same document that we first ad dressed.” Pooling of power systems has some undeniable advantages. How ever, increases in transmission costs, control complexity and sys tem susceptibility to cascading fail ures may work against more and more interconnection of power sys tems into pools, the 59-page report says. << Eastern Style Sandwiches Texas Size New York Sub-way Says Welcome Back, Aggies! 20 varieties of submarine sandwiches 109 Boyett (Next to Campus Theater) 846-8223 99 OUR PRINTER GOOFED The Circular in Today’s Paper is Good for Wednesday Jan. 11, 1978 thru Saturday Jan. 14, 1978 V-,• *yvv*yv : ' ■. .. y/trS f///r</yA “Incremental benefits of pooling decrease as the pool size increases, while disadvantages continue to in crease,” it adds. “Thus there is an optimum pool size, beyond which the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. “Benefits of interconnection must be evaluated in each case, and can not be legislated,” Patton warned. “The government plan, in effect, says they can.” Rate reforms to assure that utility rates reflect costs and encourage conservation, have some undeter mined and undesirable effects. The report suggests that “no class of util ity customer should subsidize another, but each should pay a fair rate that reflects the total cost” of service. Cogeneration and district heating from thermal plants presupposes that rejected heat is of high quality to be usable without further treat ment and that a demand for the steam exists. “Even if demand exists, capital expense is still there, and we must also pay something in efficiency of the turbine,” Patton said. The economics of cogeneration are more favorable today, he added. But specific instances may not be economically sound, if, for example, it becomes necessary to crank down a larger, more efficient power plant to keep a small, fuel oil-burning plant operating at full capacity to maintain district heating or cogen eration. The report cites efforts toward developing alternate energy sources and reflects optimism on pos sibilities. It points out, however, that capital Costs problems exist also with solar, wind and geothermal The group producing the assess ment also includes C.W. Brice, A.K. Ayoub, R.D. Chenoweth, J.S. Denison and B.D. Russell. They are in the Electrical Engineering De partment and Electric Power Insti tute at Texas A&M. Business • Science • Engineering This semester is the right time to get a Tl calculator tailored to the work you’re doing. SR-51-II Professional decision making system. Loaded with statistics functions. Accounting. Marketing. Education. Social Sciences. Life Sciences. Health. Statistics plays a major role in dozens of career fields. Here’s a calculator with the advanced capab il- ity you need to handle your projects. Comes with Calculating Better De cisions, a $4.95 book value. Helps you get the most out of the SR-51-II. Step-by-step illustrations show how to use its powerful preprogrammed functions. Learn how to gather data. Weigh alternatives. 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