Power solutions

Solutions for the power grid

Pros and cons with the current grid

Denver's current grid has several benefits, including:

• Cheap power. (287.5$ per person a year.)
• Exactly meets the maximum demand. (2287 MW when wires are lost.)
• High reliability, as it can remain powered for unlimited hours in windless nights and suffice in blackouts.

Therefore, we wanted to look at alternative solutions for handling Denver's power grid.

However, this comes at a cost of incredibly high carbon emissions, with an estimated 4276 kilograms per person a year.

Criteria for solutions

In order to design a solution, we had to come up with criteria for our power grid. Interviewing people, we found that reliability was by far the most desired part of the electricity grid. Organizing the other criteria by importance, dispatchability went second, and cost became third.

Dispatchability is how quickly a power source can match demand, or change its power output.

Solution 3: Varied

• To summarize our approach with the power grid, we:
• Used 2 winterized nuclear power plants, as nuclear is the most power-dense fuel by far.
• We removed the most polluting power plants, which were coal and natural gas.

These choices gave our system reliability where solar and wind would falter, and produce nearly no carbon emissions per person.

• Unfortunately, this came at some expense.
• Nuclear is expensive, and this drove the costs to 760$ per person a year.
• Most of our power isn't immediately dispatchable and even nuclear, our most dispatchable fuel, is slow to respond to high demand.

Overall, we chose to priortize reliability and carbon emissions over cost, and that led to a higher cost, but it guarantees that the power plants can support themselves even in a situation resembling the Texas blackout of 2021.