The Impact of Drought on Electricity Supply in North Carolina
Abstract
North Carolina is located within the Southeastern region of The United States, an
area which has experienced varying degrees of drought over the last two decades. Water
withdrawal and consumption are integral and unavoidable components of the electricity
generation process whenever it is fueled by non-renewable sources of primary energy.
It follows from these two statements, that North Carolina - which largely depends
on base-load coal and nuclear thermoelectric power generation - will be vulnerable
to electricity supply disruptions in times of severe drought. In this report, an attempt
is made to quantify the financial or economic impact on privately-owned utility companies
as well as the state economy.
The report will cover various issues en-route to quantifying the impact of drought
including: identifying areas in the state historically prone to drought, locations
of major power plants in relation to these drier areas, electricity generation costs
of different powers plants within the state as well as changes in aggregate generation
costs under different scenarios when countering the adverse effects of drought.
Major findings include that roughly 5000 MW of baseload generation capacity is situated
in especially drought prone regions and that droughts severe enough to result in plant
shutdowns occur once in three decades. Economic impact on the state would run well
into the hundreds of millions while individual utilities will see lower cost impacts
in absolute terms potentially leading to underinvestment in drought-mitigating measures.
These potential economic and financial losses are then used as a basis to explore
the possibilities for making investments in less water-intensive technologies for
electricity supply. The alternative investment options are then compared to find the
most cost effective. Such investments would alleviate the pressure on the state’s
finite fresh surface water resources while simultaneously mitigating against any drought-induced
electricity supply disruptions.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1042Citation
Milazi, Dominic (2009). The Impact of Drought on Electricity Supply in North Carolina. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/1042.Collections
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