LANL powers down in emergency

Facilities shut down and expertise shared

When an extraordinary cold spell last week caused natural gas wells to clog up and gas was cut off to area communities, Laboratory infrastructure staff went into action.

“Freeze offs” and rolling electrical blackouts at the well sites in West Texas, it seems, had destabilized the flow of natural gas down the supply pipelines into New Mexico, and the gas supplier determined that shutting down key pipelines would prevent a more catastrophic failure of the larger system. As a result, the Laboratory switched its central steam heating and power generation source from natural gas to diesel fuel that afternoon, said Andy Erickson, facility operations director in Utility and Institutional Facilities.

This reduced Northern New Mexico’s fuel usage, although it didn’t change the fact that New Mexico Gas Company’s distribution system would continue to degrade and that they would have to switch off gas supplies to Northern New Mexico towns such as Española last Thursday (February 3) morning. A subsequent surge in electrical use in the stricken communities was also a concern following cut-off of natural gas, Erickson said.

Facilities shut down

In response, working with the Los Alamos Site Office of the National Nuclear Administration, the Laboratory activated its Emergency Operations Center, coordinated with civic leaders and first responders, and further conserved energy by shutting down the big computing facilities, LANSCE, and the like. Most divisions sent nonessential staff home Thursday afternoon and NNSA directed the entire Laboratory closed on Friday to reduce power consumption and lower building temperatures to reduce electric and natural gas usage.

Decision Applications (D) Division Leader D.V. Rao noted that, “We estimate that northwestern communities (Española, Taos, Red River, Questa, and San Ildefonso Pueblo) will probably switch over to electrical heating; about 2-3 kilowatt per household. This will add between 50 and 100-megawatt demand to PNM electrical lines. We estimate that PNM has sufficient capacity to absorb this increase. . . .

“This is an example of how a perturbation elsewhere in the country can propagate and impact people close to home,” said Rao.

Reducing the Laboratory’s power consumption allowed Facility Operations to divert 14 megawatts to the grid, power that helped meet the increased need for electricity once residents turned to electric space heaters when their gas went out.

Technical expertise shared

D Division’s Energy and Infrastructure Analysis Group also powered up to provide advice to New Mexico Gas at the behest of Representative Ben Ray Lujan, D-New Mexico, and Loren Toole of the D Division team provided a “natural gas distribution 101” primer interview to local media.

By last Friday afternoon, Erickson’s teams and New Mexico Gas had determined that LANL could resume gas usage, noting “We saved approximately 9,196 MMBtu of natural gas over the period we switched to fuel oil.”