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Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

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Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#161

Post by mtdewcmu »

_delirium wrote: post #54
saryant wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind. As more export capacity comes online in the US I would expect natural gas projects in the US to continue apace even if domestic consumption stays flat or declines.

Gas is easy to transport, but only really by pipeline. LNG is a lot more expensive and capital-intensive. And there is only one place with rising demand where it's easy to transport U.S. natural gas: Mexico. Pipeline gas exports to Mexico did nearly triple between 2011 and 2016 [1]. Exports to Canada over the same period fell, however. Anywhere besides Canada and Mexico requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals,…

I wonder if it's feasible to put a pipeline under the ocean between North America and Europe. It seems crazy, but a lot of crazy stuff has happened.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#162

Post by caf »

bigiain wrote: post #152
slang800 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mini-nuke" isn't a very accurate comparison. In the event of a leak, the liquid fuel would need to flow out of the tank and turn into vapor before it could catch fire and burn. As a liquid or highly concentrated vapor it's not flammable. It needs to mix with air first. The result would be a cloud of gas that burns violently for several minutes, depending upon wind and the speed of the leak. Not the instantaneous, cr…

That's assuming an accidental leak. I wonder what the risks of "bad guys" with, say, shoulder fired rockets taking the top of the tanks off look like?

If you suddenly removed the top of a large container of LNG, it wouldn't all instantly vaporise. It would start to boil, rapidly cooling its surroundings due to the latent heat of vaporisation. Large amounts of ice would form on the outside of the container, and pretty soon the boiling rate would drop off substantially as the rate of heat transfer from the now frigid surroundings reduced.

If the vaporising gas was ignited, some of the heat from that combustion would certainly be transmitted to the pool of cold, liquid gas by radiation which would increase the vaporisation rate. The net result would still be a release of energy into the surroundings over probably tens of minutes (as opposed to microseconds in the case of a nuclear bomb).

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#163

Post by karlshea »

ams6110 wrote: post #141
davidf18 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. Still, incandescents consume a lot of power, and LEDs little.

It's too bad that the light "quality" from incandescent bulbs is vastly better than either LED or CFL.

You've just got to pick the right bulbs. I tested out a Feit LED bulb in one of my kitchen can fixtures and it was totally indistinguishable from the other incandescents so I replaced all of them. 13 watts each instead of 65, and they are the same brightness and color temperature.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#164

Post by philipkglass »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #157
toomuchtodo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you install solar panels or wind turbines, you've prepaid for whatever power they'll produce for the next 30+ years. When you generate using a fuel, your margins are dictated by power market spot prices (prices occasionally go negative; do you continue to generate and pay for someone to take your power while you're also paying someone for a fuel? In some scenarios, you must), depreciation, and your fuel costs/co…

> prices occasionally go negative How's that happen?

The main driver right now in the US is that electricity produced from wind receives a federal production tax credit for each megawatt-hour delivered during the first 10 years of a wind farm's life. During low-demand times a wind farm can pay e.g. $10/MWh for customers to take the surplus power and still earn $14/MWh net from the tax credit (presently $24/MWh). Some states also offer per-MWh credits that can drive negative prices similarly to the federal PTC.

Solar PV power does not directly drive negative prices via the federal PTC in the same way as wind. Solar presently gets a 30% federal investment tax credit up front on the costs of constructing a solar farm. This tax incentive structure doesn't encourage generation during unprofitable times like the PTC. But a solar farm can curtail its output nearly instantaneously and at no risk to plant equipment. The same is not true of e.g. coal and nuclear generators; those facilities ramp output up and down significantly slower, and cannot generate at arbitrarily low fractions of nominal power. A cold start can take 15 hours for a legacy coal plant, longer for nuclear. Full shutdowns also impose extra costs due to equipment thermal stresses during restart. Slowly-ramping coal and nuclear plants may continue to generate negative-profitability electricity at some times of day because they can't adjust fast enough to be back at full output during profitable hours otherwise and because cycling reduces equipment lifetime.

"Impact of Load Following on Power Plant Cost and Performance: Literature Review and Industry Interviews" has a lot of good details on the impact on fossil plants from making additional adjustments:

https://www.netl.doe.gov/File%20Library/Research/Energy%20An...

One thing that really stands out, reading this 5 years later, is that measures to make coal more efficient (like integrated gasification combined cycle plants, IGCC, or going from subcritical to supercritical steam) also make it even less flexible. Plant operators will continue to extract what value they can from coal plants that are already constructed. But there's no plausible combination of factors on the horizon to encourage the building of advanced/new coal plants, even if Trump remains president for 8 years.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#165

Post by ams6110 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #39
Guthur wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's positive but still no where near the scale of fossil fuels. If you consider the likely energy need growth of society, exponential maybe, it is really hard to see how solar and wind will cut it. Personally i think a full embracement of gen 4 or better nuclear power generation is the only way truly bring energy security.

You're completely off the mark. Enough energy from the sun hits the Earth in an hour or two to power humanity for a year. It's simply a matter of scaling up. Nuclear is already dead at current wind and solar generation costs.

Of course it's not remotely feasible to capture even a significant fraction of that solar energy.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#166

Post by ErikVandeWater »

rayiner wrote: post #31
leephillips wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a complex question. In trying to answer it, one should keep in mind that the tax incentives for fossil fuel production dwarf the $15 billion per year or so that supports renewable energy. In addition, fossil fuels impose an estimated $200 billion/yr in social costs (external costs), in the form of pollution, etc. And it would be hard to estimate how much of our defense spending should be attributed to the need t…

The Harvard study estimated the negative externalities of coal at 200-500 billion annually. The study estimates the effective subsidy from not including these costs at 9-27 cents per kilowatt hours.

Not taxing a negative externality is a 'subsidy'?

This a huge stretch. If this is true, the government must be subsidizing obese men to wear banana hammocks.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#167

Post by slang800 »

Retric wrote: post #130
saryant wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity may be more flexible for domestic consumption but it's damn hard to ship electrons to Japan or Europe from the US.

It's actually much cheaper to ship the solar / wind production than it is to send the LNG energy equivalent making this all a moot point. However, we could cheaply ship electrons to Russia, after that it's just a question of displacement. Aka, does energy from powerplant X get sent east or west. Net result you can send elections from US to EU for vastly less than you might think. Granted, there is no such undersea ca…

> the undersea distance is not actually that far relative to other undersea projects.

Undersea HVDC lines are nothing like the undersea fiber optic cables. The problem isn't whether or not we can create a cable like that, it's the transmission losses that long-distance power lines have. Even for HVDC you're dealing with ~3.5% loss per 1000km.

Shipping electrons over the oceans is only going to be a "question of displacement" when we have superconducting lines, but right now those need to be chilled with liquid hydrogen or nitrogen along the entire length of the cable... Meaning the infrastructure and operational costs are even more than the cost of the lost electricity.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#168

Post by _delirium »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #77
_delirium wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas is easy to transport, but only really by pipeline. LNG is a lot more expensive and capital-intensive. And there is only one place with rising demand where it's easy to transport U.S. natural gas: Mexico. Pipeline gas exports to Mexico did nearly triple between 2011 and 2016 [1]. Exports to Canada over the same period fell, however. Anywhere besides Canada and Mexico requires liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals,…

Investments in LNG are already sunk, however. Japan and China are already big importers.

About 1/3 of the UK's gas imports are as LNG also (the other 2/3 is via pipelines, mainly from Norway). But the LNG comes exclusively from Qatar [1], which has a huge LNG export terminal (and not much domestic demand).

The US doesn't have all that much export capacity, though it does seem that more is under construction. From what I can find, current US LNG terminal capacity is around 2 billion cubic feet per day (Bcfpd), equal to a bit under 3% of domestic production. But projects under construction will raise that to about 6 Bcfpd in the next few years. That's more than I would've guessed, and at ~8% of domestic production that's starting to get into a serious potential outlet for gas. Although still not enough to absorb a huge downturn in domestic demand, if there were one.

(Side note: The abbreviation Bcfpd sounds like a parody of US customary units, but it does really seem to be in common use.)

[1] http://visual.ons.gov.uk/uk-energy-how-much-what-type-and-wh...

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#169

Post by rayiner »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #166
rayiner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Harvard study estimated the negative externalities of coal at 200-500 billion annually. The study estimates the effective subsidy from not including these costs at 9-27 cents per kilowatt hours.

Not taxing a negative externality is a 'subsidy'? This a huge stretch. If this is true, the government must be subsidizing obese men to wear banana hammocks.

Say the government decided to let Wal-Mart park delivery trucks on your property for free (i.e. decline to enforce your property right in favor of a business). Economically, it'd be indistinguishable from a subsidy. Shareholders don't care whether the government policy increases Wal-Mart's revenue or decreases its expenses. The same is true for power generation.

Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money

#170

Post by douche »

cwal37 wrote: post #101
olegkikin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on the russian natural gas, so they are building LNG terminals all over. LNG tankers are freaking scary though, they are like mini-nukes, approaching 1 megaton equivalent.

For some reason people have this idea that LNG tankers are a big bomb waiting to go up, but that's not really true. Vapor cloud detonation has never been considered particularly likely, and never documented as far as I know. Mostly it seems the vapors that hit the right mix of oxygen and such would burn pretty rapidly, while the warmer gas began to rise. It would certainly be a large fire for a while, but shouldn't h…

They made fun of this, I believe, in 21 Jump Street (the remake).
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