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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

#211

Post by IsaacL »

rayiner wrote: post #169
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But with the level of compensation people think energy producers should pay to offset their "negative externalities" -- if governments forced them to pay it, the price of energy would rise by a huge amount, disrupting the economy, and making the previous calculation of the externalities meaningless.

Even the renewables would then need more subsidies, to pay for increased manufacturing costs and the fuel for the trucks that repair their transmission lines.

Point is its obviously misleading to say that fossil fuels are more heavily subsidied than renewables. People who hear that will assume that fossil fuel companies are being given taxpaper money, as the renewable companies are, when that is not the case. I don't think lumping together "companies that receive free money" and "companies we think should be fined" is an honest way to frame the situation.

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

#212

Post by Symmetry »

ndonnellan wrote: post #139
PeterisP wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind." makes me think - is it really cheaper to build and maintain a natural gas pipeline than a large high-voltage line capable of transmitting as much power?

One of the holy grails of solar is syngas: using solar thermal power to convert CO2/water to a mix of hydrogen and methane. If you can do it efficiently enough, the gas is the energy storage and you can either pipe it or use it to fuel a NG turbine/combined-cycle plant which will be more thermodynamically efficient than a simpler solar->steam cycle plant. The reason it's a holy grail is because there are some major m…

Adding enough storage capacity to the electrical grid to handle the day/night fluctuations in solar is currently in feasibly expensive. Adding enough storage for minute by minute fluctuations is pretty easy, though.

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

#213

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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…

x2. Explosives that used ambient oxygen to burn the fuel need to be finely tuned. Blowing up a propane tank (regardless of size) gets you a big fireball.

I find the fear of flammable gasses to be irrationally excessive. Sure there's more stored potential energy than the batteries under the floor of your Prius or the smartphone in your pocket but by nature of being compressed the storage tank is very robust and unlike batteries they do not include their own ignition source.

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

#214

Post by dsfyu404ed »

slang800 wrote: post #179
bigiain wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, the double hulls of these ships are inch-thick steel, but I think the dome is less protected. An attack that blew the dome off could open up a large hole and ignite the escaping gas, but it would still take minutes for all of it to boil off, probably freezing as it does. I guess a big enough rocket could blow the liquid out of the tank, or rupture a large hole in the hull of the ship causing the LNG to dump int…

Inch thick is the same as road plate and means nothing when there's tens of thousands of tons of ship involved. Freight ships are built as light as possible. Steel that you don't have to float leaves room for more cargo weight and increases fuel economy.

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

#215

Post by chaosbutters314 »

masklinn wrote: post #120
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate change will make climates in parts of the globe more extreme though, no? Is that beneficial to wind power?

No. More extreme = less consistent, and likely too violent, these are not things you want for wind power. You want consistent wind within the efficiency band of your turbines. Wind spikes are not a good thing, best case your turbines go into protection (they brake and the blades are feathered), worst case they're on fire. Significant gusts also increase wear of the blades, aging them prematurely and increasing the ri…

what about offshore wind farms? More water wouldn't be "so bad". haha. Plus, there was a cool idea about how they could be use in mass to mitigate hurricanes' strength to some degree but I'm not sure how feasible that is

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

#216

Post by chaosbutters314 »

hosh wrote: post #8
sizzzzlerz wrote: post #6

It's surprising that this is allowed to happen by the Texas GOP lege. I would have expected them to either outlaw outright or severely hamper wind farms and other renewable energy business in favor of their big oil benefactors. The resulting screwing of the energy consumers is, as always, an extra benefit.

The idea of energy independence is a thing, or can be. Texas has its own grid and prefers to be an energy independent state. People don't have to be motivated to save the planet to contribute to the overall sustainability.

Doesn't the US military use this rational for actually supporting renewables and fighting climate change?

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

#217

Post by delazeur »

slang800 wrote: post #160
jacquesm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Natural gas energy can be transported much more easily than solar or wind. Yes, but not easier than it is to transport electrons. And solar and wind energy can be converted into electrons and then transported across vast distances using existing infrastructure.

Transporting electrons is extremely difficult. Even with HVDC lines (usually more efficient than AC lines over long distances) you get around 3.5% loss per 1000km. If you tried to run a submarine cable the distance that LNG tankers travel, you'd end up losing a quarter to a half of your power just during transmission. Not to mention the cost of actually building & maintaining that infrastructure.

In comparison: my recollection is that about 1% of natural gas in the U.S. is lost during extraction and transmission (it's been a couple of years since I researched this). Interestingly, around 5% of our natural gas infrastructure accounts for 80 or 90% of the lost gas: a handful of very leaky wells and compressor stations, plus some regions of the country with legacy cast iron transmission pipelines.

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

#218

Post by jacquesm »

delazeur wrote: post #217
slang800 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transporting electrons is extremely difficult. Even with HVDC lines (usually more efficient than AC lines over long distances) you get around 3.5% loss per 1000km. If you tried to run a submarine cable the distance that LNG tankers travel, you'd end up losing a quarter to a half of your power just during transmission. Not to mention the cost of actually building & maintaining that infrastructure.

In comparison: my recollection is that about 1% of natural gas in the U.S. is lost during extraction and transmission (it's been a couple of years since I researched this). Interestingly, around 5% of our natural gas infrastructure accounts for 80 or 90% of the lost gas: a handful of very leaky wells and compressor stations, plus some regions of the country with legacy cast iron transmission pipelines.

Pipelines are better than LNG tankers at this. Good pipelines.

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

#219

Post by leephillips »

IsaacL wrote: post #211
rayiner wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But with the level of compensation people think energy producers should pay to offset their "negative externalities" -- if governments forced them to pay it, the price of energy would rise by a huge amount, disrupting the economy, and making the previous calculation of the externalities meaningless. Even the renewables would then need more subsidies, to pay for increased manufacturing costs and the fuel for the truck…

"People who hear that will assume that fossil fuel companies are being given taxpaper [sic] money, as the renewable companies are, when that is not the case."

That is in fact the case. Here is just one component of those direct subsidies, as reported by the U.S. Treasury Department:

https://www.treasury.gov/open/Documents/USA%20FFSR%20progres...

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

#220

Post by shepardrtc »

After driving through Texas last year, I really can't overstate just how many wind turbines there are, and how windy it is. I stopped at a little rest stop right in the middle of the state - in the middle of the day - and I was nearly blown over getting out of the car. And the number of turbines... Just amazing. Miles and miles and miles. It really looked like an endless landscape of turbines.
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