What units is this? $35 per what? Megawatt-hour?
Yep - LBMP for NYISO is the local based marginal price in $/MWh;
NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
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Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#32Tangentially related: New York is home to NYPA[1], the largest public power utility/authority in the United States. NYPA is entirely owned by the public, produces some of the cheapest (and greenest) power in the country, and is funded in perpetuity by bonds instead of taxes. Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the physical delivery infra…
I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really interesting energy storage idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe... Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
is there enough difference in price to actually turn a profit doing that?
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh! I guess it depends on whether those trees will actually end up being repopulated. I'm still not sure I'd put it in the same class as solar energy for that reason (not arguing against it as a power source), although perhaps solar generates so little the distinction is meaningless?
Solar and wind and hydro and nuclear aren't carbon neutral though, they're zero carbon (again excluding external costs of production, etc). With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen. It's not a distinction that is made in public discourse commonly but matters if, for example, it's powering a c…
> With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen
The net effect is the same. A country running on biofuels and a country running on solar will have the same net production irrespective of carbon capture. One emits and absorbs while the other never emits.
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#34Tangentially related: New York is home to NYPA[1], the largest public power utility/authority in the United States. NYPA is entirely owned by the public, produces some of the cheapest (and greenest) power in the country, and is funded in perpetuity by bonds instead of taxes. Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the physical delivery infra…
I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really interesting energy storage idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe... Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
There are a good few pumped storage sites in the world, here's the one most convenient for me to visit (now that COVID-19 precautions have eased) in Scotland:
https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/
It isn't practical to build mountains, so you need to find some natural mountains you don't mind cutting a big hole into, with a pre-existing lake at the top, at the bottom, or ideally both, and then spend a lot of money building the storage system, plus hook it up to the grid.
The US does have lots of spare mountains, but they aren't exactly in the middle of cities where it would be convenient, so the infrastructure cost is very large.
In the UK one rationale for these sites is that they have Black Start capability. In the event of a complete network failure, there is no grid power, most power stations can't be started from this situation, they need the grid first. At suitably equipped pumped storage sites a relatively modest amount of local electrical power (e.g. from a portable diesel generator) is enough to get the site running with no outside help, whereupon it can produce, for a few hours, a great deal of electrical power for the grid, and other generators on the grid can use that power to start themselves up safely. By the time the reservoir is empty, lots of other generators are back online. Black Start justified paying them money to exist even back when they weren't regularly used. Today cheap wind power means pumped storage is economic anyway, fill it up at night with cheap power (sometimes at negative cost) and then generate electricity in the early evening peak with all that water.
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, like Fukushima, which is rare, and had a single death?
The economic damages of a 30km exclusion zone that close to NYC might be significant, even without deaths.
Also the Japanese government is projecting a total of somewhere between $200 billion and $600 billion to clean up the mess left behind -- amortizing that on the $/MWh produced by the power plant would probably lead to slightly more expensive power...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#36Tangentially related: New York is home to NYPA[1], the largest public power utility/authority in the United States. NYPA is entirely owned by the public, produces some of the cheapest (and greenest) power in the country, and is funded in perpetuity by bonds instead of taxes. Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the physical delivery infra…
I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really interesting energy storage idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe... Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
There's a similar facility at Dinorwig in Wales. It's important not only to handle the load of all the kettles being switched on at half-time (what they refer to as "TV pickup", an almost 3GW increase in demand), but it's also a "black start" site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out ElectricityMap.org, they scrape the independent dashboards (CAISO, NYISO, ISO-NE, ERCOT) for generation mix data, anything else (in the US) is pulled from EIA’s balancing authority API with a 6-12 hour lag (ElectricityMap uses machine learning to provide real time estimates based on historical data for data delayed zones, and it is spooky how accurate it is [Chile in particular] when the data backfills and…
Woah Quebec seems to have the lowest (?) Carbon intensity on the map. Hydro power is just amazing, and I'm glad we had very forward looking PMs back in the 60-70s who pushed for massive hydro projects even when the costs were gigantic. There's still so much hydro potential in the province that isn't being used though. Makes me wonder if it would be possible to build up our hydro capacity specifically for export inste…
There is a fair amount of missing / misleading data on that map, e.g. Brazil is the 25th largest consumer of coal[0], but the map claims 95+% of Brazil's energy consumption is renewable and lists their coal percentage as "?"
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#38Why is power produced by wood (which I assume means burning wood) listed alongside solar in "other renewables"? I guess technically trees are renewable? I assume burning them releases CO2 though...
Growing them captures CO2. Burning them releases that same CO2.
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#39Why is power produced by wood (which I assume means burning wood) listed alongside solar in "other renewables"? I guess technically trees are renewable? I assume burning them releases CO2 though...
Those trees are farmed for burning. So the wood is renewable - Every X unit of time, the earth renews that supply of wood. Renewable does not mean without carbon dioxide, although this is a carbon neutral process (CO2 taken out of the atmosphere when the trees grow, and released back as they burn).
Re: NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really interesting energy storage idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe... Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
is there enough difference in price to actually turn a profit doing that?
It depends, but in some cases certainly.
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
That top left graph is showing you the (notional) system price for grid electricity in the UK. The x axis is settlement periods, which are 30 minutes long, thus period 14 on that graph ends 0700 local time, before many people are awake, system price was £0 per MWh. You want it? Have it. The evening peak a few hours ago was £327 per MWh. So if you bought 2GWh of electricity this morning and sold just 50% of it back this evening (accounting for losses) you made over £300 000 on that transaction.
Now, those sites aren't free, I'm sure you need a dozen or more specialist engineers who aren't paid minimum wage to run a plant like that, and the spares are doubtless expensive, it's not as though everybody has a spare 100MW turbine/ pump sat around you could buy. But you can do that most days and sometimes twice a day, so it's potentially a nice earner. Once upon a time all the ones in the UK were owned by the government but today they are owned by for-profit corporations.