Here’s a crazy idea. Batteries?
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/08/06/analysis-reveals-that-w...
Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
131–140 of 419 posts
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electricity isn't a great market. End-users with solar power are allowed to use the grid as a perfectly free battery, which is why everyone is dumping power on the grid at high noon.
Where I live its about 25c (of Australian Dollar) for 1kwh but you only get 7c back. So a real battery would be much preferable.
Due to subsidies, in the US people dumping home solar into the grid usually get back more than the market rate.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither of the alternatives you propose are what we currently have or are where we are currently heading (IMO). As long as we are speculating - I think a future with good storage tech and 100% solar+wind would be better than one with gas plants thrown in the mix. If climate change is as big a deal as people claim, than why would we sacrifice existing non-carbon-emitting capacity for natural gas? We don't currently ha…
The article suggests that solar + wind with natgas for peaks is exactly where we're headed. At least in the regions being talked about (mostly Europe + California). The Forbes article you linked is about New England. New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days, the winds are not that strong out…
Natural Gas "Peaker" plants are VERY expensive to run. (Mainly because of their low utilization compared to high costs). In many cases, battery storage is already cheaper than peaker plants.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#134I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
Capital costs vs. marginal costs. You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs. (This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle) Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs.…
Yes, but you are in one sense "competing" with other solutions (such as batteries) that face the same utilization factor problem.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't say for sure, but quite likely renewables cause high costs like the article says. The problem is that electricity generators of all types have very high fixed costs. If you have a lot of wind and solar power its a problem that it ruins the profitability of the traditional generators half the year, so they need high prices in the other half to cover the capital costs. Also California isn't most expensive, seem…
>Also California isn't most expensive, seems pretty much the same as many blue states. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ >Data for 2016 This lists California at $0.15/kWh. I've never paid even close to that anywhere I've lived. The current PGE residential rate of $0.28/kWh [0] is about the same as Honolulu, Hawaii, where 100% of electricity is produced from burning natural gas and petroleum.[1] [0] https://www.p…
Silicon Valley Electric was 8c when I lived there, 10c now.
My PG&E's lowest off-peak rate is now 16c, though I'm on a TOU plan and just installed solar, and I have generation through Peninsula Clean Energy so my bill is somewhat more complicated than the charts involved to send Apollo 11 to the moon.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither of the alternatives you propose are what we currently have or are where we are currently heading (IMO). As long as we are speculating - I think a future with good storage tech and 100% solar+wind would be better than one with gas plants thrown in the mix. If climate change is as big a deal as people claim, than why would we sacrifice existing non-carbon-emitting capacity for natural gas? We don't currently ha…
The article suggests that solar + wind with natgas for peaks is exactly where we're headed. At least in the regions being talked about (mostly Europe + California). The Forbes article you linked is about New England. New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days, the winds are not that strong out…
Regarding the cloudyness... Has anyone ever tried to levitate photovoltaics into the stratosphere? Blimpy-space-elevator kinda thing? Is such a thing even possible?
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe aluminum is nicknamed "solid electricity" due to the ore purification process or somesuch; which dovetails well with the strategy you outline here!
Unfortunately it doesn't. Aluminum needs a lot of electricity, but it needs to be consistent for several hours. It takes a lot of energy true, but the furnaces need to be at operating temperature. You can't just turn them on and off, there are startup and cool down times that need to be accounted for.
You might be able to add a separate process where salt gets melted, stored, and used to heat furnaces.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither of the alternatives you propose are what we currently have or are where we are currently heading (IMO). As long as we are speculating - I think a future with good storage tech and 100% solar+wind would be better than one with gas plants thrown in the mix. If climate change is as big a deal as people claim, than why would we sacrifice existing non-carbon-emitting capacity for natural gas? We don't currently ha…
The article suggests that solar + wind with natgas for peaks is exactly where we're headed. At least in the regions being talked about (mostly Europe + California). The Forbes article you linked is about New England. New England will probably be the last region to get decent renewable adoption. Solar panels don't work as well because they're far north and get a number of cloudy days, the winds are not that strong out…
I cited natural gas being used for baseload power. In the last several years, gas has been installed frequently as baseload generation.
All I'm saying is that I think governments' approaches to incentivizing energy production are very suboptimal for mitigating (negative) effects of climate change. And negative energy prices are one of the red flags that this is the case.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#139Can someone please explain then why we are paying the highest prices in the continental US for retail electricity, at $0.28/kWh, in a state with the highest percentage of renewables in the country?
CA is a huge state with a lot of grid to manage. There are lot of transmission lines and lots of trees, fires, mountains etc. that must be dealt with when doing grid maintenance. Utilities also over installed a lot of generation capacity after the blackouts in the 2000s. We are still footing the bill for all the natural gas plants they built out of fear for future blackouts. Electricity demand has been flat since 200…
LA Times did a big piece about misaligned utility incentives: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
Basically utilities don't really make money on generation, they make money by building infrastructure, financing that with a 20-year bond, and passing it onto the rate payers. So if you make money by building power plants, you're going to build power plants and make the ratepayers pay for it.
Re: Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid
#140Can someone please explain then why we are paying the highest prices in the continental US for retail electricity, at $0.28/kWh, in a state with the highest percentage of renewables in the country?
> please explain then why we are paying the highest prices (...) in a state with the highest percentage of renewables I think you gave the answer yourself. If you prefer the scientific method, take all the states and the percentage of renewables and do a plot. You will see mostly a line if you do not use the fake numbers (ex: 0.15 often reported for California instead of 0.28)
Why is California's number "fake" but the other numbers in the data aren't?