2 month anniversary energy stats for 2012 plug-in basic

OK, we can disagree. Yes, coal is declining, despite its abundance and efficacy. All accounts show that it is being replaced and displaced almost exclusively by natural gas. The only other base load generators being built in America are nukes, and last I checked, only in Georgia. Coal cannot be replaced or even displaced by any intermittent generator. Base load and add-on electricity are both electricity, just as skateboards and 747s are both transportation, but they are not interchangeable. Would that it could be true, but whoever asserted to you that the subject plant was replaced by wind is either a self-interested propagandist or simply naive.

 

I believe the current federal tax credit is aimed at developing battery technology, somewhat evident by the size of the credit being determined by the size of the battery.

 

Coal is being replaced every day by intermittent generation.

 

OK OK. I'm not arguing. Have a nice trip to Australia on your skateboard!

 

I assume there is a point here.

I was brought to this thread because people were eroneously thinking even if we build renewables, that we are stuck supplying new plug -ins with old coal plants.

I don't think that is the public perception at all. The bad public perception seems to be, that if we add plug-ins, even if we add renewables, that we burn more coal. While this may be true in the very short term (1-3 years) it is absolutely false in the medium term. As we build more renewables, even with higher plug in demand the grid is getting cleaner. The two big factors are ccgt natural gas and wind, in place of less efficient natural gas and coal.

You can look at the statistics and see that we are shutting down coal plants much faster than we are building them.

Our small 1M+ municipal utility is greening our little corner of the grid in central texas. The coal plant serving austin will be shut down, probably by 2020, replaced by renewables. Adding more plug-ins and choice customers speeds this up. 1M people is small, but our neighbor municipal utility in San Antonio is closing one of their coal plants in 2018. They did sign a contract to replace some of that coal with more coal, but from a new plant, that will capturing the co2 and use it in the oil fields, capture the NOx and make fertilizer, and capture he SO2 and make sulfuric acid. Baby steps, but we can drastically reduce coal pollution.

The epa tried to close 3 coal power plants and lost the lawsuit in texas. All the wind added though has these plants shut down this winter. They will turn back on for the summer, but it is untrue that wind can not shut down coal. It takes time. In the short term it replaces natural gas. In the longer term coal.

You must have your head stuck in the 70s if you think a large amounts of generation comes from oil. This is only true in hawaii, and that is being replaced by solar. We need more peaking stations with wind and solar, and these cost money, but they do not cost fuel. New ccgt like the GE 61, can continue to operate at 58% efficiency down to 40% load, and works well. It can work as a peaking station below 40% and starts up in minutes. It will take decades and good grid management to replace some of the old ineffient gas with these hyper efficient combined cycle plants designed to integrate with renewables.

I don't think anyone ever claimed wind was greener than hydro. Large amounts of renewables will help get rid of the idea of base load coal though that can not be ramped.

At least in ERCOT, the grid with the largest percentage of wind, the amount of fuel burned in standby natural gas plants is very low. New plants are needed on some other grids, and they can ramp very fast. ERCOT needs more of the fast cycling ccgt plants.

Over 8% of ERCOT is now wind. By 2025 it should be at least 20%. Some days wind alone provides as much as 25% of the power of this grid. We are building more renewable in spite of what the naysayers say. Because wind works, and helps reduce price risks of fossil generation and pollution. We have auditable figures on the ERCOT grid showing the benefit of wind.

 

I think you meant sailboard, or sailboat, rather than skateboard. I am still wanting to join a friend on that trip in 2014, as a crew member. It has been more than a decade since I left Sydney.

 

My EV subscription is interruptible, just like the wind supply. No base load is needed for my EV.

 

ERCOT has been very vocal about the difficulties it has had integrating the massive amounts of installed wind. And, despite our hopes, it's not all to the good: Texas Public Utility Commission pushes for $7 billion transmission lines for wind power | Texas Watchdog

 

Yea, I was privy to a DOE discussion about letting more private money build out these transmission lines, treating them more like private toll roads rather than public highways. It's a hot topic, applicable to oil and gas lines as well. The discussion was more about integrating grid scale storage into the infrastructure.

 

I don't find anything green about driving a car. If you are running your house on coal electicity, I don't think you are going to run it cleaner by using gasoline in your car.

Now if you are in a part of the country that is over 70% coal, we need some specifics. Lets take WV. Say we replace 1G of coal with 1G ccgt @75% utililization and 1G wind @ 25% utiliazation what would happen? You would clean up the west Virginia grid with wind quite quickly. Now add plug-ins to that grid, to help pay for the infrastructure, and we end up substituting wind and natural gas for coal and oil. Just drop the wind on, without closing down coal or building those fast cycling plants and you get a poor solution. But we should not be fooled into thinking that we can not build natural gas and and wind at the same time. In texas we have a large number of ccgt and ocgt that allow wind to be added much easier than west virginia.

1 dimensional thinking that we need to keep as much coal burning as possible. If you buy a plug in, and help to pay for the transition of electricity, polution drops, imported oil drops, coal burned drops. It takes years, and it takes money. But keeping the status quo is likely to cost more in the future.

Do you not think ERCOT is recording legitamate figures for wind, or Germany? Please look at the power charts. There is real, not mythical power flowing into the grid from wind turbines.

For the last 20 years the country has been building ccgt natural gas and wind. Base load is an artifact of old thinking, especially when it comes to places like texas. We built so much coal here mainly because the federal government restricted buiilding natural gas for "base load". Wind plays well with natural gas generation, especially the newer fast cycling plants. Solar also plays well but is more expensive. What renewables don't act well with is 50 year old coal plants. It cost money to tear these things down, and replace them, but often this is less expensive than outfitting them with current pollution control devices.

Wind today is less expensive than new coal, and new coal plants come with risks of needing new pollution control devices in the future. Most of your arguments were around a decade ago, but somehow ERCOT has not gone down because we canceled 7 new coal plants and built wind instead.

 

If you are going to make a claim, that ercot is vocal about difficulties, you might want to quote ERCOT instead of a group that does not want to spend money improving the grid. Here is ERCOTs page and a press release about the latest wind record.
ERCOT sets new wind power record

The opinion piece you posted, really is about the cost of wind. It tries to talk about the cost of infrastructure being expensive, but they don't say that the upgraded grid should last about 50 years. It included the name of a UT professor, and you can read his paper here.
http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~baldick/papers/Wind_and_energy_markets_IEEE_systems_journal.pdf

The gist of the paper is that as we add more wind, the base load shrinks a great deal. That was a point you will see me making further up. He took some pessimistic assumptions about wind at 30% of ERCOT, and found that the wind would cost about 5 cents more per kwh of fossil fuel displaced, than current energy in eroct. This is more than the cap and trade CO2 rate. In other words, it would be cheaper to pay the government to generate the emissions than to reduce the emissions. If you cost it out and it was spread equaly accross all ERCOT customer that is about 1.5 cents/kwh for all energy. If the price of coal and natural gas go up though, then electricity could be cheaper because of the new wind. If we build all that wind electricity prices in texas may go negative many nights.

What the paper and analysis does not say is that wind is not displacing fossil fuel? It is only analysizing the cost and gives many real statistics about how much wind displaces.

 

While this is an interesting discussion, I do love the fact that the title of this thread is "2 month anniversary energy stats for 2012 plug-in basic"

 

how about an eight month anniversary?

 

just a slight tangent.

 

where's my anniversary present?

 

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