Featured Cali Public Utility Deals a Blow to Natural Gas' Electricity

we're just catching up on ng out here, wait until they get the new news!

 

Any push to stop fracking is good, any push to use waves, wind and solar is good.

 

Yeah, well, this is a bid to keep electricity expensive in california :-(

Building a new ccgt and running it for 30 years is much less expensive than the current cali plan of importing lots of power. In texas the levalized cost is about 5 cents/kwh to build a new plant and run it, maybe it costs 6 cents or 6.5 cents in strangly regulated california. California instead is keeping up a bunch of dinasaur steam natural gas plants and importing a great deal of power. Now keeping these old steam plants running is great for the utilities, but bad for the state as they can't cycle. They cost about 3 cents/kwh of natural gas versus 2 cents (of that 5) for a new ccgt plant, but they get to force higher utilization on rate payers. The decission to keep these old plants going and send a lot of out of state power through the grid increases co2, and will increase future costs versus building now.

Total System Electric Generation
How much power? Currently 36.5% comes from in state and out of state natural gas, 4% from out of state coal, and 9.1% from nuclear (which will be shut down soon as its unsafe). 14.39% is unspecified out of state (which probably means natural gas or coal), and another 2% is out of state hydro, which really is out of state natural gas, relabeled and shipped to california for more money.

In other words, we have a sham going on preventing construction of new ccgt natural gas plants in state, because the state wants to pretend out of state power is clean.

Hey the batteries will work well with new natural gas power plants and an improved grid, don't get me wrong, but when diablo canyon nuclear plant closes in 2025, it would be nice if the state imported less power, and was less dependant on undependable rains. There is strong demand when the sun is not shining, the state could build more wind which is less expensive for the grid, but the solar push seems like the political thing today. Solar + batteries costs at least 3x more than natural gas ccgt plus wind.

 

I think you can pretty much add the whole Northeast in a similar situation, the RGGI (eg; CARB) states can import from Canada and Pa. etc so they are going carbon-free in state, but you can't really scale it up because its based on being able to import power.