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In Houston, the "Oil and Gas Capital of the World", I buy 100% wind power from Green Mountain. They're not the only game in town for 100% renewables, either. Gr
by cestith 10y ago
In Houston, the "Oil and Gas Capital of the World", I buy 100% wind power from Green Mountain. They're not the only game in town for 100% renewables, either. Green Mountain themselves do have mixed plans, but mine's 100% wind. It's not the cheapest power in town (some retail electric providers go below $0.04 per kWh for the first year of your contract or such if you don't care) but with Texas by law having a competitive retail electricity market there's a lot of choice.
- paul_f 10y agoI have a hard time believing this. What does Green Mountain use when the wind dies? Do they have a grid storage solution?
- problems 10y agoThey probably just trade it. Increase their supply so they can sell enough excess back to the grid to make up the cost later. You effectively get 100% wind, but in reality you might have got 80% wind, 20% gas and sold some wind back to the grid. It's a good interrim solution at least.
- cestith 10y agoAs problems stated, there's probably a bit of arbitrage going on behind the scenes. However, Texas also has a well connected grid across the rather large state that is only weakly connected to other grids. There's a lot of wind in Texas and a lot of wind power. On an average day 12% of the entire state is powered by wind. Some days it's 40%. Sometimes wind produces so much energy that the spot price goes negative and wind farms are paid to disconnect so they don't overrun the transmission system.