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The article does not mention whether this price includes the cost of the peaking facility necessary to cover wind intermittence. The PPA price usually would no
by hcurtiss 8y ago
The article does not mention whether this price includes the cost of the peaking facility necessary to cover wind intermittence. The PPA price usually would not. Unless you have excess peaking capacity, bringing a big new wind farm online usually means you need a new big gas peaking facility.
- Retric 8y agoCoal power plants also need peaking support as base load power is not load following. Yet, because they are cheap enough that's not been a problem in the past. Wind/Solar is thus filling the exact same base load niche of cheap power.
- sp332 8y agoCoal only needs peaker plants when demand spikes. Wind and solar additionally need peakers when production slumps.
- Gibbon1 8y agoSolar though produces power roughly in phase with the demand curve. Wind tends to wreck havoc on base load operations because it often produces a lot of power at night. Since wind is cheap the solution is to retire coal fired plants.
- theptip 8y ago> Solar though produces power roughly in phase with the demand curve. I don't think that's true -- load peaks in the evening, while solar peaks in the early afternoon. This issue (as pertains to the mismatch between solar/wind production and grid demand) has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
- Retric 8y ago1,000 miles of power lines east or west pushes solar power +/- 1 hour earlier or later at the cost of ~3% efficiency. It's only nighttime that's a real problem but again, night time has lower overall demand. Which means the duck curve is mostly a non issue over any large land mass. Alt least relative to coal / nuclear base load power plants.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoPlus the cost of the power lines and related equipment.
- gandreani 8y agoExactly! That's probably %40-25 of the cost in our utility bills. The maintenance of these is never considered
- Retric 8y agoUS has 700,000 miles of power lines, a few HVDC can send a lot of power east/west while being a rounding error.
- Retric 8y agoSort of, if you want to send power north then sending power north east takes less extra lines then sending power east then nort. So, generall sending power 1,000 miles west requires up to but not nessisarily 1,000 miles of power lines.
- Gibbon1 8y agoLittle goggling showed a proposed 3000 MW transmission line coming in at about $1.6M/mile. At a 1000 miles that would be 1.6X1000 or $1.6 billion $1.6b/3000W is $0.53/W capital cost. That doesn't seem crazy.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- natch 8y agoGood thing batteries are getting better and cheaper. Too bad coal is so dirty.
- sp332 8y agoIt's a race to see whether it's cheaper to buy more batteries or build extra solar panels to cover the afternoon gap.
- _ph_ 8y agoAs coal plants cannot be turned down quickly when the demand goes down, they always depend on peaker plants which can be shut off quickly. If you wanted to supply the peak demand with coal, you would overload the net when demand drops.
- lukeify 8y agoIf only coal and gas-fired power plants factored in health & climate externalities into their levelized cost per kWh too...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Animats 8y agoFor oil, we should add in all the US spends on Middle East wars.
- ars 8y agoAnd Russia. It's amazing how many opponents of the US have economies that are dependent on Oil.
- ph0rque 8y agoSheer coincidence, I tell you!
- fein 8y agoWhere's all the oil we acquired from destabilizing the ME? It would make sense if the US currently controlled all the oil fields in Iraq and Kuwait, but we don't.
- Brakenshire 8y agoOil is fungible, it doesn’t matter whether it is burnt in America or sold by American companies, it matters if the market price is cheap.
- hueving 8y agoThat's irrelevant. Unless you can show that the in place regimes would not have extracted the oil (something not even Norway can resist), the wars had no impact on its presence in the market (other than perhaps a delay during instability).
- safgasCVS 8y agoShun the non-believer! But you're not wrong. These articles give false hope. Average capacity of an offshore farm sits at 40% annually in best case scenarios while a typical LNG plant would be what around 80-90% capacity. So you need to build the same LNG plant locally anyways as a backup and switch it on and off as the wind changes. How is this sensible? Ok maybe you wouldnt need to build the additional coal/gas plant if USA had a good network to shuffle electricity across states but even with your terrible infrastructure everyone complains about you cant seem to get a basic spending bill passed to fix potholes, so these people think you're going to be building these trans-continental cables to trade electricity? No luck.
- gandreani 8y agoThey exist actually. For example, when California wind drives prices down to <0, it gets given away to nearby states (I think mostly Nevada)
- hueving 8y agoA wind plant that burst between not enough and too much is not the same thing as a constant source. Giving away energy to Nevada is an example of a failure, not a stable source.
- gameswithgo 8y agoif you insist on your limitations, they will be yours to keep.
- gehsty 8y agoThe price given is the subsidy, not the cost of construction. I’ve worked on multiple European offshore wind farms and no new gas facilitiy was constructed.... The switching on these things is insane, I think in the UK the nationa grid can switch off an entire +500MW facility in a couple of seconds.