14 ms·

Nonsense, they're ahead of the game, as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable productio

Nonsense, they're ahead of the game, as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.

Dylan16807 6y ago
Why is that nonsense? Being ahead of the game on wind doesn't make everything else they do disappear. Stance on petrochemicals isn't a single dial that turns back and forth and affects everything you do in unison.
- fastball 6y ago
  How is one of the most renewable energy places on earth a "bastion of the oil/petrochemical industry"? The answer to the question "where else in the US?" is basically "everywhere else in the US".
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Uh, how is it not? Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state. They also dominate refinery capacity.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.
      - megaman821 6y ago
        Maybe even the energy capital of the world.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        Yes, but if you think they'd put a price on carbon anytime soon then I have a bridge to sell you. They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.
        cryptoquick 6y ago
        Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did. Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion. It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?
        briffle 6y ago
        >Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did. They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold
        fastball 6y ago
        Right... because getting cold is normal in those places.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        > If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers. If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary. Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.
      - rualca 6y ago
        > Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy. Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry. Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.
        fastball 6y ago
        Only because all the original climate change activists were stridently anti-growth / borderline misanthropes. And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.
        undefined1 6y ago
        an opponent wouldn't be the top wind producer in the country and second in solar.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    The fact that Texas has huge exploitable oil reserves is an accident of geology, not a political stance.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      But has resulted in many oil companies being based there, which means lots of money flowing to politicians, which DOES make it a political stance. 'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil? Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.
      - walrus01 6y ago
        And certainly not just domestically either, if you look at where much of the technical expertise came from that set up the modern organization of Saudi Aramco. Houston, mostly.
    - brudgers 6y ago
      If you drive I20 west through Dallas and on toward Midland and Odessa, you will come to the Permian Basin. From there to I20’s merge with I10, the air will smell like a can of motor oil much of the time and at night the land will extend to the horizon with mercury vapor lights of pump jacks every few hundred yards. Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind. And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air. The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.
  - xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    The fact that they have wind farms is entirely irrelevant to the fact that their economy is dependent on oil and their politicians are major proponents of denialism. Stop playing dumb.
slenk 6y ago
Nuclear could scale
- onepointsixC 6y ago
  Yes it can, but it's not practical to have intermittent nuclear to supplement your solar and wind. You want nuclear to be producing at capacity at all times.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Absolute bs. Both nuclear and hydro can and do handle it easily.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Nuclear, yes, but hydro, no. Hydro simply isn’t scalable, once you build out practical sites, you cannot get more of it. This is doubly true in flat and dry places like Texas.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    There is still a lot of hydro potential left in the US. And there is no generation should be anywhere near that centralized.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    I might nitpick and point out that Texas is not flat and dry. It is flat and wet, or dry and hilly. East Texas has the swamps and weather patterns of the traditional gulf southern states. West Texas has mountains higher than anything on the east coast of the US. The rockies don't just dead end in northern NM, there are sky islands and mountain ranges extending all the way down through Mexico. Central Texas has a bit of both, but the water situation is unreliable enough that while there are a fair number of dams and reservoirs with hydroelectric very little of it is used consistently for electric generation. That is because the water value in the reservoir exceeds its electric generation value. Those dams were built mostly for flood control, so they get hammered every couple years and end up opening spillways, then slowly dropping for years as the remaining water gets used up. The hydro only really takes effect when they are sending water from one lake down to the next for water control purposes.
- StillBored 6y ago
  As load following for wind? Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult. Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return. So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two. *(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_reduction_for_Combined_Cycle_Power_Plants.pdf https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)
ineedasername 6y ago
Coal, oil, and nuclear are scalable. What's special about natural gas here? The production method doesn't leave it in a significantly better place just because the actual burn process is cleaner.
- gopalv 6y ago
  > What's special about natural gas here? On/off in seconds as the sun fades or the wind drops to fill in for the missing power output.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Coal isn't great on startup times, but oil can be as good or better: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956. According to that same page, most natural gas plants currently in use utilize a combined cycle system which takes significantly longer than more flexible, but less prevalent, combustion turbines. Though maybe the point is moot: Even if the total environmental impact of natural gas is the same as oil, and leaving aside the geopolitical issues-- natural gas is still cheaper, so if you're going to choose between two bad options then you might as well go with the lower cost one. At which point you just invest in upgrading those combined gas plants to more flexible combustion turbines. However, nuclear isn't completely out of the game here: It may have a very long cold-start time, but in the last decade there's been progress in making it capable of load-following instead of just baseload, especially when it's planned, e.g after sunset. There's certainly other environmental factors there, but if we're worried about decreasing CO2 ASAP, nuclear should probably be part of the conversation.
    - onepointsixC 6y ago
      I absolute agree that nuclear should be part of the conversation, but the biggest barriers to nuclear is regulation and costs. Spending all the effort needed to build a plant just to not run it at maximum capacity all the time would be an unaffordable luxury. It makes much more economic sense to have it be base.
gameswithgo 6y ago
>as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind. Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions. People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.
- onepointsixC 6y ago
  >Nuclear and other storage solutions. Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times. > pump back hydro Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale. > other storage solutions >People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc. I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products. There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible. The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.
  - michaelbrave 6y ago
    I can't find the link anymore, but a few years back they were looking into using pulley systems with large blocks of concrete to store kinetic energy in a similar fashion to pump back. I think something like that in theory could work.

Nonsense, they're ahead of the game, as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind.

Dylan16807 6y ago

Why is that nonsense? Being ahead of the game on wind doesn't make everything else they do disappear. Stance on petrochemicals isn't a single dial that turns back and forth and affects everything you do in unison.

fastball 6y ago
How is one of the most renewable energy places on earth a "bastion of the oil/petrochemical industry"? The answer to the question "where else in the US?" is basically "everywhere else in the US".
- TylerE 6y ago
  Uh, how is it not? Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state. They also dominate refinery capacity.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.
    - megaman821 6y ago
      Maybe even the energy capital of the world.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      Yes, but if you think they'd put a price on carbon anytime soon then I have a bridge to sell you. They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.
      - cryptoquick 6y ago
        Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did. Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion. It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?
        briffle 6y ago
        >Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did. They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold
        fastball 6y ago
        Right... because getting cold is normal in those places.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        > If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers. If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary. Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.
    - rualca 6y ago
      > Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy. Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry. Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.
      - fastball 6y ago
        Only because all the original climate change activists were stridently anti-growth / borderline misanthropes. And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.
      - undefined1 6y ago
        an opponent wouldn't be the top wind producer in the country and second in solar.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  The fact that Texas has huge exploitable oil reserves is an accident of geology, not a political stance.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    But has resulted in many oil companies being based there, which means lots of money flowing to politicians, which DOES make it a political stance. 'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil? Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      And certainly not just domestically either, if you look at where much of the technical expertise came from that set up the modern organization of Saudi Aramco. Houston, mostly.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    If you drive I20 west through Dallas and on toward Midland and Odessa, you will come to the Permian Basin. From there to I20’s merge with I10, the air will smell like a can of motor oil much of the time and at night the land will extend to the horizon with mercury vapor lights of pump jacks every few hundred yards. Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind. And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air. The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.
- xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
  The fact that they have wind farms is entirely irrelevant to the fact that their economy is dependent on oil and their politicians are major proponents of denialism. Stop playing dumb.

slenk 6y ago

Nuclear could scale

onepointsixC 6y ago
Yes it can, but it's not practical to have intermittent nuclear to supplement your solar and wind. You want nuclear to be producing at capacity at all times.

sudosysgen 6y ago

Absolute bs. Both nuclear and hydro can and do handle it easily.

xyzzyz 6y ago
Nuclear, yes, but hydro, no. Hydro simply isn’t scalable, once you build out practical sites, you cannot get more of it. This is doubly true in flat and dry places like Texas.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There is still a lot of hydro potential left in the US. And there is no generation should be anywhere near that centralized.
- StillBored 6y ago
  I might nitpick and point out that Texas is not flat and dry. It is flat and wet, or dry and hilly. East Texas has the swamps and weather patterns of the traditional gulf southern states. West Texas has mountains higher than anything on the east coast of the US. The rockies don't just dead end in northern NM, there are sky islands and mountain ranges extending all the way down through Mexico. Central Texas has a bit of both, but the water situation is unreliable enough that while there are a fair number of dams and reservoirs with hydroelectric very little of it is used consistently for electric generation. That is because the water value in the reservoir exceeds its electric generation value. Those dams were built mostly for flood control, so they get hammered every couple years and end up opening spillways, then slowly dropping for years as the remaining water gets used up. The hydro only really takes effect when they are sending water from one lake down to the next for water control purposes.
StillBored 6y ago
As load following for wind? Technically it might be possible, realistically and economically its not. The hydro could load follow, but as the other pointer notes scaling it would be very difficult. Nukes are on the other side, its much more difficult to load follow with them, particularly economically. The maint and overhead costs are going to tend to be a huge fixed overhead independent of if they are at full capacity or idled. And spinning them back up frequently can take days (as just happened when a sensor tripped at STP1). Your better off building 100% nuke capacity and running it at 100% and dumping the excess energy into syngas production via co2 recapture, desalination, H2 production, or whatever other energy intensive processes that could be used to burn up cheap excess energy while providing a return. So he is right, and I've posted (and been down voted) for noting the exact same thing. The wind in Texas is enabled by the cheap NG peaker plants, some of which aren't even combined cycle. They turn them off when the wind is blowing and the price of energy goes down, and can spin them up very quickly* when the wind dies and energy prices spike. There really isn't a good replacement for them (and no batteries aren't there). But the big negative of course is that your no longer talking about wind being a "green" energy source (or really cheap) if you have to build a MW of gas for ever MW of wind to cover the ~25% of the time they are covering for the lack of wind capacity. All you have really done is slowed the growth in CO2 emission by a decade or two. *(note cold startup of first stage in 20-25 mins https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_reduction_for_Combined_Cycle_Power_Plants.pdf https://etn.global/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Startup_time_r...)

ineedasername 6y ago

Coal, oil, and nuclear are scalable. What's special about natural gas here? The production method doesn't leave it in a significantly better place just because the actual burn process is cleaner.

gopalv 6y ago
> What's special about natural gas here? On/off in seconds as the sun fades or the wind drops to fill in for the missing power output.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Coal isn't great on startup times, but oil can be as good or better: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45956. According to that same page, most natural gas plants currently in use utilize a combined cycle system which takes significantly longer than more flexible, but less prevalent, combustion turbines. Though maybe the point is moot: Even if the total environmental impact of natural gas is the same as oil, and leaving aside the geopolitical issues-- natural gas is still cheaper, so if you're going to choose between two bad options then you might as well go with the lower cost one. At which point you just invest in upgrading those combined gas plants to more flexible combustion turbines. However, nuclear isn't completely out of the game here: It may have a very long cold-start time, but in the last decade there's been progress in making it capable of load-following instead of just baseload, especially when it's planned, e.g after sunset. There's certainly other environmental factors there, but if we're worried about decreasing CO2 ASAP, nuclear should probably be part of the conversation.
  - onepointsixC 6y ago
    I absolute agree that nuclear should be part of the conversation, but the biggest barriers to nuclear is regulation and costs. Spending all the effort needed to build a plant just to not run it at maximum capacity all the time would be an unaffordable luxury. It makes much more economic sense to have it be base.

gameswithgo 6y ago

>as natural gas turbines are the only currently existing scalable solution which could potentially handle variable production of Solar and Wind. Nuclear, pump back hydro and other storage solutions. People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc.

onepointsixC 6y ago
>Nuclear and other storage solutions. Nuclear is great for base load, but their prohibitive upfront expenses makes load-following wildly impractical. You want to be running them at full capacity at all times. > pump back hydro Not scalable. That there are some very specific oppporunities to use pump back is great, but what are you going to do in Texas? It just doesn't scale. > other storage solutions >People like to explain how massively expensive and vast the storage solution would need to be, I get it, trillions of dollars. Sorta like how hard it is to produce all the oil and natural gas we produce with amazing large scale engineering projects like fracking and deep sea oil wells, supertankers to transport it, etc etc. I would hope that scalability would be something that HN readers understand. We're not just talking Trillions of dollars to build out the battery networks. We're talking about spending trillions of dollars periodically as those batteries are consumables. We're talking millions of tons of toxic waste being produced as by products. There's a reason why no one has done it yet, it's just not feasible. The best solution would be adopting France's design of majority Nuclear. If you must use variable sources like wind and solar then have Nuclear as a baseline and supplement the intermittence with nat gas.
- michaelbrave 6y ago
  I can't find the link anymore, but a few years back they were looking into using pulley systems with large blocks of concrete to store kinetic energy in a similar fashion to pump back. I think something like that in theory could work.