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the thing is, wind in general has far surpassed its expectations.
by supernovae 4y ago
the thing is, wind in general has far surpassed its expectations.
- bequanna 4y agoHow so? Our transition to wind and other intermittent sources instead of building base load is creating a worsening reliability crisis. It seems that people forgot that we still don't have many good ways to store energy.
- supernovae 4y agoWe never transitioned, wind was just the most economical growth opportunity for generation and it works really well in that regard. Just because we have increased wind doesn’t mean we don’t need to increase base generation. Not sure why you frame it like this.
- bequanna 4y ago> most economical growth opportunity for generation Umm, I think you're missing something big here. The only reason this was "economical" were huge tax benefits/subsidies. Decentralized energy production that involves a bunch of large moving parts will NEVER be as efficient as centralized energy production.
- Paradigma11 4y agoBecause it is clear who is paying for the additional wind generation, it is not clear who is going to pay for the mostly unused backup base generation.
- Gasp0de 4y agoIn Germany, we (via the grid operators) literally pay these power plants just for providing backup capacity. Another idea could be paying companies to stop consuming power in times of high demand. Things like cold storage facilities can easily shift their power consumption by a few hours.
- juve1996 4y agoWhich is why the Texas model fails in this scenario. It's unprofitable to have emergency backup load, so it doesn't get built.
- bequanna 4y agoBingo. "Emergency Base Load" isn't a thing and would never make financial sense.
- supernovae 4y agoThe reason Texas has failed is because this state is a state of excess and they’re proud of fact. If we incentivized efficiency we’d be much better off but instead we champion mocking that as something Californian.
- EricE 4y agoCA is actually facing rolling blackouts for exactly the same reasons, yet it's always amusing that TX only ever seems to get talked about here :p
- deskamess 4y agoCA had a blackout for non-safety (fire) issues recently?
- mrguyorama 4y agoCA's system has issues because it is a 100% captured monopoly and have utterly refused to fix problems that were identified by Enron in the 90s. Meanwhile, 48 more states in the union have a variety of significantly more or less regulated energy sectors than either Texas or California and how many of them have rolling blackouts every year? I don't know why people keep pretending Texas's and California's problems are anything more than the stupidity, or willfull negligence of their respective governments.