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I was replacing your model with actual data... Not suggesting the link I gave you was old data. The important thing to note is the shape and peaks of the renewa
by StillBored 4y ago
I was replacing your model with actual data... Not suggesting the link I gave you was old data. The important thing to note is the shape and peaks of the renewable data. You can grow those curves but you can't really change their shape much. Solar is going to be offline by 9PM 100% of the time, and when the wind doesn't blow for a week at a time, and rolling blackouts start people will question why their bills are going up, and the reliability is going down.
Anyway, I'm sure solar will be built, and the graph will look similar to the past 15 years of retail pricing.. AKA the solar will suppress the energy investment in other things until it fails catastrophically and retail customers are left holding the bills for all those NG plants that were quietly going out of business until the "black swan" event gave them some breathing room while simultaneously killing a few hundred more Texans and jumping the utility rates up again to pay for all the deferred maintenance on the generators of last resort.
https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/resources/historical-rates https://www.texaselectricityratings.com/resources/historical...
Bottom line, while presumably installing a lot of really cheap energy Texas energy costs were going up, a little less than double if you factor in inflation.
Which makes sense, if you add the cost of the wind+NG, someone has to pay the bill for building surplus supply, and now we are going to have solar too, so best case a ~3x peak energy overbuild, while simultaneously not having enough to cover actual peak load when the weather doesn't cooperate.
So same as always, some smart investor will make off with a bunch of money from the solar plants, the carbon emissions might decrease slightly, still leaving us with one of the dirtiest energy generation mixes, and likely 3x higher energy bills than just using natural gas 100% of the time.
A winning formula for sure. Unless of course someone actually invents a battery technology that is cheaper than NG plants and can literally store the 10's of TW's required to bridge those black swan weather events that seem to be happening more and more frequently as we continue pumping CO2 in the atmosphere while playing around the edges with wind/solar.
- marze 4y agoAre you trying to say building more solar is a bad idea, and building more of something else would be better? What would that be, specifically? Texas needs a bunch of solar, a bit of battery, that would cover peaks due to air conditioning. More insulation specified in residential building codes wouldn't hurt. Once most Texans have EVs that charge with solar, and plug in at night and feed to the grid, the solution is even more obvious.
- pfdietz 4y agoTexas also should expose real time variations in rates to all consumers.
- StillBored 4y agoMore than this? https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices https://www.ercot.com/mktinfo/prices edit: As I post it, there is a prime example of how people wave away transmission issues when talking about green energy. The wind farms on the coast near MX have a negative price (-11 to -33) while most of the state is sitting at ~90, and there is a problem in the west/central part of the state where its $180.
- pfdietz 4y agoI believe retail customers are not being exposed to those spikes. Correct me if I'm wrong? Solar can be placed almost anywhere in Texas, and in particular can be placed near where demand is expected. Transmission costs for it should be less than for large central power plants.
- StillBored 4y agoYou wouldn't build a solar farm particularly close to any of the major TX cities which sprawl for long distances because the land is worth more than the solar panels.
- pfdietz 4y agoA 10MW+ solar installation costs > $100,000/acre. You can find land within 200 miles of the major cities of Texas for far less than that (and probably much closer than 200 miles). Or you can go far to the west to get land at maybe $1000/acre, but then transmission cost goes up. If land cost ever were a serious constraint on solar, solar would have become so cheap that it would already have destroyed all the competition.