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Putting on the side the shady tactics that the energy company used to get a gas peaker close to houses... For context: "Arizona households use 66 million Btu
by llsf 2y ago
Putting on the side the shady tactics that the energy company used to get a gas peaker close to houses...
For context:
"Arizona households use 66 million Btu of energy per home, 26% less than the U.S. average.
The combination of lower than average site consumption of all energy, but above average electricity which is relatively expensive, results in Arizona households spending 3% less for energy than the U.S. average."
source: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/state_briefs/pdf/az.pdf https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/sta...
So people in Arizona are using a lot less energy than the rest of the country, and only pay marginally less. Someone is making even more money on the energy bill.
And yes, solar is not perfect, and sometimes one needs some extra electricity on the grid (peakers). For a 16,000 household community, maybe batteries should be considered ? It is not like they have an heavy industry requiring high energy consumption 24/7. It is a small community (houses, and RV parks).
For instance, a Tesla Megapack 2 costs $1.5M and delivers 3.854 MWh so to replace the 98MWh gas peaker, we would need 25 x Megabuck 2, for a cost of $37.5M. How much the gas peaker is going to cost ? We can run the cost on maintenance too, which I suspect would also favor the battery solution.
- alfiopuglisi 2y agoA Tesla Megapack 2 can provide about 2MW of power, so you need 50 of them to replace the gas peaker. And since they have a 3.8MWh capacity, they only go for about two hours before being depleted, so if you want to cover the whole night when solar is not producing, you need 6x more, or 300 in total.
- llsf 2y agoWe are talking about 16,000 residential town in Arizona, with no heavy industry, I doubt they would need full capacity for 12hrs straight at night. But in any case, it seems appropriate to compare to the cost and maintenance of 98MWh gas peaker.