Mind your business.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 18th, 2024

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  • The study the article is talking about, is a possible solution to cover California’s solar energy glut problem during the day, because the state doesn’t have enough batteries. It is a case study. In trying to do that, it may create other problems, such as infrastructure to get people to charge their cars during the day while they work. This means employers must pay or get somebody to pay for chargers at the work place, adding onto more costs onto the employee and/or employer. Nighttime charging may be cheaper and more convenient, but remember, the study wants you to capture all the wonder solar power during the day, not use potential green house gases from natural gas at night. The more complexity, the more problems you have.



  • The Hill tries to make backup energy as something that brings volatility and rolling blackouts, which makes no sense. Implying they believe that wind and solar should go without backup, and consistent generation at night, which is basically extra capacity. If you are going to need to roll out back up generation in the future, might as well do it now, instead of later. This does a couple of things for the Texas GOP goal of increasing reliability, it increases the responsibility on solar and wind producers to address their own volatility, instead of dumping the volatility on ancillary services, which get less revenue, because of their off-time, accommodating wind and solar. By forcing solar, and wind producers to buy capacity from what would most think as only backup generation, the Legislature wants to force wind, and solar to participate in 24 hour production. A mandate like this makes room for reliable energy rollout, basically more support for natural gas, and presumably batteries, instead of just crowding out the preferred energy types.






  • Solar and wind have lower direct cost. When the wind does not blow, you get no electricity. When the sun does not shine, you get no energy. Nuclear power has the best capacity factor. It is the most reliable energy source. The indirect costs of solar and wind are their intermittency. Their intermittent issues cost money. For a company that promises to deliver electricity, and the wind does not blow? That cost money. If you have an abundance of electricity produced, and nowhere to send it, you lose money. In the case of California, they desperately jettison energy across to Arizona, while Californians pay for the expensive portion of solar energy. California has expensive electricity rates, on average double that of Texas, and has a greater percentage of energy produced from renewable sources than Texas, despite Texas consuming the most energy. That is an example of an indirect cost. To want more distribution paths for wind and solar, you need to build costly transmission lines that need to be replaced every 40 years. You need batteries to store oversupply for times of low supply, just to smooth out the price level across time. If you don’t have batteries for them, you need natural gas plants as back up. Nuclear energy has stability and reliability. With solar and wind, you get what you pay for, which is cheap, unpredictable, and unreliable energy.