NYTimes - Why a Big Utility Is Embracing Wind and Solar

[burfman]

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Well it looks like the air is going to get cleaner for the planet in-spite of what anyone does or says. It can happen fast or slow depending on the politics - (but we can forget about 'clean coal' being a viable option due to the economics regardless of what the commander in chief says), The greening of electricity production will happen....... so score one for the planet..... and breath a little bit easier

Burfman......

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Source: NY Times

Xcel Energy is a utility company with millions of electric customers in the middle of the country, from Texas to Michigan. In booming Colorado, the company asked for proposals to construct big power plants using wind turbines and solar panels.

The bids have come in so low that the company will be able to build and operate the new plants for less money than it would have to pay just to keep running its old, coal-burning power plants.

You read that right: In parts of the country, wind and solar plants built from scratch now offer the cheapest power available, even counting old coal, which was long seen as unbeatable.

Xcel, Colorado’s biggest power company, has pitched a plan to regulators that will involve replacing two large coal-burning units with renewable energy and possibly some natural gas. The company expects to save tens of millions of dollars as a result. Power bills in Colorado have been falling recently, and they are likely to fall further with this plan.



[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/opinion/utility-embracing-wind-solar.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region|

[RandomAccess]

1. This is such wonderful news

It gives me a smidgen of hope for the planet.

[hunter]

2. "...possibly some natural gas." Well there's an understatement.

This wonderful renewable energy economy doesn't work without natural gas because the sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, and the rain doesn't always fall as expected.

A purely renewable energy economy would look nothing like the high energy industrial consumer economy so many of us now enjoy.

In the long run an expanding hybrid fracked gas / renewable energy economy is just as deadly as a coal economy.

An analogy would be cigarette smoking. Sure, going from a three pack a day habit to a one or two pack a day habit is an improvement, but if you really want to reduce the odds your smoking will kill you you have to quit smoking.

The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels. Wind and solar energy will not magically displace fossil fuels. To the extent hybrid electric power systems are engines of economic growth, they'll actually increase the use of fossil fuels.

There are billions of people on earth who would love to live as the more affluent people of Colorado do, solar panels on their roofs, wind turbines on their hillsides, consuming huge amounts of fracked natural gas and oil. Thus the mass extinction event accelerates.

[NNadir]

3. It's lipstick on their gas plant pig.

According to the New York Times, we're undergoing a wind and solar "revolution."

It just goes to show that while they may report political issues correctly, they have no engineers and no scientists among their journalists.

As I am pointing out every time I hear this marketing for dangerous fossil fuels, the World Energy Outlook shows that the fastest growing source of energy on the planet this century was not natural gas - even if it's the fastest growing source of energy in the United States - nor was it so called "renewable energy." It was coal.

IEA 2017 World Energy Outlook, Table 2.2 page 79 (MTOE converted to exajoules.)

Both coal and natural gas's growth dwarfed the total amount of combined wind and solar energy ever put together in 50 years of mindless cheering for so called "renewable energy" which is, by the way, not actually "renewable" and is certainly not "green."

According to the link above, dangerous natural gas's share of the planetary energy profile grew by 39.2 exajoules from from 86.7 exajoules in the year 2000 to 126.9 exajoules in the year 2016.

Coal, which people continue to lie to themselves about, calling it "dead" when it is no such thing, grew by 60.5 exajoules from 96.8 exajoules to 157.2 exajoules in 2016.

The so called "renewable energy" scam, at a cost of more than two trillion dollars for wind and solar alone in just the last ten years, grew from a trivial 2.5 exajoules in 2000 to a still trivial 9.4 exajoules in 2016, a growth of 6.4 exajoules but in the big lie of the so called "renewable energy" "alternate facts" language, BY 275%%%%%.

In 2000, world energy consumption was a total 420.2 exajoules. In 2016 it was 576 exajoules. 83% of the growth of 156 exajoules was represented by new dangerous fossil fuel consumption.

If anyone thinks this is really great news, they actually haven't bothered to look the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

All the "feel good" news stories about how wonderful solar and wind energy is merely represents the general public lying to themselves, and slapping one another on their backs over delusional reports like this one.

In the year 2000, dangerous fossil fuels, including gas, oil and coal provided a total of 337.1 exajoules. In 2016 they provided a total of 466.8 exajoules. The 129.7 exajoules increase is the equivalent of adding 1 and 1/3 new United States to the world energy disaster.

Unless we stop lying to ourselves and cheering for bullshit like this article, the environmental disaster we are experiencing will continue to degrade at the accelerating rate we have seen all through the 21st century.

[Finishline42]

4. Xcel is looking long term

They are in an area where wind is prevalent and every time there's enough wind to produce power it's going to be used which means a fossil fuel plant gets less use. Reduce the number of hours a coal plant gets used and that increases the operational cost for that electricity. Couple that with the fact the wind farms don't have to pay for fuel and that windmills are getting cheaper and more efficient means that the closing of two coal power plants is just the beginning.

Interesting that the biggest nuclear supporter on this board is calling this a fraud as Iowa goes from 30% of it's electricity from wind to 50%.

The hermit says you have to have natgas to support wind and solar but totally ignores the increasing use of batteries to bridge the gap.

The clear trend is that wind and solar is getting cheaper (just like flat screen TV's) and is already at the point where's it's cheaper to build and bring online in some areas of the country than it is to operate coal and nuclear.

It's a process that will continue regardless of what the idiot in the WH does.

[hunter]

5. Batteries? Are you kidding?

Batteries are used to fill in the gaps between the wind or sun cutting out and the fossil fuel plants spinning up. Big battery installations are useful wherever the local fossil fueled power grid is sluggish and unable to cope with fluctuating inputs of wind and solar. The energy storage capacity of huge battery instalations is often measured in minutes, not hours or days. This is especially true in places like Australia where three-quarters of the electricity is generated in coal plants.

The limitations of battery storage are true at any scale, from an RV parked out on the desert to a regional electric grid.

Every affluent person's off-grid solar house I've seen has a "backup" fossil fuel source covering a third and usually more of the home's total energy budget, fossil fuel use far in excess of most humans.

Wind power or not, Iowa still relies heavily on coal. Batteries are not going to make that go away. Natural gas might.

[Finishline42]

6. Points well taken Hunter with the exception to how you limit their usefulness.

You seem to limit batteries usefulness in relation to just wind and solar power generation. But the fact is to keep our grid stabilized there are coal and natgas plants sitting on ready to provide power just in case. That means fossil fuels are being burnt just to keep the boilers hot enough to produce the steam needed to turn the turbines to produce the electricity ASAP. This is a function that batteries can fulfil more efficiently even if you use off peak fossil fuel plants to charge them.

Here's a story about what I'm talking about - showed up on twitter today BTW.

On islanded (or isolated) grids with growing renewable penetrations, grid operators often struggle to maintain system stability. Operators in places as diverse as Ireland, Puerto Rico and Australia frequently rely on inertial response from thermal power plants like coal or gas-fired generators to balance sudden mismatches between supply and demand. However, recent research from Northern Ireland’s Queens University Belfast (QUB) finds that battery-based energy storage can provide inertial response for system reliability much more efficiently, at a lower cost and with substantially reduced emissions than a much larger quantity of thermal generation.

QUB’s research found that just 360 megawatts (MW) of battery-based energy storage could provide the equivalent stabilisation to Ireland’s All-Island electricity system as would normally be provided by 3,000MW of conventional thermal generation. That shift to batteries could save up to €19 million (US$22.5 million) annually and could achieve approximately 1.4 million tonnes of annual CO2 savings.

https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/digital-inertia-energy-storage-can-stabilise-grid-with-1-10-the-capacity-of