Here is a thoughtfully done video about EVâs & their practicality.
As far as I am concerned the main players are Hydro, Nuclear, Coal, Gas & Oil.
That is where the money should be invested.
Here is a thoughtfully done video about EVâs & their practicality.
As far as I am concerned the main players are Hydro, Nuclear, Coal, Gas & Oil.
That is where the money should be invested.
Anyway, the main reason gasoline is more expensive is because of speculation and profit seeking, not really supply.
Iâd like to see a lot more solar on homes and in well planned new communities. Stick solar on every roof and some fields. Peaks summer usage just seems to happen with peak sunshine. As for âitâs about the moneyâ of course it is. I donât work for free not many either do. If alternate energy makes money then it sells. Oil companies have been dumping lots of money into alternatives. USA infrastructure is not properly maintained no hiding that.
@texas shooter, thatâs not what I meant.
I meant it in the fact that there are a lot of conflicts of interests and dirty money being thrown around.
Very few large entities are playing by the rules, or modify the rules to make it harder for other players to do stuff.
Hugh piles of stinking rules. My blame goes mostly to the forth branch of government, bureaucracy. No body writes a 14,000 page spending Bill without an army of paper pushing Bureaucrats. How many laws and counting? Nice thing about bureaucrats is they write rules that get enforced as law with real penalties. Look at all the commerce codes, pork on most bills. Bureaucrats breed new government jobs for themselves by themselves.
When your at the top of the food chain your legal department submits the bids that few can for contracts. Having worked for County government I prayed that the second lowest bidder would win just for better than average gear. My old department is sitting on several hundred unissued Tasers. Why, well Taser has no competitor so we didnât have to get multiply bids. So Tasers got purchased. But it gets better, there are multiple holster makers for the weapon and we need at least three for our county purchasing department to release the funds. No body but Taser made the bid, this was 5 years ago. So Iâm a little leery of any Bureaucrat.
Anyway, my Texan friends, I suggest you prepare for stuff
Why were there 6 plants all offline at once in TX? Doesnât anyone coordinate these things? And why so many issues recently?
EV owners are going to be in for a shock in the next year or so. Natural gas prices in 2020 were down to ~$2.00/MMBtu. Itâs currently $6.78. If you think the electric companies are going to feel sorry for their customers and eat the difference, I have some great swamp land in Florida to sell you.
@bobvoeh We used to call them Flicker Power & Light over here and they certainly lived up to the name. While they have gotten better since getting spanked hard by the 2004/2005 hurricanes, their grid on the west coast of Florida is sorely lacking. Still lots of outages. Worse, they manage to pump out some of the goofiest power on their lines, to the point that even commercial UPS units canât seem to handle it, and Lord knows Iâve tried many different ones at my workplace, and they all still drop the ball when FPL goes weird.
I do remember the rolling blackouts we used to have back in the 1980s with FPL, particularly when it was very cold out. Electric resistance heating uses a ton of kWh and when you normally use heat <14 days/year, it makes no sense to install anything better.
I was in the utility industry many moons ago. What people donât realize is that it is such an amazing human achievement! The largest machine in human history by far. Everything east of the rockyâs is interconnected and synchronized to 1/60 of a second â except for TX!
Truly much modernization is needed to accommodate intermittent and highly distributed sources but the fact remains that the grid is an unbelievably powerful machine that offers nearly unfathomable benefits to humanity.
I donât understand the thinking of TX to choose to reject this amazing human advancement. Then again they allow the level of genius that will allow gigantic power plants to pretend that they donât have to account for the fact that water will freeze because it so rarely does in TX.
They donât plan for âthe 100yr stormâ. Never do. Airports that rarely see snow donât invest in plows, deicers, jet-dryers, etc. Sewers are only scaled for heavy rains, not monsoons. Cell networks expect to have dropped calls on Motherâs Day because they donât plan for 100% usage, but less than that.
Problems happen when you do get that 100yr storm.
In some respects, the US electrical grid is a victim of its own success. In many areas itâs consistently reliable. As a result, people arenât prepared for it to not be there.
In my area in Florida, not so much. Outages happen weekly here and I know quite a few people who have generators.
I remember when I was working in Alaska for a decent-size company (500 employees) and was shocked that they didnât have generators. They looked at me like I had 3 heads for asking. Even when the 7.1 earthquake hit in 2018, power outages were absolutely minimal, just a blink at the office.
And yes, most (all?) Florida airports lack de-icing equipment. They employ various techniques, usually just dragging the frosty airplane into the sun with the leading edges facing the sun. Usually doesnât take long.
Well the TX controlling board ERCOT has made some huge blunders. And is likely to continue that trend.
But, in 2019 - 28% of the total wind energy in the US was generated in Texas.
Thereâs like over 33,000Mw from wind.
There are regions that have windmills as far as the eye can see and then some.
Take a look at all the wind farms
But I agree with others. Every house out here should have solar on the roof.
Havenât seen a cloud in weeks.
All the Best,
Jeff
Iâm not entirely familiar with Texasâ climate. Iâm in Florida, have had solar for 25 or so years, and actually have to admit that for Florida, grid-tie solar isnât exactly great for reliability or the environment.
At first blush, solar looks like itâd be the ideal power source for âThe Sunshine Stateâ but itâs far from it. Sure, as the sun comes out it gets hot and people turn on their aircons, and the solar cells start pumping out electrons. Works great until clouds form from the heat and humidity, which happens every summer day in Florida. Shade a solar cell 20% and youâll get an ~80% drop in output. Multiply this by thousands of solar installations and MW of power input in the grid suddenly disappears. BUT the load on the grid doesnât.
Large commercial power plants like the utilities operate were designed for efficiency over everything. Power companies are usually for-profit, so this makes sense. Similarly, less fuel burn translates into environmental benefits to keep the regulators happy. Win:win. Power plants like to run at consistent outputs. Unlike a geared car engine, these things are large turbines which take some time to ramp up / ramp down to make adjustments. Add in renewables such as solar and wind and their variability. Remember those clouds in the previous paragraph? Yep, these power plants canât handle those. So how to utilities handle the gap? âPeakingâ plants. a.k.a. diesel generators. Or worse, heavy fuel-oil ones. So all of that energy which was being âcleanlyâ produced by the solar panels will now be produced by the most inefficient and dirtiest power a utility has. Oops.
Iâd imagine out in Phoenix solar might be great if you can keep the panels cool enough.
We have weather similar to Phoenix.
Solar panels are very popular here, but I don't think they have to be cooled.
@raccoon city: Iâm not sure about âmodernâ panels, as mine are quite old, but my panels put out noticeably more power when theyâre cool(ver) versus broiling in the sun. On my old setup they were directly attached to the dark shingle roof. Moved them to the tin roof on the patio with a large gap between them & the roof and theyâre definitely putting out more power because of it.
Not as expensive as I thought. 5.5kwh there I have another 100 cells ordered to bring it to 7.4kwh, 5 to 6 bill cycles and it will pay for itself. I already have the solar panels and 25kva genset for backup. Just needed a battery.
Where are you getting the cells from?
Itâs a bit more complicated than that. Load is also variable and as one solar panel goes into clouds another comes out etc. No doubt that both solar and wind are more variable than load and certainly more so than generators. In any case the grid simply must be balanced! Doubtful to me that the net effects of peaking plants in terms of pollution or efficiency are anywhere near a net negative compared to what solar puts into the equation. However, storage must be integrated into the grid in order for renewables to reach their potential.
The scale of base load generation, which can not ramp quickly with load and also requires peaking plants, is quite mind boggling to me. I worked for a smallish utility. One of our âbigâ plants was a 360 MW coal plant. In terms of the ability to come on line consider that when it was taken down for maintenance it required something like 45,000 gal of fuel oil to act more or less like kindling in order to get the machine up to temperature so that it could maintain proper coal combustion!
For stable, reliable, 24/7-producible power, thorium is probably the answer. Iâve read that thorium nuclear plants wonât have runaway meltdowns like uranium, and thorium canât be used for weapons. The US has a 1,000 year supply of thorium in the ground.
The technology exists now, but it needs to be scaled up. And imagine building modular thorium generators that can be shipped to third world countries. They could even power the cargo ships (say good-bye to the diesel burners).
I found the batteries online and brought most of their limited stock.
You have Base load and minimum load. You hear lots of half truths about this and it doesnât apply to solar or wind or batteries because the AC wave is generated electronically. With a synchronous generator it is RPM therefore need a stable load.
Base load is the minimum load needed on a turbine to run efficiently. If a coal fired steam turbines load drops to a certain point it needs to switch to oil.
I have left the power generation industry and donât want to have to pay retailers or generators for something I can do myself. They can go jump
Thorium reactors produce uranium-232 that are high-energy gamma emitter penetrating much further than lower energy beta. Good news only has a half-life of 68.9 years. Also produces iodine-129 that has a half-life of 15.7 million years and is readily absorbed by creatures with Thyroids. Iodine-129 is a cancer causing radioisotope. Probably not going to be given to third world countries.