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The Christian Science Monitor reports on legislation proposed by Republican law-makers in Wyoming:
The bill would require utilities to use "eligible resources" to meet 95 percent of Wyoming's electricity needs in 2018, and all of its electricity needs in 2019.
Those "eligible resources" are defined solely as coal, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear, oil, and individual net metering.
The latter would encompass houses (and businesses?) with solar, wind or co-generation equipment. Utility-scale generation, however, could face a $10/MWh penalty.
The article notes that
Wyoming is the nation's largest coal producer [...] nearly 90 percent of the electricity generated in Wyoming came from coal in September 2016, the most recent month with available data.
A PDF of the bill, SF0071, is available on the Wyoming legislature's Web site.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by choose another one on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:10PM
Wind and solar PV are already cheaper, _but_ they cannot do base load or on-demand. A true capitalist solution would be based on paying spot-price to those who can only supply power at uncertain times, or fixed price to those who can meet an SLA to supply power a significant % of the time or as required. Such solutions don't go down well with renewable advocates however, because typically the spot price is low (or even -ve happens over this side of the atlantic) when the sun shines and the wind blows, and high when they don't - which would make wind and solar PV uneconomic after all.
In the UK we "resolve" this by paying renewable generators to shut down when there is too much power, and paying for multiple GW (and increasing rapidly) of backup diesel generators when there is too little - neither capitalist nor environment friendly. A capitalist solution would favour base-load and on demand generators when the spot price is highly variable, which would thus act to reduce the variability, instead we subsidise renewables with guaranteed buying contracts when they cannot produce power on demand, thus increasing variability.
The Wyoming bill doesn't sound any closer to capitalism though - because it specifies means of generation instead of specifying the characteristics of the means of generation. Solar thermal with molten salt, for example, can store power for long enough to come close to being a base load generator, and as battery tech improves the same may apply to solar PV and wind.
TL;DR: solar and wind will actually be cheaper when they are economic if paid spot price and/or when they can store their own output to provide base load / on demand power - otherwise you have to account for the cost of storing power somewhere else. Integrated renewable-battery generation is coming, but it ain't there yet, not at lower cost than fossil fuel.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22 2017, @05:25PM
Another approach to the base-load problem is increasing the (geographic) grid-size. The larger the grid, the more likely there will be an available source of intermittent power somewhere on the grid.
Grid size increases will not be sufficient to handle all cases, but they can can make a big dent in the need for storage capacity.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Sunday January 22 2017, @09:12PM
This is true, but unless the wind or solar-PV generator happens to own a grid and can take advantage of the scale, then they are still stuck being paid spot price, and the grid owner can spread the risk of failing to have enough power to meet demand across a larger geographic area.
The trouble is, in winter, a persistent High-pressure system can stay for days covering a large portion of the continental USA, or Europe, delivering low wind speeds couple with low temperatures. You need the back-up power available.
Both wind and solar-PV business cases would be enhanced by suitable grid-level storage options. They don't exist, as yet, although there are many ideas. There is a limit to the amount of pumped-hydro you can build, and it is pretty ecologically damaging, and grid-level battery storage isn't quite there yet. There are plenty of other ideas: compressing air; melting salt and using the stored heat to drive steam turbines later; electrolysing water to make hydrogen and oxygen which is stored and reburned to generate power later - but none have made the transition to full-scale commercial reality suitable for general use by utilities yet. I've even seen a proposal using Zinc-air batteries. The ones to watch are the technologies that are being commercially successful in 'peak-shaving' implementations and which therefore have the possibility of being worked up into full-grid-backup solutions. Peak-shaving is where the money is at the moment, and expensive solutions can pay off: the problem is getting the costs down far-enough to provide full backup.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday January 23 2017, @01:29AM
> I've even seen a proposal using Zinc-air batteries.
Someone has written about it in Wikipedia:
The Eos Energy System battery is about half the size of a shipping container and provides 1 MWh of storage. Con Edison, National Grid, Enel and GDF SUEZ began testing the battery for grid storage. Con Edison and City University of New York are testing a zinc-based battery from Urban Electric Power as part of a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority program. Eos projects that the cost of storing electricity with such EOS batteries is US$160/kwh and that it will provide electricity cheaper than a new natural-gas peaking power station. Other battery technologies range from $400 to about $1,000 a kilowatt-hour.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_batteries#Grid_storage [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @10:10AM
If we can get cost and efficiency of energy storage and distribution cheap enough, then creating regional energy markets similar to the currency or stock markets may make sense. Let the usual market forces reach a stable equilibrium.
Example:
During times of high winds and sun, available power rises, so the price drops. This is what energy storage providers are waiting for, who buy up the power at a low price, with the intention to sell high later. Basically similar to the day traders and other middlemen in finance. This creates demand for the extra power, preventing the price from dropping all the way to zero, and also gives this extra power someplace to go. This allows variable renewable to still make some money during periods of oversupply.
When the wind is calm and the sun is down, available power drops, so price rises and energy storage providers start to sell, making up the shortfall.
Markets can do strange things though, and energy utilities need to be reliable. You don't want blackouts or brownouts due to some market glitch, so I imagine you need a lot of constraints/regulations determining how much an an entity can/should buy or sell at a time.
Also shifting around all this power is more complex and expensive than just changing some numbers in some databases. There would be quite a large amount of overcapacity and wasted power. This is not a problem if all power is clean power from renewables, but can be problematic while fossil fuels are still being used.
Anyone else can chime in with their thoughts on this idea? I might have missed some glaring problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @10:25AM
Capitalist solution would be to give birth to energy bankers business: entrepreneurs who invest in building energy storage facilities, and profit of buying renewable energy when it is plentiful and cheap, then selling it back when renewables are off line and energy price soars. Technology? Whatever works best for them, for the money they have available to put into it: reversible hydro, flywheels, electrolysis/fuel cells, batteries, ...
It is so simple, practically a no-brainer.