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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: 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]