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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the gasoline-alley dept.

Thomas Elias writes in the Los Angeles Daily News that just one week before many California motorists began paying upwards of $4.30 per gallon for gasoline, oil tanker Teesta Spirit left Los Angeles headed for ports on the west coast of Mexico carrying more 300,000 barrels of gasoline refined in California. At a time when oil companies were raising prices by as much as $1 per gallon in some regions, oil companies like Chevron and Phillips 66 shipped about 100 million gallons of gasoline out of California. "Oil refiners have kept the state running on empty and now they are sending fuel refined in California abroad just as the specter of low inventories drives huge price increases," says Jamie Court, president of the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.

According to Elias as the oil companies were shipping out that fuel, they reaped unprecedented profits reportedly approaching $1.50 for every gallon of gasoline they sold at the higher prices. "Gasoline prices are determined by market forces, and individuals who understand how commodity markets work have recently testified that those markets are working as they should," responded Catherine Reheis-Boyd, President of the Western States Petroleum Association, to charges of price gouging. "All of the many government investigations into gasoline markets in recent years have concluded that supply and demand are the primary reason gas prices go up and down." Kathleen Foote, who heads up the antitrust division at the California attorney general's office, agreed that the industry operates like an oligopoly in the state. But proving price fixing is difficult in a field where only a few players exist. "This system is made to break because oil refineries keep it running on empty," concludes Court. "They have every incentive to create a price spike like this."


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:05AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:05AM (#215354) Journal

    The average electricity price in the USA was somewhere in the range 8-17¢/kWh in 2012. Apparently it's higher now, though I don't have numbers for that. Let's pick 10¢ as a rough ballpark to work with. If the cells cost $4.72/W installed, then that's $4,720/kW. At 10¢/kWh, you need 47,200h of generation to reach break even. That's about 16 years, assuming 8 hours a day of sunlight on average. If electricity costs 20¢, it's 8 years. In some parts of the USA, it's closer to 4 years. Of course, if you're getting solar panels installed on your roof, then you may as well install solar water heating at the same time, which saves a lot more if you live somewhere where heating, rather than cooling, is important for a house.

    The UK is currently cutting solar subsidies because the panels are cheap enough that relatively small commercial installations (a smallish field, not a rooftop) are very profitable and the subsidies are just sending taxpayers' money into the pockets of investors who would still make a good return without it. They've done their job and got the panels down to an affordable price.

    The problem with home installations is picking the time to buy. Cheap panels have gone from about 8% efficient to about 12% in the last few years, with some expensive ones at 21-22%. It looks as if 20% is quite feasible for mass production, 25% might be too. The theoretical maximum for photovoltaic is around 45% and getting near 40% is very hard. If you can buy 20% efficient panels in two years for the same price that you can buy 12% efficient panels today, then it may be better to wait. New panels come with a guarantee of 80% of their initial efficiency for around 20-25 years, so you're not going to want to replace them soon after you've installed them. This doesn't apply to commercial installations, where the installation costs per Watt are a lot lower.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:51AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:51AM (#215367) Journal

    The average electricity price in the USA was somewhere in the range 8-17¢/kWh in 2012.

    "Energy prices never go down." (grin)
    Seriously speaking, theoretically is not impossible, in practice however...

    That's about 16 years, assuming 8 hours a day of sunlight on average. If electricity costs 20¢, it's 8 years.

    I got my 4.2kW with about $1.6/W about 2-3 years ago, when the energy price was 22c/kWh. It is now 28c/kWh. As I'm a net exporter, ditching $1300/y on my energy bill leads to a RoI of 5-6 years
    (before you ask: Melbourne, Aus)

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford