If you go by the press, it seems to me, O’Malley has a much greater chance of forming a challenge against Hillary than Webb. Webb is a non-starter.
Comment on Week in review – energy, water & food edition by ordvic
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Comment on Science: in the doghouse(?) by Don Monfort
You are accountable for your own ignorance, doogie.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by David Springer
So it’s like nuclear energy which, starting in 1950, was going to make electricity so cheap we wouldn’t need to meter it?
Sixty years later we’re still metering it and nuclear is about 50% more expensive than natural gas.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by robertok06
@climategrog
“They estimate that buying new lead-acid accumulators is comparable to the cost of the grid connection subscription ( in France ).”
A lead-acid accumulator, like those mounted on vehicles, allow only a very small number of “deep discharges”, meaning that if one wants to go off-line and live with only what his/her PV system delivers then he/she will have to replace said batteries every couple of years at best.
In order to store a sufficient amount of electricity during summer days and then use them during winter days (even without considering losses) one would need TENS of such “car sized” batteries.
I happen to live in France, and my yearly subscription to the grid connection is, for a 9 kVA meter, 86.5 Euros (which is LESS than the cost of ONE small 75 A*hour car battery (between 100 and 130 Euros in France)… so whoever told you this has not been very accurate to say the least… I would dare to say he/she missed the point almost completely.
R.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by robertok06
“What are your thoughts?”
He is right!… other scholars have come to the very same conclusion… David Mc Kay of Oxford, Vaclav Smil, and the nice paper on Energy Policy by De Castro et al, which can be found almost verbatim here:
http://www.eis.uva.es/energiasostenible/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/solar-energy-draft.pdf
Its title says it all: “Global solar electric power potential: technical and ecological limits ”
R.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest
I'm going to break up my comments into several questions.
<b>Subsidies</b>: We could debate this issue "until the cows come home", and I will not expend my energy arguing the pros/cons of doing so here at CE.
The <b>problem</b> on this topic (as articulated time and again by even Conservatives in Congress like Senator Grassley) is having this discussion in a vacuum.
This "debate" should include having <b>all<b> energy related subsidies on the table for debate (e.g., in Congress). This includes oil and gas (<b>specific</b> only to these industries), Normalized versus Flow-Through of Tax Benefits by IOUs for Ratemaking, Nuclear Catastrophic Insurance (Price/Anderson), Nuclear Tax Credits and Caps on Construction Costs (EPACT), Federal Loan Guarantees (including nuclear projects like Vogtle), mandated Ratepayer payment of nuclear construction (before units are placed in service).
When Congress and Regulators put "<b>Everything</b> on the table -- I'll debate pros/cons here at CE.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Pekka Pirilä
Not tens but thousands of car size batteries.
One car battery can store less than one kWh, and typical winter time consumption is a couple of thousands of kWh (varying of course greatly).
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
Sure. Multijunctions with taylored bandgaps for different portions of the spectrum, made from III-V class semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide. Boeing makes triple junctions for deep space and military applications at something like 40% efficiency. Data was on the linked NREL chart, the purple types. Far too expensive for general commercial use. We had a paragraph on them in the initial draft; Judith suggested we simplify to the utility essence. We thought her suggestion was a good one for our purposes. This is a blog post about solar grid parity, not a comprehensive solar treatise.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Beta Blocker
harrywr2, Montana must have a plan in place with the EPA by the end of 2016 to reduce its total GHG emissions 21% by 2030. Shutting down Colstrip would go a long way towards allowing Montana to achieve that target with minimal impacts on the great majority of Montana’s residents.
Since CCS doesn’t work yet, either technically or economically, and probably can’t be made to work within the next decade, then more likely than not, the Colstrip power plants will be permanently closed at some point within the next ten to fifteen years.
The price of electricity in the US Northwest will rise substantially as these closures take place. But along with California and Oregon, the voters of the region have made a firm decision to pursue the renewables, wind and solar, regardless of the predictable impacts on energy costs.
This is only reasonable and appropriate given that it will be impossible to meet the region’s ambitious GHG reduction targets for 2025-2030 without a substantial increase in the regional price of fossil-fuel energy, increases which will encourage the energy conservation measures necessary to reach the targeted reduction goals.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
Yes.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by rogercaiazza
Rud and Planning Engineer,
Thanks for another great posting about renewables and the grid. I have one question about grid parity that I have not seen addressed.
Grid parity suggests that the renewable technology could be used instead of traditional fossil or nuclear technologies. However I think that over-simplifies one concern that can be summed up with this question: can renewable technology be used to power an electric arc furnace? For that application and many other manufacturing applications you need a dependable and large chunk of power and I don’t see renewables ever getting there unless fossil prices increase dramatically.
Does your grid parity example of northern Chile mean you think they can power industry from a solar installation?
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Comment on Observational support for Lindzen’s iris hypothesis by davidbennettlaing
I haven’t read through all the comments to see if any of them has mentioned this already, but perhaps the main reason why the iris hypothesis has been vilified by the climate modeling community is that current climate models are still too coarse-grained to be able to resolve even clustered convectional storm systems. One more reason to trust observational over theoretical science. “If it won’t fit in our ‘highly sophisticated’ conceptual models, throw it out!”
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by bobdroege
No
If you produce more than you consume and sell the excess back to the utility company, they should be obligated to buy it back at a negotiated price, less than retail.
Utilities buy and sell power between them, all the time. Say my utility Ameren UE posts the average of all contracts they have in effect during the year, and pays the residential power producer that average for excess power, while state and federal governments offer tax incentives for installation.
If you are still a net consumer of power, net metering should work, though you should probably pay for the meter and a nominal connection fee.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
Tony we will look into it. Perhaps add a sentence to our complementarynto wind and solar grid storage draft in process.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest
Base, Intermediate, Peaking Load: There is not a reputable electricity engineer here in the U.S. (that I know of) that makes an argument that current Renewables are ready to compete against Base Load generation options.
So, why does the anti-Renewable Crowd keep on making this “Straw-man Argument”?
With current technology, Renewables are primarily for peaking load. Comparing the “LCOE” of Renewables to Base Load generation options is just inappropriate. From a System Planning perspective, comparing Renewables to a conventional combustion turbine (used for peaking) would be much more appropriate: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
In reading comments here at CE, many times I just end up shaking my head. Nevada is example, where many comments several weeks ago talked about a “conspiracy theory”, or “Big Government Overreach” with a “Green Obsession”, by Regulators to “mandate” use of solar in Nevada.
How about that Nevada is simply following sound engineering economics? You simply don’t need every generation option to be available 24X7. The question is the capacity value of the generation option when you need it.
This engineering principle is called “ELCC” or “Effective Load Carrying Capacity”. Using ELCC (which is used in Nevada) explains why solar projects can have an effective capacity value of ~80% (producing electricity when the integrated system needs it for peaking load).
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by bobdroege
The problem in India is, the average per capita income won’t cover the cost of an air conditioner compressor, much less an insulated house to put it in.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by curryja
A twitter comment:
Ramez Naam @ramez 23m23 minutes ago
@DouglasLevene @curryja Solar is not yet at grid parity in most of the world, but it’s coming fast. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/renewables-are-disruptive-to-coal-and-gas.html …
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
It is a good point. Industry draws from the whole grid, so not a problem for moderate renewables penetration from a supply perspective. Of course, it still drives cost up. Germany ‘exempts’ industrial users from things like the Umlage for that reason.
The Abengoa award in Chile was only 7% of what was bid out for additional generation. Does not unbalance the grid, plus the two power towers come with molten salt thermal storage for night time generation. I presume the rest of the Chile tender was fossil fuel fired.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
Reply was to rogercaiazza.
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Comment on Solar grid parity? by ristvan
Before tweeting they should read the post rather than Scientific American, which got it wrong.
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