Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer

June 2, 2015, 5:50 am

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Stephen – maybe this clarification will help. We speak in terms of peak, intermediate and base load generation in regards to serving “firm’ load. Some loads are also considered “interruptible” (or nonfarm) and in terms of generation they are not planned for as firm loads are. Just as in interruptible load is different from firm load, intermittent generation is different from base, intermediate, or peaking resources. (Although you can consider consider interruptible load as a peaking resource in some cases.) How you compare intermittent generation to “firm” generation (base load, intermediate and peaking) is probably more an art than a science. I don’t think you can insist on one approach as being right or wrong across the board.

Note-as approaches change things are getting blurrier. Time of use rates blurs the difference between firm and non-firm load and also impact generation planning consideration’s.

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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Barnes

June 2, 2015, 5:55 am

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PE – thank you for your response. As usual, fair and informative.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer

June 2, 2015, 6:00 am

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Peter – I like that Judith provides a variety of links from differing perspectives. It’s good that she presents them for us to read and provides a place for us to discuss them. Sometimes I learn from differing viewpoints and sometimes the excellent comments I see from others make me see things were worse than I feared.

I actually would like to find someplace with a regular feature collecting the worst stuff (what everybody is touting on Facebook) that is widely swallowed, so that it could be given a proper burial in the comments.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by rogercaiazza

June 2, 2015, 6:04 am

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So much for the “we can power the world with renewables” folks then. That also means that telling countries that don’t have adequate electricity now that they must use renewables limits what industry those countries can develop.

It looks to me that the consensus is that renewables have a role in the future but have a ways to go before they can be considered the answer to everything.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by rogercaiazza

June 2, 2015, 6:06 am

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I know Ivanpah uses natural gas so they can pick up high load as soon as the sun comes out. Does molten salt add a lot of cost?

Comment on Solar grid parity? by rogercaiazza

June 2, 2015, 6:12 am

≫ Next: Comment on Solar grid parity? by Pekka Pirilä

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My specific worry about renewables is on high energy demand days in New York. Wind is nearly worthless but as you point out sun should be much better. Still when it comes down to replacing over a 1000 MW of old, dirty and inefficient peaking turbines in New York City I think that the solution is going to have to include fossil fuels. The State is throwing all kinds of money at renewables and distributed generation which, in my opinion, makes the business case for new combustion turbines a very tough sell in New York’s de-regulated market.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Pekka Pirilä

June 2, 2015, 6:19 am

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An alternative approach is to consider directly the state of the power system at the time of generation avoiding the steps of forming the load duration curve and determining the thresholds for peak, intermediate and base load from that. In this alternative approach, the decisive factor is the momentary marginal cost of generation and related to that the type of the unit on the margin. Solar and wind power generates always (as far as technically possible) with the full power available from the units under existing conditions. Wind power is usually almost uncorrelated with demand and availability of other types of generation. Therefore wind power occurs equally often under all system conditions. That makes if comparable to base load, which is similarly spread over all system conditions. As long as the amount of wind power is small, it is almost as likely to cancel load variations as to add to those. As long as that's true wind power has a very similar value as base load generation. With increasing share of wind most of the variability starts to add to the need of load following power from other sources and the value of wind generated power goes down. Solar is both correlated with load variations and intermittent. A positive correlation with load adds to the value of solar generation while a negative correlation reduces it. In places like Southern California the correlation is positive, here in Finland it's negative. The influence of intermittency varies also greatly and often in the same direction. Therefore the value of generation from the same solar panel varies hugely from place to place when the volume and the unit value change very strongly in the same direction. Solar power under best conditions correlates strongly, but not perfectly with the load. The main maximum in load comes typically later than the maximum in generation. This is what Tesla shows in its <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall" rel="nofollow">marketing material.</a>

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Barnes

June 2, 2015, 6:27 am

≫ Next: Comment on Solar grid parity? by Willard

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PE – again, thanks. I really appreciate your taking the time to answer my questions. As I have said before, I am a big fan of fossil fuels because of what to me are many obvious benefits that greens blindly ignore while grossly exaggerating the negative externalities. That being said, I also understand that they are a finite resource – how finite is difficult to assess, but I will take Rud’s analysis as a reliable estimate which, if I recall correctly, means we have another 50-60 years of supply left, which means we need to find viable replacements in the next 30-40 years, or something like that. Given that wind and solar are heavily reliant on fossil fuels for mining, manufacturing, transportation, land preparation, assembly and maintenance, my opinion is that we are wasting intellectual, financial, and natural resources pursuing these as viable alternatives/replacements. Add to that the land mass required for industrial scale (an oxymoron IMO) solar and wind installations alone makes them non-viable. I clearly do not know what the answer will be, but do not believe it will in the end include wind and solar. Nuclear seems to offer the most viable alternative at this point and with the right infrastructure, may be able to power the machinery needed to mine, transport, manufacture, etc. other nuclear power stations, along with the providing the energy needed for most if not all other manufacturing and farming processes – maybe grossly naive on my part, but that is the objective we need to set if we are going to get to a world that can survive without fossil fuels. I do not see wind and solar being remotely capable of providing the needed energy to power everything we now require, much less, what will be required in the future. “Globalclimatewarmingchange” is a massive and wasteful distraction.

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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Willard

June 2, 2015, 6:33 am

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> I actually would like to find someplace with a regular feature collecting the worst stuff (what everybody is touting on Facebook) that is widely swallowed, so that it could be given a proper burial in the comments.

There is such a place. It’s called Judy’s.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Canman

June 2, 2015, 6:35 am

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Peter Lang: <blockquote>If the comparison is between nuclear and renewables, then nuclear is around 2 to 5 times cheaper than renewables at penetration rates around 50%. <b>The gap increase as the penetration increases</b>.[my emphasis]</blockquote> That's something that needs to be considered by people who claim to be long term thinkers.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest

June 2, 2015, 6:47 am

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Go the DOE website on LCOE. Why do different generation technologies have different capacity factors? Specifically, why does a conventional combustion turbine have a capacity factor of 30% assigned/associated with it?

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Richard Drake

June 2, 2015, 6:55 am

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May I also jump to Judith’s defence. I have picked up only that

I have no idea what the solution to the energy problem

which also neatly doubles up as my own attitude.

This blog is doing a superb job of educating a ignorant person like me in this area. Hats off to whoever is responsible for that. Oh yeah…

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Pekka Pirilä

June 2, 2015, 6:57 am

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There are two totally different reasons for low capacity factor.

For peaking generation like gas turbines the low capacity factor tells that variable costs are so high that the unit is used only, when the generated power is so valuable that the value exceeds the high cost. This is the case of peaking power.

For solar and wind the low capacity factor is not due to concentration to the hours of maximal value of the generated power but due to variability in sunshine or wind. The value of the generated power is what it happens to be at that time, not necessarily higher than the average. It may be somewhat higher and it may be lower depending on the local conditions and properties of the power system. This case is not the case of peaking power. This is the case of intermittent power.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by Stephen Segrest

June 2, 2015, 7:15 am

≫ Next: Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer

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<b>Planning Engineer</b>: The issue that I keep bringing up is that the issue of intermittency is highly dependent on the flexibility and integration of the grid that you are working on. The intermittency issue of Renewables would be of much greater concern say, in the South (with a high level of older PC units) versus say, in New England with their fleet of shinny new advanced combined cycle units and access to Canadian Hydro. Based on engineering economics that System Planners base our decisions on <b>maybe</b> the proper current amount of Renewables say in Mississippi is 1%. <b>Maybe</b> the proper penetration level of Renewables in New England is greater than 10%.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer

June 2, 2015, 7:29 am

≫ Next: Comment on Solar grid parity? by Don Monfort

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Barnes-I wouldn’t challenge anything you’ve said. I think sometime between the next 30 to 90 years we will “need” to stop using fossil fuel for energy and will also accomplish it with whatever the next best thing is. I don’t think India and Africa can wait for the next best thing. It seems unconscionable for people who have seen the benefits of low cost energy to deny the third world similar opportunities.

To me lot of effort that are being made now to speed up the transition, don’t appear very likely to me to help in the final run. And they aren’t doing much in the short run either. I think using technologies where they work (not where you hope for them to work) and focusing on improving all technologies (while researching new technologies) and sharing those improvements with the third world is the way to go.

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Comment on Solar grid parity? by Don Monfort

June 2, 2015, 7:31 am

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Have someone with some sense read frantoo’s comment and explain it to you Segrest. Have you taken any notice at all of the points made by Pekka? You are outclassed here. You are just wrestling with your own strawmen.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by aplanningengineer

June 2, 2015, 7:44 am

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No disagreement there. Stephen – off track – I did talk to some of our people about SAIDI. They confirmed as I’ve said that distribution SAIDI does not really tell you much about the reliability of the bulk grid. They reminded me that SAIDI numbers from different entities are not directly comparable. Besides differences in areas there are considerable differences in how/what/why/when different entities compile their SAID numbers so that comparing any two entities on reported SAID is not meaningful. You can Google Benchmarking SAIDI – to find out something about the extensive efforts utilities will go to so that they can compare such statistics.

Here’s an example that happened not to long ago with the “transmission” SAIDI numbers. My companies numbers were significantly than our neighbors, then a terrible weather system came through and caused serious outages. In calculating SAIDI extreme weather events can be discarded. How do you define a severe weather event? By your outages. Our outage rate during the storm was just below the threshold we had established for exclusion as severe (it was a near miracle that the storms did not take out more of our system). Our neighbors outage rate was way above what was needed to exclude it, so they did. (No miracles and maybe worse tree trimming practices on their end). Our SAIDI included the storm, theirs did not. End result they finished the year with much better reported SAIDI numbers than we did even though we were better in every comparable period. A few more outages during the storm and our numbers would have appeared superior.

Comment on What can we do about climate change? by Mary Painter

June 2, 2015, 8:01 am

≫ Next: Comment on Solar grid parity? by climategrog

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Willis speaks commonsense that resonates around a world gone stark raving bonkers on this issue.

If we go the max with mitigation to cover not just a 2C but a 4C scenario-‘just in case’- then since money doesn’t grow on trees, there would surely be less money available for long-term and maybe much more useful research.

The period of the trend warmists obsess about was so short in the scheme of things before the advent of the hiatus —so little research done on clouds oceans etc before they proclaimed a set-in-concrete ‘consensus’ that must not be questioned.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by climategrog

June 2, 2015, 8:21 am

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Since everyone has their own version of “levelised” or “properly comparable basis” it’s hard to know what to make of anything we find. That is why Rudd’s article was appreciated.

Having decided that I am insufficiently informed, you still failed to answer the question, which I suppose let’s us guess what the answer is.

Comment on Solar grid parity? by climategrog

June 2, 2015, 8:38 am

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Oh so when you said “Ivanpah cost $19/W average…Plus…..Plus…. Plus much higher fatalities…” , you were talking about people falling off roofs while installing solar PV. Sorry, I lost the thread of your logic.

I did search and could not find any mention of deaths at Ivanpah, so wondered what you meant.

So if you consider we need to do LCA and these plants are only just going into service, your “Plus much higher fatalities per TWh delivered.” was fiction.

That tells me how much notice I should be taking of your other comments. Thanks.