Good points. The EIA is beginning to address these issues in its 2014 "Overnight Capital Cost" by including "Capacity Factor" and "Transmission Cost". See Table 1<a href="http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf" rel="nofollow"> "Table 1. Estimated levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for new generation resources, 2019"</a> AEO 2014 page 6.
<blockquote>A related factor is the capacity value, which depends on both the existing capacity mix and load characteristics in a region. Since load must be balanced on a continuous basis, units whose output can be varied to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units (non-dispatchable technologies), or those whose operation is tied to the availability of an intermittent resource. The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another.</blockquote>
EIA then addresses "Avoided Cost"
<blockquote>Conceptually, a better assessment of economic competitiveness can be gained through consideration of avoided cost, a measure of what it would cost the grid to generate the electricity that is otherwise displaced by a new generation project, as well as its levelized cost. Avoided cost, which provides a proxy measure for the annual economic value of a candidate project, may be summed over its financial life and converted to a stream of equal annual payments. The avoided cost is divided by average annual output of the project to develop the “levelized” avoided cost of electricity (LACE) for the project.4 The LACE value may then be compared with the LCOE value for the candidate project to provide an indication of whether or not the project’s value exceeds its cost.</blockquote>
EIA provides <a href="http://www.eia.gov/renewable/workshop/gencosts/" / rel="nofollow">further info LACE</a> with a draft paper:
<a href="http://www.eia.gov/renewable/workshop/gencosts/pdf/lace-lcoe_070213.pdf" rel="nofollow">Assessing the Economic Value of New Utility-Scale Electricity Generation Projects</a>
Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by David L. Hagen
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Ragnaar
“The author makes the error, intentional or otherwise, commonly exploited by greens.” I think I agree with you. We can make natural gas more expensive by putting it into a sub-optimal situation. When we change things, gas doesn’t look so good. So don’t change things. When we subsidize margarine, butter becomes less profitable to sell. Yes.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by aaron
Clive, very interesting. Thanks.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by aaron
+
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by jim2
What with even warmist scientists admitting clouds hold much uncertainty, one would expect more activity in this area. Maybe they really don’t want to know the answers contained in the clouds?
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Bob Ludwick
@ Walt Allensworth
I think that if are really his friend, in spite of his obvious mental deficiencies, you should introduce him to the word ‘fungible’ and how it applies to the kilowatt-hours he purchases from the grid.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by Mark Silbert
Rud’s essay, “Cloudy Clouds” in Blowing Smoke is a pretty good summary of how poorly this issue has been handled by IPCC and the GCMs.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by omanuel
Who controls the stability of Earth’s temperature? Putin? http://tgrule.com/2014/11/06/where-russia-stands-and-what-it-stands-for/
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by John Smith (it's my real name)
“not much”
astounding to me
all these great pronouncements and predictions
and nobody has bothered to figure out how cloud cover affects the system?
no need
trust the priests
it’s the carbon devil
oh yeah, and as I just heard on NPR
methane from cows
I pray thee Gaia, make me vegetarian
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Comment on JC’s book shelf by Mark Silbert
Any comment from Steve Mosher or the Berkley Earth crowd on Rud’s essay “When Data Isn’t”?
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by m.d.mill
A clear atmosphere earth is ~20 C (?)hotter than for average conditions!!
Similarly if the cloud coverage were doubled, the earth would be roughly 20 C colder!! Consider that!!!
The effect of clouds (due to solar radiation reflection) dwarfs the effect of CO2 or even water vapor as a green house gas! Cloud coverage is ultimately set by the nearly equal and opposite addition of two VERY large numbers,eg,cloud condensation versus cloud evaporation rate is one way to look at it. Fortunately these two effects are relatively stable, and track one another, but the slightest change can produce relatively large
forcing and temperature changes, relative to all other forcings!
In my studies, I have recently come to the same conclusion…J.C is exactly correct about the overwhelming importance of cloud coverage as a reflector of incoming solar radiation.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Ragnaar
I can’t image the grid marks some electricity and than routes it to the people who have signed up for the green option with their energy company. Compare the grid to a plumbing system with many wells as the sources. I can’t see how green packets of water could be routed to my house and not my neighbors. Though it could be done, it would be quite expensive.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by ROM
I think we have to go back a decade and take a look at the historical context of so much of the what we are coming to realise are the essentials that are lacking in climate research today.
By the mid 2000 noughties the CRU. GISS and NOAA “CliFi” [ Climate Fiction ] Carbonista factions controlled almost in totality, the climate publication industry even down to trying to get journal editors fired, the climate funding organisations almost totally through their proxies in the academia and the access to the political and bureaucratic policy decision makers plus exclusive access to the MSM.
Plus ensuring by what ever fair or foul and nefarious means available they had at their disposal, the castigation and exclusion and denigration of anybody, scientific or otherwise who dared to try and challenge their hold on climate science.
Some of them are still at it; ie; Mann plus many others.
That all started to come apart after Climate Gate and the Copenhagen debacle in late 2009 but it has taken another 3 or 4 years for other researchers to try and pick up the loose ends and restart research into other more genuine aspects of climate factors outside of the pathological fixation by the CRU and GISS CliFi carbonistas and their running dog support factions in academia and the science publication industry.
Still a very difficult task for most more independent minded researchers as they are still subject to extreme denigration and exclusion from funding and facilities by the still mostly CRU, GISS, NOAA factions plus their running dogs across the science publication and CliFi propaganda industry, the funding bodies and the MSM who still cling desperately to their CliFi belief in the power of “Carbon” to reign supreme over every other influence and factor that are part and parcel of the immensely complex and ultimately and most likely in the long run, a realisation that they are trying to research a completely unpredictable global climate system.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Ragnaar
Which reminds me, it might have been my high school science teacher who told me to think of electricity as water in a plumbing system.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang
Segrest,
Peter Lang — Your continued refusal to acknowledge how System Planners do their job is just baffling.
Another strawman argument. Your frequent intellectual dishonesty is baffling. I said nothing about how system engineers do their job.
I said you waffle, avoid the issue raised, and don’t understand what is relevant for policy analysis,
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang
Segrest,
peaking load and generation options to meet this load (which solar currently fits into) is important also.
Hydro and gas are the least cost way to meet peak load, not solar and wind.
For 30 years France has demonstrated the least cost way to reduce the emissions intensity of the electricity system and provide cheap reliable power that meets customers’ requirements – as demonstrated by the fact they are exporting the equivalent of the capacity of about 10 nuclear power stations to ten neighboring countries.
Why cant you recognise the blindingly obvious?
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by jim2
This is OT, but interesting. Is this another part of the “stadium wave” or something else? From the article:
…
About 14.1 million square kilometers of snow blanketed Siberia at the end of October, the second most in records going back to 1967, according to Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab. The record was in 1976, which broke a streak of mild winters in the eastern U.S. In addition, the speed at which snow has covered the region is the fastest since at least 1998.
Taken together they signal greater chances for frigid air to spill out of the Arctic into more temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who developed the theory linking Siberian snow with winter weather.
“A rapid advance of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October favors that the upcoming winter will be cold across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen said in an interview yesterday. “This past October the signal was quite robust.”
There are a few steps to get from the snows of Siberia to the chills in New York City.
Cold air builds over the expanse of snow, strengthening the pressure system known as a Siberian high. The high weakens the winds that circle the North Pole, allowing the cold air to leak into the lower latitudes. The term Polar Vortex actually refers to those winds, not the frigid weather.
…
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by jim2
Smart cars, smart grids, smart houses are all dumb. It places control of ones property in the hands of others. And if the others in question happen not to be the government, the government will bend those others to its will. All to our detriment.
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Comment on How urgent is ‘urgent’? by m.d.mill
As I understand it, you are using ~1850 as the starting point for your 2C increase reference. Why do you insist on doing this?
The climate right now is wonderfull…the earth has not been as physically “green” in the last 100 years …plants love it…extreme weather is at a 50 + year low….and most warming will occur at night, in winter, and in the higher latitudes, which is exactly where we need it…Why do you insist on taking pre-industrial as climate perfection? At the current rate of CO2 increase, CO2 doubling (from current levels) will not occur for ~200 years!!!… and the sensitivity for CO2 doubling is certainly less than 2C…perhaps much less. Even if we double CO2 emission rates, this leaves less than 2C temp increase in a century, as a certainty! Why did you not state this in your commentary?! There is a “certain” inanity in this alarmism, that you seem not to acknowledge…at least not in your writings. It is a puzzlement.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang
<blockquote>Renewables should be used in a way that achieves minimum grid power generation cost and maximum grid stability. This limits the amount of economically usable “renewable” sources as a percentage of grid assets without some form of power storage.</blockquote>
I agree. I expect the <b>"economically usable “renewable” sources as a percentage of grid assets without some form of power storage" is 0%-5%</b>
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