Ehh, you don't need to put wind farms in the cities/suburbs where NIMBYs are located. There is Central CA with abundance of flat lands as well as mountains
You clearly don't have experience with California environmental politics. There's not a single spot of land (or water) in the state where SOMEONE won't complain about a wind farm installation.
Actually infrasound is pretty bad for you. At the right frequency around 18-19Hz you start seeing ghosts. Substantially lower can really do a number on you too.
Source only states effects on people working on the turbine, and, in general, people exposed to infrasound at volumes higher than those you get from having a wind turbine nearby. You practically have to be on the device.
I sometimes wonder how and if various groups of NIMBYs - i.e. anti-wind-farm, anti-nuclear, etc. overlap with each other. Sometimes I just wish I could point a finger and accuse someone of attempting to kill people and/or destroy civilization.
> Funny, that's what anti-wind/solar/nuclear people say!
Yes, I know :). That's (among others) a reason I don't go and point my finger too much :).
> I think it comes down to a lack of science education and a fear of the unknown.
I'd add a collapse of trust in authority as an underlying cause for this and movements like anti-vaccination. I talk to people holding such beliefs quite a bit, and I've noticed they're perfectly willing to (selectively) trust science; they can even have an above-average understanding of it. It's often that they don't trust the intentions of governments and corporations (the "Big Pharma", evil Monsanto, etc.). So I think painting them as anti-science idiots, as it is often done on-line, is counterproductive. Not just because it's always counterproductive to paint the other side as idiots, but also because it's missing the point.
Arsenic, cadmium, lead, polyvinyl fluoride, and probably more. There are indeed liquid based solar panels. The toxicity of solar panels both in their production and their usage has been reported on a great deal. Some companies are making changes to make them safer but I have no clue how far along those efforts are.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out. Even if they aren't liquid based, solid state versions have thin films which contain some chemicals like cadmium and arsenic. Cadmium telluride has been introduced more recently has it is safer.
This comment is a weird mix of truth and untruth. Yes, there's a lot of toxic chemicals involved in solar panel production, as there is in IC production and a whole load of other production processes. http://www.solarindustrymag.com/issues/SI1309/FEAT_05_Hazard...
Liquid solar panels are simply not a production-ready technology. There are no commercial liquid solar cell farms. Installed solar panels are solid. They're not particularly prone to corrosion and 'leaking', and are >99% silicon with trace amounts of boron and phosphorous. CdTe is actually nastier.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out
Glad to see that someone else responded, so I'm not alone here ... this is mostly nonsense. I have NEVER seen a report on toxicity of solar panels in use from "leakage", if there is such a thing, please post. Yes, solar panels contain elements like Cd and As, so do many of the electronics that you carry around in your pocket, and as long as they are bonded inside a semiconductor, they are basically inert slices of rock. However, most commercial solar panels today are silicon-based, with these other elements as dopants at a tiny percentage. A CdTe solar panel would be made of, well, Cadmium and Tellurium, both of which are pound-for-pound thousands of time more toxic to humans than silicon !!!! (though still basically inert slices of rock if they are in solid-state solar panels).
Admittedly, as with all e-waste, we need to look to what happens to solar panels when their life is up and they are landfilled or, hopefully, recycled. That said, over its 25+ year useful life, a solar panel will prevent tons of coal from being burned, which in and of itself would release a non-zero amount of cadmium and other heavy metals into the atmosphere.
That's such as simplified analysis. Perhaps there's no shortage (unlikely given Texas' power needs), perhaps there's transportation bottlenecks creating local oversupply? That price has to lower to send the price signal that the arb is there and firms can make money building that transmission, at which point, just like the other energy products in West Texas (crude), the relative price will begin to rise again relative to the benchmark. (See: West Texas / Midland grades of crude being priced at steep discounts that are now shrinking due to increased pipeline capacity coming online.) It's not that Midland crudes were "oversupplied" it's that demand was being "artificially" lowered by transportation bottlenecks. (Economists / econometricians may argue definitions with me on that, but from the energy trader perspective, that's how I would approach it.)
Deregulation in Texas has spurred intense competition for customers.
Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
made possible by the nearly universal distribution in recent years of residential smart meters
This is key. Demand-based metering and pricing has been available for industrial customers for a long time but residential customers had dumb mechanical meters that only recorded total kilowatt-hours. This sort of thing will also become important as electric cars become more mainstream, to encourage people to charge cars at low-demand times. Otherwise everyone plugging in their car at 6pm when they get home from work, while also cooking dinner and turning on the A/C is going to stress the grid.
>> Deregulation in Texas has spurred intense competition for customers.
> Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
Anyone familiar with Enron. Or Comcast & Time Warner. Or any of a million other companies in a hundred other industries that has miraculously managed to avoid the purportedly inevitable race to the bottom. Of course, in this case "deregulation" isn't the full story:
> The incumbent utility in the area still owns and maintains the local power lines (and is the company to call in the event of a power outage) and is not subject to deregulation.
and "intense competition for customers" isn't the full story either:
> TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas.
Enron took advantage of the situation to be sure but California's deregulation plan was truly laughable. Retail prices were capped forcing PG&E and Southern Edison to pay whatever rates Enron and Dynegy could force by manipulating supply. Utilities were also banned from buying long-term contracts to stabilize prices.
The whole process was practically designed to fail.
Deregulated utilities will figure out some new way to screw their customers. Probably "plans", like cellular, where you pay a flat rate plus overage charges plus surge pricing, but have unlimited off-peak kilowatts up to your feeder capacity.
Very true, but I wouldn't blame the utilities for understanding the basics of the US.
This model is really the US standard to screw lower social classes that plays out elsewhere, i.e. credit cards as the national payment system instead of payer initiated direct transfer like in most(all?) of Europe.
Richer people will tend to have strategies and resources (i.e. the money and rights to modify their residence, control over their work schedule, etc) to pay bellow average which will make them richer. People under stress will have to pay whatever the spot rates are.
This is the only defensible position for businesses as the ones with resources and time to invest in organization are the ones who have the resources to use the political system as a tool against anyone who would have them pay their full share.
You don't need a smart meter to do demand-based pricing. You just need the electricity company to publish its pricing plans in a consumable format.
In fact most smart meter usage to date is reactive; customers have to first use electricity at peak times to learn that it is peak time and then modify their usage. And if the pricing schedule changes you'll be caught out again until you adapt.
Of course, both are right, unless an AI is running ones home energy use, the bill payer needs to know in advance the expected pricing so they can plan use, and of course smart meters are required to implement the billing side.
9pm - 6am sounds like prime Bitcoin crunching time.
It was my understanding that the limiting factor, or rather the "cost" of mining bitcoints, ultimately comes down to power consumption. Effectively if $/kWh * kWh/bitcoint < bitcoint value, you can turn a profit.
> Why not just bank the power in batteries and feed it back during peak load?
What's the retail cost of electricity in Texas during the day, and what do you pay per kWh for your batteries: capital costs and ongoing costs?
If you pay more per kWh for batteries than retail power prices then any consumer is a fool to engage in the battery scheme. And even if a consumer might be able to make money, the wholesale price is definitely lower than retail. I seem to remember calculating that batteries cost about $0.06/kWh all in in the last ~6mo but wholesale power in TX is more like $0.05 and retail it's usually below $0.12.
This is not something you can sensibly do in a residential area. (There are a few people doing Al casting with induction furnaces, but that's not the same as electrolysis of bauxite)
In Texas, I guess every wind generator should come with a bitcoin miner that turns on whenever electrical load falls short of generated power. New revenue source for the utility!
As did Denton (Denton Municipal Electric), Garland (Garland Power & Light), areas served by what used to be known as the Denton County Electric Cooperative (now CoServ), and so on.
They actually didn't opt out, they simply didn't opt in. The original law putting deregulation in place exempted cooperatives and municipal utilities unless they chose to join the competitive system. However, that choice is one way and permanent. If a co-op or city opts in, it can never go back. Most of the not-for-profit boards wanted to see if deregulation would be good for the rest of the state before they put it on their members.
I remember when natural gas costs spiked and that sent Texas electric rates, especially in the Texas-New Mexico and Oncor/TXU service areas, skyrocketing. Now that natural gas is less expensive, prices have dropped. Municipal systems, on the other hand, either owned their own generating infrastructure and were buffered or bought long-term hedge contracts that the competitive players were scared to buy (what if they bet wrong?) or were so new that they didn't have the credit to buy.
That's true. But you do get some of the lowest electricity costs in the state, as well as the option to select fixed-price contracts for 100% renewable generation if you'd like.
Be careful what you wish for in terms of deregulation. You have a great utility in Austin.
So if the Powerwall costs $5000 for a 7kWh capacity with a lifetime of about 3600 charge cycles at 80% efficiency, you're looking at $0.25/kWh. If the difference between lowest and highest prices is lower than that, you're better off not buying the Powerwall in the first place.
Once the difference between minimum and maximum price per kWh of electricity from the grid exceeds the $/kWh of the battery, you have an economic incentive to install the battery.
As the price of batteries comes down, companies will invest in battery peaking plants to take advantage of pricing on the energy market. Those bulk battery installations will limit the spread of wholesale time-of-day pricing such that it will never be economically sensible for home users to install batteries as a cost saving device based on retail time-of-day pricing. Domestic units will necessarily cost more per storage/output capacity than commercial units.
For the meantime, installing batteries for your home will only be useful for people who have problems with reliable access to electricity (e.g.: you have frequent brown-outs).
There are advances on the horizon thanks to new battery assembly technology, and Tesla Energy's "Gigafactory" bringing economies of scale and integration into battery manufacturing, with an aim of reducing battery manufacturing costs around 30% for the former and 20% for the latter. There are also some theoretical (and in some cases lab proven) technologies to extend Lithium battery lifetimes to "forever". These all alter the numbers in the equation above: a moderate decrease in $/kWh output will make batteries quite attractive for many grid-connected homes.
The tax breaks are built in for the life of the wind farms, so they don't really expire until the farms are retired.
The culprit is not actually the PTC, it's the combination of the PTC and insufficient transmission capacity from the wind farms to the rest of the state. When additional transmission capacity is added the wind generation will be absorbed (and paid for) by a much larger region and the incentive to under-price will go away.
53 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound
No danger from this.
Funny, that's what anti-wind/solar/nuclear people say!
I think it comes down to a lack of science education and a fear of the unknown.
Yes, I know :). That's (among others) a reason I don't go and point my finger too much :).
> I think it comes down to a lack of science education and a fear of the unknown.
I'd add a collapse of trust in authority as an underlying cause for this and movements like anti-vaccination. I talk to people holding such beliefs quite a bit, and I've noticed they're perfectly willing to (selectively) trust science; they can even have an above-average understanding of it. It's often that they don't trust the intentions of governments and corporations (the "Big Pharma", evil Monsanto, etc.). So I think painting them as anti-science idiots, as it is often done on-line, is counterproductive. Not just because it's always counterproductive to paint the other side as idiots, but also because it's missing the point.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out. Even if they aren't liquid based, solid state versions have thin films which contain some chemicals like cadmium and arsenic. Cadmium telluride has been introduced more recently has it is safer.
Liquid solar panels are simply not a production-ready technology. There are no commercial liquid solar cell farms. Installed solar panels are solid. They're not particularly prone to corrosion and 'leaking', and are >99% silicon with trace amounts of boron and phosphorous. CdTe is actually nastier.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out
[citation needed]
Admittedly, as with all e-waste, we need to look to what happens to solar panels when their life is up and they are landfilled or, hopefully, recycled. That said, over its 25+ year useful life, a solar panel will prevent tons of coal from being burned, which in and of itself would release a non-zero amount of cadmium and other heavy metals into the atmosphere.
Welcome to the fascinating world of Umeshisms/Malthusianisms, per [0]. :).
[0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418
Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
made possible by the nearly universal distribution in recent years of residential smart meters
This is key. Demand-based metering and pricing has been available for industrial customers for a long time but residential customers had dumb mechanical meters that only recorded total kilowatt-hours. This sort of thing will also become important as electric cars become more mainstream, to encourage people to charge cars at low-demand times. Otherwise everyone plugging in their car at 6pm when they get home from work, while also cooking dinner and turning on the A/C is going to stress the grid.
> Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
Anyone familiar with Enron. Or Comcast & Time Warner. Or any of a million other companies in a hundred other industries that has miraculously managed to avoid the purportedly inevitable race to the bottom. Of course, in this case "deregulation" isn't the full story:
> The incumbent utility in the area still owns and maintains the local power lines (and is the company to call in the event of a power outage) and is not subject to deregulation.
and "intense competition for customers" isn't the full story either:
> TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
The whole process was practically designed to fail.
This model is really the US standard to screw lower social classes that plays out elsewhere, i.e. credit cards as the national payment system instead of payer initiated direct transfer like in most(all?) of Europe.
Richer people will tend to have strategies and resources (i.e. the money and rights to modify their residence, control over their work schedule, etc) to pay bellow average which will make them richer. People under stress will have to pay whatever the spot rates are.
This is the only defensible position for businesses as the ones with resources and time to invest in organization are the ones who have the resources to use the political system as a tool against anyone who would have them pay their full share.
In fact most smart meter usage to date is reactive; customers have to first use electricity at peak times to learn that it is peak time and then modify their usage. And if the pricing schedule changes you'll be caught out again until you adapt.
It was my understanding that the limiting factor, or rather the "cost" of mining bitcoints, ultimately comes down to power consumption. Effectively if $/kWh * kWh/bitcoint < bitcoint value, you can turn a profit.
What's the retail cost of electricity in Texas during the day, and what do you pay per kWh for your batteries: capital costs and ongoing costs?
If you pay more per kWh for batteries than retail power prices then any consumer is a fool to engage in the battery scheme. And even if a consumer might be able to make money, the wholesale price is definitely lower than retail. I seem to remember calculating that batteries cost about $0.06/kWh all in in the last ~6mo but wholesale power in TX is more like $0.05 and retail it's usually below $0.12.
This is not something you can sensibly do in a residential area. (There are a few people doing Al casting with induction furnaces, but that's not the same as electrolysis of bauxite)
They actually didn't opt out, they simply didn't opt in. The original law putting deregulation in place exempted cooperatives and municipal utilities unless they chose to join the competitive system. However, that choice is one way and permanent. If a co-op or city opts in, it can never go back. Most of the not-for-profit boards wanted to see if deregulation would be good for the rest of the state before they put it on their members.
I remember when natural gas costs spiked and that sent Texas electric rates, especially in the Texas-New Mexico and Oncor/TXU service areas, skyrocketing. Now that natural gas is less expensive, prices have dropped. Municipal systems, on the other hand, either owned their own generating infrastructure and were buffered or bought long-term hedge contracts that the competitive players were scared to buy (what if they bet wrong?) or were so new that they didn't have the credit to buy.
Be careful what you wish for in terms of deregulation. You have a great utility in Austin.
This comes down to roughly:
$/kWh = $cost of installation / (kWh capacity * cycles lifetime * efficiency)
So if the Powerwall costs $5000 for a 7kWh capacity with a lifetime of about 3600 charge cycles at 80% efficiency, you're looking at $0.25/kWh. If the difference between lowest and highest prices is lower than that, you're better off not buying the Powerwall in the first place.
Once the difference between minimum and maximum price per kWh of electricity from the grid exceeds the $/kWh of the battery, you have an economic incentive to install the battery.
As the price of batteries comes down, companies will invest in battery peaking plants to take advantage of pricing on the energy market. Those bulk battery installations will limit the spread of wholesale time-of-day pricing such that it will never be economically sensible for home users to install batteries as a cost saving device based on retail time-of-day pricing. Domestic units will necessarily cost more per storage/output capacity than commercial units.
For the meantime, installing batteries for your home will only be useful for people who have problems with reliable access to electricity (e.g.: you have frequent brown-outs).
There are advances on the horizon thanks to new battery assembly technology, and Tesla Energy's "Gigafactory" bringing economies of scale and integration into battery manufacturing, with an aim of reducing battery manufacturing costs around 30% for the former and 20% for the latter. There are also some theoretical (and in some cases lab proven) technologies to extend Lithium battery lifetimes to "forever". These all alter the numbers in the equation above: a moderate decrease in $/kWh output will make batteries quite attractive for many grid-connected homes.
So "watch this space," I guess.
The culprit is not actually the PTC, it's the combination of the PTC and insufficient transmission capacity from the wind farms to the rest of the state. When additional transmission capacity is added the wind generation will be absorbed (and paid for) by a much larger region and the incentive to under-price will go away.