If the looming spectre of rising electricity prices due to CARB’s upcoming “cap and trade” isn’t enough, now the Department of Water resources has opted to be less efficient by giving low cost electricity the boot. Somebody else will buy it, so there’s no net savings other than banking “feel good” capital.
From the green section of the Chico News and Review:
Coal-fired plant gets the boot
Department of Water Resources will not renew lease with Nevada plant
California’s Department of Water Resources will not renew a lease with the coal-burning Reid Gardner Power Station in Moapa Valley, Nev., as part of a recently released climate action plan.
The department aims to cut carbon emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and the Reid Gardner plant, which has served the State Water Project (the water system that diverts water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta), accounts for one-fourth of DWR’s total emissions, according to The Sacramento Bee. Water Resources will purchase more energy from renewable energy sources, the California Independent System Operator and Lodi Energy Center, a natural gas plant beginning operations this summer.
Reid Gardner had accounted for about 10 to 15 percent of DWR’s energy for the past 30 years. The contract with the company expires in 2013.
E.M. Smith: It will be even cheaper to buy a natural gas generator and run it in a box out back of the house…
That’s a possibility. Each person has to do the calculations for his/her own needs and locale.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the local school is going to chop down the trees over the play field to install a solar panel field.
Somebody needs to have some long public information sessions there. At the AZ school that I linked, there were no trees to chop down.
Occasionally, it seems that some reader believes that I advocate current PV technology for everyone everywhere. What I have shown, with reasonable numbers, is that for some people, in some places, for some purposes electricity from PV panels is cost-competitive taking into account forecasts of natural gas price increases; and that for a larger number of people, future PV panels will be worth looking into.
Cutting down trees to protect the legacy view of a parking lot does not strike me as a good idea. Maybe it’s an especially good-looking parking lot.
@Matthew R Marler:
Not a particularly good looking parking lot…
It’s just the kind of stupidity you get when “subsidy” meets “advocacy”…
FWIW, I’m all for solar. I just think we need to have zero “subsidy” and zero “PC Pressure” and just let folks make sane decisions based on what actually works.
There are some local schools where the have put panels over the parking area and it’s a great improvement. Parking in the shade. Cars last longer and not an oven when you get it…
But once “subsidy” is in the air, all sorts of uneconomic and flat out stupid things get done.
I’ve regularly priced solar (and I refuse to use a subsidy on principle) and it still doesn’t cut it on it’s own.
vuckevich;
Units, my child, units.
Is that usage per day, week, month, year, or lifetime?
Being 14 years more suicidally insane than California is impressive. Let us know how it’s going while you still can, OK?
“””””…..E.M.Smith says:
June 22, 2012 at 7:36 pm
@inedible hyperbowl:
There was a ‘coal crisis’ in the UK in something like th early 1800s and there was a wood crisis in the USA when we chopped down all the Eastern forests. Oil came along and all was well again…
Unfortunately the present Green Insanity causes “coal crisis” as a search term to find all sorts of cruft that has nothing to do with the real coal crisis of old… so no linky link…
@george:…..”””””
Like I said E.M., Lowes doesn’t have much that’s any good. I’m sitting here with a $9.95 Phillips A19 (60 Watt equivalent} 800 Lumens @3,000K for 10.5 Watts of electricity.
LED’s do not have any ballast; that’s strictly a fluorescent light necessity. LEDs run off DC, so there’s an ac to dc switching power supply; perhaps the most thoroughly developed electronic package in the universe given the proliferation of computers and other toyz. Readily available power supply modules for sizeable LED fixtures (Stadium lighting) have 94-95% full load efficiency. Cheap junk ones are 85%. The people who make them simply don’t understand the concept of efficiency.
For every shyster solar panel purveyor (on your tax dollar) there’s a clone selling LED lights out of the back of a pick-em-up truck.
Fluorescent lighting is generated from an invisible UV gas discharge (hence the ballast), so the discharge produces zero illumination. So 100% of the visible radiation has to be produced by down converting phosphors. If you absorb a 4 eV UV photon, and emit a 2-3 eV visible photon, then you lose 1.5 to 2.0 eV in the transaction. That is the Stokes shift loss, that limits the efficiency of fluorescents. Warm white fluorescents at 2,700-3,000 K color Temp need a red phosphor as well as a broad yellow. All known conventional red phosphors have a very broad long wavelength tail, and put out a lot of radiation beyond 700 nm where the eye response is crashing off a cliff, which is why you take a penalty for warm white fluorescents ( and warm blue pumped LEDs.)
Blue pumped LEDs start with a blue emitter around 460 nm, where the Cerium doped YAG absorption line is, so that part of the blue emission is shifted to yellow, and maybe red, and also incurs the Stokes shift loss; but the remaining blue light is part of the visible spectrum, so it contributes to the “light” with no energy loss. Three or four color mixing white LEDs, incur no Stokes shift loss, and you can select a red, that doesnt produce much near IR invisible tail.
The problem with the A19 lamp, is that it is a 4pi emitter for no reason than to look like a light bulb. Who the hell cares about mean spherical candlepower from a light they are on one side of.
If I was living in a free country, I would take my house off the grid, and put up battery charging solar arrays; triple junction >100 sun steerable arrays (self) and then use DC LED lighting off the batteries, and eliminate the two way dc-AC-DC inversion along with active power factor correction both ways. Get maybe 40% efficiency from the solar,going to maybe 60% in the next five years; and then use thermal solar colection for the heating chores. Don’t need PG&E ever, if you do it properly.
LED s will be at 200 Lumens per Watt within two years.
Here in Spain the electricity supply gives details of how much is paid in taxes and subsidies and it is more than 50% of the bill! Costs of generation and supply are only 46% of the final invoice price. Sheer madness, and no wonder that people are being forced into fuel poverty.
Would they occur after the next few decades of falling surplus gas prices (in North America)? Why does that remind me of “global warming will resume even faster after the next 3 or 4 decades of cooling” predictions? It’s not really even worth the time to ask, “How do you know? What track record does that forecast model have?” Faith-based climatology doesn’t have any non-circular responses to offer. Nor does faith-based Peakism.
I say “faith-based” because proponents and believers are long inured and immune to contrary events and failure of predictions. Asking for, and getting adherence to, make/break falsification criteria is met with spirals of circumlocution.
Mathew Marlow says …. “Abengoa 200 MU PV project in the Imperial Valley.. $.03 kwh….”
Mathew,
I couldn’t find any specifics on the Abengoa project. Pete Danko said this-
“Abengoa is going to build a 200-megawatt (MW) photovoltaic plant in the California’s Imperial Valley, but for whom and exactly where is a mystery.”
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/the-mystery-of-the-imperial-valley-solar-project/
If the output of the project is going to SDG&E, likely as they are the ones who are capacity strained at the moment, then the price that SDG&E will be paying for the output will be under a PPA and the AVERAGE price will be a heck of a lot more then $.03 kwh. Out here in sunny CA the PPA’s for RE have time of delivery (TOD) factors that increase the cost of a kwh delivered to the ISO’s at super peak times during the summer. In the summer at super peak times PG&E will be paying about $.24 for a kwh for the energy (generation) from the PV facilities (2009 contracts – the cpuc time of delivery (TOD) periods and factors are noted here- http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PUBLISHED/FINAL_RESOLUTION/111386.htm) ) for 20 to 25 years. TOD factors for all three private (PG&E, SCE, and San Diego) utility service providers are noted in the resolution.
The California Public Utilities Commission recently released a report to the legislature on our RE efforts- http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/3B3FE98B-D833-428A-B606-47C9B64B7A89/0/Q4RPSReporttotheLegislatureFINAL3.pdf
…….”Figure 6 below shows the weighted average TOD-adjusted cost of contracts approved by the CPUC in that year. From 2003 to 2011, contract costs have increased from 5.4 cents to 13.3 cents per kWh. One important reason for this this increase is that the IOUs contracted with existing renewable facilities at the beginning of the RPS program and with mostly new facilities in later years. In order to meet the ambitious 20% and 33% RPS targets, the IOUs have to contract with new facilities, which require higher contract costs to recover the capital needed to develop a new facility…..”
On the bright side of things my PV system provided 100% of our usage for the last 3 days. Naturally, I had to use some power from the grid at night and I sent power to the grid when my production was greater then my actual demand.
All of the commercial users of electrical energy in CA are being moved to Time of Use metering that has higher prices for a kwh of energy at peak times which matches closer to what it costs the ISO’s to deliver the more expensive energy to them. At the moment the residential market out here hasn’t been required to move to Time of Use, or dynamic pricing. To spread the increased costs of the utility scale RE that we are adding into the generation mix the ISO’s are requesting that the residential market pay some of the increased costs too. They are requesting a further reduction in the baseline quantities and they want to add in a service fee and raise the prices of all the Tier’s for both their CARE and Non-CARE customers as noted in PG&E’s 2012 Rate Design Window- details of their requests are noted here- -http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/published/proceedings/A1202020.htm
The incremental cost I pay today in Calif is nearly double what the graph shows: closer to $0.30 per kw-hr. Pricing is tiered, so after you use up the tiny baseline, price shoots up quickly.
“Generation” cost is billed in addition to “transmission” cost, add in a bunch of “fees” and other taxes, and that’s why I’m already at 30cents.
To think that will double by mid 2020s is insane; I plan to ditch this state before then.
To answer someone else’s previous rhetorical question, the state is in the death-grip of:
1) radical environmentalists, who have embedded yhemselves into many overlapping & redundant regualtory agencies,
2) the gov’t labor unions, whose lavish pay & benefits are bankrupting the state.
3) the extensive “grievance”, “identity”, and social welfare lobbying groups, who are always seeking to redistribute (ie, seize) the wealth & income of the shrinking pool of productive residents.
Kakatoa: I couldn’t find any specifics on the Abengoa project. Pete Danko said this-
“Abengoa is going to build a 200-megawatt (MW) photovoltaic plant in the California’s Imperial Valley, but for whom and exactly where is a mystery.”
Thank you. I was both hopeful and suspicious about the cost quoted in the source that I cited. The previous most economical large scale PV power plant that I costed out came to $0.06 per kwh. If we are able to find better cost estimates, we shall have to try to share them. For my home the cost would be about $0.09 per kwh, but I do not use enough electricity to pay that cost out of savings; I would have to be granted a feed-in tariff of about $0.08 in order to cover the cost via the sales. Policy-wise, I would not support a feed-in tariff that high.
The AZ school that I linked to had a tax subsidy for the PV power, but since all the costs of running a public school are tax-paid, that’s just an accounting transfer from one account to another.
The rest of your post is also informative. It applies to me, as I am an SDG&E customer. I take my exercise walks near the originally posed Sunrise Power Link, which I supported. The new route more than doubled the cost, but the Sunrise Power Link is complete (or nearly, I don’t remember the exact date, but it’s set to enter service soon.)
Lots of people on these threads regularly criticize California electricity and other power policies. I share most of those criticisms (with enthusiasm do I share most of them). CA has a multidecade history of bad energy policy. I voted to repeal AB32, which set a goal that I think is literally unachievable without a dramatic reduction in CA GDP. But I think, and write, that blanket denunciations of solar power are unsupportable. For some purposes and some places (Arizona schools, Imperial Valley irrigation and A/C) current PV technologies should at least be given serious consideration.
Brian H: Would they occur after the next few decades of falling surplus gas prices (in North America)?
That’s a question with a faith-based premise. Natural gas prices declined and have stopped declining. The demand for natural gas has grown and will continue to grow. Soon the pipelines to the East Coast LNG terminals will be completed, and the price will be governed in part by the bidders in the international market. Neither the surplus nor the falling prices are guaranteed for “decades”. That’s why I called the Arizona school case a “calculated risk”. In a market, including government purchasers, the actors will not all reach the same conclusion at the same time. If you were responsible for that school, you’d bet on electricity from gas; if I ran that school, I’d bet on electricity from PV panels. We won’t know for 10 years or so who would have made the better bet.
Tom in Calif says:
June 23, 2012 at 8:59 am
If I could add to your list:
n) Big corporations making windfall profits but not paying appropriate taxes because of sweetheart deals with local leaders
I refer you to El Segundo and Chevron.
Please see the Tips & Notes page, (June 22, 2012 at 9:40 pm) for links to SoCal Connected coverage of this story airing this weekend on KCET.
Here’s a Toshiba PV installation at about $3.8/watt. That’s more in line with other facilities that I have seen recently. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/20/us-toshiba-solar-idUSBRE85J0ET20120620
That is not my idea of a good place to locate current technology PV power plants, but Japanese have their own views and policies; and maybe it is really sunny despite being more northerly than San Diego. Because the government is subsidizing the clean-up of the Fukushima disasters, they probably view a government subsidy of solar power with less hostility than American free marketers would.
I am rooting for Japan to restart all of its nuclear power plants. This post is only an illustration of current costs for current PV technologies from a modern manufacturer.
Something that is not generally known about LED lights, is that it makes a big difference how they are constructed. First off, there is the quality of the individual lights in any fixture. I have seen LED’s that quickly start to go bad during the first year of use, simply dimming themselves into oblivion. Those are the ones that were simply not fabricated correctly, and were probably rejected on the factory floor and sold in large lots to people who put them into devices which were then sold very cheap. But there is also a problem with how a device actually has the LED’s mounted in it. LED’s are very sensitive to voltage/current spikes. Most devices group the LED’s with just one, or perhaps several, resistors. The problem with having too many LED’s on one resistor is that the current regulation is spread evenly across all the LED’s, but each LED has a unique level at which it can withstand a spike. In addition, the manufacturer wishes to maximize the amount of light coming out of the device, because that is what people are looking for in a light fixture (duh). But, by maximizing the amount of light, minimizing the number of LED’s to create that light, and driving the voltage within just a few percent of the failure spike, you will get a fair number of LED light fixtures that go bad catastrophically because of voltage spikes. Not all the LED’s are failing, but since they are in series, one failure means none of them work (Christmas lights in series have this same failing). Now, if the LED’s are out where you can check them individually, you could replace the one that is bad, and be back in business. But, if the fixture is sealed, you cannot do that.
Now, for those people who are concerned about solid waste disposal, if you are using LED lights, you should not dispose of a “burned out” LED light fixture in normal trash. It should be handed to a electronic hobbyist to take apart, or sent to a junk yard where it will be recycled by a company that then sells the components to a hobbyist. Many light fixtures are composed of hundreds of LED bulbs, most of which will still be usable.
Mathew,
I concur that PV is appropriate in certain locations. It is not cheap, but when your alternative is no power or to mitigate $.30 to $.50 kwh from an alternative source it becomes a viable option. I saw an interesting post about a hotel in your neck of the woods that just finished putting in a fuel cell (using natural gas as the energy source) for electrical energy and the heat generated from the system is being used for a pool-
CCSE Supports Hotel Energy System
http://energycenter.org/index.php/news-a-media/latest-news/3200-ccse-supports-hotel-energy-system
“The 1940s Hollywood-era Lafayette Hotel in San Diego was the scene of a celebration and switching on of a 40- kilowatt ClearEdge Power fuel cell system on May 9. During ceremonies, CCSE Managing Director Peter Hamilton presented the hotel’s owners with $100,000 rebate check from the California Solar Initiative’s Self-Generation Incentive Program ( SGIP)………………
“With the ClearEdge Power fuel cell system, the hotel aims to reduce its annual energy costs by approximately $30,000, while eliminating 100 tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.”
http://www.clearedgepower.com/
Thanks for the Toshiba reference, that cost to install a system sounds about right to me. My panels were built by Mitsubishi and they have held up well (output wise) as I am going to be generating 9400 +/- 100 kwh this year, which isn’t to bad considering that’s about what the system generated 5 years ago (9600 kwh). Unfortunately, I agree with your assessment of the effects of AB32- a drag on the states GDP. The drag will be felt in certain areas of the state more then others.
Kakatoa: I saw an interesting post about a hotel in your neck of the woods … .
thanks. there has been much talk of that these past 12 years, but I haven’t kept up with all the stories.
Stephen Richards says:
You need to look closer at PV output. It is as useless as wind mills. It varies too much, destabilizes the grid, is very inefficient ~~ 18 – 20%, needs a lot of land and a lot of maintenance. We need a new PV technology for it to be of any real use.
Exactly what “new technology” would address the issue of random supply which cannot possibly be matched to demand? Even if the average power is sufficient you need energy storage in hundreds of TJ to tends of PJ to possibly have a stable power grid.
Should anyone here be a lawyer and care to press this, they should use Title IX, XI and the American with Disabilities Act to oppose these decisions as the loss of cheap electricity unduly affects minorities and the disabled. There is significant precedent and it has been used by the Green crowd to stop road expansions and other projects deemed to be too environmentally costly under the auspices of “Social Justice”.
kramer says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:42 am
“Somebody else will buy it, so there’s no net savings other than banking “feel good” capital.”
I think the simple goal here is to make water more expensive so we use less of it.
For some reason, water use has been getting more and more attention, not sure if its because it requires energy to move it, because we have an “unfair” amount of water here in the USA, or because they want us to conserve water (by putting a price on it) and then ship some of our water overseas in those Spragg bags…
Water usage is one of the ‘sustainability’ issues covered by Agenda 21 – that is why you are hearing it more.
Therapist,
I am not an attorney, but I believe your concern is partially covered as noted here- http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/energy/Electric+Rates/Baseline/medbaseline.htm-
The reduced rates are covered (true costs allocated that is) by the Non-Care customers in Tier 3 and 4 usage rates.