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Amazon Battles Google for Renewable Energy Crown (bloomberg.com)
Readers share a report: Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump, clean-energy developers are finding plenty of interest in wind and solar power from businesses with sustainability targets, especially technology companies. That was on display in a video tweeted Thursday by Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, as he christened the 253-megawatt Amazon Wind Farm Texas in Scurry County. Amazon has bought more than 1.22 gigawatts of output to date from U.S. clean-energy projects, second only to Alphabet's Google, with 1.85 gigawatts. Corporations have agreed to buy 1.9 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and are on pace to match the 2.6 gigawatts signed last year.
What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same. What matters is the total emissions of the country, divided by its population. The US continue to be one of the worst.
You only need 1.21 gigawatts to travel back in time, buy Bitcoins at USD$0.008, become the most powerful company on the planet and simply buy out any and all competitors before they become a threat.
#DeleteFacebook
plans for the future based on coal?
That's totally incorrect. You're only focusing on emissions (a byproduct of consumption), without considering utility. You aren't considering what was achieved using the energy obtained by each unit of per-capita greenhouse gas emission!
The question you're asking is, "How much emissions did each person generate?", when the question we should be asking is, "How much productivity was generated from the emissions that each person generated?"
You need to compare per-capita emissions against a measure like the GDP or the GNP of the nation in question.
When you do that, it turns out that the United States, and most Western nations, are actually among the most efficient users of energy. That is, they get the most productivity out of each unit of emission.
Let's look at a simplified example. The activity of a per-capita American may result in, say, 10 units of emission, while the activity of a per-capita African may result in only 1 unit of emission. But with those 10 units of emission the per-capita American is able to achieve, say, 1000 units of productive work for each unit of emission. The African, on the other hand, is only achieving, say, 10 units of productive work for each unit of emission.
When we break it down into a proper measure like that, we see that the American has a far greater utilization. The American is doing far more productive work with each unit of emission than the African. To turn it around, in order for the African to produce as much as the American then the African would need to emit far more greenhouse gases!
Your comment highlights a serious problem with environmentalists: they often have a total lack of understanding of economics. They can understand the first-order concepts, such as the total volume of greenhouse gas emissions. And they can kind of understand the second-order concepts, such as the amount of greenhouse gas emitted per individual of a population. But that's where their comprehension stops. Unfortunately, that's where economics begins! It's the third-order concepts, such as how much work is obtained from each unit of emission, that we should be considering. But like your comment shows, you don't get this far into the analysis. You stop prematurely, and thus totally miss out on the economic aspect of this issue.
Gigawatts? or Gigawatt HOURS?
It makes a big difference.
Buying a Gigawatt means buying the ability to draw up to a Gigawatt from a supplier. That might end up being anywhere from nothing to a Gigawatthour EVERY HOUR - 8,766 Gigawatt hours (about 8.8 Terrawatt hours) every year.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
To THE DEATH!
What happens when Amazon or Google buy 1 GW of green power, does a coal plant gets shut down? No. What happen is that the typical home customer has its share of green power reduced from say, 4% to 3%. The production remains the same.
No.
What happens is, with a guaranteed customer with concentrated loads (and no need to cut a deal with a power distribution company to sell THEM the power), an investor builds renewable-energy plants near the Amazon or Google sites and starts selling them the power. So more generation DOES get built for the projects, and the consumers' mix is not impacted as you describe.
(In the short run such big projects may push the price of equipment up slightly, but in the long run they enable economy-of-scale manufacturing that brings the price down.)
Photovoltic panels, for instance, beat grid power once they cost less than a dollar per watt. Market price in 10-panel pallet loads was $0.33 last I looked, and even the domestic panel manufacturers who won the anti-dumping decision are only asking for a price floor of $0.78.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You only need 1.21 gigawatts to travel back in time, buy Bitcoins at USD$0.008, become the most powerful company on the planet and simply buy out any and all competitors before they become a threat.
Don't buy too MANY of the Bitcoins. You might get back to now and find out that the market that drove their price up never developed and theyr're worth nothing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
is all I could think about when I saw Amazon's number
Apple has enough cash ...that is, cash money they could scrooge McDuck into... to buy enough solar panels at consumer market rates to match the power output of all the coal burning plants in the US.
yeah yeah, clouds, nighttime etc. To that I say quiet oil industry troll! And, wind is even cheaper! Plus if someone spent $200B on solar in a year you'd probably end up with panels that DO work at night. So yeah, Google and Amazon powering a data center with renewables doesn't impress me. If they want to actually change the world they can fucking do it today.
Vying for stupid titles like this is like running in the special olympics--even if you win, you're still retarded.
Worry more about good customer service and preventing breaches.
I'll believe people are serious about CAGW when I see the US start to built nuclear reactors at a rate that is equal to that of shutting down old coal and nuclear. A quick Google search tells me that 6GW of coal was retired in the first half of 2016. If we assume a new nuclear power plant has a capacity of 1 GW (which is pretty common) then we should see a new nuclear power plant in the USA every month. My quick search only verified what I've heard elsewhere, we will need 1 GW of new nuclear power capacity from now until the sun goes out just to keep up with current demand as old power plants are retired.
Wind is nice, I guess. It's not too expensive, compared to what we pay now for electricity, but being unreliable has it's costs. Solar on a utility scale is just plain stupid, it's too expensive, too unreliable, and takes up a lot of valuable real estate that'd be put to better use growing food, mitigating floods, and so on. Use hydro when and where you can but that goes only so far. Bio-fuels are just an environmental disaster, I cannot understand how "environmentalists" consider that an option. Nuclear has a zero carbon footprint (or as close to zero as any other "zero carbon" energy source), it's safe, it's inexpensive, and requires no more resources than coal or natural gas, and a fraction of the resources as wind and solar.
One great thing about nuclear is it can take on a hurricane and keep going, recent events prove this. Windmills and solar panels don't handle these storms well. A nuclear power plant tends to be in a large concrete building that even an airplane slamming into it won't stop it. Wind and solar are necessarily exposed to damage.
It boggles the mind that we've ignored nuclear power for so long. I guess the powers that be just aren't taking the threat of CAGW seriously, so why should I?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump
This is really getting tiresome. Trump doesn't give a flying flip about coal, or nuclear, or solar, or anything else (unless he has invested some money in one of them, which I haven't heard). Hillary was stupid enough to throw the coal miners under the bus during the election, so Trump used that to his advantage while campaigning to cozy up to them. I bet Trump wouldn't even know what a piece of coal looks like. Coal for power energy is a dead end - solar and natural gas are both cheaper and safer and are winning out and will continue to win out. Every frigging thing does not have to be about Trump or invoke his name in some way. Considering how much half of the population hates him, they sure like to talk about him at every opportunity they can.
Better known as 318230.
Doesn't even mention Apple??
200 MW of solar in Reno, 170 MW of solar in China, etc..
https://www.computerworld.com/...
Do I read the numbers correctly? We talk about 2 GWh per year, while US consumes 3,913,000 GWh from electrical energy, according to wikipedia.
The renewable part is so small that I am still looking for a 1000 fold error somewhere in the units.
Unless you are providing your own Tesla Wall or shutting down your operations when the wind stops blowing and the sun isn't shining, your "share" of Green Power cannot ever be more than, say, 20 percent of your total consumption. Or whatever other percentage of intermittent power can be placed on the Grid, without compromising its stability in the absence of grid-scale storage or some serious "demand management" in terms of customers using electricity when the intermittent sources are online.
Certainly claiming 100% Renewable Power as one local grocery store does is a fiction. "Oh yeah, renewables only account for 5 percent of power production but I am paying for Green Power so my share comes out of that 5 percent."
What if everyone signed up for Green Power? In the absence of grid-scale storage or management of customer loads, the theoretical limit to the amount of renewable power, on average, is much less than 100%.
If Amazon or Google was able to regulate their demand to match the amount of renewable power generated, I would say they are on to something and doing something worthy of praise. In the absence of Google shutting down servers when the wind stops blowing, Google is just blowing hot air.
I see these "Hate has no home here" yard signs in a liberal/Progressive college town.
If half the population hates Mr. Trump, that means this homeowner is signaling to people-in-the-know that he supports President Trump because he is against hate?
I think Trump might even be a factor in the acceleration of the adoption of green energy. Many people who are older than 40 experience the change of the climate, and take it seriously. They cringe while hearing Trump's rambles about energy and the climate. They also realize that trusting a deranged carrot to do what it promised isn't very smart. Green energy is locally produced, by the owner of the equipment, and thus a much more reliable source than promised coal. Then there is the chance that the next president will reverse much of what Trump has done, resulting in extra costs for the company. Trump is a liability, not an asset for companies.
-- Cheers!
Because salmon or because it is reliable?
Wind chops up hawks and eagles, but it is unreliable so I guess it is OK then?