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The Battle for Solar Energy in the Country's Sunniest State (newyorker.com)
Carolyn Kormann, writing for The New Yorker: Steyer [billionaire Tom Steyer, who for years has tried to pass Proposition 127, an amendment to Arizona's constitution that would require power companies to generate fifty per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030] and his coalition say that the problem is simple: A.P.S. (state's largest utility, Arizona Public Service) is an investor-owned company, motivated primarily by its responsibility to protect profits for its shareholders, many of whom reside out of state. In 2017, the company made four hundred and eighty-eight million dollars, an increase of forty-six million from the previous year. The Arizona Corporation Commission (A.C.C.), a five-member elected "fourth branch" of state government, is supposed to keep the utility's monopoly in check -- setting limits on capital investments and pricing, while guaranteeing a certain margin of profit.
But critics have long argued that the arrangement incentivizes utilities to "gold-plate," or make inessential investments. (The phenomenon even has a name: the Averch-Johnson effect.) For A.P.S., a two-hundred-million-dollar gas-fuel plant would be more lucrative than a twenty-million-dollar solar array because the utility can charge higher rates to recoup its investment costs. Kris Mayes, a former Republican A.C.C. commissioner, who helped write the language of Prop 127, told me the Averch-Johnson effect explains why, in 2017, A.P.S. called for more than five thousand megawatts of new natural-gas additions, and almost no utility-scale renewables. "If they were truly acting in public interest," Kris Mayes, a former Republican A.C.C. commissioner, said, "they would not be proposing fifty-four hundred megawatts of new natural-gas plants."
But critics have long argued that the arrangement incentivizes utilities to "gold-plate," or make inessential investments. (The phenomenon even has a name: the Averch-Johnson effect.) For A.P.S., a two-hundred-million-dollar gas-fuel plant would be more lucrative than a twenty-million-dollar solar array because the utility can charge higher rates to recoup its investment costs. Kris Mayes, a former Republican A.C.C. commissioner, who helped write the language of Prop 127, told me the Averch-Johnson effect explains why, in 2017, A.P.S. called for more than five thousand megawatts of new natural-gas additions, and almost no utility-scale renewables. "If they were truly acting in public interest," Kris Mayes, a former Republican A.C.C. commissioner, said, "they would not be proposing fifty-four hundred megawatts of new natural-gas plants."
For A.P.S., a two-hundred-million-dollar gas-fuel plant would be more lucrative than a twenty-million-dollar solar array because the utility can charge higher rates to recoup its investment costs.
And the fact that the gas plant generates far more power than the solar array has nothing to do with it.
When you are buying politicians.
https://www.npr.org/sections/m...
Steyer has done uniquely well with it, but if you think he is about clean energy or this proposal is think again
https://www.azcentral.com/stor...
It will force the early shutdown of APS's nuclear power plant and likely boost greenhouse gas emissions.
Solar is to save fuel, for the moment only to limit CO2, it's not economical. Gas is to have reliable power.
The investments in gas plants might be inessential, but that's completely orthogonal to their investment in solar. The solar investments would almost certainly increase electricity prices ... but of course that's not something mr. Mayes wants to say outright, lying by omission for the public interest, how fucking noble of him.
You don't get efficiency. You get a company skimming 20% off the top of an essential service. This is why you can't pay your power bill with a credit card without a 4% surcharge. The service is essential and (unlike housing) there are no alternatives so they don't have to play nice.
As for me, I'm in a city that saw smog days 80% of the time this summer. Screw the power company and their half a billion in profit. They need to be forced to build out solar so I can breath. Doesn't matter if I don't smoke if every day I go outside I'm getting the equivalent in bad air. I'm still gonna die of lung cancer in my 50s. And I don't get to move out of the city because I need money and like most working class Americans I live where the jobs are.
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First off, he does not live in Az.
Secondly, he is working at trying to kill off their nuclear power plant. Right now, Az is a low emitter BECAUSE of their nuclear power. Instead of trying to close nuke plants, the far left should focus on replacing fossil fuel plants. In this case, the bill should require that all utilities have a minimum of 60% clean energy, along with requiring 2/3 of the energy to be base-load (i.e. on-demand).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
From TFA:
"For A.P.S., a two-hundred-million-dollar gas-fuel plant would be more lucrative than a twenty-million-dollar solar array because the utility can charge higher rates to recoup its investment costs. Kris Mayes, a former Republican A.C.C. commissioner, who helped write the language of Prop 127, told me the Averch-Johnson effect explains why, in 2017, A.P.S. called for more than five thousand megawatts of new natural-gas additions, and almost no utility-scale renewables. “If they were truly acting in public interest,” Mayes said, “they would not be proposing fifty-four hundred megawatts of new natural-gas plants.”
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
> fifty per cent
> four hundred and eighty-eight million dollars
> forty-six million
> five-member
> two-hundred-million-dollar
> twenty-million-dollar
> five thousand megawatts
> fifty-four hundred megawatts
Can you spell that out for me?
From the ballot description, which was contested:
"irrespective of cost to consumers"
Despite the complaints of the supporters regarding the ballot description, it does appear that the proposition mandates the use of renewable energy sources, as defined in the proposition, without consideration of the cost to ratepayers. This got the attention of many of us in Arizona.
It's a laudable goal to use renewable sources, but somehow I cannot reconcile the complaints of the proponents of this measure against utility company profits with the apparent intention of the measure to mandate these changes no matter the costs. It's as if they don't mind if the utilities double their rates, with the attendant increases in profits, so long as it's renewable energy they are gouging us for. Or something.
I also don't much care for the government being put in charge of determining what energy sources will be installed. If renewable energy is desirable, or in some way 'better', this will become evident soon enough. Leave it alone.
Oh, and then I consider Tom Steyer, a nice enough guy, who lives in San Francisco. Perhaps, tom, you should be working on the problems your home town has, and leave us in Arizona to deal with our problems? Not enough problems in San Francisco? Just go away.
Yes, I've already voted 'no' on this. Not necessary, not helpful, not now.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"If they were truly acting in public interest..." they would not be a for-profit organization. For-profit is a great model when you are letting companies provide a service at a competitive price and giving them flexibility about how they provide it. But short term market incentives are often not aligned with the long term public interest, so we have complex regulations that are always being gamed for profit. SNAFU. The only real solution is a public that cares about the long term public interest and holds their elected leaders accountable for long term thinking. Go Vote!
It you can't make Solar Power work in Arizona, you can't make it work anywhere. We need to make it work there or see that it can't work. If it can't work there, it can't work anywhere and we can move on to other solutions. If it can work there, we'll have a better idea of how to make it work elsewhere and what the limitations might be.
Stop pussy-footing around. We need a major push. Let's make it happen. Stop spending $$$ on worthless psychology experiments and start funding serious energy independence. It's what a nation like ours should do. Anything else is ceding the future away and selling our progeny into slavery.
Fuck #metoo and SJW's and MAGA-FAGAS and all the other bullshit. Make THIS happen!
Only works to the extent that the regulated rate of return is better than market rates on Wall Street. No sane investor is going to dump money into assets when the payback is better elsewhere. The big problem with utilities is that they are usually guaranteed rates of return even on non-performing assets. That is: Build a power plant for $X and the utilities commission will allow you to charge 10% of X per year (or whatever the regulated rate is). Even if it generates no power. If it generates nothing, customers' power rates just go up to cover the capital costs. To be fair, most rate regulation rules include limits on which investments are allowed into the rate base. So if you start building crap, they will just refuse it. And then it comes out of your investors' pockets.
What I'm not seeing here is whether this Proposition 127 would automatically 'bless' solar investments as being in a utilities rate base. That means, once built, the utilities commission is obliged to allow a rate of return regardless of how much or little the solar plants generate. The telling phrase is "require power companies to generate fifty per cent of their electricity". Not invest 50% of their generation capital budget in renewables. Given that renewable generation might be sort of iffy in terms of actual power output per dollar of capital, this could be a bottomless pit for A.P.S. Keep pouring money into plants until the power output hits 50%.
Now if I had to get involved in this deal, I'd like to be a wealthy hedge fund manager with an environmental tilt and a customer on the hook to buy my solar plants, regardless of sound economics.
Have gnu, will travel.
means more electrics. But that's kind of a stretch since the ROI on solar is debatable.
The main thing is that for all the talk of "Clean Coal" and even natural gas those plants still crank out a lot of emissions. Yes, it is possible to build a zero emission coal or gas plant, but it's expensive as hell and you have to change the filters way more than they want to. By the time you're done you could have done solar.
But that's not the point. They want to spew out their particulates while spewing nonsense about Clean Coal and pocket the extra money.
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In California they're busy shutting down all their baseload nuclear and watching Ivanpah save Gaia by cooking birds.
This is why Californians buy so much power from...wait for it...Arizona with all their evil nuclear and CH4 carbon-sinning that also makes Tesla-and-internet feeding electricity on the side.
And Californians will undoubtedly have to buy more because in California they hate electricity except the magical kind that mysteriously is in their house outlets somehow.
This probably explains the big baseload expectations (and profits) by APS, because they're building California's electricity supply; both for California directly and the hundreds-of-thousands of more Californians who will join the already-in-progress exodus to Arizona.
and I don't support nuke. Show me a nuke plant that's cheaper to run safely in 50 years than to run dangerously. I don't mean "Cheaper because you don't have to clean up a meltdown" I mean "Cheaper right now, in this quarter, so that the CEO will run the plant rightly because that way he gets his bonus".
Fukushima was a disaster everyone knew was coming. The Almanacs said they were due for a big Tsunami. They knew the plants cooling system couldn't outlast the inevitable power outage. They knew they needed to buy a shit ton of trucks with generators and keep them standing by. They didn't because the CEO figured he'd retire before the next disaster. What's worse is that so far as I know none of the ones responsible ever got punished. They went on TV and cried a bit and all was forgiven. There was talk of independent commissions but let's face it, you don't spill the blood of kings.
Now, Arizona is pretty free of natural disasters (baring California sinking into the ocean it should be good on Tsunamis). But with climate change, drought and rising temps who's to say we won't be pushing those cooling systems past their limits in 50 years? I'll be dead, but my grand kids won't be.
So again, show me a reactor that's cheaper to run safely. Oh, and one that's either in active use or can be built. Nothing experimental or "just a few years away". Something that can be built today. Until then the extra cost for solar is worth it. I've never heard of a solar power plant turning a city into a dead zone.
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Steyer is a one percent billionaire who is trying to use tax dollars to fund his profit making businesses. Do not be fooled he is a capitalist and does not care about anyone else.
Since when has ANY government shown the ability to EFFICIENTLY run ANYTHING?
It isn't their money, so spending it wisely is inconvenient to maintaining oversized pensions.
As for the surcharge - government agencies do the same thing. There is a "convenience fee" for using a credit or debit card to pay a tax or license fee, because the government agency is not to be deprived of the FULL VALUE of what you are required to pay. Most businesses will negotiate for a lower rate, because it is a fee they pay. AT&T doesn't charge me for paying my bill with a credit card, but my license plate incurs a "2.5% fee, minimum $2.50" if I don't pay with cash or check.
The hedge fund manager who got rich in large part off of energy investments at Farallon before selling out his carbon producing investments and going in on alternative energy is now pushing for the advancement of alternative energy, which will profit him, while criticizing others for being for profit... the irony.
While zero profit would be ideal for utilities like electricity, APS is mandated to only turn a 3% profit (no more). It's not like they're out to perpetually increase shareholder value via increasing net profits.
Also, while opponents to 127 have been putting up "No new taxes! No on 127", signage everywhere, taxes not the real driver among friends I've spoken with. It's the feeling that AZ is already moving in the right direction towards more renewables without the proposition - and that we'll get there soon (enough). And to be fair, they have a point. AZ is moving in the right direction already (albeit too slowly for such a sun-drenched state). Spritz in a little conservative ideology - "I've never seen a regulation that helped companies innovate faster," etc. - and you have a general dislike for the prop.
Finally, the biggest problem with 127, IMO, is that it's a prop in the first place. Too many people don't understand how difficult propositions can be to deal with after they're passed. Undoing bad props in tough times is almost impossible (requires a 2/3rds legislature vote + governor support), and 50% is a really tall order (AZ is still in the single digits.) We'd have to buy some of the power from out-of-state for years.
What happens if there's another recession? "Tough beans - it's a prop. Arizona WILL get to 50% and you will make the sacrifices - or the state will get sued into the ground." One needs to be really careful when modifying the state constitution like that.
So while I agree that APS just doesn't want to have to eat their ignorant decision to go all in on natural gas, and I'm probably going to vote for it (I think we can do it), this prop is likely doomed to fail.
âoeThey are fighting this so hard because they know they will make more money off of natural gas than they will off of renewables,â Mayes said. âoeThatâ(TM)s my viewpoint as a former regulator.â
Greed is human nature, of course they will choose the option that makes them the most money. Humans have survived as long as they have because people are greedy. Nobody can remove greed from the human soul. If you want solar power to succeed then make it cheaper than natural gas.
Carbon taxes won't fix this, that's an artificial cost that not only will be difficult to pass into law but also merely hides the costs in shuffling the numbers about. The true costs will still be reflected upon the consumer in some way, and people will do what they can to lower their costs. As an example of this I ran some numbers for a thought experiment. I computed how much natural gas I'd have to buy to run my own generator to power my house. This was for a common household backup generator, just the average backup generator someone could buy from a local hardware store. If I ignored the cost of the generator then I'd be paying the same for my electricity that I generated myself compared to my utility bill. Now, I'd have to account for the cost of the generator in there somehow so I'd still have to pay for the initial investment of the generator, installation costs, as well as maintenance. If there is a carbon tax then the costs of the electricity and natural gas will shift to account for that tax.
With the cost difference so small it is conceivable for it to be cheaper for people to run natural gas or propane generators in their backyard than buy electricity from the utility if there is a carbon tax on the utility for their burning of coal, natural gas or (primarily for Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico) fuel oil.
People are greedy because that is a very basic survival instinct. Don't try to fight it, make it work for you. You want greedy people to buy solar power? Then make it something that they can make (or save) money on. Trying to force the matter in law will always fail in one way or another, because voters are greedy too.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I live in Arizona and voted 'no', but my reason is a little different. State constitutions are not the right place for energy policies. The constitution should include things about the structure of government, human rights, who is allowed to vote, powers reserved for the government, and limits to those powers. What kind of ass-hat tries to stick energy policy in a constitution? We have laws for things like that.
lifetime. In good times they'll built it with a 50 year plan then 50 years from now the economy's in the cyclic downturn and it's time to shut down the plant and build a new one but nobody wants to.
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Arizona has the only nuclear power plant far from a major body of water. It already uses reclaimed water from suburbs of Phoenix upstream. What happens when that water is no longer available as the Southwest dries out from climate change? We may very well enter another megadrought forcing most people to leave Arizona in a decade or two. Arizona needs to switch to renewables, increase energy efficiency of buildings (wrap them in thick walls of adobe?), and conserve water, but if the rest of the world doesn't do its part, Arizona is screwed. So Vote Yes on 127 (if you live in the state).
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Energy is going to become more expensive no matter what mix of energy we use. Might as well install as much solar as possible. Arizona is the sunniest state in the Union and installing solar should be a no brainer. We still need a way to store that energy. I hope molten salt batteries, or train car kinetic energy storage or something else will solve that problem. Vote Yes 127
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
How does this work?
"a two-hundred-million-dollar gas-fuel plant would be more lucrative than a twenty-million-dollar solar array because the utility can charge higher rates to recoup its investment costs"
I would think that the utility could charge rates to recoup investment costs of either solar or gas. What am I missing here? I would think that once you have recouped your investment costs, I would assume by charging rates, then it would be mostly profit since you don't have to purchase natural gas.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
Its intentions are laudable: fight carbon warming by promoting carbon-free energy sources. But not only does it leave out nuclear energy, which is already a large fraction of Arizona's baseload generation, but it leaves out the most important renewable, hydro, which happens to be another large fraction of Arizona's power base.
Prop 127 promotes only solar and wind as power sources. To put more of these on the grid would require that APS issue 'smart meters' to all customers that would measure demand load continuously, and which eventually would be able to turn major appliances on and off at strategic times to make the most of sunny afternoons and surges of wind.
And guess what? In my town, a rollout of the first-generation of smart meters was opposed by the same hippie moms who promote Prop 127. By refusing smart meters, they have already negated the whole idea of putting sun and wind on the grid.
Water on this planet is not being created or destroyed. it is only being maldistributed.
Vote No on 127 as I did, add more air-cooled nuclear capacity at Palo Verde, and have Los Angeles desalinate its own water supply with the added energy. With LA not sucking water from as far away as Wyoming, there will be plenty left over for inland users.
Think of it as trading Arizona energy for a part of California's allocation of inland water.
which are batshit crazy. But that said, solar is a completely different ballgame in a place like Az where you've got sun 90% of the time.
Global Warming is a problem that needs solving, but nuclear plants with their 10+ years time to start up aren't going to solve it anyway. Solar can be up and running in 16 weeks (ok, let's be honest , 32, but 8 months is better than 8 years). That's because you don't have to constantly watch every step and every screw. If you cut corners then it costs a bit more in maintenance. Do the same on a nuke plant and you've got a meltdown + dead zone.
And you haven't said what is going to replace those older plants. If it's the same type of plant that's cheaper to run unsafe than safe then Houston, we've got a problem.
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The southwest drying out won't so much be about climate change, I mean it's already dry -- and gets most of its water from elsewhere.
The real problem is allowing a metropolis of nearly 5m people to exist in a fucking desert (phoenix) -- and bleeding the Colorado dry to sustain it. There are some externalities at work here that defy logic, and are absolutely not sustainable.
(Not to mention they actually do grow corn and cotton in the phoenix metro area.. which seems completely god-damn bonkers)
So Tom Steyr, the ultimate "toss my money around and try to make people do what I want", is mad that someone else is tossing their money around.
Essentially, if Steyr supports it, run away.
I'd mod you up if I had not started this.
Seriously, this is far more of an issue than the idea of building new ones.
In fact, if we were smart, we would put nuscale in place of coal plants
Then while also developing thorium, we could then put thorium reactors in the old nuke sites, re-use the 'waste' that is sitting on site for driving the thorium, while burning up all the 'waste'. THat would allow all of the utilities to continue making their profits, while we clean up the air, land, and water.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not adobe - stone. A 2 feet wide (deep) stone wall comes cheap, and if you put half a foot of air gap between the outer 1 foot of stone and the inner foot of stone, practically does not need heating or cooling even in Arizona. The condition in the fertile crescent where people first started agriculture were not much different from what the conditions in Arizona are
First off, Solar in AZ is not 90%. It is around 45%.
Again, I agree with your assessment of nukes. That is why we need SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS that are built offsite and transported there. That would keep the real costs and build time, low. In fact with nuscale, once they are started, once they are going and a site is approved, within 1-2 years, they would be up and running.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
cotton is so heavily subsidized that it is literary turning into gold in your own pockets
I voted Yes to Prop 127, eff APS and they're "Public Service" for private profits.
The Colorado river's drying up. As water gets scarce even waste water becomes valuable. Again, think 20, 30, 40 or 50 years from now. I'll be dead, my kids won't.
Again, if Az would invest in new water infrastructure now it wouldn't be an issue. But it's a red state. They'll just sit around until it's a crisis, blame the poor for not planning and wait for federal dollars to bail them out (or not, and the entire state will collapse). I wish I could say I was exaggerating or trolling...
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especially in a sun state like Az. But there are a lot of vested interests that want profits _now_ and investment when it's somebody else. If I'm a CEO in charge of building a solar plant I just spent several million this quarter that could have gone to shareholders like me (remember most CEOs are paid in stock). Meanwhile those solar farms might be 10, 20 years before they really pay off. I'll be retired by then.
We've created an economic and political system that incentivizes short term profit and incumbent powers. We shouldn't be surprised when the long term results are poor at best and disastrous at worst.
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Re: growing corn and cotton. I agree it is bonkers. The Southwest has experienced natural megadroughts in the past, but it is our overuse and poor water management that is the problem. Global warming is only going to exacerbate it. Last year I read The Water Knife , an interesting near future thriller all about water or lack thereof and the fights over it. Hopefully, it will remain a what if scenario.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
What would actually happen is that, due to the "irrespective of cost" clause in the proposition, they'd simply bleed us dry selling us overpriced solar to make quota. There is a profit motive here, but not the one they allude to. I want to see more solar, but this is a terrible way to manage it and a terribly written proposition. Our nuclear plant is doing just fine, I don't want it to get starved of funds for maintenance and then develop problems because some environmentalists tried to force that into a self-fulfilling prophecy, either.
I sent in an early ballot with a NO on Prop 127 already. I hope the rest of Arizona is smart enough to do the same.
By "without issue", you mean, "with horrible market distortions that drive prices up 3x that of the US, but with higher CO2 emissions than the US.
If you cut corners then it costs a bit more in maintenance. Do the same on a nuke plant and you've got a meltdown + dead zone.
Here's an idea, don't let drunken Soviets design, build, and run your nuclear power plant. That should solve all the problems of a meltdown and dead zone.
It turns out that in the USA there's a shortage of drunken Soviets. I think we'll do just fine on that.
Oh, because I'm expecting someone to prop up another straw man from another nuclear accident, Arizona seems to have a shortage of tsunamis. I'm thinking Arizona is a very good place for some nuclear power, as is much of the USA.
It doesn't have to take 10+ years to build a nuclear power plant, the ones near me were built in less than 5 years. That was 40+ years ago, and our ability to build things since then has improved. There's nothing keeping nuclear power plants getting from breaking ground to producing power in 5 years if we set our minds to it, and chased off the Greenpeace assholes when they show up. We've seen nuclear power plants get built in 3 years before, and I'm guessing that once we got some experience that we'd be able to do that in less than 2 years.
Even if it did take 10+ years to complete a nuclear power plant that still doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. We know we will need the electricity, and large civil projects routinely run longer than that. All that long building time means is that we should stop talking about it and get started building them. I remember having a discussion with a co-worker about drilling for oil in ANWR, it came up because oil prices crept up a bit. He told me that drilling there for oil now because oil prices went up a bit is a stupid idea, it would take 5 years to get any oil from it. Every well takes 5 years to get oil from it, if we made that argument for every well then we'd never have drilled before. Then 5 years after that conversation oil prices hit record highs. I don't know if drilling for oil in ANWR would have done anything meaningful to lower prices but it would not have hurt. Just in general we have large projects planned out years in advance. Given that a nuclear power plant, once online and built to modern specification, is expected to last for 80 years this is just a good idea for the future. Construction on Hoover Dam was started in 1931 but the last generator wasn't installed and running until 1961. That's 30 years. It's been there for a very long time, managing the water flow and generating power. It's expected to continue doing so for a long time yet.
Telling me it takes a long time to build a nuclear power plant is not an argument to not build them, it merely means we need to account for that in the planning. We can build some solar at the same time as the nuclear power plants, perhaps even on the same sites so they can back each other up and share in resources, human resources and power lines.
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Another APS employee posts on slashdot.
Logical fallacy: Argumentum ad monsantium.
When you are so corrupt that the ONLY way to do what the majority wants is to let the people vote on it directly--- that is when a constitution amendment is the solution. You can't pass a law because the system is too corrupted and the wealthy elites are too powerful they can hack the system. It's not clean but the system is dirty and polluting your constitution with a few popular amendments gets stuff DONE without waiting for the system to be cleaned... if that is even possible anymore.... you may want a clean simple constitution but that isn't a good enough reason for many of us who are fed up from decades of corruption stopping common sense obvious policy shifts. Sure, we should fix the system but people just are not motivated, informed or smart enough to do that yet. if ever. If that ever does happen, then you can pass laws and undo amendments... the fact you can't undo an amendment that is not relevant also speaks to how broken the system would be.
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Arizona is a desert and should not be heavily populated.
Fortunately electricity is very fungible
Yes, that is true. Proposition 127 would destroy that fungibility.
People generally don't much care where their electricity comes from so long as when they flip a switch a light comes on. What we see people in Arizona doing is make electricity not fungible, making a distinction between different energy sources "irrespective of cost" based on an arbitrary distinction. This will inherently drive up costs, because there is no fungibility in the electricity any more as different kinds of watt-hours are treated differently. The utilities can't ship in electricity from where they choose, or ship it out as they wish. They are bound by the law to have at least 50% of their electricity from what the law defines as renewable.
The only way for Proposition 127 to not drive up energy costs is if the market prices for wind and solar power naturally become lower than competing sources by 2030. That's not going to happen. If the people writing this proposition had any faith that it would happen naturally then they would not have put this proposition on the ballot. People complain about Big Coal and Big Nuclear being "evil" in their grabbing for profits. Well, here's an example of Big Wind and Big Solar putting a proposition on the ballot that would guarantee themselves a profit for decades.
People are getting all excited to vote in favor of government guaranteed profits for big corporations, with the common middle class wage earner carrying the bulk of this load. The rich don't care, they will move, prop up some solar panels on the roof (and probably get paid for it), or just suck it up and pay the higher rates. The poor probably don't care either, there's lots of government programs to pay the electric bills for them.
Proposition 127 is just the rich getting richer and the middle class being driven to poverty. You disagree? Fine, vote "yes" and see what happens. I'll watch from a safe distance.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
“You cannot plug an electric car into a coal-fired power plant and think that somehow you’re doing anything environmental.”
Sure you can! While, yes, you're centralizing demand on dirty power, the overall emissions output is STILL lower than if all those cars were gasoline vehicles.
If these people were SERIOUS about either low emissions or greenhouse gas reduction, they'd be going nuclear.
But, yet again, the NIMBY crowd couldn't accept that in a trillion years.
"Nukz iz baaaaaad!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If we're talking about a PV plant and not a solar thermal plant, you're talking about a facility with several tons and tons of panels that are essentially no good after about 40 years. And they normally cannot be recycled. So, tons of landfill...
A gas plant can be refurbished endlessly. And most of the materials used can be recycled after being swapped out.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In 2017, the company made four hundred and eighty-eight million dollars
This is a highly misleading (purposefully misleading?) statement where "made" is pretty ambiguous. I looked up APS's 2017 statement and found the following for Pinnacle West Capital, their parent company:
Pinnacle West Capital Corporation (NYSE: PNW) today reported consolidated net income attributable to common shareholders of $488.5 million
So they had revenue of $488 million. That is not the same as profit even though the article tries to conflate the two. I tried finding a quick link to their 2017 profits and came up empty. However, they did report a Q1 2018 profit of $23.3 million on revenue of nearly $677.7 million. Even assuming a $30 million profit per quarter, that's only $120 million profit per year, far less than the $480 million the article would lead you to believe they "made."
I won't quibble whether or not APS makes "too much" profit. That's not the point. The point is people need to understand the different between revenue and profit when they're griping about "greed." Words matter.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Los Angeles (where I live) uses a percent of the water used in California. What percent? I have no idea. Little or no LA water comes from the Colorado river. Some comes from northern California, most of it comes from the Owens river on the east side of the Sierra Nevada range. Us 'Angelinos" stole that water back in the 1920-30's.
I tried to look up water use in California. It's complicated. One number bandied about is 80% goes to agriculture. Depends how you count it. Some say you should also count the water flowing in streams and rivers that reaches the ocean as being used allocated for environmental purposes. Most California water comes from rain and snow. The snow pack on the Sierra Nevada range melts and is used. Global warming will probably reduce the amount of snow pack and melt it sooner. We may start running out of water in September or December before winter storms replenish it. Most of the water California gets from the Colorado river goes to agriculture. Some of that water goes all over the country, and parts of the world, in the form of crops grown and beasts raised. California is one of the US larger growers of food.
The average car trip moves roughly 250 pounds of human being(s) (1.59 humans per trip, but that is only the easiest source I found via google). Using a car we are also moving 1-2 tons of vehicle. 2-100 tons for and SUV. Oops! 2-4 tons?
An electric scooter moves and average of 135 pounds homo slacker or homo brat, and taking a guess, 50 pounds of scooter.
That saves a some money. There are things to work out, such as 17 year old a-hole scooter riders running down grandma.
About half of the LA water supply comes from the Colorado River:
https://viterbi.usc.edu/water/
If most people need to leave the state, then why would there need to be a lot of power production? What you say makes no sense.
Los Angeles bleeds the Colorado dry; Arizona is far behind in Colorado River water rights (and first to take cuts to its supply).
Phoenix was founded on the Salt River for a reason. The previous Hohokam settlement on the site did indeed succumb to drought (or at least that's the prevailing theory), but they lacked the technology to build damns upstream to manage the water supply over years and decades; the multiple reservoirs that modern Phoenix has are doing very well, even after about a decade of drought, even while Lake Mead dwindles.
Further, I read years ago (sorry, no lmddgtfy.net citation link) that the international agreements were already in place for Arizona to desalt and pipeline from the Gulf of California when the need finally arises. Currently, conservation and reclamation have meant that the Phoenix metro area uses less water today, even with massive population growth, than it did 20 years ago. (Most water use, 69% (http://arizonaexperience.org/people/arizonas-water-uses-and-sources) is still agricultural; when an alfalfa farm becomes 250 single family homes or such, water use actually drops.)
Phoenix's water future is actually pretty well secured; remember years ago when Atlanta was facing a full-on water outage? Non-desert cities naturally don't feel the urgency to plan for water shortages, but Phoenix knows it will always need to carefully manage an eternally thin margin. All the claims of "unsustainable" seem to start from the premise that cities must be sufficiently supplied by the rain that falls on them; Phoenix was always predicated on relying on the rain and snow upstream.
Lake Mead is almost in single-digit feet range now of the level that will automatically trigger cuts. It will likely happen soon, and Arizona will be first in line for those cuts. 39% of Arizona's water currently comes from the Colorado. But do the math; if Arizona cut its farming in half, that would almost cover the loss of ALL Colorado River water, and the cuts don't start with "all".
Never confuse law with justice, nor religion with morality.