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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."
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.
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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$200M seems kinda cheap for a gas plant, can't be very big. Using EIA numbers at around $1000/kW for gas plants that would be a 200MW installation.
200MW is on the small side for large scale solar farms. Okay the cost is higher than gas, but I thought he point here was to spend as much money as possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Maybe you should look at the cost structure of wind and solar and the payback over time.
E.g. larger up front cost - very low operating costs.
At this point in time, its cheaper per MW/h to build solar in a high sun exposure state than it is to build gas or nuclear.
So no, it's more economical to build solar than gas.
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.
When there is a freak cloudy but humid day people still want to run their air-conditioners.
Solar is to save fuel, you still need the gas plants for backup.
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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"we need" is exactly the problem I have with this jerk's entire proposal. He doesn't speak for me. Nor does he speak for some altruistic interest. He speaks for his own interest. GFY
How many straw men can you get in one post?
Government is _exactly_ what's needed for necessary things like power and gas delivery.
What makes you think a company that answers to shareholders will do things more efficiently, and includes their profit margin, than a public utility that has no profits to generate.
E.g. your assumption that a public utility is inherently wasteful, or that too much money goes to pensions isn't supported by the large number of agencies that operate utilities very efficently .. the pensions and waste you cite are red herrings.
Most all public utilities have regulations in place that almost all of the money collected go towards providing the service being regulated.
There might be surcharges or forward fees in your bill for new infrastructure or power plants, but again, those things are for he use of the rate payers, not the profit margins of the shareholders.
First off, countries like Germany have been working with solar for decades as part of their infrastructure without issue.
The other is that renewables are a multiheaded thing.
E.g. you don't just build solar, you also build wind, you build hydroelectric, you build stored energy plants like water pumps during the night, you interconnect the power grids so a shortfall in one source means drawing on other sources.
e.g. same idea as today, just with more power sources.
And you think that the entire electrical grid for the state should be built around an extreme edge case?
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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.
They already have more than enough power plants, the goal should be to diversify. Most power usage is during the day, and solar plants could easily cover this peak usage.
But the crux of the problem is not that the utility wants to build this plant in order to generate electricity; they want the more expensive plant because this will result in more profits when they are reimbursed for the costs of the plant.
and their dessert climate
Well, that explains the obesity problem. ;^) Sorry, couldn't let that typo slide by.
Heating your home with wood pellets is good for you now but what happens when more people also choose to do this? The price of wood pellets is a very simple supply vs. demand scenario. The price of heating oil and wood pellets is relatively stable because both can be tanked up, stored for long periods easily, transported with relative speed and low cost, therefore what you pay for it day to day, hour to hour, and even year to year, is known and doesn't change quickly. Solar power is not like that.
Solar power costs, like electricity costs generally, changes minute by minute. We, as residential consumers, don't see this but utilities and large consumers do. Solar power is not only highly variable in cost but also very difficult to store, not always easily transported elsewhere, and therefore can't simply be dipped into on demand like wood pellets, oil, natural gas, or any other fuel.
It's like that old joke, you have the cook on a cattle drive saying to his fellow cattle drivers when the gather for supper, "Well boys, I have good news and bad news. Bad news is all we have for supper is horse shit. The good news is we have plenty of it." Having plenty of solar power is not always good news if the bad news is that it's expensive to store, expensive to transport, and is not available when you need it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
First off, countries like Germany have been working with solar for decades as part of their infrastructure without issue.
Sure, that's quite likely true. There's a problem though. It's trivial to go from 0% unreliable energy to 20% unreliable energy. Going from 20% to 40% will be a bit harder but not insurmountable. From 40% to 60% will be very very difficult. Beyond that is effectively impossible.
Hydroelectric power is the only viable means we have of grid scale electric storage. Germany doesn't have a lot of hydro dams, neither does Arizona. That will make deploying wind and solar a problem beyond perhaps 20% or 40%. Germany likes to talk big about how much energy the export, but they can only do so because their neighbors have a lot of coal, nuclear, and hydro. If they keep going like they are, as well as their neighbors deploying more wind and solar, then they will run out of hydro storage, run out of reliable energy sources like coal and nuclear, and generally find themselves in an impossible situation.
Germany is doing fine now with their plan of replacing coal and nuclear with unreliable wind and solar but this will not last. They will have to return to nuclear power or become totally reliant on their neighbors to keep their grid stable, and that is a national security (economically and militarily speaking) problem.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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!"
When there is a freak cloudy but humid day people still want to run their air-conditioners.
And why would you want to run an AC then? Sorry, that is beyond me.
When the humidity in a house gets above about 50% it can be very uncomfortable at any temperature, the AC will dehumidify as it cools and so people will still want to run the air conditioner even if the thermostat is set to what would otherwise be a comfortable temperature.
If the humidity gets above about 60% then it's not only uncomfortable but also unhealthy. I'm guessing that such high humidity is rare in Arizona but while I lived in Texas that kind of humidity was relatively common. I've been living in the American Midwest for many years now and humidity is always a problem, it will always be too high or too low. Whole house humidifiers are pretty common, and I've had conversations with people considering whole house DE-humidifiers. My guess is that with better insulation on houses today running the air conditioner to dehumidify is not always practical.
If you cannot fathom the idea of running the air conditioner on a cool and humid day then you must live in a very moderate climate, or one so cold that heating will always be enough to dehumidify the house.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
My government ran the electrical utility well for 70 years until we got a more right wing government that claimed to be good business people, who then lowered taxes and made up the deficit by demanding the utility borrow money and give it to the government.
Unluckily it just takes one election to vote in a bunch of idiots who can destroy things. They're usually business people who can't see past the next quarter and yes, things are good for a short while until the bills come due, usually under the next government so they can blame them for the crap.
Of course private, is always inefficient as they have to have ever growing profits, at least in the case of publicly traded private companies.
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Another factor they don't understand is Arizona's role in being a lifeline of baseload power to California, which no longer deigns to generate power of its own. Several California cities have quietly bought fractional shares in Palo Verde, our giant nuclear plant, for this reason.
If we want to move towards carbon-free, if we want California to survive, we should add several new units at Palo Verde.
Ah Germany ... did you know that apart from Energiewende they coined another great term, Dunkelflaute. It means when there is very little solar or wind, which can happen across all of Europe at the same time. Which has happened. The German backup is coal, gas and some French nuclear power. There is no other backup in sight either. Power to gas could work, if we want to multiply our electricity costs by an uncomfortably large amount.
There's a page on the English wikipedia for Energiewende, not for Dunkelflaute though.
Over 1/4 of total household power use in AZ is Airconditioning, during the day that is obviously most of the household use. Guess what is not needed after a tropical storm with cloud cover? It also helps the wind and hydro power will then be driven up to take over any excess. Also cloud cover doesn't end solar, still get 25% of the capacity, so when daytime demand is cut in half you will still have 1/4 of the solar power, so not that much makeup would be needed if PV was providing half the power, all is still good.
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!"
https://www.azfamily.com/news/...
Cloudy, humid AND 107F ... why the fuck do people live in Phoenix?