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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.
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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.
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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I early-voted "No".
I strongly believe in Solar Power - especially in Az. We don't have much in the way of wind resources (and I hate the view of windmills anyway), but sun we've got an abundance of. Solar and Fossil fuels are neck-and-neck for 30-year amortized costs, but solar should win simply from a public health standpoint.
However, I really don't believe complex law should be ensconced in the State Constitution. The entire US Constitution is four handwritten pages long. The first ten amendments fit comfortably on another. This amendment is four pages long by itself. If this was coming up in the legislature, I'd probably support a version of it (using a definition of "clean power" that includes existing hydropower and nuclear power).
And the worms ate into his brain.
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.
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.
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).
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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.