Air conditioners are not reversible heat pumps, which is what you need to be able to use it for heating.
Honestly, it surprises me that a reversible heat pump would be that much more expensive or massive than a standard AC unit, but so far very few EVs have used them, so I have to assume that they are (probably due to the small market at present).
Back to the GGP, it's also worth noting that while EVs only give off around a quarter as much heat as an ICE, they still do give off heat - in the battery pack, wiring, inverter, and motor, and all of them are typically fan- and/or ram air cooled. If you're cruising at 10+kW power, you still have the potential to draw the equivalent heat of a small portable space heater off of your powertrain. Whether it's worth the cost/mass/complexity to do so, that's another story...
You know, I've long been dismissive of solar power on EVs, but actually, those numbers aren't that bad.
20% isn't "impressive" any more, you can get 20% efficient cells quite affordably - some brands of common rooftop panels are over 22%. Even if you limit yourself to cheap thin film solar, there's several selling in the 17% range. On the other hand, if you have a large budget, you could cover the vehicle in Spectrolab/Soitec/Fraunhofer multijunction cells with microconcentrators and get 30-40% efficiency.
On the road on a sunny day you have full "exposure" unless you're driving through the woods or an urban canyon. You can certainly cut the power down by solar angles (aka, not "peak sun"), but then you can't separately cut it down with your "5 hour" limitation.
17 miles is longer than the average American's commute. And commutes often involve city driving; the 215-mile Model 3 range is for highway driving, not city. EVs get much better range in city driving than highway. And the depth of discharge isn't 100%, a (small) portion of that 60kWh is reserve at the bottom and unused at the top. On the other hand, you didn't factor in charging losses, and light that hits the windows has only partial charging potential (if that) - but these losses are smaller than the range gain for mixed driving vs. highway-only and accounting for DoD.
And lastly, "not really enough to be useful if you run out of charge on the side of the highway." - really? How far did you miss the charging station by? Are you picturing that if you're going to miss a charging station it's going to be dozens of miles? How the hell did you do that? And if you're that bad at trip planning, how did you ever manage to drive a gasoline car?
Modern EVs know where all nearby charging stations are, and there's fast charging stations regularly spaced on almost all US interstates. If you're missing charging stations by dozens of miles, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Re, heating: the heater itself is only part of the winter losses. From your baseline 200-300mi highway range, a general rule of thumb for a Tesla is one mile of range lost per degree Fahrenheit or 3km per degree celcius, below 50F/10C or so, from both interior heating and reduced battery capacity / increased battery heating needs. On top of this light to moderate snow accumulation on the roads will cost you about 25% additional range.
At low speeds, heating costs you more of your range, because it means more if your time driving. (On the other hand, low speeds dramatically increases range, and also, who spends 10 hours a day in only low-speed driving? Maybe if you're a courier operating in downtown LA...)
To the EV's cold-weather benefit, the vehicle can preheat from mains power, either by command on the app or by schedule.
In hot weather, its a bit more complicated as battery range increases offset cooling, and cooling power needs are nonlinear. But in general, you go further in hot weather than cold.
I didn't know that a low-end Toyota does zero to sixty in 5.6 seconds (baseline model) and costs 2-3 cents per mile with 1/10th the moving parts of a typical car. Kudos to Toyota for upping their game!
And I'm sorry that going from a six-figure two seater to a $35k passenger car in half a decade, with a clear plan laid out to contine the trend (Gigafactory and its planned successors) isn't fast enough of a cost reduction timeline for you.
25 miles range is a joke. Barely over a tenth of the baseline Model 3's range. Level 2 chargers are not how you do a cross-country trip, that's what superchargers are for. But if for some reason you wanted to use level 2s, you's get about 70 miles of normal highway driving per hour of charging in a Model 3. More if you slow down (but then the driving phase is longer). In short, doable... but you really want level 3 / superchargers.
As for the track, none of the EVs in question are designed as track cars (although you can certainly use them there); your biggest problem will be overheating, not range, as they're aircooled, not watercooled. Just like with gasoline cars, each car targets a specific market. For a track car, in addition to watercooling, aero designed for downforce, smaller seating, etc, you use a pack focused more on power density than energy density or price; power density affects both discarge and charge rates.
They do if you forget to or don't bother to plug in *every night for weeks on end* for the average commuter.
So, in other words, no.
Lets say however that you set out to run out of range. First off, as you get low, you will start to get warnings. When you actually hit zero, it doesn't run out - you have 10-20km left.þ, and it puts you in a power restricted mode (did you seriously plan so badly that you were more than 10-20km off? Especially given that your car knows where charging stations are?) Not enough? Slow down; unlike gasoline cars, EV ranges drastically increase with speed reduction. Still not enough? Pull into any random shop or farmhouse and ask if they could let you have an emergency charge (try that with gas). I've never heard of anyone ever being turned down on a charging request after explaining how little power is involved (under $1 an hour), and charge current can be set. You can charge from a regular 120v outlet at "5-10 miles per hour", depending. So by what massive distance did you hypothetically miss the charger by?
This. It's very common to have separate "development" and "deployment" versions (the latter often with a title like ".min.js"), the latter having been run through a program that mangles it not to "hide" things, but to minimize bandwidth. Part of the mangling can be undone on the client side. Part of it can't.
Honestly, I think it'd be best for everyone if we'd finally get around to standardizing Javascript compilation, with servers being able to request both compiled and uncompiled versions. Then everyone's happy. Developers can code in a nice, easy to read format, don't have to deal with maintaining two versions, and have the smallest-possible bandwidth use on deployment. Web users have their pages load fast, run fast, and can in development mode request the raw code. Having the raw code as a delivery option allows for backwards compatibility with older browsers. What's the drawback?
There's a push in the direction of WebAssembly, but it's not the same. It has no "backwards compatibility mode and support is currently limited. It doesn't give users the source code. It doesn't allow for using today's massive JS codebase. Etc. Emscripten isn't much better.
1) Where did you get your $40m figure from? I've been searching for quite a while now and can't find a cost statement for the plant anywhere. And it's suspicious (although not damning) that your dollar figure is exactly the same as the power production figure, making it look like a miscopy. Then again, it's in the ballpark; the average for new US plants is now around $1.50/W, while $40m for 40MW would be $1/W, in a country with cheaper labour, etc.
2) Panel power production doesn't just end after 25 years. For typical cells, the production would be down to 70-80% after 25 years. Inverters are a more likely early replacement item than panels. On the other hand, nor do you factor in cost amortization.
3) That's not how you calculate solar generation; you use capacity factors. It doesn't make a material difference (average US capacity factors for PV plants is 28%), but it's a very amateurish way to go about things.
4) 6*40*365*25 is not 32, it's 2,19 million MWh. You mean to also divide 40 million dollars by that figure, but that's not 0,32 dollars/MWh either, it's 18.26 dollars/MWh.
5) You seem to think that that's a bad thing. 18.26 dollars per megawatt hour is ~1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. Let alone 0.32 dollars per megawatt hour, which would be 0.32 cents per kilowatt hour. How much do you pay?
I don't understand how that's supposed to address the drone problem. So you can't fly under manual control? Fine, fly to GPS coordinates and do everything automatically. A prison yard isn't exactly a small target, you don't need precision. Are they planning to jam GPS too? Fine, you're not talking a long flight, inertial guidance on a calm day should do it.
With the amount of money involved in drug smuggling, I don't think any of this poses a hindrance except to amateurs with no connections. So unless they're planning to HERF or shoot drones out of the sky...
Plants are an incredibly inefficient means to capture light energy. At best you're looking at capturing a couple percent of the energy - more typical is a fraction of a percent. Then you throw half to three quarters of it away due to processing/conversion losses and Carnot losses in combustion. And they use large amounts of water, don't function for half the year in most locations, require pesticides and fertilizers, and on and on.
How exactly is a solar farm supposed to black out in 100 msec? Do clouds move at orbital velocities over solar farms? Or if we're talking solar farms spread across large geographic areas, then relativistic velocities?
Most grid battery buffers have traditionally been used to stabilize frequencies on long lines, having nothing to do with supply constraints. The new, large-scale grid batteries are designed to function as peakers. Tesla's Australia battery, for example, is cited at 100MW with a cost estimate of $62M ($0.62/W), By contrast, a NG peaker usually costs $1/W or more. The former's batteries have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, with a current replacement cost of around $40M (presumably well lower 15 years in the future); otherwise they're largely maintenance free (unlike NG peakers).
At present, NG peakers are still the go-to solution for pairing with renewables. But the numbers on batteries are looking impressive, and they'll probably take over at some point in the future.
You're denying that the cheap solar panels you mentioned are being subsidized by the chinese government in order to control the market.
Chinese solar panels face anti-dumping tarriffs upon import to the US to combat this, in some cases as high as 239%, due to the low-interest loans the Chinese government gives solar manufacturers. And they've faced these tarriffs since 2012. China, for its part, denies that its dumping, and says that the loans are simply an investment in clean power and an attempt to improve the environment. Of the top 10 manufacturers, 4 are from China, 2 from the USA, 2 from Taiwan, one from Canada and one from South Korea.
China not only produces extensively to export, but also has a huge domestic solar consumption as well. For example, China just completed the world's largest floating solar farm. China is the world's largest market for photovoltaics and is the world's largest producer of solar power. They're on track to have over 100 GW installed solar power by 2018 (up from 77GW in 2016). They also use 70% of the world's total installed solar water heating.
Net metering at the residential scale. Forcing energy companies to pay retail instead of wholesale is a direct subsidy to residential solar.
It can also be the other way around. Solar production tends to correspond with peak demand, and peaking power costs an arm and a leg. A solar user importing power at night and exporting power during the day is doing operators a favour.
That said, I think it would be fair to do what we do in Iceland with power bills, that is separate the infrastructure cost on your bill (aka, what it costs them to provide you with a power connection, amortized) from the generation cost. So if you want a grid connection, you always pay the infrastructure bill - but your generation bill could be net metered, even negative, ideally wholesale** both ways with time-of-use taken into account.
** Wholesale because you're already paying the overhead cost separately.
The EPA Andrew other federal and state agencies giving coal construction, particularly major repairs and upgrades, a pocket veto by just not responding to permit actions is an indirect subsidy, as they are deliberately driving up the construction cost to competition.
Citation needed for specifics showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all. The feds generally have no say in "coal construction" excepting where it touches upon the EPA, which is obligated by law to respond to all permit actions. Coal-producing states are generally extremely coal friendly.
Ignore direct congressional pressure on major landholders in the desert southwest to force them into leasing their land to politically connected renewable companies at well below market rates.
Again, "Citation needed showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all." What you're describing is eminent domain - quite common with roads, oil pipelines, power lines, etc, but can you name a single example of it being used for building "renewable" power plants in "the desert southwest"?
And let's not get started with the average of a decade and a half of regulatory and judicial delays to nuclear construction which increase the cost ten-fold.
"The delays have been due to various problems with planning, supervision, and workmanship" "The first problems that surfaced were irregularities in the foundation concrete, " "Later, it was found that subcontractors had provided heavy forgings that were not up to project standards and which had to be re-cast" "An apparent problem constructing the reactor's unique double-containment structure also caused delays, as the welders had not been given proper instructions" "... told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction" "...are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default."
Tell me, when was the last time that you welded a large-diameter zirconium-alloy pipe and X-rayed it for defects, with any possible sign of imperfection meaning having to cut it off and start from scratch? How many people in the world do you think have that skillset? Because that's what's involved in nuclear power plant construction - it is extremely exacting. And if you think it'd be just jolly to cut corners, by all means hold that view, but understand that I most definitely will not be joining you in that.
They're not stupid. Their entire business is built on long-term analysis (a new deepwater well may take over a decade to start producing, and then last for decades; you have to predict the market very long in advance before sinking such huge amounts of capital). The supermajors will sink their money wherever their analysis tells them to.
It's a bit harder for the service providers. If you have a tanker and oil is predicted to decline or stay low for long periods, you might want to have plans for conversion options, or scrapping if it's showing its age. If you make / work with deepsea platforms, deep offshore wind may be a market to move into. Etc. But not everyone would find such a transition that simple.
All of that said, when you're talking wind and solar, you're not so much directly competing with oil. In most of the world, oil is rarely burned for power. In some regions it is, like the Middle East, and they are working to transition away from it (it's very expensive per joule compared to other sources), but even taking out all oil-fired power would not be devastating to the market. When it comes to oil, you have to hit transportation. I'm incredibly encouraged by the EV market; how quickly people put down orders for the Model 3, for example, and this despite how many people are waiting for the used market and second-generation vehicles, and how there's still great potential for major battery cost reductions as the market grows. But even still, a couple hundred thousand cars per year is just a blip. Even millions per year would butt up against a world with 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. Even if production scaleups occur at a lightning pace, the average car on US roads is a decade old, meaning an expected life of around two decades; in the developing world it's much greater. So oil is going nowhere fast.
All of that said, EVs are another factor among many that makes the long-term future of oil prices look bleak. The tight oil revolution for example has just crushed the market. Bitumen producers have been getting their prices down. Oil markets are this weak even with sanctions on Russia, the world's largest oil producer (note that they have relatively little affect on their current production, but are factored into futures forecasts as they slow Russia's ability to develop new resources).
No, they said 129MWh at 100MW. That's a 100MW peaking plant.
And where are you getting the lifespan on it? Powerwall units have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, with a 10 year warranty. And how expensive exactly do you think batteries are going to be that far down the line? Not to mention that the battery is only about $40m of the cost (see earlier).
Vegetable oils are not a mixture of alkanes, cycloalkanes, alkenes, etc. They're carboxylic acids bonded to glycerol. They're not the same thing chemically. There's some potential for conversion**, and there are some products which are easier to produce from fat feedstocks - but the vast majority of hydrocarbon products that we consume is much easier produced from petroleum.
** At the most basic level you can turn any hydrocarbon into petroleum with the Fischer-Tropsch process via gasification to syngas. But that's not much of an argument, because the reason we don't use much Fischer-Tropsch oil is because it's well more expensive than conventional petroleum - at least at today's prices. For some products you don't have to go all the way to making a syncrude, however, you can use the syngas more directly as a feedstock. Carbon monoxide is great at building simple carbon compounds because it's quite stable under normal conditions but incredibly reactive at elevated temperatures and pressures, to the point of even self-decomposition. So it'll tack carbon onto almost anything you include in the mixture with it.
Which is only reasonable. Ignoring the export potential with high power interconnects, the Middle East has traditionally relied on oil-fired power plants, which means burning a valuable export commodity (of the three main hydrocarbon fuels, oil is by far the most expensive per unit energy... because you can put petrol in your car, but not gas or coal, at least not without some significant industrial processing!).
That's actually a pretty nice price for a 100MW peaker. $65m for 100MW = 65 cents per watt? Most around around $1W a watt or more in capital costs. Now, to be fair, they also need to supply it with charging power - but it can buy at the cheapest possible rate, whenever power is cheapest (and conventional peakers still have to buy fuel).
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Air conditioners are not reversible heat pumps, which is what you need to be able to use it for heating.
Honestly, it surprises me that a reversible heat pump would be that much more expensive or massive than a standard AC unit, but so far very few EVs have used them, so I have to assume that they are (probably due to the small market at present).
Back to the GGP, it's also worth noting that while EVs only give off around a quarter as much heat as an ICE, they still do give off heat - in the battery pack, wiring, inverter, and motor, and all of them are typically fan- and/or ram air cooled. If you're cruising at 10+kW power, you still have the potential to draw the equivalent heat of a small portable space heater off of your powertrain. Whether it's worth the cost/mass/complexity to do so, that's another story...
You know, I've long been dismissive of solar power on EVs, but actually, those numbers aren't that bad.
20% isn't "impressive" any more, you can get 20% efficient cells quite affordably - some brands of common rooftop panels are over 22%. Even if you limit yourself to cheap thin film solar, there's several selling in the 17% range. On the other hand, if you have a large budget, you could cover the vehicle in Spectrolab/Soitec/Fraunhofer multijunction cells with microconcentrators and get 30-40% efficiency.
On the road on a sunny day you have full "exposure" unless you're driving through the woods or an urban canyon. You can certainly cut the power down by solar angles (aka, not "peak sun"), but then you can't separately cut it down with your "5 hour" limitation.
17 miles is longer than the average American's commute. And commutes often involve city driving; the 215-mile Model 3 range is for highway driving, not city. EVs get much better range in city driving than highway. And the depth of discharge isn't 100%, a (small) portion of that 60kWh is reserve at the bottom and unused at the top. On the other hand, you didn't factor in charging losses, and light that hits the windows has only partial charging potential (if that) - but these losses are smaller than the range gain for mixed driving vs. highway-only and accounting for DoD.
And lastly, "not really enough to be useful if you run out of charge on the side of the highway." - really? How far did you miss the charging station by? Are you picturing that if you're going to miss a charging station it's going to be dozens of miles? How the hell did you do that? And if you're that bad at trip planning, how did you ever manage to drive a gasoline car?
Modern EVs know where all nearby charging stations are, and there's fast charging stations regularly spaced on almost all US interstates. If you're missing charging stations by dozens of miles, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Re, heating: the heater itself is only part of the winter losses. From your baseline 200-300mi highway range, a general rule of thumb for a Tesla is one mile of range lost per degree Fahrenheit or 3km per degree celcius, below 50F/10C or so, from both interior heating and reduced battery capacity / increased battery heating needs. On top of this light to moderate snow accumulation on the roads will cost you about 25% additional range.
At low speeds, heating costs you more of your range, because it means more if your time driving. (On the other hand, low speeds dramatically increases range, and also, who spends 10 hours a day in only low-speed driving? Maybe if you're a courier operating in downtown LA. ..)
To the EV's cold-weather benefit, the vehicle can preheat from mains power, either by command on the app or by schedule.
In hot weather, its a bit more complicated as battery range increases offset cooling, and cooling power needs are nonlinear. But in general, you go further in hot weather than cold.
I didn't know that a low-end Toyota does zero to sixty in 5.6 seconds (baseline model) and costs 2-3 cents per mile with 1/10th the moving parts of a typical car. Kudos to Toyota for upping their game!
And I'm sorry that going from a six-figure two seater to a $35k passenger car in half a decade, with a clear plan laid out to contine the trend (Gigafactory and its planned successors) isn't fast enough of a cost reduction timeline for you.
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25 miles range is a joke. Barely over a tenth of the baseline Model 3's range. Level 2 chargers are not how you do a cross-country trip, that's what superchargers are for. But if for some reason you wanted to use level 2s, you's get about 70 miles of normal highway driving per hour of charging in a Model 3. More if you slow down (but then the driving phase is longer). In short, doable... but you really want level 3 / superchargers.
As for the track, none of the EVs in question are designed as track cars (although you can certainly use them there); your biggest problem will be overheating, not range, as they're aircooled, not watercooled. Just like with gasoline cars, each car targets a specific market. For a track car, in addition to watercooling, aero designed for downforce, smaller seating, etc, you use a pack focused more on power density than energy density or price; power density affects both discarge and charge rates.
They do if you forget to or don't bother to plug in *every night for weeks on end* for the average commuter.
So, in other words, no.
Lets say however that you set out to run out of range. First off, as you get low, you will start to get warnings. When you actually hit zero, it doesn't run out - you have 10-20km left.þ, and it puts you in a power restricted mode (did you seriously plan so badly that you were more than 10-20km off? Especially given that your car knows where charging stations are?) Not enough? Slow down; unlike gasoline cars, EV ranges drastically increase with speed reduction. Still not enough? Pull into any random shop or farmhouse and ask if they could let you have an emergency charge (try that with gas). I've never heard of anyone ever being turned down on a charging request after explaining how little power is involved (under $1 an hour), and charge current can be set. You can charge from a regular 120v outlet at "5-10 miles per hour", depending. So by what massive distance did you hypothetically miss the charger by?
I would have powered it with an electronium cell that harnesses the power of sunspots to produce cognitive radiation, and harvested that.
This. It's very common to have separate "development" and "deployment" versions (the latter often with a title like ".min.js"), the latter having been run through a program that mangles it not to "hide" things, but to minimize bandwidth. Part of the mangling can be undone on the client side. Part of it can't.
Honestly, I think it'd be best for everyone if we'd finally get around to standardizing Javascript compilation, with servers being able to request both compiled and uncompiled versions. Then everyone's happy. Developers can code in a nice, easy to read format, don't have to deal with maintaining two versions, and have the smallest-possible bandwidth use on deployment. Web users have their pages load fast, run fast, and can in development mode request the raw code. Having the raw code as a delivery option allows for backwards compatibility with older browsers. What's the drawback?
There's a push in the direction of WebAssembly, but it's not the same. It has no "backwards compatibility mode and support is currently limited. It doesn't give users the source code. It doesn't allow for using today's massive JS codebase. Etc. Emscripten isn't much better.
** 0.032 cents per kilowatt hour.
You make bridges out of zirconium where you are? Impressive budget you have ;)
1) Where did you get your $40m figure from? I've been searching for quite a while now and can't find a cost statement for the plant anywhere. And it's suspicious (although not damning) that your dollar figure is exactly the same as the power production figure, making it look like a miscopy. Then again, it's in the ballpark; the average for new US plants is now around $1.50/W, while $40m for 40MW would be $1/W, in a country with cheaper labour, etc.
2) Panel power production doesn't just end after 25 years. For typical cells, the production would be down to 70-80% after 25 years. Inverters are a more likely early replacement item than panels. On the other hand, nor do you factor in cost amortization.
3) That's not how you calculate solar generation; you use capacity factors. It doesn't make a material difference (average US capacity factors for PV plants is 28%), but it's a very amateurish way to go about things.
4) 6*40*365*25 is not 32, it's 2,19 million MWh. You mean to also divide 40 million dollars by that figure, but that's not 0,32 dollars/MWh either, it's 18.26 dollars/MWh.
5) You seem to think that that's a bad thing. 18.26 dollars per megawatt hour is ~1.8 cents per kilowatt hour. Let alone 0.32 dollars per megawatt hour, which would be 0.32 cents per kilowatt hour. How much do you pay?
Ahem.
I don't understand how that's supposed to address the drone problem. So you can't fly under manual control? Fine, fly to GPS coordinates and do everything automatically. A prison yard isn't exactly a small target, you don't need precision. Are they planning to jam GPS too? Fine, you're not talking a long flight, inertial guidance on a calm day should do it.
With the amount of money involved in drug smuggling, I don't think any of this poses a hindrance except to amateurs with no connections. So unless they're planning to HERF or shoot drones out of the sky...
Hawking radiation is not renewable. That said, the lifespans of black holes are usually written in scientific notation with a large exponent, so....
Plants are an incredibly inefficient means to capture light energy. At best you're looking at capturing a couple percent of the energy - more typical is a fraction of a percent. Then you throw half to three quarters of it away due to processing/conversion losses and Carnot losses in combustion. And they use large amounts of water, don't function for half the year in most locations, require pesticides and fertilizers, and on and on.
How exactly is a solar farm supposed to black out in 100 msec? Do clouds move at orbital velocities over solar farms? Or if we're talking solar farms spread across large geographic areas, then relativistic velocities?
Most grid battery buffers have traditionally been used to stabilize frequencies on long lines, having nothing to do with supply constraints. The new, large-scale grid batteries are designed to function as peakers. Tesla's Australia battery, for example, is cited at 100MW with a cost estimate of $62M ($0.62/W), By contrast, a NG peaker usually costs $1/W or more. The former's batteries have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, with a current replacement cost of around $40M (presumably well lower 15 years in the future); otherwise they're largely maintenance free (unlike NG peakers).
At present, NG peakers are still the go-to solution for pairing with renewables. But the numbers on batteries are looking impressive, and they'll probably take over at some point in the future.
Chinese solar panels face anti-dumping tarriffs upon import to the US to combat this, in some cases as high as 239%, due to the low-interest loans the Chinese government gives solar manufacturers. And they've faced these tarriffs since 2012. China, for its part, denies that its dumping, and says that the loans are simply an investment in clean power and an attempt to improve the environment. Of the top 10 manufacturers, 4 are from China, 2 from the USA, 2 from Taiwan, one from Canada and one from South Korea.
China not only produces extensively to export, but also has a huge domestic solar consumption as well. For example, China just completed the world's largest floating solar farm. China is the world's largest market for photovoltaics and is the world's largest producer of solar power. They're on track to have over 100 GW installed solar power by 2018 (up from 77GW in 2016). They also use 70% of the world's total installed solar water heating.
It can also be the other way around. Solar production tends to correspond with peak demand, and peaking power costs an arm and a leg. A solar user importing power at night and exporting power during the day is doing operators a favour.
That said, I think it would be fair to do what we do in Iceland with power bills, that is separate the infrastructure cost on your bill (aka, what it costs them to provide you with a power connection, amortized) from the generation cost. So if you want a grid connection, you always pay the infrastructure bill - but your generation bill could be net metered, even negative, ideally wholesale** both ways with time-of-use taken into account.
** Wholesale because you're already paying the overhead cost separately.
Citation needed for specifics showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all. The feds generally have no say in "coal construction" excepting where it touches upon the EPA, which is obligated by law to respond to all permit actions. Coal-producing states are generally extremely coal friendly.
Again, "Citation needed showing that this is some sort of widespread practice, or even that it occurs at all." What you're describing is eminent domain - quite common with roads, oil pipelines, power lines, etc, but can you name a single example of it being used for building "renewable" power plants in "the desert southwest"?
Pure nonsense. Name a single nuclear power plant that has had its cost "increased ten-fold" due to "regulatory and judicial delays". One can easily take a look at power plants that have gone way over budget - for example, here's one of the most extreme cases in modern times. Planned for 2010, but now probably not operational until as late as 2020, and coming in at three times its initial budget. Why? NIMBYs? Red tape? Hardly:
"The delays have been due to various problems with planning, supervision, and workmanship"
"The first problems that surfaced were irregularities in the foundation concrete, "
"Later, it was found that subcontractors had provided heavy forgings that were not up to project standards and which had to be re-cast"
"An apparent problem constructing the reactor's unique double-containment structure also caused delays, as the welders had not been given proper instructions"
"... told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction"
"...are in bitter dispute over who will bear the cost overruns and there is a real risk now that the utility will default."
Tell me, when was the last time that you welded a large-diameter zirconium-alloy pipe and X-rayed it for defects, with any possible sign of imperfection meaning having to cut it off and start from scratch? How many people in the world do you think have that skillset? Because that's what's involved in nuclear power plant construction - it is extremely exacting. And if you think it'd be just jolly to cut corners, by all means hold that view, but understand that I most definitely will not be joining you in that.
They're not stupid. Their entire business is built on long-term analysis (a new deepwater well may take over a decade to start producing, and then last for decades; you have to predict the market very long in advance before sinking such huge amounts of capital). The supermajors will sink their money wherever their analysis tells them to.
It's a bit harder for the service providers. If you have a tanker and oil is predicted to decline or stay low for long periods, you might want to have plans for conversion options, or scrapping if it's showing its age. If you make / work with deepsea platforms, deep offshore wind may be a market to move into. Etc. But not everyone would find such a transition that simple.
All of that said, when you're talking wind and solar, you're not so much directly competing with oil. In most of the world, oil is rarely burned for power. In some regions it is, like the Middle East, and they are working to transition away from it (it's very expensive per joule compared to other sources), but even taking out all oil-fired power would not be devastating to the market. When it comes to oil, you have to hit transportation. I'm incredibly encouraged by the EV market; how quickly people put down orders for the Model 3, for example, and this despite how many people are waiting for the used market and second-generation vehicles, and how there's still great potential for major battery cost reductions as the market grows. But even still, a couple hundred thousand cars per year is just a blip. Even millions per year would butt up against a world with 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. Even if production scaleups occur at a lightning pace, the average car on US roads is a decade old, meaning an expected life of around two decades; in the developing world it's much greater. So oil is going nowhere fast.
All of that said, EVs are another factor among many that makes the long-term future of oil prices look bleak. The tight oil revolution for example has just crushed the market. Bitumen producers have been getting their prices down. Oil markets are this weak even with sanctions on Russia, the world's largest oil producer (note that they have relatively little affect on their current production, but are factored into futures forecasts as they slow Russia's ability to develop new resources).
No, they said 129MWh at 100MW. That's a 100MW peaking plant.
And where are you getting the lifespan on it? Powerwall units have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, with a 10 year warranty. And how expensive exactly do you think batteries are going to be that far down the line? Not to mention that the battery is only about $40m of the cost (see earlier).
Not in the least. $65M (see earlier in the thread) for a 100MW peaking plant is cheap, not expensive.
Vegetable oils are not a mixture of alkanes, cycloalkanes, alkenes, etc. They're carboxylic acids bonded to glycerol. They're not the same thing chemically. There's some potential for conversion**, and there are some products which are easier to produce from fat feedstocks - but the vast majority of hydrocarbon products that we consume is much easier produced from petroleum.
** At the most basic level you can turn any hydrocarbon into petroleum with the Fischer-Tropsch process via gasification to syngas. But that's not much of an argument, because the reason we don't use much Fischer-Tropsch oil is because it's well more expensive than conventional petroleum - at least at today's prices. For some products you don't have to go all the way to making a syncrude, however, you can use the syngas more directly as a feedstock. Carbon monoxide is great at building simple carbon compounds because it's quite stable under normal conditions but incredibly reactive at elevated temperatures and pressures, to the point of even self-decomposition. So it'll tack carbon onto almost anything you include in the mixture with it.
Which is only reasonable. Ignoring the export potential with high power interconnects, the Middle East has traditionally relied on oil-fired power plants, which means burning a valuable export commodity (of the three main hydrocarbon fuels, oil is by far the most expensive per unit energy... because you can put petrol in your car, but not gas or coal, at least not without some significant industrial processing!).
That's actually a pretty nice price for a 100MW peaker. $65m for 100MW = 65 cents per watt? Most around around $1W a watt or more in capital costs. Now, to be fair, they also need to supply it with charging power - but it can buy at the cheapest possible rate, whenever power is cheapest (and conventional peakers still have to buy fuel).
Sounds like a great deal.