> I think you can be sure no matter how this plays out, power is going to be more expensive.
No, you can't be sure of that. Wind power in the central portion of the country is cheaper than coal now. PV is cheaper than market power in the Southwest and the Northeast now. Many coal plants in tUSA are 50+ years old -- they're going to retire soon one way or another. And, not for nothing, wholesale electric power is cheaper now than it was five years ago due to cheap natural gas (and, by the way, switching from coal to gas helps comply with 111(d) and saves money).
> if the coal-fired plants are removed from the equation before replacement sources of power are in place, there will be power shortage
If my aunt had nuts, she'd be my uncle. There's absolutely no chance that 111(d) will result in reliability performance below the industry standard 1-day-in-10-years. Just won't happen. Retiring a unit requires years of planning. Google "integrated resource plan IRP" for your favorite utility and hunker down to a ~120 page report, produced every 3-5 years, laying out the company's plan, including projected retirements, new units, new transmission, etc.
111(d) doesn't require any coal plants to retire. It requires our fraction of electricity generated from coal to be reduced. The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time. Instead, a combination of new energy efficiency measures, new renewable energy production, more frequent operating of combined cycle natural gas generators, and squeezing even more MWh out of existing nuclear units through uprates or reduced downtimes will be the way states will comply with 111(d).
Seriously slashdot. Pithy remarks more frequently display ignorance than insightfulness.
As a Virginian (and now as a Marylander), I don't consider it any of my business who represents people in say, California.
This is asinine. The 100 US Senators and 435 members of the US House each have an equal vote in their respective chambers on all federal legislation. So long as you as a Virginian (and now as a Marylander) are subject to federal law, then each and every of those Congressmen have a direct vote on the laws that you are obligated to follow. Just because only 2 of the 100 US Senators will return your call doesn't mean that the other 98 aren't your business. They are United States senators, not California state senators. They write your laws; they're your business.
Indeed. The article agrees with you -- it doesn't advocate for "blasting" through the light. It advocates for approaching the stop sign controlled intersection slowly enough to determine all cross-traffic location and speed to determine if it is safe to cross, and then doing so. That includes peds as cross-traffic. Further, it advocates coming to a stop at traffic light controlled red lights, determining all cross-traffic location and speeds, and then, once there's no risk of collision, proceeding.
For both stop signs and red lights, the Idaho stop advocates for pedestrian safety, not for "blasting through the red lights".
If you're going to extract tar sands of their crude, then refining the crude in ND doesn't change anything. You've still got to ship liquid petroleum products from ND to the rest of the country -- and, in fact, the rest of the world since the USA is a net exporter of refined crude -- be it pipe, rail, or truck. Moving the refinery doesn't change the need for transport.
My part of the country gets about 5% of our electricity from coal. The largest share (though not the majority) is natural gas, with big chunks of hydro, nuclear, and small but growing chunks of wind and solar and biomass/landfill gas. The carbon intensity of the electricity in my region per usable energy (say, per mile the vehicle can go) is less for electric than for gasoline, by a pretty wide margin.
Furthermore, if a person has PV panels on his own house, he can legitimately claim that his vehicle is low carbon emissions even if he does live in Kentucky or Ohio or Arizona or any other significantly-coal-dependent state.
Furthermore, coal plants are being retired all around the country. There's currently about 300 GW of coal fired capacity in tUSA -- by 2020 it will be closer to 220 GW. Folks who want less carbon emissions are opposed to building new capital infrastructure which will facilitate more carbon emissions for decades to come. Those folks would rather spend money (and create jobs) building wind turbines and solar farms and expanding subway and bus lines and switching more truck delivery to rails and switching from the manufacturing of gasoline fired autos to electric vehicles.
The folks who oppose the Keystone aren't in favor of coal fired electric power plants. That's pretty freaking obvious.
Every action that increases the cost of gasoline decreases the consumption. For people who believe that climate change is real and caused/exacerbated by human activity, reducing the amount of gasoline consumed is a good thing.
Whether or not the cost rising results in more profits for oil companies (hint: it doesn't -- the profit per unit goes up, but the number of units sold goes down, and profits go down) is irrelevant to those who want less consumption of fossil fuels because, well, the carbon emissions are bad for mankind.
> "I'm not sure if there's anything a software company could do by themselves to lower the black-market value of a vulnerability in their product, other than voluntarily decreasing their own market share so that there are fewer computers that can be compromised using their software! Can you think of any other way?)"
Sure. Educate your users so that fewer of them allow themselves to be vulnerable to the bug. This doesn't work in all cases, but certainly some -- encourage your software users to use better network security, to avoid using their actual ID information, etc. If fewer of the software's users are valuable to the crackers because the users protect themselves, then the black market value of the vulnerability goes down. If my front door lock can be picked, I'm vulnerable -- but if I don't store my most valuable items in my house at all, the value of picking my lock goes down... maybe to the point where the cost-benefit ratio to the criminal makes my house a bad bet for a burglary.
> Coal today is just as clean as other forms of energy when you factor in all the externalities.
No, no it isn't. Coal is far dirtier -- even modern scrubbed plants (of which most aren't) emit mercury and other heavy metals, and SO2. Less than they used to, but more than gas, hydro, wind, nuclear, and solar, which emit none. Both gas and coal emit NOx (the others don't). Extracting coal from the ground is horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who like to drink water in West Virginia. Storing the coal waste is also horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who live along the Dan River in North Carolina and Virginia. Oh, and then there's those pesky CO2 emissions. Coal emits twice as much CO2 as gas per MWh, and of course hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar emit zero or virtually zero.
Coal is far, far dirtier than gas. Coal emits twice the CO2 as gas. In terms of environmental damage, the power plants aren't the same merely because they all have downsides.
> The environmentalists need to learn to quit when they achieve "good enough".
I suspect that they know to quit when they achieve good enough. After all, being an environmentalist is hard work -- the pay sucks if you're even lucky enough to get paid to do it. You're up against deep pockets all the time. The environmentalists won't quit until CO2 emissions are down 80%, and that won't happen so long as we're getting any electricity from coal.
I do. Much lower bills -- lower heating and cooling, easier to landscape, lower taxes. I still BBQ in the back yard, and I'm near enough a public park that I have plenty of greenspace available.
Oh, and the subway is two blocks away, so I save lots of money by not owning a car.
NYC, Chicago, DC, Boston, SF, Philly off the top of my head, but that's not really the point. Google is near enough San Francisco that they could have located in San Francisco. There's plenty of Class A space, and at this point Google would build the building themselves, just as countless Fortune 500 companies have done for over 100 years in major American cities.
"Unfortunately, even with the best technology we have on the planet, you'll need at least 3kWh electricty to get 1kWh of electricity back out of storage."
That's just not true. Pumped hydro averages about 70% efficiency (3 kWh in to get 2 kWh out) and new pumped hydro where evaporation isn't a problem is about 85% efficiency (5 kWh in to get 6 kWh out).
But that's irrelevant -- if there is enough daytime demand for 4 GW in that region of India, and if their dispatchable power plants can ramp sufficiently quickly, than they don't need storage. This need not be a "power" unit -- it could simply be an "energy" unit, replacing coal with solar, thereby saving money and pollution.
1. They did. The bulk power market in New England, managed by ISONE, uses locational marginal prices. They also use economic dispatch, subject to voltage control, transmission capacity, and other reliability issues. The LMPs were enormous during the cold snap. And, while the LMPs were high, it won't be reflected (much) in the electric bill because the power companies (the folks you send a monthly check to) have long term fixed rate contracts with generators, so they're not paying the spot price.
2. Gas generators are on pipelines. The pipeline owners sell two kinds of delivery -- firm and non-firm. The local gas company buys firm, because they have to be sure that even on the super cold days, they can get enough gas to their customers for heating. The generators, they're non-firm. They pay a lower rate, but get no guarantee. It's better for them, because the added cost of firm is so high that the system is better off burning jet fuel once in a while than building a pipeline big enough for the coldest snap, which would be wildly underutilized the rest of the year. As for derivatives market -- you have to actually be able to deliver the physical product. This isn't a Wall Street game, this is an actual commodity. Delivered. As I wrote above, the generators don't pay for firm, so they don't get delivery. It's got nothing to do with the price, it has everything to do with physically moving the gas itself.
No generator can "guarantee" a continuous base load, and no generator ought do so. What we need to do is guarantee that supply meets demand in every minute of all 8760 hours of the year. Traditionally, that means being able to adjust supply to meet demand, but in the future it will also be adjusting demand to meet supply (think: charging electric vehicles, etc).
As long as we have enough generation all the time, it doesn't matter if any given generator can provide a continuous level output. Wind alone isn't enough -- but hydro, wind, solar, landfill gas, geothermal, large storage (pumped hydro), small storage (electric vehicles), reducing demand (energy efficiency), large instantaneous demand reduction (demand response), small widespread instantaneous demand reduction (air con/elec heat small thermostat adjustments) may well be enough. If it isn't, combustion turbines (CTs) can be used in a pinch to help with energy, ramping, or regional voltage support.
"Base load" is a 20th century concept which was appropriate and necessary when the number of generators were small, the grid was vertically integrated, and we lacked the computational ability to accurately understand the outage risks of a large, complex system. As the 21st century progresses, you won't even hear the term "base load" because it's just not something that even makes sense for a modern electric grid.
It doesn't effect the customers. The customers' electric company doesn't typically buy much electricity on the spot market anyway -- they have long term contracts to mitigate risk. In the medium term, though, it does push the average price per MWh down, which will lower the supply costs for the customer (though not the distribution costs).
As the price gets low enough, either on average or on the spot market, entities will pop up to take advantage. For example, an industrial user who heats a process could install an electric heating system alongside their gas/oil/etc system, so that every once in a while when the price gets low enough it switches to electricity. That will "juice" the demand of electricity, helping to keep the price positive -- and will allow wind power to offset the consumption of fossil fuel in a traditionally non-electric use. If the price is low enough on the average, you'll see heating go from gas or oil or whatev to air source heat pump, again, electrifying an energy use outside of the traditional electric uses.
For the grid operator, instantaneous prices below zero mean that there's too much generation. The operator "doesn't care" if it's solved by increased demand or by decreased supply, and a negative price will stimulate both actions. It also stimulates investment in transmission from these areas with very low (even negative) prices to areas with higher instantaneous prices at those times, because the transmission owner can buy low and sell high. That's good economics and good finance, and ultimately, will help even more renewables get on the grid too.
EVs don't need to be half the cars on the road yet. Not even 1/4.
It's true -- if the median is near the mean, the 47 mile range leaf won't work for a big chunk of commuters (who can't charge at work, and have sufficiently large commutes). But even the most popular car on the road only makes up a few percent of the cars on the road. If EVs only work for half the commuters, and if each two-car-household would only buy one EV (so they can drive to grandmas this week), that's still 1/4 of all cars on the road. Sure, that's an upper bound since not every household is a two-car-household, but surely 1-in-10 could easily incorporate an EV with the leaf's range into their two-car-household.
If 10% of cars were EVs, that would be a substantial number, and it would result in dramatically improved infrastructure, lower prices, and improved R&D. That they don't work for everyone doesn't mean there's not a sizable market. See: SUVs, sports cars, minivans, economy cars, etc.
And personally, I agree with you about mountain cabins, be they of the 800 or 8000 square foot variety. And, in fact, the Dept of the Interior et al do let plenty of wildfires burn out.
That written, cities are the natural habitat of mankind, and we do have an obligation to protect more urban settings.
The collective PM from wood burning stoves is significant in some parts of the country. The EPA has air regs on all kinds of combustion, from large coal power plants down to, well, wood burning stoves and fireplaces. Heck, in some parts of the country dirt roads are a major source of air pollution.
I'm not going to be your monkey and look up the citations -- but I'd bet if you're really interested, you could find 'em.
Most coal fired power plants are illegal by EPA standards today. Very few buildings in America's inventory would comply with 2013 building codes or zoning regulations.
Wood burning stoves emit pollutants that we all breathe. The EPA already regulates wood stoves. As technology has improved, they've ratcheted up the standards, just like they do with lots of regulations.
The *cost* of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is way, way too high to do this. Even with cool tech, you've got to build the power plant right next to the sequestration site -- which means getting the fuel to the site -- which means building right of way, pipelines or rail, etc. Transmission lines too. Then you take the performance hit in the generation to run the sequestration equipment.
It's cheaper to build big wind in the breadbasket, lesser wind offshore, solar on roofs and in the southwest, bits of biomass and geothermal where it works, and use transmission to move it around. What about no sun or wind? Well, it's windy or sunny someplace nearly all the time in tUSA, but yes we'd have to use our ~21GW of pumped hydro storage differently, maybe build more, maybe use electric vehicles (EVs) for storage, maybe upgrade our infrastructure to change when we demand electricity [run electric hot water heater, air source heat pumps extra when flush with renewable generation so that we use them less when we'd be short]. All of that is way cheaper than CCS, and as a bonus it won't leak the carbon later, it doesn't require creating mini earthquakes, chopping off the tops of mines, figuring out what to do with the ash, the SOx, the NOx, the Hg, and other pollutants, the nuclear waste, how to deal with water shortage or water temperature problems, and on and on and on.
Look, I've been on slashdot 15 years or so. I know the community believes in nuclear power. The answer to CCS is the same as nuclear: it's too expensive. You can argue breeder or reprocessing or any number of other things, but the age of cheap gas has killed any nuclear renaissance, and the age of plentiful cheap wind in the breadbasket, plentiful expensive wind on the coasts [where electricity is expensive anyway], and plummeting PV costs means that nuclear and coal are dead for economic reasons, it's just a matter of time.
(footnotes) I didn't bother to provide links, but you might check out "2012 Wind Technologies Market Report," the economics behind the closures of Vermont Yankee and Kewaunee, "Analysis of Drought Impacts on Electricity Production in the Western and Texas Interconnections of the United States," the recent output reductions at Pilgrim and Millstone nuclear plants due to the Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound water too hot for cooling, how Xcel Colorado electric utility is procuring 450 of MWs of wind and 170 MW of solar because it's cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear, and on and on and on. We built loads of coal in the 50s and 60s, nuclear in the 70s and 80s, combined cycle natural gas units in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now those will operate until retire, while being replaced with wind, solar, some new gas, and energy efficiency. Know why? It's the cheapest way to do things. CCS (and nuclear) aren't, not by a long shot. There's no reason to think that they will be, either.
The VT legislature passed a tax on all large power plants in the state built post July 1965, to the tune of $0.0025-per-kilowatt-hour.
Vermont has about a half dozen oil-fired peaking plants (some may also be able to run on gas), each under 50 MW. 80-something hydro dams, most under 10 MW. Since Vermont has just under 200 MW of total hydro power, no dam is 200+ MW. Vermont has no coal-fired power plants, nor stand-alone gas plants. No biomass, solar, nor wind projects are anywhere near 200 MW in size. As far as I can tell, there is no 200 MW power plant in Vermont that has pre-1966 vintage, so I don't know why the construction date is in the law at all.
Strictly speaking, the law did not single out Vermont Yankee. It applied to all power plants of significant size. Vermont Yankee is the only plant that fits that description, though any new power plant 200MW+ built in Vermont would also pay that tax.
Keep in mind that the denominator is "land" in the city, not total area -- this brings NYC down from almost 500 sq miles to just more than 300 sq miles.
Federal gas tax roughly covers federal expenditures on roads State gas tax does not cover the entire state expenditure on roads The local government's expenditure on roads -- covered by property tax.
In my town of ~60,000 people, we spend ~$3M/yr on roads. Not one dime comes from motorists per se. It comes from property tax.
Cyclists do pay for local roads via property tax, pay for some of state roads via income or state property tax (and some state roads prohibit bicycles) and you won't cyclists on interstates.
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> I think you can be sure no matter how this plays out, power is going to be more expensive.
No, you can't be sure of that. Wind power in the central portion of the country is cheaper than coal now. PV is cheaper than market power in the Southwest and the Northeast now. Many coal plants in tUSA are 50+ years old -- they're going to retire soon one way or another. And, not for nothing, wholesale electric power is cheaper now than it was five years ago due to cheap natural gas (and, by the way, switching from coal to gas helps comply with 111(d) and saves money).
> if the coal-fired plants are removed from the equation before replacement sources of power are in place, there will be power shortage
If my aunt had nuts, she'd be my uncle. There's absolutely no chance that 111(d) will result in reliability performance below the industry standard 1-day-in-10-years. Just won't happen. Retiring a unit requires years of planning. Google "integrated resource plan IRP" for your favorite utility and hunker down to a ~120 page report, produced every 3-5 years, laying out the company's plan, including projected retirements, new units, new transmission, etc.
111(d) doesn't require any coal plants to retire. It requires our fraction of electricity generated from coal to be reduced. The coal plants can still be "plugged in" and operated during times of peak load (weekday summer afternoons and winter mornings); what they can't do is operate much the rest of the time. Instead, a combination of new energy efficiency measures, new renewable energy production, more frequent operating of combined cycle natural gas generators, and squeezing even more MWh out of existing nuclear units through uprates or reduced downtimes will be the way states will comply with 111(d).
Seriously slashdot. Pithy remarks more frequently display ignorance than insightfulness.
As a Virginian (and now as a Marylander), I don't consider it any of my business who represents people in say, California.
This is asinine. The 100 US Senators and 435 members of the US House each have an equal vote in their respective chambers on all federal legislation. So long as you as a Virginian (and now as a Marylander) are subject to federal law, then each and every of those Congressmen have a direct vote on the laws that you are obligated to follow. Just because only 2 of the 100 US Senators will return your call doesn't mean that the other 98 aren't your business. They are United States senators, not California state senators. They write your laws; they're your business.
Indeed. The article agrees with you -- it doesn't advocate for "blasting" through the light. It advocates for approaching the stop sign controlled intersection slowly enough to determine all cross-traffic location and speed to determine if it is safe to cross, and then doing so. That includes peds as cross-traffic. Further, it advocates coming to a stop at traffic light controlled red lights, determining all cross-traffic location and speeds, and then, once there's no risk of collision, proceeding.
For both stop signs and red lights, the Idaho stop advocates for pedestrian safety, not for "blasting through the red lights".
I fail to see why you didn't RTFA.
just ban them from driving.
If you're going to extract tar sands of their crude, then refining the crude in ND doesn't change anything. You've still got to ship liquid petroleum products from ND to the rest of the country -- and, in fact, the rest of the world since the USA is a net exporter of refined crude -- be it pipe, rail, or truck. Moving the refinery doesn't change the need for transport.
My part of the country gets about 5% of our electricity from coal. The largest share (though not the majority) is natural gas, with big chunks of hydro, nuclear, and small but growing chunks of wind and solar and biomass/landfill gas. The carbon intensity of the electricity in my region per usable energy (say, per mile the vehicle can go) is less for electric than for gasoline, by a pretty wide margin.
Furthermore, if a person has PV panels on his own house, he can legitimately claim that his vehicle is low carbon emissions even if he does live in Kentucky or Ohio or Arizona or any other significantly-coal-dependent state.
Furthermore, coal plants are being retired all around the country. There's currently about 300 GW of coal fired capacity in tUSA -- by 2020 it will be closer to 220 GW. Folks who want less carbon emissions are opposed to building new capital infrastructure which will facilitate more carbon emissions for decades to come. Those folks would rather spend money (and create jobs) building wind turbines and solar farms and expanding subway and bus lines and switching more truck delivery to rails and switching from the manufacturing of gasoline fired autos to electric vehicles.
The folks who oppose the Keystone aren't in favor of coal fired electric power plants. That's pretty freaking obvious.
Every action that increases the cost of gasoline decreases the consumption. For people who believe that climate change is real and caused/exacerbated by human activity, reducing the amount of gasoline consumed is a good thing.
Whether or not the cost rising results in more profits for oil companies (hint: it doesn't -- the profit per unit goes up, but the number of units sold goes down, and profits go down) is irrelevant to those who want less consumption of fossil fuels because, well, the carbon emissions are bad for mankind.
> "I'm not sure if there's anything a software company could do by themselves to lower the black-market value of a vulnerability in their product, other than voluntarily decreasing their own market share so that there are fewer computers that can be compromised using their software! Can you think of any other way?)"
Sure. Educate your users so that fewer of them allow themselves to be vulnerable to the bug. This doesn't work in all cases, but certainly some -- encourage your software users to use better network security, to avoid using their actual ID information, etc. If fewer of the software's users are valuable to the crackers because the users protect themselves, then the black market value of the vulnerability goes down. If my front door lock can be picked, I'm vulnerable -- but if I don't store my most valuable items in my house at all, the value of picking my lock goes down... maybe to the point where the cost-benefit ratio to the criminal makes my house a bad bet for a burglary.
> Coal today is just as clean as other forms of energy when you factor in all the externalities.
No, no it isn't. Coal is far dirtier -- even modern scrubbed plants (of which most aren't) emit mercury and other heavy metals, and SO2. Less than they used to, but more than gas, hydro, wind, nuclear, and solar, which emit none. Both gas and coal emit NOx (the others don't). Extracting coal from the ground is horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who like to drink water in West Virginia. Storing the coal waste is also horribly messy -- just ask the good folks who live along the Dan River in North Carolina and Virginia. Oh, and then there's those pesky CO2 emissions. Coal emits twice as much CO2 as gas per MWh, and of course hydro, nuclear, wind, and solar emit zero or virtually zero.
Coal is far, far dirtier than gas. Coal emits twice the CO2 as gas. In terms of environmental damage, the power plants aren't the same merely because they all have downsides.
> The environmentalists need to learn to quit when they achieve "good enough".
I suspect that they know to quit when they achieve good enough. After all, being an environmentalist is hard work -- the pay sucks if you're even lucky enough to get paid to do it. You're up against deep pockets all the time. The environmentalists won't quit until CO2 emissions are down 80%, and that won't happen so long as we're getting any electricity from coal.
"Who the hell "likes" sharing walls with people?"
I do. Much lower bills -- lower heating and cooling, easier to landscape, lower taxes. I still BBQ in the back yard, and I'm near enough a public park that I have plenty of greenspace available.
Oh, and the subway is two blocks away, so I save lots of money by not owning a car.
NYC, Chicago, DC, Boston, SF, Philly off the top of my head, but that's not really the point. Google is near enough San Francisco that they could have located in San Francisco. There's plenty of Class A space, and at this point Google would build the building themselves, just as countless Fortune 500 companies have done for over 100 years in major American cities.
"Navy Seal teams get more money for training ammo than the entire Marine Corps. "
I'd like to see a citation on this. There are roughly 2,500 active duty SEALs, and almost 200,000 active duty Marines.
"Unfortunately, even with the best technology we have on the planet, you'll need at least 3kWh electricty to get 1kWh of electricity back out of storage."
That's just not true. Pumped hydro averages about 70% efficiency (3 kWh in to get 2 kWh out) and new pumped hydro where evaporation isn't a problem is about 85% efficiency (5 kWh in to get 6 kWh out).
But that's irrelevant -- if there is enough daytime demand for 4 GW in that region of India, and if their dispatchable power plants can ramp sufficiently quickly, than they don't need storage. This need not be a "power" unit -- it could simply be an "energy" unit, replacing coal with solar, thereby saving money and pollution.
1. They did. The bulk power market in New England, managed by ISONE, uses locational marginal prices. They also use economic dispatch, subject to voltage control, transmission capacity, and other reliability issues. The LMPs were enormous during the cold snap. And, while the LMPs were high, it won't be reflected (much) in the electric bill because the power companies (the folks you send a monthly check to) have long term fixed rate contracts with generators, so they're not paying the spot price.
2. Gas generators are on pipelines. The pipeline owners sell two kinds of delivery -- firm and non-firm. The local gas company buys firm, because they have to be sure that even on the super cold days, they can get enough gas to their customers for heating. The generators, they're non-firm. They pay a lower rate, but get no guarantee. It's better for them, because the added cost of firm is so high that the system is better off burning jet fuel once in a while than building a pipeline big enough for the coldest snap, which would be wildly underutilized the rest of the year. As for derivatives market -- you have to actually be able to deliver the physical product. This isn't a Wall Street game, this is an actual commodity. Delivered. As I wrote above, the generators don't pay for firm, so they don't get delivery. It's got nothing to do with the price, it has everything to do with physically moving the gas itself.
No generator can "guarantee" a continuous base load, and no generator ought do so. What we need to do is guarantee that supply meets demand in every minute of all 8760 hours of the year. Traditionally, that means being able to adjust supply to meet demand, but in the future it will also be adjusting demand to meet supply (think: charging electric vehicles, etc).
As long as we have enough generation all the time, it doesn't matter if any given generator can provide a continuous level output. Wind alone isn't enough -- but hydro, wind, solar, landfill gas, geothermal, large storage (pumped hydro), small storage (electric vehicles), reducing demand (energy efficiency), large instantaneous demand reduction (demand response), small widespread instantaneous demand reduction (air con/elec heat small thermostat adjustments) may well be enough. If it isn't, combustion turbines (CTs) can be used in a pinch to help with energy, ramping, or regional voltage support.
"Base load" is a 20th century concept which was appropriate and necessary when the number of generators were small, the grid was vertically integrated, and we lacked the computational ability to accurately understand the outage risks of a large, complex system. As the 21st century progresses, you won't even hear the term "base load" because it's just not something that even makes sense for a modern electric grid.
It doesn't effect the customers. The customers' electric company doesn't typically buy much electricity on the spot market anyway -- they have long term contracts to mitigate risk. In the medium term, though, it does push the average price per MWh down, which will lower the supply costs for the customer (though not the distribution costs).
As the price gets low enough, either on average or on the spot market, entities will pop up to take advantage. For example, an industrial user who heats a process could install an electric heating system alongside their gas/oil/etc system, so that every once in a while when the price gets low enough it switches to electricity. That will "juice" the demand of electricity, helping to keep the price positive -- and will allow wind power to offset the consumption of fossil fuel in a traditionally non-electric use. If the price is low enough on the average, you'll see heating go from gas or oil or whatev to air source heat pump, again, electrifying an energy use outside of the traditional electric uses.
For the grid operator, instantaneous prices below zero mean that there's too much generation. The operator "doesn't care" if it's solved by increased demand or by decreased supply, and a negative price will stimulate both actions. It also stimulates investment in transmission from these areas with very low (even negative) prices to areas with higher instantaneous prices at those times, because the transmission owner can buy low and sell high. That's good economics and good finance, and ultimately, will help even more renewables get on the grid too.
EVs don't need to be half the cars on the road yet. Not even 1/4.
It's true -- if the median is near the mean, the 47 mile range leaf won't work for a big chunk of commuters (who can't charge at work, and have sufficiently large commutes). But even the most popular car on the road only makes up a few percent of the cars on the road. If EVs only work for half the commuters, and if each two-car-household would only buy one EV (so they can drive to grandmas this week), that's still 1/4 of all cars on the road. Sure, that's an upper bound since not every household is a two-car-household, but surely 1-in-10 could easily incorporate an EV with the leaf's range into their two-car-household.
If 10% of cars were EVs, that would be a substantial number, and it would result in dramatically improved infrastructure, lower prices, and improved R&D. That they don't work for everyone doesn't mean there's not a sizable market. See: SUVs, sports cars, minivans, economy cars, etc.
And personally, I agree with you about mountain cabins, be they of the 800 or 8000 square foot variety. And, in fact, the Dept of the Interior et al do let plenty of wildfires burn out.
That written, cities are the natural habitat of mankind, and we do have an obligation to protect more urban settings.
The collective PM from wood burning stoves is significant in some parts of the country. The EPA has air regs on all kinds of combustion, from large coal power plants down to, well, wood burning stoves and fireplaces. Heck, in some parts of the country dirt roads are a major source of air pollution.
I'm not going to be your monkey and look up the citations -- but I'd bet if you're really interested, you could find 'em.
Most coal fired power plants are illegal by EPA standards today. Very few buildings in America's inventory would comply with 2013 building codes or zoning regulations.
Wood burning stoves emit pollutants that we all breathe. The EPA already regulates wood stoves. As technology has improved, they've ratcheted up the standards, just like they do with lots of regulations.
The *cost* of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is way, way too high to do this. Even with cool tech, you've got to build the power plant right next to the sequestration site -- which means getting the fuel to the site -- which means building right of way, pipelines or rail, etc. Transmission lines too. Then you take the performance hit in the generation to run the sequestration equipment.
It's cheaper to build big wind in the breadbasket, lesser wind offshore, solar on roofs and in the southwest, bits of biomass and geothermal where it works, and use transmission to move it around. What about no sun or wind? Well, it's windy or sunny someplace nearly all the time in tUSA, but yes we'd have to use our ~21GW of pumped hydro storage differently, maybe build more, maybe use electric vehicles (EVs) for storage, maybe upgrade our infrastructure to change when we demand electricity [run electric hot water heater, air source heat pumps extra when flush with renewable generation so that we use them less when we'd be short]. All of that is way cheaper than CCS, and as a bonus it won't leak the carbon later, it doesn't require creating mini earthquakes, chopping off the tops of mines, figuring out what to do with the ash, the SOx, the NOx, the Hg, and other pollutants, the nuclear waste, how to deal with water shortage or water temperature problems, and on and on and on.
Look, I've been on slashdot 15 years or so. I know the community believes in nuclear power. The answer to CCS is the same as nuclear: it's too expensive. You can argue breeder or reprocessing or any number of other things, but the age of cheap gas has killed any nuclear renaissance, and the age of plentiful cheap wind in the breadbasket, plentiful expensive wind on the coasts [where electricity is expensive anyway], and plummeting PV costs means that nuclear and coal are dead for economic reasons, it's just a matter of time.
(footnotes) I didn't bother to provide links, but you might check out "2012 Wind Technologies Market Report," the economics behind the closures of Vermont Yankee and Kewaunee, "Analysis of Drought Impacts on Electricity Production in the Western and Texas Interconnections of the United States," the recent output reductions at Pilgrim and Millstone nuclear plants due to the Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound water too hot for cooling, how Xcel Colorado electric utility is procuring 450 of MWs of wind and 170 MW of solar because it's cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear, and on and on and on. We built loads of coal in the 50s and 60s, nuclear in the 70s and 80s, combined cycle natural gas units in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now those will operate until retire, while being replaced with wind, solar, some new gas, and energy efficiency. Know why? It's the cheapest way to do things. CCS (and nuclear) aren't, not by a long shot. There's no reason to think that they will be, either.
The VT legislature passed a tax on all large power plants in the state built post July 1965, to the tune of $0.0025-per-kilowatt-hour.
Vermont has about a half dozen oil-fired peaking plants (some may also be able to run on gas), each under 50 MW. 80-something hydro dams, most under 10 MW. Since Vermont has just under 200 MW of total hydro power, no dam is 200+ MW. Vermont has no coal-fired power plants, nor stand-alone gas plants. No biomass, solar, nor wind projects are anywhere near 200 MW in size. As far as I can tell, there is no 200 MW power plant in Vermont that has pre-1966 vintage, so I don't know why the construction date is in the law at all.
Strictly speaking, the law did not single out Vermont Yankee. It applied to all power plants of significant size. Vermont Yankee is the only plant that fits that description, though any new power plant 200MW+ built in Vermont would also pay that tax.
I submitted the post (yesterday). Any chance I can get some +1s for the "excellent summary" I provided?
(yeah, karma whoring, I confess)
Sao Paulo: 18,690/sq mi
NYC: 27,550/sq mi
Keep in mind that the denominator is "land" in the city, not total area -- this brings NYC down from almost 500 sq miles to just more than 300 sq miles.
Source: wikipedia
Federal gas tax roughly covers federal expenditures on roads
State gas tax does not cover the entire state expenditure on roads
The local government's expenditure on roads -- covered by property tax.
In my town of ~60,000 people, we spend ~$3M/yr on roads. Not one dime comes from motorists per se. It comes from property tax.
Cyclists do pay for local roads via property tax, pay for some of state roads via income or state property tax (and some state roads prohibit bicycles) and you won't cyclists on interstates.