The collapse of Germany's solar and wind industry!!

[danielpalos]

dear; renewables cannot fail, they are renewable. unlike, fossil fuels.

first and foremost, my avatar is of a record label, not a greek goddess, when you assume something based on your lack of experience, you inevitably make a mistake. Renewables are not renewable. Technically, a Wind Turbine has a life that is only 10 years at the most, lately more like 5 years. Same with Solar, commercial panels burn out quickly and need replacing. That is not renewable, you are using a finite source of materials and fuel to power the heavy industry used to build millions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines. Renewable? Wrong name for a product made from fossil fuels.

we are recycling now; and renewables cannot fail; unlike fossil fuels.

 

[danielpalos]

we need to upgrade our grid to better implement renewables, wherever they may be found.

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

the grid needs to be upgraded anyway; we might as well make it more, plug and play, friendly.

There's the ole "plug and play" gambit yet again. Tell ya what. How about you design a "plug and play" hamster wheel to power a hospital?

The grid stability depends on CONTRACTS. So that utility companies know what theyre gonna get next Tuesday at 2PM. If you cannot guarantee a wind delivery, nobody is gonna kick off the PREFERRED and reliable suppliers to let the hamsters run for a couple hours...

i guess we need managers with market volatility experience. they may even need a bonus.

 

[flacaltenn]

we need to upgrade our grid to better implement renewables, wherever they may be found.

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

 

[Billy_Bob]

we need to upgrade our grid to better implement renewables, wherever they may be found.

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

Your trying to teach a monkey how to do more than collect change as the organ grinder grinds...

This idiot thinks you can just plug in something magical and it will work forever and at no cost..

I commend you for dealing with this moron.. I haven't the patience for his kind of stupid.

 

[skookerasbil]

dear; renewables cannot fail, they are renewable. unlike, fossil fuels.

first and foremost, my avatar is of a record label, not a greek goddess, when you assume something based on your lack of experience, you inevitably make a mistake. Renewables are not renewable. Technically, a Wind Turbine has a life that is only 10 years at the most, lately more like 5 years. Same with Solar, commercial panels burn out quickly and need replacing. That is not renewable, you are using a finite source of materials and fuel to power the heavy industry used to build millions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines. Renewable? Wrong name for a product made from fossil fuels.

we are recycling now; and renewables cannot fail; unlike fossil fuels.

Holy crap s0n..........this forum is the varsity. You need to go back to People.com.....its for people who dwell in bubbles for most of their life. Renewable energy is a joke......its fringe energy and will be for..........ready for this.........at least another 30 years. By then new technologies will have supplanted renewable energy. Still.........in 2050, fossil fuels will be dominating the energy landscape. Every non-green projection says it.......including the most recent Obama administration EIA report.

People.com s0n..........you can post all you want and say anything and not look like a jackass doing it. Just trying to be helpful here........

 

[skookerasbil]

[URL=http://s42.photobucket.com/user/baldaltima/media/eia-energy-demand-to-2035_1.jpg.html][/URL]

 

[elektra]

we are recycling now; and renewables cannot fail; unlike fossil fuels.

No shit? Recycling, what is that? And when the fossil fuels fail how do you replace all the failing wind turbines and solar panels.

Solar panels and wind turbines are kind of a by-product of fossil fuels and heavy industry. When fossil fuels fail all that are dependent on fossil fuels die. You are right, fossil fuels will fail, and thus, wind turbines amd solar will fail as well.

Such a waste to use more fossil fuels to produce the world's largest, yet weakest secondary source of power, solar and wind.

 

[Old Rocks]

"The U.S. is indeed the fastest developed growth market for solar globally and in 2016 will be the highest growth market overall," said Mohit Anand, GTM's senior analyst for Global Solar Market

U.S. set to smash solar power records this year

No new coal plants at all. Wind and solar account for over 68% of all new generation in 2015.

Still haven't learned that generation capacity and actual output are not the same things huh?

Wind only produces on average less than 30% of its nominal capacity

And yet the utilities are putting up gigawatts of wind, and no coal fired at all. And gigawatts of solar. You think they don't know the ratio of rated production to actual production? They are putting up both solar and wind because the real production of both at present prices make them cheaper per kw/hr of electricity than coal or even natural gas. And they are not dependent on further infrastructure, such as pipelines and railroad. And the price of wind and the sun does not change dependent on the market.

Why the Texas wind boom may be an outlier rather than a model for the wind industry in the rest of the U.S.

Energy
The One and Only Texas Wind Boom
Wind power has transformed the heart of fossil-fuel country. Can the rest of the United States follow suit?

• by Richard Martin
  
• October 3, 2016

Rolan Petty stabbed at the dirt with a boot toe and looked up at the broiling west Texas sun. “I call it farming on faith,” he said of his unirrigated cotton farm. “You just have faith that the rain is gonna come.”

If it doesn’t come, Petty has a backup income stream: leasing fees. All around us, towering 150 feet over Petty’s combine and the scrubby-looking cotton plants in neat rows, stood a forest of wind turbines that stretched to the horizon. Petty’s land on the arid plain of west Texas lies on the edge of the vast Horse Hollow wind farm, with 430 turbines spread over 73 square miles. It was the largest wind farm in the world when it was completed, in 2006. Petty’s family leases land to Horse Hollow and another wind farm in the area, making about $7,500 a year on each of the several dozen turbines on their property. Wind power has become a big windfall for the Pettys, as it has for many landowners in Texas—allowing Rolan and his parents and three brothers to make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year whether the rains come or not. And the Petty farm is just a small player in the largest renewable-energy boom the United States has ever seen.

A turbine at the Horse Hollow wind farm.
With nearly 18,000 megawatts of capacity, Texas, if it were a country, would be the sixth-largest generator of wind power in the world, right behind Spain. Now Texas is preparing to add several thousand megawatts more—roughly equal to the wind capacity that can be found in all of California. Most of these turbines are in west Texas, one of the most desolate and windy regions in the continental United States. Fifteen years ago, when the groundwork for this boom was being set, this area had little but cotton and grain farms, oil fields, scrub and dry riverbeds, and small towns that were mostly withering.

Today it’s a land of spindly white turbines that line the highways—and the pockets of landowners. At night, when the wind blows strongest and steadiest, if you stand out in one of the fields you can hear the great blades make a ghostly shoop-shoop sound as they turn. Wind power has brought prosperity to towns that were literally drying up less than a generation ago. “In the 2011 drought a lot of people around here would have filed for bankruptcy if not for the turbines,” said Russ Petty, one of Rolan’s brothers, who was giving me a driving tour of the property. “What it’s done is helped keep this land in the family.”

Yeah they are doing it for the subsidies

Wind-Energy Sector Gets $176 Billion Worth of Crony Capitalism

Germany also had put up gigawatts of wind if you are talking rated capacity but the system is a failure and can't meet the power demands
The same thing happened in the UK

And like I keep telling you installed capacity is not the same thing as actual output

We know the average output of wind is less than 30% of its rated nominal capacity

National Wind Watch | Output From Industrial Wind Power

Industry estimates project an annual output of 30-40%, but real-world experience shows that annual outputs of 15-30% of capacity are more typical.

National Wind Watch | Output From Industrial Wind Power

What is the difference between large and small turbines?
Small turbines are designed to directly supply a home or other building. Their variable output is balanced by battery storage and supplemented by the grid or an on-site backup generator.

Large turbines are designed to supply the grid itself. The variable output of large wind turbines adds to the complexity of balancing supply and demand, because there is no large-scale storage on the grid.

As we post, there is grid scale storage being made in the US in Nevada and North Carolina. And that really changes the whole equation. Wind, per kw/hr created, is cheaper than coal or gas. And solar just went lower than wind. Goodby coal.

 

[Old Rocks]

"The U.S. is indeed the fastest developed growth market for solar globally and in 2016 will be the highest growth market overall," said Mohit Anand, GTM's senior analyst for Global Solar Market

U.S. set to smash solar power records this year

No new coal plants at all. Wind and solar account for over 68% of all new generation in 2015.

Still haven't learned that generation capacity and actual output are not the same things huh?

Wind only produces on average less than 30% of its nominal capacity

And yet the utilities are putting up gigawatts of wind, and no coal fired at all. And gigawatts of solar. You think they don't know the ratio of rated production to actual production? They are putting up both solar and wind because the real production of both at present prices make them cheaper per kw/hr of electricity than coal or even natural gas. And they are not dependent on further infrastructure, such as pipelines and railroad. And the price of wind and the sun does not change dependent on the market.

Why the Texas wind boom may be an outlier rather than a model for the wind industry in the rest of the U.S.

Energy
The One and Only Texas Wind Boom
Wind power has transformed the heart of fossil-fuel country. Can the rest of the United States follow suit?

• by Richard Martin
  
• October 3, 2016

Rolan Petty stabbed at the dirt with a boot toe and looked up at the broiling west Texas sun. “I call it farming on faith,” he said of his unirrigated cotton farm. “You just have faith that the rain is gonna come.”

If it doesn’t come, Petty has a backup income stream: leasing fees. All around us, towering 150 feet over Petty’s combine and the scrubby-looking cotton plants in neat rows, stood a forest of wind turbines that stretched to the horizon. Petty’s land on the arid plain of west Texas lies on the edge of the vast Horse Hollow wind farm, with 430 turbines spread over 73 square miles. It was the largest wind farm in the world when it was completed, in 2006. Petty’s family leases land to Horse Hollow and another wind farm in the area, making about $7,500 a year on each of the several dozen turbines on their property. Wind power has become a big windfall for the Pettys, as it has for many landowners in Texas—allowing Rolan and his parents and three brothers to make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year whether the rains come or not. And the Petty farm is just a small player in the largest renewable-energy boom the United States has ever seen.

A turbine at the Horse Hollow wind farm.
With nearly 18,000 megawatts of capacity, Texas, if it were a country, would be the sixth-largest generator of wind power in the world, right behind Spain. Now Texas is preparing to add several thousand megawatts more—roughly equal to the wind capacity that can be found in all of California. Most of these turbines are in west Texas, one of the most desolate and windy regions in the continental United States. Fifteen years ago, when the groundwork for this boom was being set, this area had little but cotton and grain farms, oil fields, scrub and dry riverbeds, and small towns that were mostly withering.

Today it’s a land of spindly white turbines that line the highways—and the pockets of landowners. At night, when the wind blows strongest and steadiest, if you stand out in one of the fields you can hear the great blades make a ghostly shoop-shoop sound as they turn. Wind power has brought prosperity to towns that were literally drying up less than a generation ago. “In the 2011 drought a lot of people around here would have filed for bankruptcy if not for the turbines,” said Russ Petty, one of Rolan’s brothers, who was giving me a driving tour of the property. “What it’s done is helped keep this land in the family.”

Yeah they are doing it for the subsidies

Wind-Energy Sector Gets $176 Billion Worth of Crony Capitalism

Germany also had put up gigawatts of wind if you are talking rated capacity but the system is a failure and can't meet the power demands
The same thing happened in the UK

And like I keep telling you installed capacity is not the same thing as actual output

We know the average output of wind is less than 30% of its rated nominal capacity

National Wind Watch | Output From Industrial Wind Power

Industry estimates project an annual output of 30-40%, but real-world experience shows that annual outputs of 15-30% of capacity are more typical.

Lets not forget an additional 50% power loss due to distance from the consumers

Really? The big turbines in the Gorge are no further than most of the big dams. And the power from the coal plants in Wyoming is shipped clear to California. So tell me about solar on top of warehouses and commercial centers being further from the point of use than the nukes and coal plants. LOL

 

[Old Rocks]

we need to upgrade our grid to better implement renewables, wherever they may be found.

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

Yep. Are all engineers as stupid as you? LOL

Tesla Wins Massive Contract to Power the California Grid

It's the latest response to a fossil-fuel disaster.
by
Tom Randall
September 15, 2016, 11:21 AM PDT
Tesla just won a bid to supply grid-scale power in Southern California to help prevent electricity shortages following the biggest natural gas leak in U.S. history. The Powerpacks, worth tens of millions of dollars, will be operational in record time—by the end of this year.

Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries. Tesla's contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed.

Eos Energy Storage – Powering the Dawn of Energy Storage

Eos Energy Storage, the startup that’s attracted utility interest from around the world in its low-cost, zinc-based batteries, is raising money to build more of them, and to get those units out in the field. Deployments are needed to prove the company’s bold claims of multi-hour, long-lasting energy storage at a cost of $160 per kilowatt-hour. On Tuesday, Eos announced the initial closing of a sale in a private placement of approximately $23 million.

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

• By David Pratt
  
• Sep 21, 2016 5:02 PM BST
  
• 0

Share

Image: Tesla.

The first grid-scale installation of the Tesla Powerpack system in Europe has been completed in the UK by Camborne Energy Storage and is already providing ancillary services to the National Grid.

The 500kWh capacity system, has been co-located with a 500kWp solar farm in Somerset to demonstrate the potential to provide a balanced grid.

Each of Camborne’s installed systems are designed to further assist and improve the efficiency of the UK’s energy infrastructure, with this latest project providing firm frequency response (FFR) to the grid.

It is currently not providing arbitrage but is prepared to in the future with the assistance of an undisclosed aggregator working with Camborne.

Dan Taylor, managing director of Camborne, said: “The development of Tesla’s first European grid-tied system is an exciting step forward for Camborne and Tesla in terms of our respective storage strategies. This project is another success for storage development in the UK and being co-located with a renewable generation site, should offer significant benefits to all stakeholders.”

According to Poweri Services, which was the EPC for the project, it is a commercially viable project and not a demonstration. The system was able to share the existing grid connection used by the solar farm, which helped to keep the costs low.

 

[polarbear]

 

[Old Rocks]

Mississippi gas plant explosion caught on video

Natural gas plants blow up regularly.

 

[danielpalos]

we need to upgrade our grid to better implement renewables, wherever they may be found.

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

Technology is improving all the time. And, it doesn't have to be batteries, it could be capacitors. A better grid could include more capacitance anywhere on the grid.

 

[danielpalos]

dear; renewables cannot fail, they are renewable. unlike, fossil fuels.

first and foremost, my avatar is of a record label, not a greek goddess, when you assume something based on your lack of experience, you inevitably make a mistake. Renewables are not renewable. Technically, a Wind Turbine has a life that is only 10 years at the most, lately more like 5 years. Same with Solar, commercial panels burn out quickly and need replacing. That is not renewable, you are using a finite source of materials and fuel to power the heavy industry used to build millions of solar panels and millions of wind turbines. Renewable? Wrong name for a product made from fossil fuels.

we are recycling now; and renewables cannot fail; unlike fossil fuels.

Holy crap s0n..........this forum is the varsity. You need to go back to People.com.....its for people who dwell in bubbles for most of their life. Renewable energy is a joke......its fringe energy and will be for..........ready for this.........at least another 30 years. By then new technologies will have supplanted renewable energy. Still.........in 2050, fossil fuels will be dominating the energy landscape. Every non-green projection says it.......including the most recent Obama administration EIA report.

People.com s0n..........you can post all you want and say anything and not look like a jackass doing it. Just trying to be helpful here........

alternative energy is about balancing our energy portfolio.

we can learn how to "catch" and store lighting with a more efficient grid.

 

[danielpalos]

we are recycling now; and renewables cannot fail; unlike fossil fuels.

No shit? Recycling, what is that? And when the fossil fuels fail how do you replace all the failing wind turbines and solar panels.

Solar panels and wind turbines are kind of a by-product of fossil fuels and heavy industry. When fossil fuels fail all that are dependent on fossil fuels die. You are right, fossil fuels will fail, and thus, wind turbines amd solar will fail as well.

Such a waste to use more fossil fuels to produce the world's largest, yet weakest secondary source of power, solar and wind.

You have even less of a solution to the end of fossil fuels; just improving an already mature sector is merely sinking costs.

 

[danielpalos]

"The U.S. is indeed the fastest developed growth market for solar globally and in 2016 will be the highest growth market overall," said Mohit Anand, GTM's senior analyst for Global Solar Market

U.S. set to smash solar power records this year

No new coal plants at all. Wind and solar account for over 68% of all new generation in 2015.

Still haven't learned that generation capacity and actual output are not the same things huh?

Wind only produces on average less than 30% of its nominal capacity

And yet the utilities are putting up gigawatts of wind, and no coal fired at all. And gigawatts of solar. You think they don't know the ratio of rated production to actual production? They are putting up both solar and wind because the real production of both at present prices make them cheaper per kw/hr of electricity than coal or even natural gas. And they are not dependent on further infrastructure, such as pipelines and railroad. And the price of wind and the sun does not change dependent on the market.

Why the Texas wind boom may be an outlier rather than a model for the wind industry in the rest of the U.S.

Energy
The One and Only Texas Wind Boom
Wind power has transformed the heart of fossil-fuel country. Can the rest of the United States follow suit?

• by Richard Martin
  
• October 3, 2016

Rolan Petty stabbed at the dirt with a boot toe and looked up at the broiling west Texas sun. “I call it farming on faith,” he said of his unirrigated cotton farm. “You just have faith that the rain is gonna come.”

If it doesn’t come, Petty has a backup income stream: leasing fees. All around us, towering 150 feet over Petty’s combine and the scrubby-looking cotton plants in neat rows, stood a forest of wind turbines that stretched to the horizon. Petty’s land on the arid plain of west Texas lies on the edge of the vast Horse Hollow wind farm, with 430 turbines spread over 73 square miles. It was the largest wind farm in the world when it was completed, in 2006. Petty’s family leases land to Horse Hollow and another wind farm in the area, making about $7,500 a year on each of the several dozen turbines on their property. Wind power has become a big windfall for the Pettys, as it has for many landowners in Texas—allowing Rolan and his parents and three brothers to make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year whether the rains come or not. And the Petty farm is just a small player in the largest renewable-energy boom the United States has ever seen.

A turbine at the Horse Hollow wind farm.
With nearly 18,000 megawatts of capacity, Texas, if it were a country, would be the sixth-largest generator of wind power in the world, right behind Spain. Now Texas is preparing to add several thousand megawatts more—roughly equal to the wind capacity that can be found in all of California. Most of these turbines are in west Texas, one of the most desolate and windy regions in the continental United States. Fifteen years ago, when the groundwork for this boom was being set, this area had little but cotton and grain farms, oil fields, scrub and dry riverbeds, and small towns that were mostly withering.

Today it’s a land of spindly white turbines that line the highways—and the pockets of landowners. At night, when the wind blows strongest and steadiest, if you stand out in one of the fields you can hear the great blades make a ghostly shoop-shoop sound as they turn. Wind power has brought prosperity to towns that were literally drying up less than a generation ago. “In the 2011 drought a lot of people around here would have filed for bankruptcy if not for the turbines,” said Russ Petty, one of Rolan’s brothers, who was giving me a driving tour of the property. “What it’s done is helped keep this land in the family.”

Yeah they are doing it for the subsidies

Wind-Energy Sector Gets $176 Billion Worth of Crony Capitalism

Germany also had put up gigawatts of wind if you are talking rated capacity but the system is a failure and can't meet the power demands
The same thing happened in the UK

And like I keep telling you installed capacity is not the same thing as actual output

We know the average output of wind is less than 30% of its rated nominal capacity

National Wind Watch | Output From Industrial Wind Power

Industry estimates project an annual output of 30-40%, but real-world experience shows that annual outputs of 15-30% of capacity are more typical.

Lets not forget an additional 50% power loss due to distance from the consumers

Really? The big turbines in the Gorge are no further than most of the big dams. And the power from the coal plants in Wyoming is shipped clear to California. So tell me about solar on top of warehouses and commercial centers being further from the point of use than the nukes and coal plants. LOL

improving our grid means we can place power lines underground with insulation.

 

[Billy_Bob]

If the grid needs to "upgraded" to implement renewables, that means renewables were forced on us when they were not ready.

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

Yep. Are all engineers as stupid as you? LOL

Tesla Wins Massive Contract to Power the California Grid

It's the latest response to a fossil-fuel disaster.
by
Tom Randall
September 15, 2016, 11:21 AM PDT
Tesla just won a bid to supply grid-scale power in Southern California to help prevent electricity shortages following the biggest natural gas leak in U.S. history. The Powerpacks, worth tens of millions of dollars, will be operational in record time—by the end of this year.

Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries. Tesla's contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed.

Eos Energy Storage – Powering the Dawn of Energy Storage

Eos Energy Storage, the startup that’s attracted utility interest from around the world in its low-cost, zinc-based batteries, is raising money to build more of them, and to get those units out in the field. Deployments are needed to prove the company’s bold claims of multi-hour, long-lasting energy storage at a cost of $160 per kilowatt-hour. On Tuesday, Eos announced the initial closing of a sale in a private placement of approximately $23 million.

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

• By David Pratt
  
• Sep 21, 2016 5:02 PM BST
  
• 0

Share

Image: Tesla.

The first grid-scale installation of the Tesla Powerpack system in Europe has been completed in the UK by Camborne Energy Storage and is already providing ancillary services to the National Grid.

The 500kWh capacity system, has been co-located with a 500kWp solar farm in Somerset to demonstrate the potential to provide a balanced grid.

Each of Camborne’s installed systems are designed to further assist and improve the efficiency of the UK’s energy infrastructure, with this latest project providing firm frequency response (FFR) to the grid.

It is currently not providing arbitrage but is prepared to in the future with the assistance of an undisclosed aggregator working with Camborne.

Dan Taylor, managing director of Camborne, said: “The development of Tesla’s first European grid-tied system is an exciting step forward for Camborne and Tesla in terms of our respective storage strategies. This project is another success for storage development in the UK and being co-located with a renewable generation site, should offer significant benefits to all stakeholders.”

According to Poweri Services, which was the EPC for the project, it is a commercially viable project and not a demonstration. The system was able to share the existing grid connection used by the solar farm, which helped to keep the costs low.

Too Funny:

The batteries are in a blast configuration... Looks like they have been having some catastrophic failure problems.. AND....

Further investigation finds; according to the British Electrical Safety Division, they will not allow an unprotected connection to the grid due to problems with catastrophic failure of batteries.


Going to have to look into this further.. Its a fledgling industry rife with problems.. Not ready for prime time

 

[elektra]

a better grid means it is easier to "plug and play" energy sources.

Cost of using renewables when THEY are ready to perform is idling perfectly good power plants that have employees and investors. And the cost of WASTED energy from the power-down/power-up cycles is NEVER properly added to cost of solar and wind.

In MOST BIG systems -- the excess energy is just DUMPED and wasted rather than cycling very expensive equipment. The "plug/play" catchword is just ANOTHER exaggeration of how simple all this is promulgated by folks who have no FUCKING idea how the lights come on.. .

we just need a better grid with more capacitance.

Yep a couple Gtons of limited life batteries. Do some math. The Nissan Leaf has a 30Kw-hr battery. That's enough to run 30 homes for 1hour. (NOT including grocery stores, steel mills, hospitals, etc).. AND assuming none of those of homes are already trying to CHARGE a Nissan Leaf.. It's COST is somewhere around $4000. To carry a small town (30K homes) with all it's other infrastructure thru a 1 hr "lapse in sun or wind", you're talking about 2000 of these battery packs and $8Mill (not counting land, design, facilities construction, other stuff reqd and maintenance) for just ONE HOUR !! To get thru night without solar you need 32,000 of the packs @ a cost of $128Mill. Total cost of the facility could approach $250,000,000.

The combined energy stored in that last "grid scale battery" is a fucking 960Mwatt - hrs. It would take a solar capacity of THREE TIMES what you put into the field in the first place to keep it charged. Or the full capacity of nuclear power plant for 1 hour. And if all that energy were RELEASED by a plane crash or a terrorist action -- it would have the explosive yield of a small tactical nuclear weapon.. Any questions?

Yep. Are all engineers as stupid as you? LOL

Tesla Wins Massive Contract to Power the California Grid

It's the latest response to a fossil-fuel disaster.
by
Tom Randall
September 15, 2016, 11:21 AM PDT
Tesla just won a bid to supply grid-scale power in Southern California to help prevent electricity shortages following the biggest natural gas leak in U.S. history. The Powerpacks, worth tens of millions of dollars, will be operational in record time—by the end of this year.

Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries. Tesla's contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed.

Eos Energy Storage – Powering the Dawn of Energy Storage

Eos Energy Storage, the startup that’s attracted utility interest from around the world in its low-cost, zinc-based batteries, is raising money to build more of them, and to get those units out in the field. Deployments are needed to prove the company’s bold claims of multi-hour, long-lasting energy storage at a cost of $160 per kilowatt-hour. On Tuesday, Eos announced the initial closing of a sale in a private placement of approximately $23 million.

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

First grid-scale Tesla Powerpack for Europe installed in the UK

• By David Pratt
  
• Sep 21, 2016 5:02 PM BST
  
• 0

Share

Image: Tesla.

The first grid-scale installation of the Tesla Powerpack system in Europe has been completed in the UK by Camborne Energy Storage and is already providing ancillary services to the National Grid.

The 500kWh capacity system, has been co-located with a 500kWp solar farm in Somerset to demonstrate the potential to provide a balanced grid.

Each of Camborne’s installed systems are designed to further assist and improve the efficiency of the UK’s energy infrastructure, with this latest project providing firm frequency response (FFR) to the grid.

It is currently not providing arbitrage but is prepared to in the future with the assistance of an undisclosed aggregator working with Camborne.

Dan Taylor, managing director of Camborne, said: “The development of Tesla’s first European grid-tied system is an exciting step forward for Camborne and Tesla in terms of our respective storage strategies. This project is another success for storage development in the UK and being co-located with a renewable generation site, should offer significant benefits to all stakeholders.”

According to Poweri Services, which was the EPC for the project, it is a commercially viable project and not a demonstration. The system was able to share the existing grid connection used by the solar farm, which helped to keep the costs low.

Too Funny:

The batteries are in a blast configuration... Looks like they have been having some catastrophic failure problems.. AND....

Further investigation finds; according to the British Electrical Safety Division, they will not allow an unprotected connection to the grid due to problems with catastrophic failure of batteries.


Going to have to look into this further.. Its a fledgling industry rife with problems.. Not ready for prime time

Why does los angeles need batteries? Oh yea, they shut down San Onofre Nuclear Power Station, now they need power and they certainly don't want to eat crow, by having to build another, or build a fossil plant. Nope, los angeles will buy power from Mexico, New Mexico, and Utah, even Wyoming, and store it in Batteries. Anybody know how much debt California owes? Anybody know how much debt Los Angeles owes?

It don't matter, our generation will never have to pay it off.

 

[elektra]

nobody is claiming alternative energies can handle our loads; we are merely balancing our energy portfolio.

How is something that you can not control, something that is always fluctuating, "merely balancing" our energy? It is not, you are a literal blithering idiot.

 

[Billy_Bob]

For example?

For example, you are a troll, obviously you have no facts to add here or there, so you troll. Your next response typically will be to demand facts of me or others, and then reply, "no its not".

So, you can't support your claim as usual.

Do you know how to calculate the resistance of cabling? Resistance causes power consumption/loss. Another idiot that has no clue how electricity works.