The impossible just happened in Texas

[G_j]

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-impossible-just-happened-in-texas-2015-9?utm_content=buffer58f9a&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=Epoca+Now+via+Buffer

Daniel Gross, Slate
Sep. 20, 2015, 4:02 PM


Shutterstock
Austin, Texas.

In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep.

The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow.

Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed.

And then a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours.

As the Lone Star State slumbered, power producers were paying the state's electricity system to take electricity off their hands. At one point, the negative price was $8.52 per megawatt hour.

..more...

[Human101948]

1. Solar and wind power will never work!

How many times have you heard a wingnut say so?

[KansDem]

2. It simply isn't feasible!

[SheilaT]

9. I'm expecting that some day state legislatures

especially in states with lots of sunshine, will pass laws saying people do not own the solar rights above their homes and land. Sort of like people already don't own the mineral rights. Give it time.

[47of74]

36. ALEC is probably burning brain cells right now on that.

Knowing the dumb fucks they own all over this country it'll probably get introduced sooner or later.

[CrispyQ]

18. A comedian once said,

"If they could put a tap on the sun, we'd have solar everything by midnight."

[eggplant]

24. What good would it do at midnight?

Bah dum pum.

[Fred Sanders]

37. Lots of thing! Could be exported, could be stored, but the point is the abundant energy everywhere.

[eggplant]

52. Do I really have to explain the joke?

[Human101948]

64. It wasn't funny, don't bother...

Three men were in a NASA conference room to decide how to spend $10 billion.
“I think we should put our men on Mars!” said the first man.
“Ooh, good idea,” said the other two.
“I think we should put our men on Venus!” said the second man.
“Ooh, good idea,” said the other two.
“I think we should put our men on the Sun!”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Easy. We go at night.”

[rpannier]

54. Funny... Funny... Funny

Hey eggplant I just figured out your style, your comedy styling is in the same mold as Gregory Peck

[eggplant]

58. Aw, thx!

[rpannier]

65. I have to give credit where credit is due

[eggplant]

66. :-D n/t

[passiveporcupine]

21. Perfect storm for big money

[valerief]

12. Not for billionaires, only for humans. nt

[BobTheSubgenius]

60. Of course not!

Solar works in Germany, but will never work in the US, because it gets much less sunlight, and turbines slowing the wind, which is a finite resource after all, will actually increase global warming.

These facts were on both TV and the Interwebs, so I know they are true.

[sulphurdunn]

62. If it becomes too efficient,

laws will be passed against it. Oops, in some states they already have been.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

3. wow

it is time to rethink many things

[Omaha Steve]

4. WOW

K&R!

OS

[littlebit]

5. I drive from Amarillo to

Springfield MO and back six days a week. The number of windmills going up right now off of I-40 is amazing.

[SheilaT]

10. Isn't that like a twelve hour drive in each direction?

[littlebit]

15. No it's about 537 miles.

It takes me 8 1/2 hours each way.

[Gore1FL]

19. I hope that's a job and not a commute!!!

[littlebit]

25. It is

I'm a truck driver.

[SheilaT]

28. Oops. Didn't read your response

fast enough.

That's still 17 hours a day of driving. Is it legal?

[CanSocDem]

31. Ssshhhhh...

[littlebit]

47. Not for one driver.

We are only allowed to drive 11 at a time before we have to take a 10 hour break. I have a co driver so the truck runs about 22 hours day.

[SheilaT]

49. Thanks for the clarification.

[Dustlawyer]

34. Our port off loads wind turbine blades everyday now. You see them going out by rail and truck all

of the time. Of course they are imported because we don't make shit here anymore!

[47of74]

38. Yeah I see the blades for them every so often here in eastern Iowa

I used to have to drive a bit more often for work so I'd see them around the Quad Cities where a truck would be hauling a blade somewhere.

[Major Nikon]

45. From the air flying at low altitude you can see thousands of them at once

[closeupready]

6. K&R

[A HERETIC I AM]

7. And here's the real reason;

That gave wind-farm owners a great incentive to lower their prices. The data shows that the clearing price in the real-time market went from $17.40 per megawatt-hour for the interval ending 12:15 a.m., to zero for the interval ending 1:45 a.m. Then it went into negative territory and stayed at zero or less until about 8:15 a.m. For the interval that ended 5:45 a.m., the real-time price of electricity in Texas was minus $8.52 per megawatt-hour.

How could this be? I mean, even the most efficient producer couldn't afford to provide electricity free or pay someone to take it.

Well, there's one more wrinkle. Typically, wind is bid at the lowest prices — because you don't need fuel, it doesn't really cost that much money to keep wind turbines moving once they have been built. But wind operators have another advantage over generators that use coal or natural gas: A federal production tax credit of 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour that applies to every kilowatt of power produced.

And that means that even if wind operators give the power away or offer the system money to take it, they still receive a tax credit equal to $23 per megawatt-hour. Those tax credits have a monetary value — either to the wind-farm owner or to a third party that might want to buy them.

As a result, in periods of slack overall demand and high wind production, it makes all the economic sense in the world for wind-farm owners to offer to sell lots of power into the system at negative prices.


Only in Texas, folks. Only in Texas.

So this phenomena was facilitated by a US Government tax subsidy.

[brush]

56. And only in Texas because Texas' power grid is self-contained and aren't linked with . . .

regional power grids like the other states are so they couldn't send the power to neighboring states.

Another odd Texasism (is that a word?).

They're getting into Flori-duh territory there with there weirdness.

[47of74]

8. Yeah I've been thinking of getting my dad to consider solar power for the farm;

I do wonder how much it would save him in electricity since the barn has so much roof space.

[Volaris]

13. Probably he would never pay an electric bill again.

[jeff47]

14. Try this calculator

http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/

Has handy features like "draw where you're gonna put the panels on google maps, and we'll figure out how many panels you can fit"

[Marty McGraw]

22. I just wish Bernie's

Clean solar initiative for low income households would pass. Or that the cost of panels come down. They are still pretty high for what materials they are made from. Hook up and battery storage is another hurdle to tackle as well. I know there are big strides being taken in this area, but property ownership and affordability is leaving more & more people in the dust these days

[47of74]

35. cool

Thank you!

[Beartracks]

40. I was talking to an electric co. employee recently...

... and he described how, as more and more people go solar or off-grid to save money, the remaining customers are left to pay the fixed costs of building/maintaining the grid infrastructure (and other fixed costs), and thus rates will keep inching higher and higher -- and that hurts guess who? People on small or fixed incomes.



====================

[jeff47]

41. That's assuming people actually go off-grid.

Far more likely is distributed generation while remaining on-grid.

First, a very, very, very large number of people don't have enough space and southern exposure to get 100% of their power from solar. They can get part of it, but not all of it.

Second, the grid is a much more lucrative "dump" for excess power. Local storage is hard, and currently high-maintenance and expensive.

Third, the grid is a fabulous backup for your own systems. Cloudy week? No problem. Sure, you'll pay more on the next electric bill, but at least you actually have power. Same if your system develops a fault - you'll at least be able to get power from the grid until you can fix it. And fixes are very often not cheap.

[Beartracks]

42. You make it sound like cloud computing.

=================

[jeff47]

44. A little.

The main stumbling block is #1 - all those people in NYC aren't going to be able to put up solar plants big enough to go off-grid.

[progressoid]

27. I know a farmer in NW Iowa that put up his own wind generator.

It's a big investment, but he says so far it has been paying off. He has a fairly large operation.

[kairos12]

11. A long way from Enron.

[Dont call me Shirley]

16. But but but but......oil and natural gas and coal and uranium...

May many more days worldwide become spot-price zero days!

[hobbit709]

17. And how much of that will be passed on to the consumer?

[Major Nikon]

46. I'm currently locked into a 6.2 cent per KwH rate

It should even be lower this winter when I renew my contract.

[Jack Rabbit]

20. K/R

[Angry Dragon]

23. kick

[leveymg]

26. Sounds like a "windfall" profit for those shorting the Southwest electricity futures market.

Likely less of a glitch than the syncopated sound of champagne corks popping.

[bvar22]

29. I worked for a year out of Midland and Odessa (West Texas).

The wind NEVER stops.
It is enough to drive some people bonkers.

[Eleanors38]

30. Saying in that area: The wind is always blowing sand, except when it's blowing ice.

[bvar22]

32. That is not an exaggeration.

absolute truth.

[Gloria]

33. here in So. NM we get service fron El Paso Electric, I gave solar!!

They want to raise rates for more upgrades. No sweat for me...

I ugraded my 70% system to 100% 1 1/2 years ago under the same terms...getting paid 12c a Kwh I generate...those deals are gone, way down to 2c, I think...

It's my hedge against future costs,,, the tax rebates were great and both sections will pay off at the same time, now about 4 years...then...really free!
And having no bills now is great, to!

[ion_theory]

39. K&R. Okay TX. n/t

[Stinky The Clown]

43. If I'm not mistaken, T Bone Pickins owns a lot of those windmills.

[TexasBushwhacker]

55. Not as many as originally planned

The problem is the lack of high capacity transmission lines in the places where the wind is blowing. The Texas panhandle, where it's windy all the time, doesn't use all that much energy. So that means building or upgrading hundreds of miles of lines to major metro areas.

Pickens thinks the feds should build the transmission line network not unlike Eisenhower built the interstate highway system. Of course the fossil fuel producers think that's unfair and unwise. They'd rather frack the country into oblivion.

Keep in mind Pickens is old and he's a hedge fund manager. He wants quick return on his investments. Right now he's investing in natural gas. He still sees large scale wind energy as part of America's future, but he's not willing, at this point in his life, to put up all the money.

[brush]

57. Pickens is right, the government should build the lines like Ike did the interstates . . .

but that would have provided so many jobs and boost the economy and make Obama look good so the repugs would never let that happen, the a-holes that they are — I would even venture towards anti-American/anti-country a-holes that they are.

Same with the high-speed rail system and other infra-structure fixes that need doing. Too many people would have good jobs that can't be off-shored for the repugs' liking.

[TexasBushwhacker]

68. Not to mention, if we really ramped up wind and solar

the problem of brown outs and black outs should be less. The biggest demand is during the summer WHEN IT'S SUNNY. It should take stress off the grid.

The GOP would rather spend money on the military and if you pour all that money into it, you have to have a war periodically to justify all that spending. Isn't it. funny that we've spent more money, as a % of GDP, on the Department of Defense than when we called it the Department of War.

[Octafish]

48. Gosh. Imagine what would happen if this was how it was around the whole country?

We could do it for less than the price of the Iraq War 2.

Oh. No radiation, either.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/for-the-price-of-the-iraq-war-the-u-s-could-have-a-100-renewable-power-system/5330881

[rhett o rick]

50. I don't see any Hillary logos in this thread. Is she against wind power? nm

[AnAzulTexas]

51. you better believe

that shit-ass Neugebauer will have something negative to say about this malarkey

[Uncle Joe]

53. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, G_j.

[FloriTexan]

59. I have Green Mountain Energy..

and we are 100% renewable. Perhaps our efforts are making a difference

[jamesatemple]

63. I have Green Mountain Energy here in East Texas.

With the weather cooling a bit last week, my kWh usage for that week was 341.37 kWhs at a cost of $12.05, just a tad over 3½¢/kWh. I can't remember having electric bills that reasonable during the last 20 years. I just hope it continues at a comparable rate.

[turbinetree]

61. The Sun ...................

http://www.universetoday.com/18847/life-of-the-sun/

[ReactFlux]

67. Provides ALL the energy life needs

And then some.

[turbinetree]

70. It sure does..................................

and using the proverbial saying------------- it's free

[ColesCountyDem]

71. 'The Sun'

[turbinetree]

72. Coooooooooooooooooool..........................................

or it should be said Hot, HOT

[ColesCountyDem]

73. Thank you!

One of my favorite groups.

[turbinetree]

74. ------------Your Welcome.............................

enjoy:

[Liberal_in_LA]

69. cool

[Takket]

75. whoa, they have renewable power in Texas???

How was that allowed to happen? Was Rick Perry asleep???????? Probably shouldn't publicize this much. Texans might go tear down Satan's windmill if they find out!!!!!!!!!

[Recursion]

76. Wind farms having to pay for producing electricity is a good thing for renewables? (nt)