Solar and Wind Power Fees for Oklahomans

[heironymouspasparagus]

I am waiting for Bloom Energy (or one of it's competitors - Redox is making the right noises.) to come out with a cost effective, efficient residential fuel cell system.  100kva is still a little bit on the big side, unless I had a compound with several houses to share with.....

http://www.bloomenergy.com/

http://www.redoxpowersystems.com/


Now all I need is a good supply of natural gas.....

[Cats Cats Cats]

Germany for example - their stated goal is 30% solar and wind by 2015.  Last time I looked was a couple years ago, and they were well along that path.  

Nathann, I know YOU understand this - it is for others;
The naysayers always make some lame BS nonsense about how solar and wind won't work in the dark or when the wind isn't blowing....  So what?  We don't depend on any single point supply as it is.  This state has both natural gas and coal.  Other states add nuke into the mix.  NONE of them is enough to do it all.  What wind and solar bring to the table are another VERY viable, VERY competitive, VERY cost effective tool to the toolbox.  It further distributes the generation capacity, so no one or two have to shoulder the load alone.   Anyone who has ever designed and tried to built anything in more that a handful of units has dealt with the issues of "single point of supply" for a critical item, or set of items.  If they have NOT dealt with it, they are either lying, incompetent, or haven't been burned by it yet, which is really the second - incompetent!

Well you act like people in Germany are putting one wind farm every 10 miles that connects to one circuit or something.  Not how it works.  They are probably putting 400-600 MW of wind at one place and I'm not sure about solar.  I believe it would be 200-400 MW.  Sure.. Wind is distributed...  But look at texas.  it isn't in the middle of any major cities.

  

That doesn't include the SPP part of texas.  

Texas just spent 6.9 Billion dollars in projects to effectively get that wind to the major cities in Texas.  They spend $300 per customer to connect wind.  It will probably be much higher when you count in the 10% ROI ERCOT is giving the companies that invested.  Since on the hottest days of the year the wind isn't blowing very hard you can only assume a small output from the wind farms.  Which means that you then have to still build another gas plant. So you aren't saving the money there.  Also the power from the wind farms costs the same as the most expensive unit on at the time.  I think you will find that the power prices in ERCOT haven't decreased recently.  Wind farms also do not provide the power grid with stability during a fault because they are asycnhronous.  Those big spinning motors have other uses too like making sure we have 60 hz.  The further you are away from a big unit the more likely you could beome out of sync and have to be tripped offline.
Wind does help the existing power plans run less though and produce less CO2. I am pro wind and solar, I'm just telling you how it is.  

[nathanm]

Nobody said that utility scale wind saves the utility money on transmission. I did say that distributed generation (IOW, rooftop solar and residential wind turbines) do that. The discussion is about how our betters have seen fit to allow electric utilities in Oklahoma to charge fees to residential customers with distributed generation, supposedly to offset cost to the utility. Costs that I am saying are actually negative in other states.

[Cats Cats Cats]

Nobody said that utility scale wind saves the utility money on transmission. I did say that distributed generation (IOW, rooftop solar and residential wind turbines) do that. The discussion is about how our betters have seen fit to allow electric utilities in Oklahoma to charge fees to residential customers with distributed generation, supposedly to offset cost to the utility. Costs that I am saying are actually negative in other states.

Hopefully we can get the efficiency of solar up there where we can do that.  Wind isn't going to do it.

[TeeDub]

Costs that I am saying are actually negative in other states.

Are you saying in some states, the cost of transmission is negative?  Can you elaborate or give a cite?

[Cats Cats Cats]

Are you saying in some states, the cost of transmission is negative?  Can you elaborate or give a cite?

I think the idea that wind, while a free fuel, does not necessarily result in lower costs to customers.

[nathanm]

Are you saying in some states, the cost of transmission is negative?  Can you elaborate or give a cite?

I'm saying that rooftop solar and residential wind reduce the utility's total cost of transmission. Even when forced to purchase at retail rates, which utilities are not required to do in Oklahoma, utilities make money on the power delivered by residential distributed generation. That effect is obviously greater in places where the utilities pay for carbon emissions, but even taking that out, utilities in Minnesota make a couple of cents a kWh on the power they buy from residential generators in net metering arrangements. There is no legitimate reason to charge fees to residential grid tied solar/wind systems, especially when the rules are like they are here in Oklahoma. In the abstract, it's not so offensive in states where there is true net metering.

The paper with the actual numbers should be in my browser history somewhere, I'll see if I can dig it out...

[Cats Cats Cats]

If A to B is congested and everybody at A buys solar panels and nobody at B does then it makes it worse.  If everybody at B does and nobody at A does then it makes it better.  But if you back off the flow from A to B you might overload something elsewhere.  Its almost like moving water around.

But generally constraints around cities are form outside of the city to inside of the city. So anything inside will help.

[nathanm]

If A to B is congested and everybody at A buys solar panels and nobody at B does then it makes it worse.

If demand at B remains constant, there will be no increase in load on this hypothetical transmission line. If anyone at B buys panels, it reduces congestion, regardless of what people on the other end of the line do.

[Cats Cats Cats]

If demand at B remains constant, there will be no increase in load on this hypothetical transmission line. If anyone at B buys panels, it reduces congestion, regardless of what people on the other end of the line do.

In a closed system from only A to B and B isn't connected to anything else you are correct.  That isn't exactly real life though.  My A and B have other things attached to them.

[sgrizzle]

 My A and B have other things attached to them.

TMI

[Conan71]

TMI

Sounds like kinky body piercing.

[Red Arrow]

I think what you are looking for is in here.   (Maybe table 1.4?)
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/electric-car-global-warming-emissions-report.pdf

That's pretty much what I was looking for.  The Well to Wheels comparison includes the inefficiencies I wanted to see included.  I believe the level of transmission losses they used (page 4) seem bit low though. Tables 1.1 and 1.4 are a good summary.
 

The small percentage of electricity consumed in the transmission from the coal-fired power plant to the point of use, about 6 to 7 percent, is also taken into account.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Well you act like people in Germany are putting one wind farm every 10 miles that connects to one circuit or something.  Not how it works.  They are probably putting 400-600 MW of wind at one place and I'm not sure about solar.  I believe it would be 200-400 MW.  Sure.. Wind is distributed...  But look at texas.  it isn't in the middle of any major cities.


Texas just spent 6.9 Billion dollars in projects to effectively get that wind to the major cities in Texas.  They spend $300 per customer to connect wind.  It will probably be much higher when you count in the 10% ROI ERCOT is giving the companies that invested.  Since on the hottest days of the year the wind isn't blowing very hard you can only assume a small output from the wind farms.  Which means that you then have to still build another gas plant. So you aren't saving the money there.  Also the power from the wind farms costs the same as the most expensive unit on at the time.  I think you will find that the power prices in ERCOT haven't decreased recently.  Wind farms also do not provide the power grid with stability during a fault because they are asycnhronous.  Those big spinning motors have other uses too like making sure we have 60 hz.  The further you are away from a big unit the more likely you could beome out of sync and have to be tripped offline.


Wind does help the existing power plans run less though and produce less CO2. I am pro wind and solar, I'm just telling you how it is.  

I never said or implied they were doing it one mill at a time....they are using farms like we do here.

As for the wind not blowing...well, look at that map and see the wide distribution of mills.  If the ones up north are still, the odds are VERY much that the ones down south will be turning.  It's an extremely widely distributed system.  Kind of like going from the north panhandle to Corpus or more south is on the order of El Paso to Houston -   +/- a few dozen miles.  And El Paso to Houston is further than from El Paso to Los Angeles...so the idea that the whole of Texas is gonna be still at the same time...well that's like expecting the entire west of CA, AZ, and NM to be still at the same time.  Probably not.

Why would the price ever decrease??  That sounds a little bit like the same mindset that the RWRE has been trying to get people to assume in relation to "energy independence" - where we produce all our oil/gas here.  The unspoken implication that they want you to think is that somehow that will also create lower or even stable prices for energy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  (You don't believe that nonsense, do you??)

The big windmills have generators in them that do stabilize/synchronize 60Hz to the grid.  Distance does not affect frequency.  Otherwise they could NOT connect to the grid.  If anyone looks at the following link, move the cursor over different sections of the rotating windmill picture to see what is happening in each section.

http://energy.gov/eere/wind/how-does-wind-turbine-work


And for just a little bit of snarky... How is it that it is again?

[heironymouspasparagus]

If A to B is congested and everybody at A buys solar panels and nobody at B does then it makes it worse.  If everybody at B does and nobody at A does then it makes it better.  But if you back off the flow from A to B you might overload something elsewhere.  Its almost like moving water around.

But generally constraints around cities are form outside of the city to inside of the city. So anything inside will help.

You just made the case for OK to NOT do what they are doing....  If Texas is buying wind/solar/etc - which they are - and OK does not, then it makes it worse.  True.

So, if we sell TX less power, it's gonna overload something elsewhere??   How would that work again...?