solar power economics

Of those, only burning biomass is really controllable and hence a real asset for energy production.

A really hot water or geothermal hot steam resource might also be a valuable resource for electric production.

I meant that what is already in place is working and is renewable.

Nnot that many new dams are going in. A few small ones though. And some old ones are even being removed around here.

We have cheap electricity up here in the pacific northwest so solar electricity doesn't make nearly as much sense. I guess you could say we get most of our energy from rain and snow which really is solar. It's almost all fusion energy. Wireless Transmitted Fusion (WTF)

boB

So what happens when the power company becomes the power sink?

Hardly a way of offsetting fossil fuels.

A lot of them are being removed. It's for the fish, you know. Building a big one will be harder, politically, than building nukes (at least there are two of those in the pipe).

We have cheap electricity down here in the Southeast, too. Screw the morons in the Northeast and Kalifornica.

That can only happen for brief periods, or when there is a ton of wind at night and those turbines keep feeding. Germany has a lot of pump hydro so up to a limit they can start pumping water up the hills. This energy is then used again during peak usage. Inverters also have a limit. When the grid voltage exceeds that then they gradually disconnect.

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Ideally, they pump water back up into a hydroelectric generator reservoir, or compress air into underground caverns. The UK has one such hydroelectric system.

It's efficiency isn't great - you get about 75% of the stored energy back.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman,Nijmegen

I meant what happens when the power company becomes a *NET* sink? Where to the subsidies come from then?

If they weren't there, then a nuclear, coal or gas fired plant would take their place. There WAS a coal fired plant in Washington state running until just recently.

Here is a blurb about a local dam going in. Pretty small (7.5 MW) but more to come and the local people evidently are in favor of it. First new hydro for SNO PUD in 20 years (other than micri-hydro which is very common)

With the current economic model, which assumes that everything is correctly measured in $$, you only have to care about the time it takes for your investment to be paid back. Everything else is superfluous!

Pere

What are you talking about? The subsidies come from the consumers bills.

Germany might well go into generation deficit in the near future since they seem determined to switch off all their nuclear capacity and import it from France instead. But the grid in Europe is always in slight surplus with the various disconnectable loads used to balance it typically electrolysis cells and furnaces are at the end of the chain.

The main problem with the new German policy is that they will burn incredibly dirty brown coal in far greater amounts to make up for the shortfall which completely negates their well intended but barking mad feed in tariff scheme for renewables (and in particular solar PV).

UK is also operating *very* close to the point where in cold still winter weather we are in serious danger of having to import power on the continental interconnects. A guy called TNP has done a rather nice realtime analysis of the live data available on a web page.

At the moment wind power is 3+ GW out of a lowish daytime demand of

Good grief. Get your head out of your ass and read what I wrote.

Let me talk slooowwwwerrrr. Hydro is hardly an energy source that will placate the greenies and carbonophobes happy. It's not even worth discussing.

What *YOU* wrote is illiterate gibberish you moron.

From the ratepayers. The good old power monopoly game. They go to their PUC and say "Look, we have this much in normal expenses, this much in solar feed-in subsidies to dole out, this much in revenue, and we are entitled to this much in profit. So we want the rates to be increased by another x cents kWh". And then the rates are increased accordingly.

What I wrote was *very* clear. I can't help it if you can't read.

"carbonophobes"! I like that term. Good one.

Well, they can't complain very much up here. Most of our electricity already comes from hydro.

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And then they start using the surplus power to synthesize coal. How green can you get?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs