Turns out Sen Feinstein from California is not loving the renewables enough to cough up some acreage in the dessert. Lets see, they hate coal, won’t tolerate nuclear, despise oil and gas, view hydro as problematic, won’t site wind in many logical places. So now they also don’t want to put solar projects in the freaking desert. You wonder why California is so screwed up from an energy perspective? You need not look any further than your elected officials.
“Feinstein said the lands in question were donated or purchased with the intent that they would be protected forever.”
If this is true then what’s the beef? I’ve seen the same issue come up before and the intent usually has a lot to do with the outcome. For example, check out what happened with Rackham Golf Course north of Detroit when developers wanted to build Condos there.
It’s always made me scratch my head a little to watch the “eco-friendly” groups trip all over themselves.
No such thing as clean coal.
No Nukes as the French couldn’t possibly do that right.
Wind kills the birds
Solar displaces snakes
Oil is well, just so 20th century
Hydro kills the fish & causes more greenhouse gasses.
“It’ll be interesting to view the replys on this topic.”
So far it is what I pretty much expected. A bunch of people making smarmy comments about environmentalists, and one person trying to discuss the merits of the particular project (and getting no response).
What would happen if you donated $40 million of your own money to purchase property with the intent that it be set aside and not developed out of protection for habitat and then someone else came in and wanted to develop the land? Sounds like they are actually being consistent in that they will not allow development of anything on that property, even environmentally friendly energy development.
What always make me laugh about all the clowns who advocate that we need widescale adoption of electric cars, is when you start doing the math and solve for the decatherms required to actually produce enough electricity to charge all those cars up every day and then solve for the amount of new power generation required which would be astronomical. I really think half of our population thinks electricity just comes out of the wall socket magically. SO how many people would be up for dropping our dependence on foreign oil by say 10% at the cost (social and economic) of having to build say 200 new 800MW coal fired power plants at $2billion a pop.
I have thought the same sort of thing. In Ontario the past couple summers have been pretty hard on the grid (according to the Hydro company and the government), so a slew of people adding a whole wack of electric cars to the grid will do what? There doesn’t seem to be any talk about adding any new ways of creating the needed electricity. Like you say, people must think electricity comes off a magical tree.
What’s left? In their mind, conservation. We can conserve our way out of anything. Who cares if all the industry moves away? At least we don’t have any of those pesky power plants.
For years the Euro boys have 40- 60 mpg diesel cars burn their $6 + a gallon fuel . Their nuclear power plants squeezing the last radiation out of the fuel rods , till they have a 20 yr half life . Its here now , oh wait , maybe the oil an Coal lobby are keeping it on that side of the pond .
$2bn for an 800MW coal plant? Maybe under the new emission laws that some folks have planned, but in today’s dollars, that would get you an 800MW nuclear plant.
If the land was donated by someone for preservation without development then I don’t have a problem with it, AND it makes this totally different than the Nantucket Wind Farm thing that will obscure somebody’s view of a federal wildlife area.
From what I have seen of the plan for electric cars – it would appear that we’re supposed to plug them in at night, when there is less demand on the grid. What most people don’t understand is that the grid has base load and peaking load. Base load is going to be your nuclear and most hydro plants – they run full throttle all the time. A lot of your coal plants (and even some BWR nuclear plants) are configured so that their main turbines follow grid demand – so during certain points of the day they run full throttle and during certain points they hardly put out any electricity. Wind and solar just put stuff on the grid, displacing the peaking supply (read: throttling down the coal plants). There is never more electricity on the grid than is needed at any point in time – the opposite can not be said. From what I can tell though, the “plug your car in at night” crowd seems to equate “less demand on the grid” with “surplus electricity”. There is NEVER surplus electricity on the grid, and it all comes at a cost. So, that coal plant that never needed to run during the night, is going to need another ½ mile long coal train to feed the electric/hybrid cars that charge at night.
That’s a pretty good summation, but there are a few more issues.
Charging cars off-peak actually reduces electric rates for everyone. Using base-load on a more flat basis allows for greater utilization of capital assets, thus bringing down average cost and rates. Some of our industrial groups that like low rates are clamoring for utilities to help create off-peak load. It is not about “surplus electricity” but rather about “surplus capacity.”
Adding a rail-car or two of coal for vehicle use is preferable to adding another oil tanker or two. Emissions are lower when using electricity for vehicle travel. The domestic energy balance gets better. And costs are better.
As for P-Tex scaring people about making a rapid transition to electric, make sure you recognize that a tiny percentage will make that shift every year. It is not like we are going to make a transition of such magnitude over night, or even over a decade or two. It is a process where we get better incrementally.
If we wanted to get back to the OP discussion, another example might be where my wife chose to get a specialized license plate that supports her favorite cause. At some point, the Governor decided there was a budget problem and commandeered the money to be used for education. Now, education is fine, but she donated that money for a different reason. Just because she didn’t want her donation to be shifted to education doesn’t mean she doesn’t support education. Rather, it means that she wanted the money to go toward the intended purpose.
That’s a pretty good summation, but there are a few more issues.
Charging cars off-peak actually reduces electric rates for everyone. Using base-load on a more flat basis allows for greater utilization of capital assets, thus bringing down average cost and rates. Some of our industrial groups that like low rates are clamoring for utilities to help create off-peak load. It is not about “surplus electricity” but rather about “surplus capacity.”
Adding a rail-car or two of coal for vehicle use is preferable to adding another oil tanker or two. Emissions are lower when using electricity for vehicle travel. The domestic energy balance gets better. And costs are better. I think your comparison is noble, but the BTU’s contained in “a couple of rail cars” vs. a tanker is nowhere near equal. Also, emissions out of an electric vehicle are lower than out of an internal combustion vehicle, but a coal fired power plant is - at best - 40% thermally efficient. Most internal combustion engines are in the low to mid 30’s, when you factor in electrical losses due to transmission distances and transformers, I believe it is probably a wash.
As for P-Tex scaring people about making a rapid transition to electric, make sure you recognize that a tiny percentage will make that shift every year. It is not like we are going to make a transition of such magnitude over night, or even over a decade or two. It is a process where we get better incrementally. I agree, but I think that once enough people make the leap over to electric cars and “create a demand” for off peak electricity, that off peak is going to start going for a rate very similar to peak rates. That’s just economics - if I’ve got something that people want all of the sudden, I’m going to charge more for it.
**If we wanted to get back to the OP discussion, another example might be where my wife chose to get a specialized license plate that supports her favorite cause. At some point, the Governor decided there was a budget problem and commandeered the money to be used for education. Now, education is fine, but she donated that money for a different reason. Just because she didn’t want her donation to be shifted to education doesn’t mean she doesn’t support education. Rather, it means that she wanted the money to go toward the intended purpose. ** **** I agree, they should contact the former land owner and try to get permission/change the stipulation on the donation.
compact, a couple of things. you can’t touch a 800 MW nuclear plant for anything in the neighborhood of $2 billion. They are 2-3x that. We are going through permitting a few now and the cost estimates are shocking. Also you don’t just throttle up and down coal plants, if you try they run amazingly ineficient and the costs per btu becomes cost prohibitive. they are meant to be on for large chunks of time and then turned off and maintained for large periods of time and then fired back up over 8-12 hours. That is why in almost all of your energy markets ERCOT, PJM, CALISO, NYISO, NEPOOL, etc. the fuel source on the margin is natural gas. Also many of your peaker plants and CC gas plants have the ability to be started quickly and are more responses to changes in demand. So most nuclear and coal facilities are running 24x7 when online and are not just hanging idle and can be juiced up on a whim hence the classification of baseload capacity. If we had a increase in demand over time for nighttime off peak power it would initially be met by incremental gas burning facilities and then over time as the dispatch curve shifted and smoothed out lower marginal cost facilities (nuke and coal) would be built.
I agree, but when Com-Ed built 12 nuke plants in IL, 6 were PWR’s for base load and 6 were BWR’s for load following - the jet pumps can throttle much more quickly than the boration requirements of a PWR.
I got my $ figure for the nuke units based on the fact that the places I have heard that are applying for dual unit AP1000’s are calling for 6 - 8 bn, which is 3 - 4 per unit, not too far off your $2bn price tag. Of course my numbers could be off, the state I live in refuses to allow any new units.