Posted on 02/19/2011 2:09:22 PM PST by NormsRevenge
Since 2002, California's utilities have committed to spend about $6 billion more on renewable power contracts than they would have paid to buy the electricity from new power plants burning natural gas, ..
The report, from a division of the California Public Utilities Commission, examines the costs of a state law that required the utilities to get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources such as the sun and the wind by the end of 2010.
Since the law was passed, 59 percent of the contracts the utilities have signed with renewable power developers have been more expensive than the levelized price of electricity from a new natural gas plant. ..
The renewable contracts that topped the levelized price of power from a gas-fired plant did so, on average, by 15 percent.
"The thrust of the message is, we need some kind of cost containment," said Yuliya Shmidt, a regulatory analyst with the commission's Division of Ratepayer Advocates.
The report, which Shmidt co-wrote, suggests that the utilities commission set a contract price limit for each utility that would be kept confidential and revised year by year. .. also recommended that the commission give some contracts more scrutiny than they now receive.
Renewable power technologies tend to be an expensive way to generate power, when compared with fossil fuels. But that isn't uniformly true. For example, geothermal energy - using Earth's heat to generate electricity - can cost 36 percent less than power from a natural gas plant, according to data from the California Energy Commission. Wind power also can beat a natural gas plant's prices.
For years, California's big, investor-owned utilities were frantically signing renewable power contracts, trying to meet the state's 2010 deadline. All of them missed it, but the law gives them until 2013 to comply. ..
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Who cares? It’s not their money.
I agree, but they can "blame" all they like and it's not going to make electricity flow out of the wall socket at a price ordinary people can afford. Power's one of those things where distance between "effect" and "cause" is very small. Politicians and lawyers can flap their gums till kingdom come, but end of the day you've got to plug your flat screen TV or microwave in, and the meter goes round and round.
Ya think?
I wonder which “editorial” writer/editor/assistant global warmer denier added in that little bit about wind power being less expensive than natural gas?
In the real world, wind power is about 70% more expensive to build and hook up to the grid, and even then - after it is built - it is on average only available 23% of the time.
(Geothermal IS less expensive than natural gas - IF (big IF!) you can install the geothermal power plant above a volcanic fault line where active lava is close to the surface and also close to available and permitted cooling waters. And IF - another big “IF” there - your neighbors can tolerate the drilling mess, surface contamination from the drilling and cooling water, and the poisonous sulfuric acid odors leaking out of the drill hole and evirons.)
That all depends on the price of natural gas. For several years after Katrina, windpower was much less than power produced with nat gas.
You also have to look at the conventional wisdom on the domestic gas supply and price that had been place for many, many years. That although the domestic supply of gas was more than adequate to supply the traditional uses of natural gas, as more and more gas was used to produce electricity, the domestic supply would be inadequate and the US would have to turn to imported LNG and it was thought that under those conditions, nat gas prices would be $7.50/mcf. Windpower competes very well when gas is $7.50.
The nat gas shortages in 2000-2001 spiking at $17/mcf pulled the trigger. That led to the many deals made on importing LNG, developent of the Burgos field in Mexico, and Congress passing the Alaska Nat Gasline Act of 2004.
Then along came Katrina in 2005 and prices went back up and stayed up until the economy collapsed and shale gas kicked in.
There were a lot of windmills installed during that period of time.
The leftists have invented a new word, and that can't be good. You can't level the price between wind power and natural gas power without first consuming powerful pharmaceuticals.
It doesn't compete at all when the wind isn't blowing.
Don't worry, Texas can sell that to NJ.
There, fixed it.
NJ gets 50% of its power from nuclear. Although the wind is blowing hard here tonight, it’s nothing that can be counted on.
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