Posted on 03/16/2014 10:24:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you use solar to do that you almost have a perpetual motion machine. Pump enough of it up during the day - the sun is up every day - and let it flow 24/7 to make the power. With a large enough well then you may even have excess to sell downstream.
You can always trace it back to congress critters who promoted these boondoggles in order to get kickbacks.
Sure it is less energy output vs input overall.
It is not a perpetual motion machine.
The laws of physics can not be repealed.
But we have excess overall generation capacity,
so at night during low demand,
water is pumped upstream and reused the next day during peaks.
Lake Oconee is, in effect, a storage battery.
Try this one. Sounds like zer0’s actions too.
“The goal of socialism is communism.”
Vladimir Lenin
Wind energy will soon be illegal as a result of its destruction of bird species.
So, at 5 PM during the dog days of summer, ERCOT, who manages the Texas grid, will ask for very little power from the west Texas wind farms(1%-2%). OTOH during the mild and windy spring, the wind farms may be producing 20%-25% of the state's consumed power. The state record is about 28%.
This gives rise to the hybrid power plants, which may consist of wind and nat gas. Blending the high capital cost of wind and the low capital cost of nat gas for an average capital cost. This is then offset by blending the low operating cost of wind with the high operating costs of nat gas for an average operating cost. Under this scenario, the hybrid plant operator decides the mix of the source(wind vs nat gas), not Ercot. The operator is then in the position of being able to utilize the greatest amount of wind(cheaper) and the least amount of nat gas(higher cost).
And then on top of that, a hybrid plant operator can install a grid battery because that cost would be amortized relative to nat gas, not wind.
"Ideally, no energy source would be subsidized"
In the US we subsidize all sources of energy, some more than others. This is what makes the anti-wind crowd look bad. If you were sincere in your opposition to subsidies, you would be going after nuclear and ethanol, not wind.
And if you were really sincere in your opposition to subsidies, you would be going after the externalized costs of coal. The health and environmental costs from the pollution generated from utilizing coal are huge. We socialize these costs and because you ignore this, that makes you a right-wing socialist.
I'm no "right-wing socialist". If you were to look up my posting history on the subject; you'd see that I was amongst the first on this forum to voice a strong opposition to ethanol (food in fuel tanks).
As for internalizing the external costs of various forms of energy generation -- I completely agree, in principle. However, coal, nuclear, oil and gas are not getting the completely free ride, you seem to believe they are. At least here in Canada, there are very stringent environmental laws, and very thorough socio-economic and environmental review processes associated with any resource development project, or nuclear plant.
These quasi-judicial panels order a great many (often expensive) things to mitigate or eliminate as much of the environmental risk, and other external costs as possible. They also order compensation for affected parties. That internalizes a lot of the externalities.
In addition, Canada produces all the coal, oil, gas, and uranium it uses (actually, we're net exporters of all those). Royalties are applied to all of those things -- calculated to be as high as possible, without completely repelling investment. In the case of British Columbia, we even have a "carbon tax" (we were suckered into this by the U.S. -- and in particular by Arnold Swartchnegger). This carbon tax is now considerably higher than the cost of carbon credits in the E.U. It is intended to internalize the external costs of emitting carbon dioxide. (Regardless of how bogus "global warming" is, we're paying a lot for it already.)
Compare all that to the wind industry, which has largely gotten a free-pass from all environmental reviews. What are the externalities involved with killing tens of thousands of birds every year -- we don't know, because it's not been the subject of environmental reviews. Meanwhile, a settling pond in the Alberta oil sands killed about 500 ducks three years ago, and we never hear the end of it. If you want to put up a cell-phone or microwave tower on a hill top, you're subject to reviews regarding the aesthetic impacts. Meanwhile, much larger windmills, with monstrous moving blades, are making an eyesore of large swaths of our countryside. People pay a lot for a good view -- but the wind companies pay nothing to compensate for the loss of views.
At least solar power output, in a lot of the places where it’s installed, tend to track with the demand for A/C.
No, there’s not a lot of use for unreliable, unpredictable sources of electricity, at least not until we come up with some reasonably cost-efficient method of storing electrical power when there’s a surplus.
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