Posted on 09/19/2015 2:03:35 AM PDT by Timpanagos1
Wind power was so plentiful in Texas that producers sold it at a negative price. What?
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep. The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow. Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed.
And then a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours. As the Lone Star State slumbered, power producers were paying the state’s electricity system to take electricity off their hands. At one point, the negative price was $8.52 per megawatt hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Read the other posts:
Fed subsidies exceed the $8+ per MW-hr they are paying by nearly $15, resulting in a net profit.
Hydrogen storage is not so easy as you might think; H2 is a really small molecule and manages to find its way out of most conventional containers, to the extent that 15% - 20% of commercially-produced hydrogen is lost to leakage.
And you REALLY don’t want to have any kind of spark near one of those leaks...
There’s a big brackish water desalination plant in el paso. the largest such plant in the USA.
Its a shame they’re not a part of the texas grid. they could get electricity at prices that would chop their desalination costs by a third and make fresh water cheap enough for high end agriculture.
There’s an ocean of brackish water under the west texas scrub. Brackish means the water is slightly salty. Its much cheaper to desalinate than sea water because the salt content of sea water is 4-8 times saltier.
Traditionally windmills were used to pump up water from wells—except where the water is brackish.
All they need to do is harness the night time production of windmills— when electricity prices are dirt cheap— to pump up and desalinate water out in west texas—and suddenly they have fresh water that’s cheap enough to water high end crops growing on land that’s dirt cheap.,..,
There is one large brackish water desalination plant in El Paso but its not currently on the Texas Grid.
Or just meet the demands of a growing state.
Yes, that’s a good idea. And unlike electricity, water is easy to store.
That sounds like a wonderful idea. Or they can use it to produce Hydrogen to power fuel cells.
If you have a regular business which generates profits, and have some wind-power on your property, those tax credits can be useful.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.