Posted on 05/19/2022 7:38:57 AM PDT by Churchjack
“We have idiot government FORCING us to turn out food crops in to inefficient fuel.”
Ann Coulter remarked a couple of years ago that in the future, our descendants will wonder why we were burning our food for transportation.
Here are the actual numbers should anyone want to look at them.
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/crude.php
Oil production is up from last year, exports are up, and refinery capacity is down by over a million bbl per day <<<< This is the reason for the high prices right now there is not enough refinery capacity. Those refinery that were shut down during 2020 are not coming back if ever there has been a structural change in the petrochemical industry. This coupled with the fact that diesel and petrol are fungible world wide with the Europeans willing to pay $2.5+ per liter or nearly 9 USD per gallon means that the few dollars per bbl in transport costs from the USA to Europe means massive profits for those shipping diesel and petrol to Europe.
Since the refinery industry knows they have the world by the short hairs they are cashing in big time.
You actually can turn wind or solar or better yet nuclear power into ammonia which is the best nitrogen fertilizer around used by the billions of tonnes per year straight into the soil has anhydrous ammonia. The hydrogen source for the Haber reaction is the only thing different than using natural gas via steam methane reforming vs electrolysis or thermal hydrogen chemical cycles.
Here check out some peer reviewed science.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b03159
In texas at night wind power can be had at one cent per kWh sometimes even negative where ERCOT will pay an industry to use power rather than curtail it and risk frequency disruption in the grid.
Offshore wind has enormous amounts that blow 24/7/365 ever been offshore in the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles from shore on a rig? I have it’s howling wind all day all night, same for the North Sea and off the East Coast in the Cape Cod area it’s always windy.
Look at the USA pdf this is just offshore we are the Saudi Arabia of wind power. 5,100,000 megawatts worth that’s averaged outputs or the equivalent to 5100 typical sized nuclear reactors. Onshore wind potential is twice that amount. I have access to real time commercial level data from ERCOT in the night times Texas goes 100% wind power in the regular now. West Texas is freakishly windy anyone who has ever lived and worked out there will tell you it roars non-stop in West Texas
The issue has never been about the size of the resource it always has been how to move and store it in usable form to be dispatchable. Adding in onshore wind on a Continental sized scale there is always wind somewhere all the GIS data shows that if the three American grids were interconnected with superconducting HVDC links 85 to 90% of the grid would be wind at night and solar during the day with a 99% reliability factor due to the continent sized collection area it’s always windy somewhere and clouds don’t cover all the deserts or great Plains at once. The USA usually has at least two low pressure or high pressure frontal systems across its land mass on a daily basis that move from west to east those fronts drive winds along their boundaries and sheep clouds with the frontal zones. Google scholar USA super grid GIS energy diversity tons of ESRI GIS data to be had.
https://esmap.org/esmap_offshorewind_techpotential_analysis_maps
https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/321
Norway plans to do just this.
Locally MN is planning on it as well they love corn and corn sucks up ammonia like a frat boy does natty light.
Where in the USA do you live? I have a 15kw/60kWh main house system and a 10kw/30kWh guest house system and both export power every month. I am in sunny North Texas my system is making 25kw right now and my homes are only using 5kw and 3kw as I type this with 2 of 4 AC units running I have dual zone climates and Mitsubishi split units for individual rooms like my man cave cigar lounge so keep that air from inside the house and the master bedroom has a Mitsubishi so I can chill it to 65 at night and not freeze out the guests or pets. We get 220 days if full sun at my location and daylight today will be 13 hours 57 minutes. I have trackers on my 15kw panels they make full rated power from 15 min after sun clears the southern horizon till.15 before it sets to the West all the trees have been cleared. The smaller 10kw is on poles that get adjusted once a month in pitch and azimuth they make 90+% of there rated power in the mid morning and late afternoon and 100% in the heart of the day. In the last five years I have exported power every month net the battery packs are new im demoing them for a associate who owns a solar instal biz so far they have been able to take me off the grid any day I chose too. Mostly I use them to buy cheap power at night at wholesale off peak rates and then in two hours from now at peak times I’ll dump all my.solar plus max out the discharge from the packs into the ERCOT pool for 50 plus cents per kWh $$$$$ to be had. It makes economic sense for me to just buy one cent per kWh at night and fill the banks up then right now all my solar excess is being grid feed out.
My power utility would charge a monthly "solar fee" if I put power onto the grid. The fee is $5.41 per kW of the inverter rating. My inverter is 12kW, I'm in the process of doubling it to 24kW. So if I put power onto the grid after the upgrade I'd have to pay 24 X $5.41 = $129.84. That's how much I'd have to pay the power company for the privilege of them paying me very little for the power I sell to them. That's on top of the $15.86 I and every other power user pays every month before we draw power. In solar user lingo, my state doesn't do net metering. I've read that some states that used to do net metering are now changing it to charging the "solar fee" Alabama does. Of the states that are changing to not doing net metering, some of those grandfather in older solar users who set up during net metering (maybe you won't be charged the solar fee if Texas starts charging it).
I have a two-story, all-electric house totaling 2,300 square feet of livable space (read: A/C and heat). Plus we have a hot tub. LOL It's sunny now and my batteries are fully charged. My house is currently drawing 2.6kW, which is all my solar panels are showing bringing in (because if my inverter/charge controller let more power come in from solar there'd be nowhere for the power to go with the batteries fully charged).
In the past 365 days I've averaged 3.337 hours each day in which my batteries were fully charged. This average is across all 4 seasons, including winter. If it wasn't for the solar fee I too would be a net exporter even without the system upgrade I'm in the middle of doing.
I don't have mini split A/C. But I do have a variable speed heat pump, as well as a hybrid water heater. Too much of my house is built in ground in a hill for the condensate drain of mini splits.
Also, my power utility does have optional peak hours rates which I could take advantage of if I wanted to. But again, if I signed up for that I'd have to pay a large monthly fee that's not worth the savings. LOL So, instead of having time of day rates, I'm charged a steady rate no matter time of day -- no incentive at all for me to draw power at certain parts of the day so I don't have to draw power at other times of day. The only incentive I have is to reduce the amount of power I draw from the grid overall. The only situations I pull power from the grid is if my batteries are 30% or below SOC, or if I'm consuming more power than my inverter can produce (currently 9kW continuous power, but I'm about to double that). That happens when many appliances are on simultaneously (i.e. if the clothes dryer is on high while the oven is pre-heating while the wife and I are in the hot tub while the A/C is on high because we had the doors open a lot bringing in a lot of groceries...) my inverter might have to draw 1 or 2 kW from the grid even if it's bright and sunny and my batteries are fully charged). That 9kW inverter limitation is one reason I'm upgrading as part of getting an EV.
I do go many days in a row without pulling power at all from the grid, especially this time of year when the weather is rather mild and most of when my A/C is on high (variable speed heat pump kicks in higher gear) it's liable to be during peak solar hours. In fact, the last time I pulled form the grid was Monday morning at 7 AM (bad weather over the weekend kept my batteries from being fully charged heading into Sunday night). That was over a 12 hour period from 7 PM Sunday to 7 AM Monday in which I had to pull power from the grid. The time before that I had to pull from the grid was 7:30 AM May 11 (Wednesday). Since my last meter reading on April 22, I've pulled from the grid only 9.7% of all the power I consumed.
But that changes bigly in the winter. On my January bill I pulled 68% of the power needed. Here in Alabama during winter we can go a week or two of nothing but drizzle rain. We joke that it rains only a few times per year in the winter ... because each rain can take a week. Plus, with my now all-electric house, heating in the winter means heating at night, which means needing lots of battery storage to make it through the night without pulling from the grid. If I wasn't getting an EV it wouldn't be worth upgrading my battery storage just for a few months out of the year.
Learning about solar bookmark. Thanks for the explanation and insight.
Wait till gasoline hits ten bucks a gallon!
Thank Biden and his stooge utopian staff for it because it’s a plan that can’t work it never has.
Their motto worse is better until we get our way.
You actually can turn wind or solar or better yet nuclear power into ammonia which is the best nitrogen fertilizer around used by the billions of tonnes per year straight into the soil has anhydrous ammonia. The hydrogen source for the Haber reaction is the only thing different than using natural gas via steam methane reforming vs electrolysis or thermal hydrogen chemical cycles.
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How much fossil fuel is required
to produce the materials and manufactor the panels, windmills and batteries
and run the many factories and processing plants to produce fertalizer
and to maintain them,,
and to transport those products ?
Aka
Show us how it is cost effective this new grean deal power and fertalizer is.
.
Making it fail so the government can take it over.
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