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Aug 27
Love98

Electricity’s Decoupling From Fuel Costs

By Energy Rant No Comments
Two years after natural gas prices spiked, resulting in a jump in coal consumption for electricity (see Figure 1), natural gas prices have plunged to inflation-adjusted record lows. The Wall Street Journal reports drillers and producers are curtailing activity as storage bulges at the seams. Figure 1 United States Electricity Production by Source (eGRID) Figure 2 Natural Gas Futures Prices Price suppression is partly due to the recent mild winter and summer, which produced only a few early heat waves to stress the Southwest and West Coast grids. Electricity Prices Decoupling from Fuel Cost Electricity prices are rising because, as…
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May 21
Love82

Full Spectrum Virtual Power Plants

By Energy Rant No Comments
A couple timely articles and posts have dropped since I reintroduced virtual power plants (VPPs) last week. First, I'll share a LinkedIn post from Matt Golden, CEO of Recurve. He wrote:  "VPPs being defined as dispatchable loads only, is just plain wrong. Just like the grid is supplied primarily by load following and base load power plants, with a small but important amount of peak dispatchable emergency power, VPPs are a combination of long-term load modification and dispatch.  The vast majority of the potential to shape load with virtual power plants comes from things like heat pumps that provide better air conditioning and attic insulation…
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May 14
Love80

Virtual Power Plants Order in Load Management

By Energy Rant No Comments
Virtual power plants (VPPs) represent a considerable slice of the clean energy race these days, and for a good reason: policy continues to favor intermittent renewable energy supply over baseload nuclear and dispatchable natural gas assets. Load needs to follow supply. Theoretically, we would need a lot of load flexibility for many hours and sometimes days to keep the grid energized with, mmm, 50% renewable energy. As of 2021, the renewables slice of the supply pie was around 13%, so there is a long way to go.  The DOE's Virtual Power Plants Commercial Liftoff report declares the United States needs 80-160 GW…
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Mar 28
Love21
illustration of the earth asking for help

Are You Serious About the Climate Apocalypse?

By Energy Rant, Featured Energy Rant No Comments
Washington Post headline last week: “World is on brink of catastrophic warming, U.N. climate change report says.” Wolf! Wolf! People aren’t serious about decarb, and this post will prove it, but I provide ways to get it done. Is Solar Plus Storage Competitive? Solar is nice, but the numbers are ugly. If solar and storage with batteries were a serious contender for a clean energy grid, electric utilities would be soiling themselves because solar and batteries would put them out of business as customers would install their own and cut the cord. Let’s look at some basic arithmetic. Lazard pegs…
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May 03
Love2

Weaponized Energy by Xi and Putin

By Energy Rant No Comments
This week I’m going to my news stack, starting with an interesting article from Zerohedge - How Far are We from Phasing out Coal. Answer: a long way and getting longer. CCP’s Exploding Coal Fleet Coal-fired power generation jumped 9% in 2021, to an all-time high. That increase is the biggest leap since I was in Ha Skewl and the DeLorean was hot. How is coal consumption growing worldwide today? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They continue to build and fire huge coal plants with zero reservation (or pollution control). The difference between governors and the governed in the U.S.…
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All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

All things energy. That’s our jam.

We talk a lot about energy – from the serious to the satirical.

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