About two weeks ago, New England got a punch in the mouth from old man winter. I tuned into the Mt. Washington Observatory (New Hampshire) to check the conditions. On Friday evening, February 3, it was cool and breezy at minus 46°F with 99 mph wind and freezing fog. I dig that. Today’s post continues last week’s discussion on wholesale electricity markets, including capacity and energy-only markets. Summary of that post: Wholesale markets are headed for trouble because Electricity cannot and will not be stored in bulk quantities Society cannot function without electricity Grid loads are getting spikier, and that…
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Last week I described how net zero sounds grand, it’s easy to do, but it doesn’t work to support the transition to a clean-energy grid. The reason is that everyone, whether utilities or customers, overproduces simultaneously, and then later, customers all need energy from thermal power plants simultaneously. We have an exploding deficit of customers to take that overproduction and shift load or store it for use when intermittent renewable supplies shut down. In Renewables at Scale, I described how renewable supply and batteries would never be sufficient. The gaps in intermittent renewable supply are too big for batteries to…
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In this week's Energy Rant, we're covering part three of good, perfect, and real carbon targets.In Part I of this series, we examined how various storage technologies work, their pluses, and minuses. In Part II, we put numbers to generation and storage technologies, including maximum power, duration of discharge (for storage), cost per megawatt and megawatt-hour to build and operate, and a slew of other great stuff. In Part III, we will size up the numbers from Part II to actual grid demand. The objective is to provide scale to see what we would need to pair high percentages of…
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Everyone has applied for health insurance, and many of you have applied for life insurance. Anyone over, oh, 40, 50, or for sure 60, knows health flaws start to accumulate like the dumpster’s worth of unwelcome gifts, used shoes, and outdated clothes for those of you who stay current with the style trends of the day.Come to think of it, all you digital natives, back in the day before weddingregistry.com (where you shop and make other people fill your house with stuff you want), we just took whatever the aunts, uncles, or more especially, great aunts and uncles, decided to…
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