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“Utilities should select the most cost-effective energy mix to provide reliable and affordable service, without being constrained by government-imposed mandates that make it more expensive for their customers.”

Cost effective. It's an argument that can cut two ways.

In his classic "Lectures on Physics", Richard Feynman had this to say about a topic different from wind/solar, but which applies none the less.

"If you start a [classical] argument in a certain place and don't go far enough, you can get any answer you want."

The argument in question here is the marginal costs of an infinitesimal addition of wind/solar generation, without regard to the system costs that finite additions of wind/solar impose on the grid as a whole -- inefficient use of fuels ramping thermal plants, maintaining a spinning reserve, additional transmission costs, over building of wind/solar plants, and the as yet not clearly understood amount of battery storage. We can forget about pumped hydro because the resources for necessary amounts of pumped hydro simply do not exist.

That stacked resource diagram from TEP is in all IRPs and drives me utterly crazy. Is the amount of wind/solar displayed a nameplate rating or some seasonal average or what? The storage component has different units than the other categories, so time duration has snuck into this graph without so much as a peep from the utility or PSC (ACC in this case). The graph is fundamentally misleading because the utilities really don't have much clue about storage needs in a weather dependent system.

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Exactly right. Utilities can be crafty with what they present as "cost-effective" in IRPs, only to request rate increases in the following years due to the "cost-effective" investments they made.

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Almost comical if not for wasted resources and ratepayer money.

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The IRPs are garbage. Would make for a good article to dispel the drivel the utilities and their consultants produce.

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Totally agree! We’ll need to dig deep for that one or make it a series!

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It could make for an excellent series. However, the IRPs are typically many hundreds of pages long with 500-1000 pages of supporting appendices. Lots of work involved. I have read only a few of our local ones; Rocky Mountain Power, PacifiCorp, Idaho Power -- very similar to one another. They are full of inconsistencies, downright engineering errors, and magical thinking. Luckily they are more political documents than they are roadmaps for our future. At least for now. They all show troubles ahead.

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That is the barrier to entry. Lots of time invested and then you have to make it interesting for the general audience.

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As an electrical engineer, I think the most maddening part of renewable energy additions is advertising their nameplate ratings as what the system will actually see. A 1MW solar farm will not actually have a capacity factor of 100% over its lifetime and does not have the ability to ramp up or down. And when the sun goes down, that 1MW becomes 0MW, every single day without fail.

Adding wind into it is more maddening because wind is so unpredictable and when weather reaches the extremes wind usually disappears or is ineffective. So a wind farm with a 5MW nameplate will never reach that 100% capacity factor ever.

As for natural gas and nuclear, they can easily operate on the upper end of their capacity factor at virtually any time. This is referred to as “baseload” generation, which has to be spoon-fed to the public to understand.

Thank you for all you do and keep up the good fight.

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Exactly right. Nameplate capacity is only useful for intermittent sources in terms of showing how inefficient they are.

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Mar 25
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Organic farming is dumb and produces less food per acre. Only stupid affluent people who have no idea what’s good for the plant buy into the scammy marketing.

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Mar 25
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My cousin works for one of the largest vegetable growers in the United States. Their organic fields far underperform their conventional ones so I know what I’m talking about.

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Germany now imports Louisiana natural gas because it is “organic”. ;)

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As I’m sure you’re aware, Leah Stokes recent book depended heavily on how the evil Arizona utility was fighting renewables.

This situation may be the start of a battle royal. I hope Palo Verde wins.

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Was that her book short circuiting policy? I downloaded it but haven’t read it yet.

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Yes. That’s the book.

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At the very least, it is an encouraging start on the road back to sanity

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Arizona’s action is a threat to the Green power oligarchy and to the environmental left in general. Don’t expect them to accept this defeat gracefully, lest others learn from Arizona’s example. I would expect action at the Federal level to reverse this. You might think Republican control of the House would prevent this but the Left now rules largely through the regulatory agencies. Congress is irrelevant.

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I've been thinking about this. We decided to hitch the ship of state to these regulatory horses and now we're seeing how undemocratic it can get.

It's time to put a bridle on. The next Republican president should create an oversight agency directly accountable to congress. This agency will be given the authority to overturn decisions and processes of other agencies based on a reasonable cost benefit analysis. They could freeze their authority if they can't meet the criteria. "Hello EPA? NEPA is cancelled. And you are suspended from making rules affecting reliable electricity sources"

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Excellent news! Well done analysis.

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Thanks Pengu!

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Arizona gets about 35% of its electricity from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the most powerful in the nation at 3.9 GWe, and the only one in a desert -- and it occupies 4,000 acres, not 4,000 square miles. It's cooled by reclaimed waste water. Its wholesale price is 3.79 ¢/kWh, among the lowest in the nation, right down there with the Washington Nuclear Generating Station on the Columbia River, Diablo Canyon on California's central coast, and fully amortized plants in the northeast that, in their infinite wisdom, some states are closing. But nuclear is the most expensive way to make electricity, and solar and wind are the least expensive, right? Isn't that why the utilities want rate increases and subsidies? And in the entire civilized world, nuclear power is safer than Teddy Kennedy's car, but that's another story for another day.

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No lies detected

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If the Public Utilities Commission denied the rate increases, forcing solar and wind to stand on their own two feet, and insisted that solar and wind scammers pay for their own transmission to get electricity from behind the back of nowhere to the places it's actually needed instead of foisting this onto the system operator, APS and TEP would probably start singing a different tune.

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Exactly

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Let the litigation begin

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The Boys are back in town.

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Let's have another nuclear plant instead of expensive unreliables.

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Quoting battery capacity in megawatts instead of megawatt hours is deceptive. 400 megawatts for how long? Ten minutes? That's worthless. My calculations, using real data from California, USA as a whole, Texas, EU as a whole, Denmark, and Germany, show that storage of 1,000 to 1,500 watt hours per watt of average demand is necessary to provide firm power, depending on your location. Assuming Tesla prices and lifetime, free installation, 100% charge-discharge efficiency, that batteries can hold 100% charge for six months, and that full discharge won't destroy them, the cost is only three times total USA GDP. Not once, but every year, forever. Adding in the other costs, the price might be thirty times total USA GDP -- every year, forever. Read http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Worse.html. Even better, read my new book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?"

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One burning question I have is-at the glutinous rate we consume fossil fuel-how many years, decades, millennia do we have left? OK two questions. Can wind and solar alone, ever meet the requirements of constructing and maintaining wind and solar?

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Last I looked we had 500 years of coal reserves in the U.S. and 200 years for gas. But the thing with hydrocarbons is the more we find the more we find.

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Well ole Otto was wrong, all of us make mistakes, only a fool repeats them. Otto did exactly that. Either way the point is made. Good article

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That’s true! Thanks, Richard!

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"there is an energy hierarchy of needs where reliability must come first, affordability must come second, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions must come third."

Amazing how many folks have it - literally - completely backwards.

Nice post, Mitch & Isaac.

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Thank you!

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Do it!

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