Re: California spot energy price: $99 MWhr

On Apr 11, 12:39 pm, "bill" <ford_prefec...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 11, 2:32 pm, dave.walt...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:





On Apr 11, 11:22 am, "bill" <ford_prefec...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 11, 1:10 pm, dave.walt...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Apr 8, 4:57 pm, bradg...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Mar 30, 8:39 am, dave.walt...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Rightnow, the price for power is slightly more than $99/MWhr. Yes, the
entire state load in California is only 27,000 MWs. Hmm....I sense
some price manipulation. AT this price, ALL forms of energy are trying
to come on line and provide power to the grid (solar is not, as the
sun is too low in the sky right now).

David

What's wrong with $100/gallon of petrol/diesel, and with having to pay
$1/kwhr upon average (with california paying at least twice the
national average).

After all, I'm almost certain that other forms of alternative energy
will not be jacking up their prices to suit.
-
BradGuth

First, this was the price...and it's not hourly either, it is in 15min
increments. Look at the week I mentioned. The CAL ISO site it cited
has it running as a ticker along the bottom of the page. That point
about Califorinians paying twice the national price IS the point...and
the way the bidding system still works is that almost free geothermal,
cheap nuclear, more expensive NG and alternative power all get the
SAME price, the highest price, not what they bid the price for...it's
a "Dutch auction" and that's never been changed. So, expensive GT's vs
even more expensive wind and solar (I don't think there is actually
any commercial solar in California yet) don't really compete with the
cheaper hydro, geothermal (we have quite a lot of that) and nuclear
all get the same plus $33/MWhr price...or the $99/MWhr price when it
goes that high.

David

Which all strikes me as being exactly as it should be. your KWH
is not better than bob's kwh. however, it does rather beg the qestion
of why there aren't electricity resellers who buy electricity to fill
their reservoirs at the low rates and simply resell at the higher
rates. seems like that would go a ways toward smoothing out the
prices and be quite profitable besides!

If by 'reservoirs' you mean hydro...only 1% of hydroelectric
generators are equipped to reverse polarity on the gens to turn them
into pump storage devices. In California and the West Coast, all hydro
is based on the seasonal snow melt and precipitation. it would be a
huge capital expense to turn the water turbine/generators into pump
storage devices. Worth investigating, though.

David

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of holding lakes
designed and built specifically for the purpose. a 40 million gallon
holding lake (quite small in lake terms) with 30 feet of head
represents 10 mwh of energy storage, at a difference of say $40
between daily buy and sell price, that means $400/day in income from
the round trip (call it $300 after inefficiencies)
the investment will be approximately $100k to construct the lake
and another 200k for the reversible turbine w/ generator (recta-
numerical extraction proceedure here, corrections welcome), which
would give a 3 year economic payback on a small, suboptimal
installation!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

bill, I've been thinking that you are 100+% right as rain.

Earth as it stands needs roughly twice the energy, and this energy
also needs to become much cleaner and at not half the current end-user
cost. If we give government and local states any say, as such we'll
be lucky to end up with half of what we currently have, and it'll be
costing twice again as much.

Once we've established the mostly private owned cache of spare/surplus
energy to burn (sort of speak); Back-Flooding a Reservoir = Green
Energy in a lake.

California spot energy price: $99 MWhr
(often means the combined efforts of ENRON and the local utility will
be jacking off twice that energy cost for their end-users)
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.energy/browse_frm/thread/14277d1ffa700718/1022b26b4c8df322?lnk=st&q=guth+brad&rnum=3&hl=en#1022b26b4c8df322
"a 40 million gallon holding lake (quite small in lake terms) with 30
feet of head represents 10 mwh of energy storage"

Reverse polarity hydroelectrics; Sounds almost good enough to eat,
and if possible going for holding 100 fold more volume at a greater
head pressure of at least 100 meters should be done at all cost.
Obviously many of our existing dams could be retrofitted for best
accomplishing this method, so that each peak draw-down at least starts
off with as much head pressure as possible.

Hydroelectric is after all 100% renewable to begin with (often
receiving more of nature's water than we can possibly know what to do
with), and I do believe that we could always use another crater lake
or two. Actually, a good nuclear bomb might be an efficient
alternative for creating that deep lake basin in the first place (I'm
sure ELF or GreenPeace will not terribly mind, especially once they're
all rounded up and sent to Iraq for guarding Exxon's share of Muslim
oil).

We might even obtain that artificial lake indirectly, and at a good
enough elevation in the process of our having to excavate our
relatively piss poor dregs of yellowcake, that'll soon enough become
worth $1000/kg.

So, instead of making the nifty likes of LH2 or the do-everything
better alternative of H2O2,t either of which would by itself represent
a considerable win-win for all of us (including all sorts of improved
fossil fuel burning aspects), as easily derived from any such surplus
of wind/solar/stirling derived energy that's capably worthy of
delivering 40 kw/m2, as can be safely taken as is from such energy
tower footprints, whereas instead we can merely utilize that spare and
clean energy for getting as much reservoir water as possible back up
into those energy storage lakes of fresh water, that's also a good
enough cash of water for a number of other uses besides generating
such clean peak energy on demand from each of these hydrostatic cells.

Some of the coastal or island located hydrostatic cells could even be
stocked with saltwater. Obviously we're not talking about all that
much efficiency here, just pondering the alternatives to otherwise
ignoring or otherwise wasting each and every other spare kwhr that
comes along.
-
Brad Guth

.

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