The Solar Energy Duck Curve Challenge

To supply peak demand using stored power is a challenge at large scale. Whoopty do. The video makes it sound like this is a huge hurdle. No. It’s not. It is a problem for utilities to make the investment because it drives up the price. Can you think of some way to store power in case you might need, say, a light when it’s dark out? Must you use open flame because, golly gee whiz, storing power is just too darn big a problem for us little brained folk to figure out and way too expensive to prepare for. The battery farm in Australia put up by Tesla (guaranteed to be up and running in 6 months or free) has already generated in comparable savings nearly its entire cost in the first year of operation (cost was 50 million and the savings 34 million). It’s also allowed a 5% across the board reduction in price to its customers whereas the utilities have had to raise theirs by 5% because of fuel, you see. Now do you see why utilities are dead set against renewables unless they can control them?

This is a price problem in that it brings about what the utilities know full well is death spiral for business as usual – higher costs mean fewer customers, which means higher costs, which means… you get the idea. Storage can be done in many ways (the Germans, for example, use water heaters in people’s homes, other countries pump water uphill when power is plentiful and produce hydro to meet peak demand) but paying for it by the utilities prices them out of the renewable market and they have to offer a much higher priced product compared to local renewables. The small communities and land owners in Michigan, for example, that own their own wind generating stations and sell to local customers 100% renewable energy are laughing at these utilities all the way to the bank because combining wind with solar is far, far cheaper and more stable than generating stable power by fossil fuels and nuclear. That’s why many big companies are relocating to where energy costs are not just low but getting lower forever and produces zero emissions. That’s why the utilities are running scared. They usefulness is coming to an end because it has been the public that has paid for the infrastructure we call the grid and then sold to private companies for some token amount. Renewables cuts out these middlemen utility companies.

LikeLiked by 1 person

Yeah, that’s an ugly situation about to get worse. The Feds can try to impose a ‘solution’ but I cannot see how it will work throughout BC where the local populations aren’t on board and both premiers and PM caught between rocks and hard places.

BTW, this is the 50th anniversary of Hansen’s seminal report to both the US Congress and UN about climate change caused by human activities – predated, we find out now, by internal reports by climate scientists working for Exxon and Mobil and Shell and BP warning of exactly this effect. For 50 years these companies have been fighting any switch away from business as usual (and continue to pay people to attend local meetings and complain about renewables with a Heartland Institute folder with talking points) so that people like the oil sands workers think their product is necessary for the health of the economy. We can see how earnest is the desire of these energy companies to adapt and profit from this inevitable switch… as close to zero as they can away with.These companies are going to die and no one should be sad about that but ashamed at how gullible we have been as a collective to allow them to do nothing but increase production and expand markets.

No one is reminding these same oil and gas advocates that Dion had a Green Plan they would not endorse, a plan that would have situated these same workers at the forefront of the global economy producing all the infrastructure and equipment for the sustainable renewables we know must come. We – meaning the voters not just of of Alberta and BC but throughout the heartland of Canada – decided in our collective wisdom to give that economic engine over to the Chinese and leave advancements in the hands of American entrepreneurs and their financial institutions. No one is mentioning that more people in the US and China are gainfully employed in solar and wind production than the combined workforce of the entire oil, gas, and coal industries. This is a boat we have decided to miss and so we squabble over diminishing returns who should continue to supply the ‘lucrative but planet killing’ oil and gas industry.

LikeLiked by 1 person