More commentary... Richard said: CA. is a leader of sorts into alternate energy, having decent wind, geothermal, hydro and solar opportunities, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to nuclear and fossil. A fairly interesting summary is presented in the current issue of Infinite energy. Supposedly a lot of their wind capacity is old and due for retirement or replacement too.
Indeed.. for a variety of reasons, (very cheap regulated power being one) there wasn't much incentive to develop alternate forms of power production. When you can buy at $0.02/kWh, making a plant that produces at $0.10/kWh isn't very attractive. As a result, almost everything is in the nature of "pilot projects" or "technology demonstrators", and has had no opportunity to achieve any of the learning curve cost reduction. Probably the best thing to come out of the recent events is that it provides a gambler's incentive to try some new technologies. At $2.00/kWh on the spot market, clunky old solar cell technology at $5000/kW installed cost starts to look pretty attractive.
Richard: The idea of conserving energy is a rather silly idea with mega quantities of new qizmos, widgets, and electrically powered status symbols flooding the market daily. Those who conserve generally just conserve it so the rich or power hungry inductries can gobble it up and happily pay for the new energy they receive. They gleefully pass any increases in their bills back along down the line to the struggling conservators.
Interestingly, over the past decades, most factories and industrial electrical users in California have made significant improvements in efficiency, for plain old economic reasons. The two biggest improvements: better electric motors and controllers (you don't see many resistive speed controllers any more...), and much more efficient lighting (HID dominates in large area lighting, replacing the old rows of fluorescents. CFDs replace incandescents). Sure, if you are using electricity for heating (arc furnace, induction heating) you're sort of stuck, but much of industrial power consumption is to run <10 HP electric motors and lights, and in that area, huge gains (in a MWh/yr sense) have been made. There is more industry in California now than, say, 20 years ago, but the electrical consumption is less.
The situation in residential market (which is much slower to change) is more grim. My brand new tract house (2 yrs old) had to meet Title 24 energy conservation standards, but the builders game the system a bit. They have to install energy efficient lighting in the kitchen and bathroom (which they do with fluorescents), but then, they install a whole raft of 75 watt incandescent floods as "accent lighting" which is exempt. Guess which one gets turned on?
In my house there are 18 (at least) of these flood fixtures. If they operate 2 hrs a day (on average) and are populated with 65 W halogen flood bulbs, that's 2.3 kWh/day, about 7% of my average consumption. At today's prices ($0.15/kWh), that's about $120/yr. If the builder were to have installed Compact Fluorescent (and yes, they are available with comparable brightness and color rendition), it would have added $270 to the cost of the house (about $15 for screw in type CFD...). Out of the hundreds of thousands you spend on a house, this is a trivial amount. Add to that the reduced maintenance cost (5-7 times the life for CFD. Replacement cost $10, incandescents are $3), and it seems a good idea. Do they offer it even as an option? NO.....(and I asked.., even as a special order) This one change would reduce my consumption about 5%, a signficant amount, when generating margins are thin (whether just due to lack of capacity, or being priced out of the market).
So... conservation has lots of room left to go.
By the way, the 40% rate increase isn't exactly that... That's increasing the cost of the "raw power", which constitutes about 3 cents per kWh on my current bill. The other 12 cents is distribution, billing, etc. costs, which remain the same. So a 40% power cost increase (to 4.2 cents) only jacks my rate from 15 cents to 16.2 cents, or about 8%. And, on most consumers, the impact will be even less, since the full rate increase doesn't apply until you get up to 3 times baseline usage.
If you are a commercial consumer who is paying regulated commercial rates, and for which the power cost is a larger fraction of your bill, it will have a larger effect. If you are a large consumer, you are already probably paying PX rates, and getting soaked at the spot price.
I have zero sympathy for the few hundred whiners who signed up for interruptible power (>> 1 MWh/month required to even qualify for the tariff, so there aren't all that many businesses in that league) in exchange for 20% rate reduction, and then complain that they get interrupted. The penalties if you don't interrupt when they ask are truly punitive, by the way, because the grid operators depend on you being being able to shed load as you promised, and when you don't it causes big troubles. This is as it should be. If you've got a critical load, then make a business decision and spend money on UPS or standby generators.
Personally, I think that the utilities (not the generators) should tell the generators to go "pound sand" when the spot price gets too high, and go ahead and black things out. It will make people pay attention.
Created on Thursday, March 29, 2001 11:43 AM EDT by James Lux