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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (134632)	3/16/2001 10:26:37 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1579790

" My understanding is that the problem is more one of not being able to afford to buy the energy on the spot market rather than a real shortage." I am not in that part of the country so what I have heard may not be correct. But it is my understanding that California is over-reliant on gas-fired plants for a number of reason. Since the rates to the consumer are regulated, and the price of natural gas has made the production of electricity pretty marginal, owners have "dicovered" that they need to bring the plant down for maintenance at higher than normal rate. Since like Texas, everything past the Sierras are on a separate grid, the spot market is local only, they cannot tap into whatever excess power that can be generated across the whole country. So the price on the spot market has skyrocketed. So the heart of the problem is that California, Oregon and Washington state cannot tap into the resources of the whole country, they rely mainly on what is generated in their own area. Which is fine when supplies are normal, but when they are not... The downside of privatizing stuff like this is you have to live with calculations that bear these results. You cannot really blame a company that finds some way to avoid selling a product below their cost. "What CA has a lot of are wind farms in the desert that generate power" This apparently done on a larger scale than I was aware of. Still, wind is a fairly low-density source and can only be tapped in fairly unique areas. Solar is similar except that the areas it can be tapped are larger. It is also something that is so close to being really practical that this whole crisis in the West could push it over the edge. Those places where wind power can be reasonably exploited it should be. I am more dubious about hydro, be it via reservoirs or tidal because of the ecological and geological consequences. Solar seems ideal, except for the costs.