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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (36684)	12/16/2012 12:58:53 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

wait until he have 100,000s of old rusty windmills

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (36684)	12/16/2012 1:30:48 PM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Respond to of 86356

Get Ready, Utilities: Solar Is Coming By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 16, 2012 at 8:21 am by John Farrell, via Renewable Energy World Quick question. Your state has good sunshine, lots of open rooftops, and the cost of solar energy has been falling by 10% per year. Do you think it will take 13 years to double the 10 megawatts (MW) of installed solar power? Yes, if you’re the largest corporate utility in my state, and willfully ignoring the economic trend. But ‘no’ if you make decisions based on data, because the price of unsubsidized solar electricity will undercut most utility retail electricity prices within a decade, enabling 200 times more solar (4,400 MW) than found in this utility’s plans. That’s just one utility’s wake up call in a new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), Commercial Rooftop Revolution, and it’s far from the only one. By 2016, over 100,000 MW of unsubsidized rooftop solar will able to match grid electricity on price. Within 10 years, it will be 300,000 MW, enough to provide 10% of the nation’s electricity. This affordable solar future presents a stark challenge to traditional utility planning and a clarion call for better electricity policy. Some utilities have responded by clinging to the 20th century paradigm of centralized control. Virginia’s Dominion Power, for example, expressed satisfaction at a recent conference at introducing standby charges on solar producers, ostensibly to help them recover the cost of “backing up” solar power. On the other hand, many utilities and state regulatory commissions are finding the value in solar and realizing that perceived barriers aren’t as large as they had feared. Austin Energy, a Texas municipal utility, now pays a non-subsidy premium for solar because it helps them offset expensive peak power purchases. In Hawaii, utilities who two years ago argued that the distribution grid was at its limit have been managing to accommodate thousands more solar projects on their grid systems. Regardless of their predisposition toward solar power, utilities, regulators, and policy makers need to recognize that there’s a revolution in electricity systems coming soon. Solar will become so affordable in the next 5-10 years that as many as 38 million homes and businesses will elect to produce their own power more cheaply from unsubsidized solar rather than buy it from their utility. That means policies that limit distributed generation will have to change: net metering limits must rise, permitting must be simplified, archaic “15% rules” will have to be driven by data not speculation. Ultimately, as one Hawaii public utility commissioner has said, the paradigm for the electricity system will flip. Utilities will need to transition from being inflexible to being flexible. They’ll switch from primarily running slow-response coal and nuclear power plants to finding the right mix of flexible natural gas or energy storage systems that can partner with low-cost wind and solar and advanced demand response to supply reliable electricity. The forthcoming revolution in solar power promises more change in the next 10 years than utilities have faced in the last 100. And they had best get ready. thinkprogress.org

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (36684)	12/16/2012 6:55:45 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Respond to of 86356

Finally a post from you I can agree with. If somebody wants to build a wind farm and farmers are happy to have them on their farms, it's nobody else's business, though neighbouring farmers might moan that it cuts down the air flow to their farm in which case the old tragedy of the commons problems arise, but that seems not to be an issue. If anything, neighbouring farmers like to have the wind speed reduction and more wind farms on surrounding properties. With swarms of blades, it might keep the bird population down too, protecting the crops. Probably the sort of birds that get killed are not the sort that eat crops though. They might even be the birds of prey which keep the low-flying crop eater populations low. If in decades to come, the wind farms become uneconomic, the spare parts would probably be worth salvaging and if not, the machinery would be the farmer's problem. The farmers should demand sufficient payment to allow for decommissioning costs in the event of the business defaulting on decommissioning. Or they could demand a bond be paid to a third party bondholder to guarantee decommissioning. Mqurice