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I worked in the power business 1973 to 2000 and I was utterly appalled at how fast utility executives and directors caved in to the extreme greeniacs. There was hardly any defense of the industry during the non-stop assault on the industry. That politicization drove me out of that industry. It’s gotten much, much worse since I left.

They appeased the crocodiles hoping to be eaten last. Well, here we are at the and all that appeasement didn’t count for diddly squat. The last of the conventional utilities are being eaten.

Between 1999 and 2008 I created a research onboard continuous monitoring system for coal cars that ran between the Powder River Basin (WY) and the Miller Steam Plant in Alabama. The reason for the monitoring was to detect wear patterns on the cars and allow owners to schedule maintenance in their own shops instead of paying high rates for emergency repairs by outside suppliers. The monitoring system had a bearing generator made by Timken for power and tachometer pulses to read speed. Each bearing had an accelerometer rated to 100 KHz @ +/- 80g made by Wilcoxon Research. Each bearing had a thermal sensor. A tri-axial accelerometer was placed under each bolster to monitor ride quality. A brake piston position indicator provider ability to detect if the brakes were set or not. A GPS provided time , position and doppler speed. A 1XRTT modem from Kyocera provided data network connectivity back to my server in Falls Church, VA. An 802.11b WiFi device running an OLSR mesh network provided full connectivity for all cars back to a monitor in the locomotive. Later versions included actuator control for the handbrake, angle-cock valves and coupler cut levers. I published a few papers with ASME-IEEE and one at the 10th International CAN Conference detailing the system.

January 20th, 2009 around 4 PM I received notification that sponsorship and funding of the project via the Federal Railroad Administration had been cut. Obama had been inaugurated and this was the first casualty. I had to notify 46 vendors. Over $1 million in equipment was abandoned in the field. Not a penny was offered to recover the project hardware. Some of it remains in my basement to this day. Within a year of this cut, my colleague died from melanoma that had invaded his spine. It was a sad demise of a very successful effort for rail safety for the FRA.

I am currently in the energy industry I just looked Texas RRCOT grid right now is 62% of total demand powered by wind, solar , nuclear in those orders of percent delivered on a 15 second refresh. Coal is 9% , natural gas is 29% as of 30 seconds ago.

Last night at 0025 wind peaked out at 25,200 megawatts and 55% dwarfing everything else, natural gas was 27% , nuclear 8% and coal 9%.

Wind hit it’s lull at 0924 this morning with 16800 megawatts at 34% and NG at 31%. This was not due to a fall off of wind power available because solar ramped up to it plateau at that very instant gaining 3000 megawatt in under 30 minutes you can watch the wind power drop by a one for one megawatt amount that’s curtailment. there was too much wind as solar ramped up and solar has priority over wind power on the grid. Gas was not curtailed because solar and wind share high voltage lines from West Texas it’s a line capacity issue not availability of resources.

Point is Texas is and has been a wind dominated grid for a while now. Texas is the number one wind producer in the nation and had the largest installed capacity anywhere fora single entity. Every megawatt of wind on the grid is 18 million BTU of natural gas that gets saved for another day in the future since wind and gas are fundamentally linked for now. Texas also has 5800 megawatts of power storage online committed this month that number grows nearly every month now. You can watch the power storage curves this morning 1500 megawatts was being added to the grid right before the sun came up that’s equal one of the four nuclear reactors on the grid, once the sun came up you can see the power storage curves go negative as ERCOT was shunting over a gigawatt from solar back to the energy storage systems. Tesla is making megapacks with shipping container sized modules on the regular now.

On a local note it’s storming pretty good right now mosty overcast but my panels are still making 2500 watts in the storms they have yet to go to zero even in 15 inch per hour rain fall rates. We just had 1.3 inch hail as well I picked up a couple of chunks off the back deck not worried the panels have a hail rating well above 2” hail. Last big hail storms we had the only undamaged part of the roof was under the panels how’s that for irony. Thin film cells just flex with the hail there is no hard glass layers to break it’s thin film of flexible gorilla glass like a cell phone screen protector but much stronger.