Posted on 12/01/2012 8:50:24 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Because it was never profitable without massive subsidies, and was never competitve with abundant coal, gas and oil?
Next question that has them stumped please.
Ping.
A bunch of liberal arts majors wouldn’t listen to us engineers.
Well, it turned out pretty much as we engineers predicted.
Science and math have a much better level of predictive skill than “hope” and “change.”
Sub=bituminous coal, from the Powder River Basin is trading at $10.35/ton, but the value of the coal is far less than the cost to transport the coal to a terminal, yet to be built, on the west coast.
Who do you think is going to pay the costs to build the terminal, improve the rail lines and pay the mitigation costs.
The answer is simple, you are, you and all the rest of the federal tax payers because the coal export terminal is just like Solyndra and the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon, a government crony capitalist project that costs tax payers way more than they can ever hope to get out of it.
bump
Succinct and spot on.
I can see why the some global elitists would push “alternative energy” for it’s carbon trade market and government “investments.” But anyone with the least bit of common sense would not buy into the alternative energy agenda and lie.
Many liberals sound as if they are living in a fairy tale land where magical “energy” is just going to pop up if they wish so hard enough and hate gas and oil enough.
I am really sick of these people.
It’s all in the marketing. Don’t call it “oil” or “coal”
Call it “liquid solar stored energy” and “solid solar stored energy”.
They’ll come a-running !!!! (evil grin)
Well, when idiots try to put a cart before the horse they always end up with a horse that can’t push the cart. They think we’re the idiots for wanting to grow our economy by collecting and using our own energy resources.
Financial Markets File.
Yeah, bash away but look at the data. The chart shows that onshore wind is “cheaper” than some the author has his cheesy arrows pointing at, such as advanced coal. And let’s compare fuel costs...
I’m fine with combined cycle and we should be exploiting the hell out of natural gas, and nuclear. But ALL energy sources were and ARE subsidized. The point is that you don’t subsidize forever or just for political reasons like was done with solar and other crapscience-based schemes.
Onshore wind is cost effective now with the subsidy, and engineers who design turbines know how to increase efficiency to the point where they will be cost competitive WITHOUT subsidies. This should be the goal. Who’s going to invest in R&D to reduce the cost of their product when the gov’t is paying you to keep making the old inefficient and high-priced product? Porkulus was a big step in the wrong direction because it only added more subsidies which in turn delayed industry investment and innovation that much longer.
The PTC will expire in another month. Let it. Don’t replace it and the industry will innovate and invest it’s own money to become competitive. The subsidies played a role in teaching the little bird how to fly, now it’s time to fly on its own.
Do you have a link or source to support that the taxpayer will be paying for the port terminal and the extra needed rail infrastructure.
Rail cost for PRB coal averages about 11.75 per ton to the utilities right now. Coal prices have been going down and transport has been going up.
... unlike the republican party, the green energy movement will survive.
Thanks SeekAndFind.
The data are incomplete.
What isn’t being shown are the ancillary costs involved in putting a significant amount of wind power into the grid.
Wind and solar power are not base-load power sources. The wind varies and cloud have been known to intercede between the sun and the earth from time to time.
Well, we can’t run a modern industrial or computer economy on ephemeral power sources. We need reliable power that can be scheduled - as in “In 2015, during the month of July, your power co-op is committing to taking 100MWh of power for your customer/members.” That’s how power is scheduled and priced - there are firm and non-firm contracts, and the only way you can afford your power bill as it stands now is that your local utility has committed to a base load of X megawatt hours for some time period, perhaps even scheduled down to the peak four-hour blocks during some seasons of the year. If your utility doesn’t take that power, then they have to sometimes pay “push-back” fees to generators and transmission operators.
This gets into another issue: transmission capacity has to be scheduled. In Wyoming, we’re seeing so many of these ugly monstrosities going up that our grid in Wyoming is now getting over-loaded during peak generation periods - we don’t have enough transmission capacity to get the power out of the state. So who is going to pay for all that? I’m sure as heck not going to. It’s bad enough I have to look at these monstrosities clogging up my view.
To compensate for the ephemeral nature of wind and solar, we either have to build big storage of excess power into the grid that we can release when we want, or we need to build peaker plants (usually powered by natural gas, but sometimes they’re big diesels) to jump into the fray when the ephemeral power sources go into hiding.
Big power storage is *the* tough nut to crack today. If we had more hydro power, we could simply pump water uphill behind a dam, but there’s not much hydro outside the western US, the St. Lawrence river area of the northeast and TVA. Some of those systems (St. Lawrence and TVA) don’t have a lot of head (elevation change), so you have to pump massive amounts of water uphill to store power.
Net:net - ephemeral power sources have much higher costs than are usually stated by non-engineers.
If engineering were easy, we’d have more engineers than liberal arts majors, wouldn’t we? But that’s not the case. Policymakers, who are by and large liberal arts majors (or, worse, lawyers or economists) should learn to shut their pieholes on issues like this. They’re worse than useless... because these issues aren’t ever quite so easy as the policy makers like to make them sound.
I don’t think that chart begins to tell the story. It’s apples and oranges, 24/7 electric vs. bull crap.
Hard to be really butt hurt over green energy hope that
I never had.
Everyone but Barack Hussein has given up on green energy. He’s seen the bankruptcies and federal money poured down a rathole; but like all things destructive to the U.S.; he’s DOUBLING DOWN on “green” energy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.