OT: USA & Canada Electricity costs.

Just recently, they had some -50C weather.

There is a picture in the news, of an outdoor thermometer, where the needle on it cannot register any lower. Just to show it is -50C (or could be lower).

It's almost as bad as working in Antarctica.

Not every day here, has to be cold. Sometimes we ski in rainy weather, and the resort gives you a garbage bag to wear after you buy your lift pass. You poke two holes for arms, and a hole for your head. By the customer doing that, your garbage bag is a "custom fit" for the occasion.

When you downhill ski in rainy weather, you need a different "posture" on your skis. If you dig your tips into the elephant snot, you can easily end up with a broken leg. So part of your priorities when skiing in that, is to make sure you're leaning back a bit. You can build up too much speed, and it takes energy to initiate a turn, and you have to keep telling yourself to not get lazy and make some turns to blow off some speed.

I've snapped a ski in two, while downhill skiing. The binding was set too tight, and did not release, and instead of my leg breaking, the ski snapped in two. That cost me a hundred bucks (they were rental skis and the shop should have known better than to set them that high).

Paul

I've done that, but only when the central heating was non-operational. It takes 8.8kW to heat my house at a decently cold temp outside.

There is zero electric fire here at the moment.

Paul

The good news (if there is really any such news to be had), is that people are building bigger batteries. I read of some project a couple days ago, aiming for 1.8GW sizing for a battery. Once the idea makes the rounds, it might become more common, a facility with larger dimension. And then more of that fine "perfectly free" power can be made available a 8PM on a windless night.

Lithium isn't the only chemistry suited to making stationary storage, and lithium has been falling in price for a while now. Yet the retail price of batteries, the curve for that has not followed the price of making them. And the latest propaganda piece was complaining about "the Chinese will corner the market". Which is surely true when the shirkers stop building the battery factory building and... give up. It's a foregone conclusion, that at least for some tech types, the Chinese will win and they will set the price.

If any country was really concerned about that, they have not shown us their hand-of-cards, as to what their response will be.

I don't know if there are any current price estimates for "renewable source plus one day storage" and then what price the lekky would be. Normally, contract prices are set for "free" lekky without a battery, which is not a useful thing to be pricing out. We need to know what it would cost, if the power could be dispatched any time.

If you look at the size of the solar field in Nevada, then you'll see what real solar power looks like. And wedged somewhere in that story, is a sub-sized battery (partially for grid stabilization when "clouds pass over"). But the batteries and inverters will get bigger.

Paul

There are published costs for the current large battery installations and they are not insignificant when compared to the average domestic demand. Add the costs of the infrastructure upgrades needed to support new solar and wind farms in places where the grid doesn't exist or in rural locations where historically the grid has only had to supply a relatively small demand. In the UK we are unlikely to see any significant reduction in our electricity bills in the next decade or more.

No-one is going to start sinking a new deep coal mine here in the UK[1], and all the deep mines we used to have are now unrecoverable.

.. but some parts are Statized e.g. New York Power Authority, or regulated but not actually publicly owned.

That'd cost you about £30 a (14 hour) day in the UK with electric heating - a quarter of that if using an air pump or gas. High, in other words. I use

Quite wise! I use one if I'm up early to warm though this reasonably well insulated attic room if I'm up in the night. A 700W heater does the job - 19C at the moment.

Trying to explain electricity prices by reference to one variable is a pretty limited way of looking at things.

Taking extremes - say, California - then yes, a significant part of the high cost of electricity can be explained by investment in renewables. But that's an edge case. One where externalities are built in and understood. Unlike most other forms of generation.

I’m not sure that is true.

Al Capone would have just loved a system in which he was paid for doing something, paid for not doing it, and subsidised in the process.

TNP can tell you about electricity generation in the Republic of Ireland, where a study of generation from a mix of gas and wind showed that the cheapest method was to run gas flat out all the time, and flog the unreliable wind power to the Brits.

Cheapest to run gas flat out in the middle of a hot summer's night ?

Not until we go nuclear, no. The whole renewable farce is coming apart at the seams.

Totally agree, but there are a few potential open cast locations I believe.

So the renewable advocates would have you believe

But ultimately ALL the last two decades' rise in energy prices van be traced back to the drive for renewable energy.

Just like climate is all ultimately about sunlight

Depends. The cost benefit is of course well understood by Eirgrid. It is cost effective to shut down less efficient gas plant for weeks at a time, but not for hours at a time.

And their report seems to suggest ramping down for hours at a time.

When you have a surplus, something has to give. You have to pay the windmills to shut down, but not the gas plant. In that case the consumer pays instead.

They were ramping down for a few hours at a time even with no windmills. As opposed to "run gas flat out all the time".

That's why in the States, they do "mountain-topping", cut the top off a hill and extract the coal, and avoid any deep mining situations (which might be more expensive).

I don't think anyone is in a rush to go underground every day.

One of the mines here recently, had a collapse underground, the news article made all sorts of puffy comments about the "recovery experts have been dispatched", but there was no news from the people actually underground, and it's not clear that they made it to a safe-station. Mining is still dangerous and that was a potash mine.

OK, here's an update.

Paul

What national grid ?

It's broken up into grid sections.

There should be a vertical line in the map, which is plesiochronous. Both sides are (nominal) 60Hz, but not necessarily in-phase with one another. There would be an attempt to "cycle-count" on either side of the dividing line, so that wall clocks all keep decent time. But you can't run a wire from one side of the street to the other, because the wire would burn off. The instantaneous phase would not allow it.

This map shows both Canada and USA, and some amount of interconnect runs from Canada to the USA. In particular, Quebec Hydro has a fair amount of capacity that goes South.

Rural populations not connected to the grid and running off diesel, would not show on that map (even as tiny dots).

Paul