Daily Archives: February 26, 2008

Texas does carbon big, and that’s not all…

Posted on by

Michael Giberson

… Texas does the non-carbon thing in a pretty big way, too.

3pct_csp_tx.jpgTom Fowler, at NewsWatch: Energy, pulls together some numbers. Among his points (edited and slightly rearranged):

  • Texas leads the nation in greenhouse gas emissions; and
  • If Texas were a country, it would rank seventh in the world in greenhouse gas emissions.

But also:

  • Texas is the nation’s top wind-power producing state [as also noted here at KP a few days ago. -MG] , avoiding over three million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually;
  • The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) expects to have 4,500MW of installed wind generation capacity – roughly 7% of peak demand – by mid-2008;
  • The potential for solar power is also among the highest in the country, with high levels of direct solar radiation concentrated in West Texas*; and
  • Texas has an abundance of biomass energy resources.

*Translation: It sunny out there.

Texas will never aspire to be the “Persian Gulf of solar energy,” but it will darn-well be proud to be the “Texas of solar energy.”

Power outage in Florida

Posted on by

Lynne Kiesling

Few details yet, but I’m sure this will give us stuff to talk about over the next week: a large power outage in Florida, affecting 3-4 million people. Florida Power & Light representatives officials expect to have the power restored by 5:30, which is pretty quick.

But can such a large outage be due to one substation failure? That’s a heck of a cascade.

What I’ll be most interested in hearing about is how the Silver Spring Networks smart grid technology that FP&L uses affects the speed and quality of the restoration of power services for customers. If you want to read more about Silver Springs Networks, check out this smart grid tech take article by Erich Gunther in the Smart Grid News.

BTW, I know we’re having comment registration troubles, so if you have a comment on this that you’d like me to post, please email it to me and I’ll put it in the body of this post. Thanks!

“Bourgeois commitments to virtue” reduce collective action problems

Posted on by

Lynne Kiesling

Lots of folks who worry about climate change argue for large-scale collective action, usually taking the form of some sort of government intervention that involves some degree of coercion. Guest-blogging at Instapundit, Megan McArdle makes a very trenchant observation about how self-reflective virtuous behavior can reduce the need for collective action, in this case with respect to climate change:

… if you want everyone to do something, you are morally bound to do it whether or not they follow suit. I am rethinking that–but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments [sic.] to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion.

I absolutely believe that this is very true, very important, and completely overlooked in almost all policy debates. In part that’s probably because, in electricity geek-speak, it’s not dispatchable — you can’t be 100 percent sure that you can rely on it to be there at the exact time when you need it. A quest for higher certainty reduces our ability to rely on virtue, custom, and other social norms that do enforce longer-term beneficial behavior.

Naturally, my response to those who yearn for higher certainty, and implement coercive collective action policies to achieve it, is “get over it”. But that doesn’t win many arguments, even if it’s true that too often we seek more certainty than is optimal, or even feasible. That’s probably also why so many coercive collective action policies end up creating so many unintended consequences.

Can Arizona become the “Persian Gulf of Solar Energy”?

Posted on by

Michael Giberson

Spanish company Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company have announced plans to build a large solar powered electric generator, to come online in 2011, but like many such announcements it comes with a couple of public-policy related “ifs”; they’ll build it if they get the necessary approvals from the Arizona utility regulator, and if the U.S. Congress extends the federal solar investment tax credit.

An Associated Press story described the announcement:

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) — A Spanish company is planning to take 3 square miles of desert southwest of Phoenix and turn them into one of the largest solar power plants in the world.

Abengoa Solar, which has plants in Spain, northern Africa and other parts of the U.S., could begin construction as early as next year on the 280-megawatt plant in Gila Bend — a small, dusty town 50 miles southeast [sic] of Phoenix.

The company said Thursday it could be producing solar energy by 2011.

Abengoa would build, own and operate the $1 billion plant, named the Solana Generating Station.

Solana will be enough to supply up to 70,000 homes at full capacity.

It won’t be Abengoa’s first solar project in Arizona. Since 1999 the company has operated a 17,000 square foot solar powered hot water system serving a federal prison complex. The system is said to have reduced overall electric consumption at the facility by about 10 percent.

The AP story quoted Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as saying, “There is no reason that Arizona should not be the Persian Gulf of solar energy.”

AZCSP.gif

It is always tempting to “do the math” when a politician makes such, um, enthusiastic claims.

Well, why not? Let’s see: Three square miles yields a 280 MW capacity plant. Using the 70,000 homes number, a little calculation gives a 38 percent capacity factor for the plant, so that implies the plant will produce about 932,000 MWh per year. If Arizona is going to become the “Persian Gulf” then they must be a net exporter of solar, meaning they first serve all the state’s own consumers and have power left over to export. If all of the state’s electric power needs were generated using similar technologies and assuming constant economies of scale, it would take about 236 square miles (or about 1.2 percent of the land mass in the state) to accommodate the necessary solar power plants.

So 236 square miles of Arizona would, on the assumptions listed, get self-sufficiency from solar. Presumably a “Persian Gulf” would be a big exporter of power, not just self sufficient. Here the calculations rapidly get crazy (i.e., over 36,000 square miles of land), depending on just what you think a “Persian Gulf of solar energy” means, and that doesn’t include the land needed for additional transmission lines.

Nowhere in the article does it say just how expensive the new solar plant will be, but given that the project hinges on regulatory approvals and continuation of the federal solar investment tax credit, we can assume it isn’t yet competitive with other commercial electric generation technologies.

UPDATE: See also this related post: How can Arizona become a solar power exporter if it opposes building interstate power lines?