How renewables are saving Texans billions

The best thing happening right now are the grid scale batteries. They make the companies that build them rich through better arbitration of power prices at the same time they vastly lower power prices for everyone.

No more peaks of power costing ridiculous amounts (and troughs of negative power prices).

You can be anti green for all it matters on this one. The batteries are massively profitable. They are coming on mass everywhere and there’s no stopping them.

https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/infrastru...

As an aside: the blog author is using ChatGPT to asses the factual claims made by his commenters in a similar way to the Twitter trend of asking @grok to fact check tweets.

Interesting times.

ERCOT has done a great job of setting up incentives, getting out of the way, and letting markets solve their problems. Working with CAISO and then going to set up batteries in ERCOT was such a breath of fresh air for an old team of mine.

I moved from ERCOT to MISO/Entergy (still in Texas) and my electricity costs have dropped by nearly 50%.

The part that is really shocking to me is the cost to maintain transmission infrastructure is dramatically higher in this area too (power lines in the forest).

I think it's hard to compete with a certain combination of fuel mix and fully amortized 20th century plants.

Texas needs more (any?) pumped-storage hydro (a non-chemical, gravity-fed battery) to store all this renewable energy.

TVA (similar in size to ERCOT, mostly within Tennessee) is about to begin its second such facility, after Raccoon Mountain [0]. Run-of-the-river facilities exist (including two in TVA's jurisdiction), which are capable of pumping water "up" the dam (for later use during peak loads) — perhaps LCRA might explore the feasibility of this?

Regardless of how the energy is stored, it might also (eventually) make sense to join Eastern/Western interconnects (and thereby "store" the energy outside of Texas). But I know ego/"Texus"/pride mentality exists (having grown up in Austin), so I won't hold my breath on accepting Federal regulations...

[0] wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon_Mountain_Pumped-Storage_Plant

Texas is one of the best climates in the US for renewables but in locations with less sun and wind the math will be different. That math includes batteries for load shifting of which Texas is installing a lot.

As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .

I think people misunderstand the aggregate conservative position:

They just dont want the state to fund the cause and don’t consider it the state’s role or problem or the state as a solution to a problem that isnt wholly solved by the proposed expensive solution

People outside of that group attribute the disagreement to insanity

When in reality as soon as an economical and private sector solution is there, republicans are on board

I see a way to bridge consensus so maybe I’ll run for office eventually since this is still too abstract for most

Texas is only ahead in renewables by certain biased metrics.

If you instead measure how much people talk about renewable energy, California comes out far ahead.

Wrong because the underlying assumption is that we are moving from a system where energy can be brought on as required to an equivalent system.

One of the big issues with renewables that the author is, I can only assume, is deliberately eliding is that energy cannot be brought on as required. Even in Texas, you still need non-renewables to fill the gap and you still need to recover the costs of running those assets in the price...Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working (as the comments show, it is quite easy to see why: people are obsessed with politics and reality matters less than your political enemies being wrong, companies have also realized that the subsidies in this area are incredible if you tell politicians they are right). The same thing is happening with battery operators.

You also see the same thing in other countries that invested heavily in renewables (UK is one example, they are mothballed a lot of non-renewable sources ten years ago, the government had to introduce massive subsidies for retail consumers because electricity prices are so high due to the need to recover costs of the remaining non-renewable sources when the wind happens to stop blowing): it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.

Hurrah for heavy metals! Hurrah for gigawatt AI datacenters! Hurrah for battery materials mining! Hurrah for Chinese manufactured solar panels! Hurrah for megawatt air conditioning! Hurrah for overall peak power demand in Texas up 20% in the last 10 years!

Yeah, when the panels degrade, seriously, what will happen to runoff into streams and groundwater? Have we all been on a farm and seen what weather does to abandoned vehicles and structures?

Still, remarkable how much solar capacity has been installed, I had no idea. 18 GW seems like quite a lot. Is that figure for electrical power, or does that also generously include all solar gain on all structures?