Wind, Solar, Biomass Provide All New US Electrical Generating Capacity in January 2013

The author writes: "Once again, renewable energy sources have dominated the new electrical generation market. And once again, their rapid expansion demonstrates that the U.S. can meet its future energy needs without resorting to dirtier sources such as nuclear power or the Keystone XL pipeline."

The capacity of a marketing executive to use anything to defend a predetermined conclusion is boundless. 1200 MW of new generation is an inconsequential amount and says nearly nothing about the electricity markets. The Keystone pipeline will provide transportation fuel, a product that solar and wind power (or electricity from any source) does not even compete with. The only inference we can draw from the author's writing about these data is that he has no better news to use to defend his argument--it must have been a very boring month for renewable energy news.
Steven

1200MW of new generation is roughly equivalent to a new nuclear plant coming on line. That is a fair comparision.

Keystone XL pipeline on the other hand is really about moving oil from Canada to the gulf states where it can be refined and sent oversea (Europe).

If a Keystone like pipeline was really being built to help with the "oil security" of the US, it would be including significant improvments in east/west movement of oil across the country to existing refineries in California, Washington, Montana, (west for example).

1200 MW of low-capacity intermittent supply is a nearly negligible amount of new generation. These resources won't provide nearly as much energy as a new nuclear reactor, contrary to what Dennis claims in comment #2. Capacity additions should be compared on a yearly basis as one month is too little time to get good statistics on the distribution of sources that are being added. It is disingenuous to suggest that one can draw reliable inferences based on one-month totals.
Steven

Nuclear reactors have lately turned into intermittent resources also. Ft Calhoun on the Missouri was nearly flooded and has been offline for almost two years. In France, they are also spending more time retrofitting their plants -- because low and behold -- the emergency control/backup power supplies were too centralized and at risk during disasters. If you look at the long term (10-20 years) for a nuclear plant -- they are not running at 98% uptime. If you look at one nuclear plant at a time - it would appear to be very intermittent and unreliable.

Neither is wind or solar, but they are not expected to be generating 24hrs a day, seven days a week. Instead it is expected that you can meet demand by moving the energy regionally. Enough diversity in sources and locations and renewables no longer appear to be intermittent.

I believe that the %s quoted for coal and natural gas have been reversed. "coal for 29.04 percent, and natural gas for 42.37 percent." Coal still is the larger generation.

for the sake of perspective: a kilowatt of solar or wind capacity is not the same as a kilowatt of natural gas turbogenerator capacity, nor a kW nuclear capacity. 1230 MW of solar PV would generate scarcely 2000 GWh/year of electricity, much less than 0.1% of US demand, by my latest statistics.

Anonymous, Dennis;

"1200 MW of low-capacity intermittent supply is a nearly negligible amount of new generation. These resources won't provide nearly as much energy as a new nuclear reactor..."

Depends.

Wind turbines were long used in agriculture for pumping water out of wells for irrigation and livestock. Without controls there could obviously be a surplus pumped out and a cow or a plant could get mighty thirsty when the wind didn't blow.

When the same technology is used to generate electricity, it might serve agriculture a mite better in such matters as conserving water and allowing notification when things are getting dry but it could be disastrous if one depended on the electricity for lighting without backup.

I generally agree it is very misleading to label sources of energy only by their optimum output. But very small amounts of electricity in the kw range can be great for some purposes such as isolated homes or farms, bus stops or traffic warnings or ocean buoys used for signals.

Generalizations, like generals :-), have severe limitations.

Best, Terry

No arguments that 1230MW would produce 2000GWh/yr. More likely that 1230MW solar would produce about 1300GWhr/yr. In the Seattle area - where it ALWAYS rains - 1KW AC installed solar will generally produce 1MWhr/year.

It is not expected that solar only, or wind only, or biomass only would provide ALL the power for the US.

A diverse mixture of wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, hydro could provide a MUCH MUCH larger share of the energy than today. That would mean our existing stocks of coal, oil and natural gases would last longer. And yes nuclear is still likely to be in the long term future of the US.

Remember that the fossil fuels are also feedstock for much of the chemical industry. Those feedstocks are used in things like plastics and fertilizers. Making sure we have a good stock of the natural resources long term also means we have resources used for industrial and farm production.

Terry, I agree that labeling resources by the peak output seems crazy. This fall I spent time abroad and at times the use of 'optimum output' kept my head spinning -- until you realize that there are good reason that the speakers used the peak number generation numbers. It makes it easier to match the expected peak loads and the peak available capacity of the transmission lines.

Using Wh/yr doesn't work well for those calculations.

The author of comment #5 writes:
"I believe that the %s quoted for coal and natural gas have been reversed. "coal for 29.04 percent, and natural gas for 42.37 percent." Coal still is the larger generation."

These numbers were referring to capacity rather than electricity production. We have quite a lot of natural gas plants that are only used for peaking resources and this is why natural gas has the largest share of capacity. There was no reversal.
Steven

I wish authors would quote Whr units expected in a year vs peak Watts as the Energy unit is the important unit.

It is often quoted that the US has 1TW of generating capacity, but that we consume 4000 TWh of electrical energy. That would assume a 50% load factor. This is before renewables broke into the double digit % range. Not sure what capacity is being counted to bring the effective load factor down so much.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see KWh or MWh or GWh quoted, not peak Watts.

Lately, I've read allot about LFTR, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.
The same scientist that invented the LWR also invented the LFTR and recommended that the LFTR be used to generate electricity for domestic consumption.
The Light Water Reactor uses uranium which must go through a very extensive/expensive/potentially dangerous enrichment process, only uses <1% of the available fissionable material and creates deadly radioactive solid waste with a 10,000 year half life. Only advantage/disadvantage, waste can be converted to weapons grade material (military weapons).
While Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, uses a byproduct of mining operations (Thorium), is very fertile, enough in the USA alone to generate power at current levels for 10,000 years, can be used without complicated processing, is almost totally consumed in the generation process, can be used to separate very valuable rare earth materials from the end waste, produce very high temperature waste heat than can be used to turn coal into gas and tar sands into clean oil, and best of all can consume the radioactive waste stored all over the country to generate more electricity! And the tiny amount of waste produced has a half life of <300 years. Also LFTR generates 4 times the power and <1% of the waste of LWRs.
This is a proven technology. LFTR was built, by the government with our tax dollars, and tested for 5,000 hours without a hiccup.
Oh, by the way it's completely safe. No insane failure prone safety systems. ie. walk away safe, no possibility of a run away reaction. Needs no water. Is safe to handle, dig up a piece put it in your pocket no problem.
So much more! Visit ThoriumEnergyAlliance.com to learn lots more! Then ask yourself, Why aren't we doing this? Really good question?

God bless,
MikeyBC

Once again, the Liberal, "Anti-Everything Productive" position rears its ugly head to denounce the Keystone XL Pipeline. Thousands of miles of pipelines criss-cross the United States and Canada supplying oil, gas and other "Energy" components with a minute deleterious effect on the environment. The XL pipeline would result in a large increase in employment, greatly increased taxes from personal income and corporate taxation and a long step toward ending petroleum dependence on Middle-East suppliers and the "Oil Blackmail" that comes with it. Warren Buffet supports President Obama's election campaign. Post-election Warren Buffet's company plans to transport 700,000 barrels of oil per month by rail. Do we need to wonder why the U.S. government refuses to allow the pipeline to be built.........

Tom, The authors choice of generating capacity or yearly production capacity is driven by their article AND the expected use of the data. If the author intends to show the what portion of electricity can come from a particular resource at the peak times... then using KW, MW, GW is it.

The electrical loads are intermittent and peaky also. Northern states have high winter time peaks, southern have high summer time cooling peaks. Using the annual production numbers alone doesn't tell the story for those regions. But if you can produce power to meet the expected peak loads (as long as needed) - you can produce enough power to meet the annual consumption.


If the author wants to show how much energy is used over the course of a year - then of course MWh/yr, or TWh/y is used.

Jerry, If the keystone pipeline were built with the intention of sending the crude to east/west coast refineries - there would be far fewer people protesting it. But when its stated purpose (by their executives - at testimony in congress) is to move the crude to the refineries in Houston for shipment outside of the US. That becomes hard to swallow.

Remember additional pipelines to move oil east/west to those refineries also would have created jobs. The need for a east direction pipeline is there ... rail cars with crude are leaving the oil fields in North Dakota for the refineries on the east coast.

The Canadian producers could have made a pipeline that traversed east/west across Canada - but they lack the refineries near their ports. Their profits from the oil will be higher by sending through the refineries in Houston where they can sell to the highest buyer on the world markets.

@Dennis,
Naturally. But I've only seen one article (out of many I've read) which estimated KWh instead of KW. When these systems are put into use, KWh is used for financial impact, not KW. I don't give the authors benefit of the doubt. Often they are lazy or don't understand the physics as I often see quotes like (xx GigaWatts per hour). It's less work to use peak Watts than to figure out the effectiveness of the installation.

Tom:
The EIA tabulates new generators by capacity and this is where the author gets his data from. A significant amount of generating capacity is used only for peaking power needs so these is no way to know how many hours a year it will be used for production making energy production data for new installations difficult to calculate and of limited utility. This was a slow month for new capacity additions and one cannot properly deduce any trends from such limited data. New capacity additions are only a part of the story regarding trends in production sources. In 2012 natural gas gained more than 5% market share for electricity production mainly from higher utilization of existing infrastructure.
Steven

Why all the discussion about 1.23MW when there is a comma,
not a period? The article is 1,231MW,not the former.

Sheesh!

Tom, That is a good point that KWh, MWh, GWh is typically used for financial analysis (ROI, LCOE, etc).

When you ask the question would it even work, you start totaling up the capacity in KW, MW or GW and comparing the loads.

When you look at power grid stability you look at the KW, MW, GW and the availability (duty cycle, uptime, your choice) of the power source. But just these two (capacity and availability) are still incomplete - you need information on the diversity of the energy sources and the geographic dispersion. Load information is also often over simplfied.

Renewables depend on a wide spread geographic dispersion to average out the intermittency. Other energy resources (nuclear for example) are highly dependent on a very localized generation point because of the cost for construction and security of the materials.

The premise of the original article above 'Wind, Solar, Biomas...' is good - but I do agree that I think the author added an unnecessary paragraph at the end when he added the comments about Keystone. Keystone has nothing to do with electricity generation capacity.

Terry/Tom-Mosden: 1: Terry: Obviously you have never been out on the plains or farm/ranchland. Anone that has, knows that windmills are a vital part of the farm/ranch life. You would understand what "tank" means. Can be a pond or galvanized! It stores a precious commodity (water) when the wind does not blow. 2.Tom: As for the pipeline, products refined from the pipeline will travel East-West in truck tankers and rail cars to wherever saleable, as well as to off-shore destinations, producing taxeable corporate profits. I thought that was what "capitalism" was all about. 3. Lack of pipeline capablity results in crude oil being transported via tanker. Can you say "Valdez?" One "Valdez" occurence will result in Ten Thousand times the environmental impact of one pipeline incident. Get real and get off the "environmental" bandwagon and think for yourself. Its called common sense.

Is zero electrical generating capacity for fossil fuels in January negligible?

o

Here is the link to the FERC report that the column was based on. It isn't long.

http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staff-reports/2013/jan-energy-infrastructure.pdf

@Jerry - learn to read. I never mentioned anything about a pipeline, plus you spelling my name incorrectly.

Jerry Schofield,

"Terry: Obviously you have never been out on the plains or farm/ranchland. Anone that has, knows that windmills are a vital part of the farm/ranch life."

You have to have lived a very sheltered life to make such an odd claim.

My earliest years were spent in a large desert valley where everybody - everybody but the storekeeper/postmaster and a single teacher who boarded around during the school year with parents of children - lived and worked on isolated livestock farms.

As far as I can recall, I saw not a single windmill in that huge valley but it would take you a very long time to visit every farm. You could meet most everyone at the Grange though.

Later we moved to an area of 300 souls where many of the people worked in a sawmill but we and our nearest neighbors were farmers.

There was nary a windmill in sight there either.

The store in Adel, OR, where we first lived has added a bar and restaurant and RV park and has even regular gas pumps but is not exactly a metropolis:

"Photo: Adel Store and Tavern is a typical center-of-the-universe representative of the amenities offered in rural Eastern Oregon, as most town centers are compressed into a general store, gas station, bar, post office, and maybe an RV park."

http://www.erench.com/RESTAUR/OREGON/ADEL/STORE/index.htm

Best, Terry

Jerry,
About the 'Valdez' comment... The oil is being sent to Houston via pipeline where it will be loaded in a tanker and shipped abroad. So, it's the worst of both worlds. Not only that, but tar sands oil is thick, hard to pump, gritty, and requires a large portion of its own energy for conversion to various fuels. All we get down here is the liability of a pipeline break or fire. They're building their own pipeline so they don't have to pay us for transport. Might as well put a Canadian free trade, no tariff, no tax highway down the great plains. Even Exxon doesn't get that kind of treatment.

I grew up on the great plains. Wind mills are indispensable for large cattle ranches. They're not much use in deserts where well water is very deep, and tanks dry up in short order.

I think the point of the article is this...We are seeing the beginning of the permanent rise and dependence on renewable energy. It's stopped being a sideline novelty. This is a precarious and exciting time for generation. Beginnings like this only happen once. It's great to be alive to see it.

Last Comment: As always, there are pros and cons to all arguments. Having spent 18 years in the Middle East, I can assure you that petroleum independence should be your first order of business. Subsidies will disappear by this year and with it many wind and solar ventures. As one who is directly involved in wind, biomass energy and as a tidal energy investor I would love to see the technology become available to make petroleum a thing of the past. It is not going to happen, at least not for possibly a decade. In the meantime, we need to take advantage of the development of plentiful domestic petroleum resources, both here and in Canada in order to maintain a liveable pricing for those products. Or, like our President, do you advocate $5.00 gasoline?

Jerry, the sad thing about the Keystone pipeline is that the executives of the company would not provide any assurance that if the US had prices climbing again - toward $5 a gallon, then the oil transported by the pipeline and refined in Houston would stay in the US markets. It will not. The oil isn't sent south, and refined and stored, no money in that. It would be sold on the open market - even while prices might be climbing in the US.

If we have more extreme weather events in the Gulf states, that often means a reduction in refining capacity. Instead of shipping the oil all the way to Texas for refining and export - pipelines needed to be built to move east/west. If capacity is being added - we do not seem to hear much about it.

And you are correct - even if we could build out the wind, solar, biomass, geothermal at two or three times the rate the US is doing to day - fossil fuels will still be needed in the US for decades.

For people interested in reading more about the transitions off of one fuel source and to another, look for books by Vaclav Smil. Or even the standby Denis Hayes book "Rays of Hope" from the 70's. The move between types of fuel sources often takes generations.

Jerry Schofield,

"As always, there are pros and cons to all arguments."

True enough. What is the pro argument for chance of extermination of all human life on the planet - even of all life?

"I can assure you that petroleum independence should be your first order of business."

Partially agree. Independence from all fossil fuels should be the first order of business.

"As one who is directly involved in wind, biomass energy and as a tidal energy investor I would love to see the technology become available to make petroleum a thing of the past. It is not going to happen"

Your experience and location is acknowledged. What is going to happen depends on you and me and everyone else. Baseload energy like biomass could very rapidly replace fossil fuels. I think tidal energy is marginal though baseload but that is JMO.

"like our President, do you advocate $5.00 gasoline?"

Surely a canard. Our President is on your side and has presided over an enormous increase in fossil fuel production in the U.S. He pumped the tar sands pipeline for example despite strenuous opposition by those who give a damn. Like most any politician, he has been on every side of every question.

Best, Terry

Wow! A lot of talk about how energy is produced and percentages. My house is 100% solar electric and most of my transportation is electric. I guess none of this matters to me any more. My overall cost is about 7 cents per kWh for the last 10 years and will be about the same until I die.

scottttcarlson writes in comment #30:
"My overall cost is about 7 cents per kWh for the last 10 years and will be about the same until I die."

Somewhere I sense an arithmetic error. Possibly he forgot the time value of money for his initial investment, and doubtless he neglected government subsidies. If he isn't using battery storage, he is benefitting from the net metering subsidy. PV technology from 10 years ago generated electricity that was vastly more expensive than $0.07/kWh and that is still true today--otherwise we will be seeing a lot more PV adoption....
Steven

Scott, the generally accepted method to compare energy costs is to use LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) see https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sam/help/html-php/index.html?mtf_lcoe.htm

At $0.07kWh, it sounds like you are either ignore the original capital investment or there was very little (free panels). Maintenance, the cost of the original capital, discount rates, system component life, etc are generally included in calculations.

Very, very, very few solar systems can reach $0.07kWh -- unless of course it is a pocket calculator.

Even a small backyard coal fired generator (if there was such a thing) would have problems reaching that low cost - because of the small scale.

For example - if I take a small (10kW) natural gas powered standby generator, run it at only 5kW, 7x24 for ten years. that would be something like 438000kWhr. But then you calculate the original cost of the system ($4000), the discount rates, plus the gas used... and pretty soon the you find that the electric cost is still around $0.20kWh. (someone want to run the numbers out with their gas rates...)

About the natural gas generator -- the simple calculations above, do not even consider any of the externalized cost. Are my neighbors unhappy because of the noise? Is it smoking up the neighborhood after ten years? How much CO2, NOx was produced, etc.

Generally LCOE calculations when done are quite surprising. Key to the debate between the fossil fuel community and renewables community is how to capture and put a value on the external costs.

That is pretty hard to answer especially when the generation facility is generally 'not in my back yard'. So the question I always ask myself -- would I complain if my neighbor built one in his yard, or on his roof?

Ask that about, coal, oil derrick, solar panels, wind turbine, biodigestor, geothermal plant, nuclear plant, and pretty soon the acceptable choices most of us make are really narrowed down.

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I don't know as much of what is commented here but it appears most arguments regard a unit comparison around the value of brown electricity vrs green electricity. I've been led to believe that the added value benefits of renewable generators should weigh in things like voided environmental externalities, offtake solutions, long term balanced load, PPA revenues, etc. How does the increased penalties for Cap&Trade programs for instance effect the baseline value of clean MWh? Help me understand, please.