Electricity Crisis

Jordan Hayes jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com
Sun Feb 11 00:28:01 PST 2001



> Just out of curiousity, Jordan, what do you think of Wasserman's
> option, wind power? He seems to think it's both cheaper and more
> reliable than nuclear and, best of all in the current situation,
> has the fastest construction time of any power source.

My (limited) understanding of the current wind power projects is that they are nowhere near close to being "cheap enough" -- the main problem being that they often use a significant amount of the power they generate during windy periods to keep the turbines from stopping (inertia is a killer) during the not-so-windy periods.

So when they work, they work well; but they mostly don't work. The all-in cost is still several times anything petroleum based.

---

I was too terse in my initial message; I mean to say that there is no "electricity shortage" because California has about 45GW of production capacity and peak needs of about 30GW -- so we have 50% more than we need. But a lot of it is off-line; the public reason is "off-season maintenance" but the real reason is the producers have the consumers over a barrel: why bring your plants back on line when your unit profit will drop because of it? Keep it close to 100% and you can squeeze the price up.

But peak power demand in the upcoming summer will approach 45GW, so I'm not sure where we'll be then.

---

As far as what's needed, I'm all for throwing money at figuring out better ways to transport (and ultimately store) power: Texas over-built production in the last few years while California under-built. But if you could realize the dream that "the grid" promisses, we'd be in a much better position to have a real market. Since all the players in California "are" the market, you'd need external players -- like those in Texas -- who would step up and when the local are just playing games.

What we have now is just the illusion of a market with a short squeeze of epic proportions going on.

It's the Hunt Brothers and Silver.

/jordan



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