I have heard many times that there is electricity available since they don't want to turn off some of the power plants. That doesn't mean that they give it to you for free. While I haven't seen numbers for that yet, I'd expect that it is factored into the lower cost of off-peak electricity.
There's no real excess electricity produced at any point in time (otherwise they need resistor banks like JRP3 says). What they do is run the generators at a lower less efficient level. For instantaneous drops in demand, they do something similar to what JRP3 says, which is allow steam pressure to rise so output is decreased (steam bypass is only a last resort for very extreme drops). Most of the lower cost of off-peak electricity comes from not having to run less efficient peaking plants (basically turbine plants that can be turned on and off very quickly and can be throttled easily compared to baseload plants). But as I said, the kind of savings you get from off-peak will average out as more EVs come on the grid (and the baseload plants no longer have to throttle down).
I disagree with this. You are implying that it might be possible to improve the efficiency of refineries to the same level as it will indeed be possible to improve the effieciency of NG plants. But there is no basis in fact to believe that, whereas there is a basis to believe it for NG plants.
Actual, for one, it IS possible! The best for NG plants is 20% better than the 40% average I used. On the refinery side, it only needs to improve 3.4% (20% of the 17% losses) to have the same impact. I don't see how that is impossible.
And given 83% average refinery efficiency, unless all plants in the US run at 83%, there has to be a refinery in the US that runs higher than 83%. Therefore, it is inherently unfair to compare the best 60% efficient NG plant to average 83% efficient refineries in the US.
And the problem with using "best" in comparisons is that "best" usually changes quickly, and it's hard to verify the figure you have is really the best for the industry. Averages don't change very quickly and with a large enough data set, even if you miss one or two data points, you usually aren't off by a significant amount.
It is listed in Table 4 of your link, but with 0%. Unless I'm missing something else.
This is the case where 0% doesn't equal 0 (a fact many food advertisers take advantage of). Table 2 shows 34 thousand short tons of coal being used.
So you think if we were to produce electricity after closing a refinery, we would use the "still gas", "steam", etc., which it has consumed ? I'm sure we would not.
If you assume we won't use those resources at all, then all that will do is reduce the amount of electricity you can theoretically get to even lower than the 2.4-3kWh figure I got from using 40% efficiency. I think using 40% is already pretty generous, because I'm already making the implicit assumption there that all of the resources used by the refineries are equivalent to natural gas, and also because natural gas plants are the most efficient fossil fuel plants (even looking at averages).
It wouldn't be "directly from refining" if it actually happened (as opposed to thought experiments).
This is just my short way of summarizing the current topic (perhaps phrased badly). At first, the argument was looking only at electricity used in the refinery process. We found purchased electricity to be relatively insignificant and couldn't find figures for internally generated electricity. So the topic shifted to how much electricity can be made from the resources that refineries use to make gasoline (plus the purchased electricity of course).
