Paracelsus
Active Member
Thank you very much for sharing these articles! They are very uplifting from the perspective of helping the planet. Beyond the scope of the information in the articles I think a few people will be surprised to realize the scale of this impact on the hydro and gas peaker plant operators in the Pacific NW who had enjoyed a steady stream of peak demand revenue for California - and even from their own NW states. While Pacific NW hydro has tremendous capacity and can produce power at fairly low rates, the mitigation costs to cover huge Capital projects and an ever-growing Operation & Maintenance budget for their salmon/steelhead Hatchery & Habitat programs have left operators in a position to become fairly dependent upon peak demand rates to pay for those programs. And because they are required to utilize wind energy when it is available they are in a similar boat as these articles present. In fact, last week they too sold energy at negative rates. And once independent operators utilizing the renewable-favorable programs of Oregon & Washington start installing sufficient battery storage it will allow them to likely get paid to store during peak daylight by buying energy at negative rates and then sell in the early evening during the last of the peak demand load. So even in the Pacific NW I think we will soon see the head finally get chopped off the duck (duck curve). However, this will result in the Pacific NW hydro generators to operate/fund Habitat and Hatchery on the remaining much lower demand rates. Thus that means rate hikes are very likely for the rest of us simply to pay for programs that grew a little larger than necessary, and operate a little less efficient than possible because the bar for those programs were established when life was good with lots of peak demand revenue. With battery storage/residential solar/distributed generation and massive commercial solar growth on the near-term horizon this is going to get sticky very fast in the Pacific NW. Very, very fast. In fact, since Pacific NW operators had to sell energy at negative prices last week, the tipping point might already be here before Elon unveils Solar Roof pricing this month.
