Or did they already account for that?

Overall good points and good things to know, but IDK, I just felt like I was talking to a PR representative while I was reading.

BTW, is there a way to submit editing corrections that are a little less public? I just feel kinda iffy throwing it out there in public if there could be a better solution, so thought I’d ask.

I don’t know about the inflation question, but would assume they incorporated it.

Regarding emissions, this is a great piece tackling that issue (I tweeted it to the head of BNEF following a tweet of his regarding that emissions stat): http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/05/1275811/why-claims-about-reductions-of-us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-are-misleading/
Thanks for the stutter & questionable grammar catch.

Researchers at University of Delaware used four years of weather and electricity demand/load data in one minute blocks to determine 1) if a combination of wind, solar and storage could meet 99.9% of demand and 2) the most cost effective mix of each to meet demand.

The data for 1999 through 2002 came from the PJM Interconnection, a large regional grid that services all or part of 13 states from New Jersey to Illinois, from Pennsylvania south into Tennessee and North Carolina. This is the world’s largest competitive wholesale electricity market, serving 60 million customers, and it represents one-fifth of the United States’ total electric grid.

They used currently available technology and its projected price in 2030. They included no subsidies for wind and solar in their calculation. They did not include hydro, nuclear, tidal or other possible inputs. They also did not include power sales to and purchases from adjacent grids.

They found that by 2030 we could obtain 99.9% of our electricity from renewable energy/storage and the remainder 0.1% from fossil fuels for about what we currently pay “all-in” for electricity. The all-in price of electricity which includes coal and oil produced health costs currently paid via tax dollars and health insurance premiums.

During the four year period there were five brief periods, a total of 35 hours, when renewables plus storage were insufficient to fully power the grid and natural gas plants came into play. These were summer days when wind supply was low and demand was high. The cheapest way to cover these ~7 hour events was to use existing natural gas plants rather than to build additional storage. Adding in hydro, tidal, etc. would further reduce this number.

After 28 billion simulations using differing amount of wind, solar, storage and fossil fuels they found the best solution was to over-build wind and solar and at times simply “throw away” some of the produced power. Building “too much” wind and solar turns out to be cheaper than building more storage given the storage solutions we have at this time. Finding markets for the extra production, selling electricity to offset natural gas heating for example, further reduced costs.

Budischak, Sewell, Thomson, Mach, Veron, and Kempton Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time Journal of Power Sources 225 (2013) 60-74

https://docs.google.com/file/d/1NrBZJejkUTRYJv5YE__kBFuecdDL2pDTvKLyBjfCPr_8yR7eCTDhLGm8oEPo/edit

Remember, this is a “worst case” study. Add in hydro, tidal, geothermal, and residual nuclear and the price drops because less storage will be needed. The same happens when there is exchange of power between grids. And they used storage technology currently available.

http://inhabitat.com/florida-launches-the-worlds-first-hybrid-solar-energy-plant/

Natural gas + Solar CSP + Molten Salt storage, kind of like a plug-in hybrid car. Yeah pure renewable would be better, but this is a very good start and setups like this will make slow ramping baseloads like coal and nuclear obsolete.

Here’s another example in Turkey.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/06/07/the-worlds-first-wind-solar-natural-gas-power-plant/

They’re saying these hybrid plants could get up to 70% efficiency, that’s just redonkulous. Coal is around 33% and well run nuclear is around 40%.

Going forward I see wind handling everything off-peak, solar will handle ALL peak energy (Germany is basically there already), and natural gas for everything in between. Then when cost effective storage comes onto the market for wind and solar PV then you won’t need the natural gas anymore.

The most important project for the United States electric grid is this anyways.

http://www.tresamigasllc.com/

The unification of all the seperate regional grids and the ability to send power anywhere in the US and to parts of Mexico and Canada. Need moar merit order effect.

“The specific stat from the presentation was that total energy use fell 6.4% from 2007 to 2012, while GDP grew 3% in that time.” -Does that GDP figure account for inflation? Because if not overall GDP would have fallen during this time period.

Also, while NG does make great “peaking plants” to fill in for regional RE power sources, that is not what is happening. The second they add a waste heat boiler to “improve efficiency” it’s no longer a peaking plant! While it could operate that way, it would completely defeat the purpose and it is more economical for them to run as base load.

And “U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions declined 13%.” That seems fairly specific. What about overall US CO2 emissions? What about overall US energy-related GHG emissions? What about overall US GHG emissions? And then there’s other pollutants – fine particles, NOx, SOx… And what portion of that 13% was related to the fact that we dropped energy demand?

You did a commendable job pointing out some of the misleading PR wording, but the way they engineered their wording really rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the points I raise may very well support them – idk I don’t have the numbers, but I think overall this was a feel-good PR bubble to distract more than inform.

(“and it it would” => “and it would”)
(“I thought this was all the most interesting part” might check this wording?)