Category — Promises versus reality

My post last week evaluated the claim that wind generation can save money for power pool customers.  It was found that the supposed savings could be realized only if the elephant in the room – the above-market feed-in tariff – was ignored.  In other words, consumer payments for electricity from a power pool was half of the story; the real price had to include the consumer-qua-taxpayer funding of the feed-in-tariff (FIT).

And with this two-part scheme, games are played. Wind generators can bid a low price into the pool only to receive a higher FIT, which gives them an incentive to underbid. This might reduce the pool price but not overall cost to Germans for electricity.

Investing in New Generation: What Makes Sense?

If a generation resource is a good investment for its developers then it must return a profit to them.  In a normal electricity market this profit comes from supplying a segment of the demand (peak, intermediate/cycling, baseload) from a plant that is efficient technically and financially.

For existing plants and determinations of electricity costs in the here and now we can figure out the average cost of supplying electricity by calculating the weighted average cost of supply for each time period in the market every day.  If the addition of one generation source raises this weighted average without improving service quality or reliability, then it is not economical and would generally not be chosen in a well-functioning market.

But what about the future?  Electricity suppliers must invest large sums in new generation plants with the expectation that these plants will meet demand at the least cost.  This cannot be known with certainty, and mistakes are made all the time, especially when government policy and rent-seeking drive investment choices.

Transmission network operators – those in charge of the “natural monopoly” part of the power business – try to reduce the risk attendant to future supply by figuring out the least costly way to supply power and energy to their customers in the future, including the wires to transmit the electricity.  They have to take account of a long list of considerations: investment cost, fuel supply, emissions and licensing regulation, proximity to existing load centers and transmission nodes, transmission congestion – you get the idea.

The transmission system operator also has to pay attention to public policy – renewable energy mandates (“portfolio standards”), federal tax incentives (producer tax credits for wind and solar), feed-in tariffs, powerful politicians who do not want their vistas impaired – in a host of ways that directly impact their views of an optimal future generating system.

What Does the Wise Transmission Operator Do?

A wise investor in generation will first figure out what is economic to build? what are the physical constraints on the system? and finally, what limitations will public policy put on otherwise least cost generation choices?

A Case Study of “Germania”[i]

Let us imagine that we have a rather large and wealthy country to play with, one that currently has about 129 GW of installed generation capacity.  Further, we can imagine that this wealthy country, responding to its powerful environmental movement, has decided to

(i) phase out nuclear power;

(ii) limit future coal power-plant operations;

(iii) build a lot (a lot!) of wind generation plants; and

(iv) bring in most of its gas supply from Russia at prices linked directly to refined oil products and crude (i.e., high and volatile). [Read more →]

In a post on his blog and then again on the Huffington Post, Joe Romm challenged me to a wager on oil prices, claiming prescience concerning the price rise in the past decade compared to my 1996 forecast of low prices for two decades.  He seems to be implying that that I have refused to wager him, having closed the webpage to any further comments.

I find myself taken aback, as my experience with the blogosphere is somewhat limited.  My experience is primarily as an academic, writing articles for refereed journals and books, as well as working papers, with an intention to make them carefully sourced and referenced.  A blog can consist of nothing more than a rant, and the comments appended to them often worse (and usually anonymous).  I will not however yield to the temptation to follow suit (even if our illustrious moderator would permit it, which he won’t).

Having put up approximately 20 posts on the subject of peak oil, it might be thought that Romm is an expert on the subject. But so far as I know, he has a grand total of one article on oil, his famed, “Mideast Oil Forever” Atlantic Monthly piece (co-authored with Charles Curtis), which is the source of his pride on the subject.

A careful reading of “Mideast Oil Forever” shows that his argument was not so much that prices would soar, but that global dependence on Middle East oil would soar, which has not happened.  My argument was that the forecast of rising Middle East market share was likely to be incorrect, and it was (see Figure), so that economic fundamentals would not imply ever rising prices.

Forecasts of OPEC Market Share from 1996/97

Which is a far cry from saying my forecast was wrong and Joe’s correct.  In my testimony, I specifically stated,

“The reality is that prices may go up in the future.  And Persian Gulf oil production and exports will rise.  However, the most likely scenario, given what we know about oil supply and demand and what we have learned about forecasting in the last 10 to 15 years, is that OPEC is going to be under continued pressure for at least the next 10 years, possibly for much longer, that they will be fighting with each other for market share.  And, it’s going to require some very substantial changes in the world to see prices rising.” (See my opening statement on pp. 127-128.)

Arguably, the price collapse leading to the rise of Hugo Chavez, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq, are those ‘substantial changes’.  Certainly, not the soaring Middle East market share predicted by Romm.  (Since he downloaded the transcript of the hearing, it’s not clear how he missed this.) [Read more →]

Suppose you began this morning by learning that some investors and developers had stepped forward with a reportedly new type of commercial grade electrical power called “Zephyr Integrated Power” (ZIP). Being clever, they are spending a LOT of time and money marketing ZIP, knowing that this is their chance to break into the grid in a BIG way.

Their message– ZIP is “FREE, CLEAN, AND GREEN”–sounds great! Oh yes, and for good measure, ZIP will create oodles of jobs.

So the basic question is this: exactly what do we do before we allow these people and their new product on the electric grid?

We wouldn’t be so gullible to just take their word for it, would we? Yet this is exactly what we are doing today!

And there is more: our politicians are so enamored with ZIP that they tell these promoters that we will not only allow them on the grid, we will FORCE utilities to use ZIP. (Hmmm. Wouldn’t utilities WANT to use ZIP if it was so great?) How are utilities going to be forced to use ZIP? Lobbyists have sold our politicians a clever tool called the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to do just that.

Yet there is more. Despite the supposed benefits (which a free market would obviously jump on without government involvement), our wise government is going to offer the ZIP promoters billions of dollars of taxpayer money and ratepayer guarantees to support their product.

Remember, all this is without independent proof that ZIP has any real benefits…

Sadly, this astounding state of affairs is how our currently lobbyist-driven system operates.

Policy Proposal for the Environmental Left

The Left looks to government to do good things for the environment. My Pollyanna vision is that complex technical matters should be solved by science. So here is my (government-involved) proposal (with apologies to the libertarian bloggers and readers of MasterResource). It would go something like this… [Read more →]