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Choice: A Novel Idea
Photo Credit: Harvey McDaniel.
In the latest dispatch from the Reality-Refuses-to-Conform-to-Narrative Files comes this bit of news from the WSJ:
Texas has added more wind-based generating capacity than any other state, with wind turbines accounting for 16% of electrical generating capacity as of April. Now Texas is anticipating a huge surge in solar power. […] In April, there was more than 19,000 megawatts of renewable capacity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, cranking out enough power for nearly 4 million Texas homes.
Mind you, this is not a simple tale of the free market triumphing over statism: In addition to the generous federal subsidies, this partially came about through state mandates signed into law by George W. Bush and Rick Perry, and Texas residents will have to figure out how to deal with the significant grid-load problems that intermittent renewable energy sources pose. However, the same legislation that enacted those state mandates also performed a lot of trust-busting on Texas energy utilities, making things like this possible:
Residents of Houston currently can pick from 107 different rate plans offering 5% to 100% renew-able power. In general, they are willing to pay a bit more to go green. Top-rated Reliant, a unit of NRG Energy Inc. MMNRGMM, charges 7.1 cents a kilowatt-hour for the plan that’s all renew-able versus 5.9 cents for one that’s 5% green.
The upshot: While other states are struggling to meet their self-imposed green mandates, Texas has blown past its.
Imagine that: In the the state (rightly) most-associated with fossil fuels, people have embraced wind power not because their choices were restricted, but because they were opened.
Published in Economics
I don’t like them where there was a view of nature. Nature is always better than wind turbines.
Also, they kill Eagles.
Do you have past examples that you base this claim on or merely mistaken etymology?
Yes.
My wife also feels this way.
From what I understand, the data is very weak on this. On the one hand, the number of documented eagle deaths is fairly low, though the number that windfarms are allowed to kill is significantly higher.
Interestingly, a major source of eagle mortality appears to be poorly-designed electricity poles.
It’s also interesting to note that, especially over the last couple of decades, all the imagery (favored of the Left) of refineries pouring out smoke from their stacks are actually refineries pouring out steam from those stacks. Including coal-fired establishments.
Eric Hines
Speaking of the left’s imagry, old Soviet movies of the era of socialist realism like to show cooling towers of nuclear power plants right next to residential areas, and smoke-billowing smokestacks, all as a wonderful thing – a sign of progress.
When a customer decides they want to pay extra for 100% green power, how are those electrons separated out just for them?
Its one big pile of electrons. They just get to call some of them their very own. Kind of like paying to have a star named after you.
And if the wind turbines are built because of government mandates, how can you call that the people “embracing” it? This choice to pay more doesn’t cause anything to be more green. Seems to me a bit like the Church of Texas is selling indulgences.
You are absolutely right that there is no such thing as a green electron or a brown electron. But if I sell you “green electrons” that is shorthand for saying that I bought electrons in the market from a “green” source and “allocated” them to you. If I buy wind power in Abilene and sell it to you in Houston, perhaps none of the actual electrons from the wind farm I buy from make their way to Houston (though some likely do, even if it is unlikely that they make it to your house/business), but at the margin, your purchase increased the amount of “green” energy in the grid, thus decreasing the “brown” energy. That’s the theory. So not quite like paying to have a star named after you, which has no effect on the number of stars.
Because the mandates were exceeded so quickly. From the WSJ piece:
^ What he said.
Well, if you want to be sticky about it, the electrons don’t go very far at all; they just “vibrate.” That “vibration” creates an electric field, and it’s that electric field that travels, at not quite the speed of light in a vacuum (because a wire isn’t a vacuum), from Abilene to Houston.
It remains, though, the energy that gets swapped around as described. That’s also how freewheeling works in Texas and some other jurisdiction–freewheeling allows you to pick and choose which electricity supplier you want to buy your electricity from, rather than as in the bad old days being stuck with whichever electricity company had the franchise.
[/fastidiosity]
Eric Hines
Ok, maybe I was getting a bit too facetious with the separating of the electrons, of course they don’t reach you personally, but the star thing…
I don’t believe that paying extra to allocate green power to you causes any more green power to be generated. The business decision to build those green sources (solar, wind, etc) is most likely based on the expectation of increased government mandates (Texas and surrounding) causing an artificial demand. I suspect the retail/residential payment plans are insignificant. So just like paying for a star, your payment doesn’t create any new ones.
The crux of my disagreement with @isaacsmith and others seems to be whether additional green energy is generated because of these payment plans. I don’t have first hand knowledge of this, but I doubt it very much.
Tom laid out some figures suggesting that it does and that the mandates, being exceeded, are not currently the driving force. What is your basis for disputing them?
Maybe I’m missing something here, what figures are those?
I understand the argument that because the mandates were exceeded, this could suggest people signing up for green options are driving the construction of more wind turbines. This could be true, but I don’t see anything here but speculation. I’m saying that mandates from neighboring regions also affects construction within Texas. My basis is purely experiential–hours a day, every day, dealing with renewable energy providers and trying to meet similar targets, but maybe that doesn’t pass muster around here.
My hunch is that its easier to build these things (and the associated transmission lines) in Texas than other places and that’s having a significant effect.
I agree with the last para, and I was inexact in using the word figures, but I felt that Tom went beyond speculation. I agree that it would have been even better with more numbers, but I’m not sure that a detailed statistical analysis of Texas energy figures compared to some control state would be to everyone’s taste. ;-)
I confess I had not considered that. Interesting.