Transmission lines limit Colorado's renewable energy

[phantom power]

Denver -Colorado faces potentially severe energy and economic challenges if the state’s utilities are delayed in developing planned high-voltage electric transmission lines in the next several years, a new analysis finds.

Failure to upgrade the state’s “backbone" system of high-voltage transmission lines, particularly along the Front Range, could lead Colorado toward a genuine energy crisis, according to a report issued this week by the Colorado Energy Forum, a non-profit education and research organization.

(...)

Several major transmission projects are under development in Colorado. For example, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Western Area Power Administration propose to construct the Eastern Plains Transmission Project, a 1,000-mile high-voltage transmission system across eastern and southern Colorado.

(...)

“Colorado faces a true crisis if we don’t see significant expansion of the state’s high-voltage transmission grid," Smith said. “Not only will we hamstring our ability to meet policymakers’ goal of deploying the state’s huge renewable energy resources, but we also may fall short of being able to get new power delivered to where it is needed. That situation could quickly escalate into a true crisis for Colorado consumers and for our economy."

http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/content/view/1761/2/

[Kolesar]

1. Or, a half a million homes in the Front Range towns could each put in 1kW of photovoltaics each

500 Megawatts during peak demand hours could be available to take the spike off of the daily demand curve.

[MH1]

2. No fair, using LOGIC like that. n/t

[NickB79]

3. How much does a 1kW PV system run these days?

Is it below $10K yet?

[Kolesar]

4. 960W for $8650 from this Ohio dealer, batteries included

solar backup 960W solar 2500W grid-tie inverter 4800Wh batteries expandable $8650
http://www.repowersolutions.com/solar.html

[NickB79]

7. This isn't meant to sound snarky, but do you think most homeowners can afford that?

Especially with all the other woes that are currently hitting the US economy?

[Kolesar]

8. That's a fair question. I think of it on the scale of other "conspicuous consumption"

Ten grand would be the difference between buying a "primo" car or SUV and buying a functional sedan for transportation. Plenty of people buy or finance a product like that. Ten grand could be a family vacation, certainly for the upper middle class, but they could buy a vacation like that every few years. Putting two kids through college could cost ten times that. I could finance a PV array with our wine budget.

Well, that's my opinion.

[NickB79]

12. You could finance a PV system with your WINE budget?

:wow: You and I live in entirely different worlds.

[Kolesar]

13. $100/month * 100 months

Eight bottles on the weekends and a few extra on weekdays. Note that this is for two people. In all fairness, that would probably finance a $6000 system over eight years.

[oldhippie]

14. $100 a MONTH?.....................

Man, what are you drinking? Boone's Farm? :-)

$100 a week is more like it for real wine.

[Kolesar]

15. Could further leverage our frugality by drinking beer and/or backpacker stove fuel

:beer:

[NMDemDist2]

11. sweet! and NM will pay back 30% of it too

:woohoo:

[MH1]

5. 500K x 10K = 2 weeks of US operations in Iraq

or thereabouts.

(I think - did I do the math right?)

[Kolesar]

6. $5 Billion/two weeks sounds high

But I see your point.

[MH1]

16. Burn rate in Iraq is over $10B per month,

according to op-ed by Lawrence Korb in today's Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/09/how_to_withdraw_quickly_and_safely/

I was just guessing from memory when I wrote that post but I guess I wasn't far off.

It does seem awfully high though, doesn't it?

[Kolesar]

24. I thought it was $5B or $6B/mo, but maybe the surge/escalation drove the cost up

I really liked that editorial. Newspapers should be running articles about the logistics of bringing our forces home.

Reminds me of when Hillary Clinton wrote to the Pentagon asking how a withdrawl would proceed and some AEI neocon wrote a nasty response saying that to even ask about withdrawl is harmful to the war on terror.

[FREEWILL56]

9. It all depends

If you have a battery backed gridtied system the efficiency is lower and costs a bit more than a straight gridtie system. Both types need the appropriate inverters, wires, fuses/breakers, etc. Do it yourself and you may save even more. Here's a link to some of the photovoltaic panels available and associated costs with each of them.
http://store.solar-electric.com/solarpanels.html
There is also a forum there if you want to learn even more of what's involved.
http://www.wind-sun.com/ForumVB/index.php

edit to add:

I almost forgot there is help for some people.
www.dsireusa.org
That usually involves more governmental stipulations and red tape, but in most cases it has to be inspected anyway as it must pass NEC standards.

[struggle4progress]

10. Una planta solar suministrará energía eléctrica a 40.000 casas de la comarca

Su construcción, en 300 hectáreas de la finca Guzmán, durará 2 años y generará 400 empleos. Está previsto que su ejecución se apruebe en septiembre y que las obras comiencen en el 2007.

09/03/2006 ELISA MANZANO

Una planta solar térmica abastecerá de electricidad a 40.000 viviendas de Palma del Río y de sus alrededores en el año 2009. La inversión de la empresa P&T Tecnología IbER, SLU generará 50 puestos de trabajo fijo durante su explotación y creará 400 empleos en el transcurso de la construcción de la planta. La inversión que la empresa hará en esta iniciativa, que tendrá una potencia nominal de 49,9 megawatios, asciende a 200 millones de euros. La planta solar térmica, llamada Soluz-Guzmán, ocupará 300 hectáreas de la finca Cortijo Guzmán, del término municipal palmeño. Actualmente, P&T, empresa filial de una multinacional alemana, ha obtenido la autorización administrativa del proyecto, que será adjudicado en marzo. La buena disposición del Ayuntamiento y la idoneidad del terreno han determinado la ubicación en Palma del Río ...

http://www.diariocordoba.com/noticias/noticia.asp?pkid=236593

[losthills]

17. Renewables can make power lines obsolete.

The best use of renewables is not to power the "grid." It's to power individual homes, neighborhoods and communities and to free us from the grid.

It just strikes me as wrong to build giant wind farms solar installations to power a grid that is a relic of a byegone era. Solar and wind power can be dispersed in smaller arrays and we could move beyond the frankensteinian model of circling the earth with giant power lines.

Everyone could have solar panels on their roofs, and every neighborhood a bank of wind turbines. Each house could have it's own bank of batteries and run their lights and basic systems on DC and turn on their inverter when they really need AC.

Anyone can do it on their own right now. Anyone who owns their own home can take out a home loan, or get their system financed from the company that sells them for about the cost of a new car.

You can have your own photovoltaic system, or your own wind turbine for around $20,000.00. It's no different from buying a new car or adding a bathroom. If you're not ready to disconnect from the grid, you can have it installed with a reverse meter and it will probably pay for itself in ten to twelve years. With that model we could keep the grid going without building giant power plants and miles of new transmission lines (But you loose one of the greatest advantages of renewables, which is storing power in batteries for later use.)

The correct way to think about renewables, in my mind, is to disperse them throughout the community, through individual ownership or cooperatives, until we have a level of saturation that enables us to shut down "The Grid."

Put Frankenstein to bed...

[FREEWILL56]

18. Individuals are already doing just that, but

you just don't hear much about it. Solar, wind, and hydro are very needed in this day and age, but overall it cannot supply all of our power needs, well at least not without a big change in our habits. I do fully agree in your dispelling of the notions that it must be in wind farms or solar farms and this is becuase people are used to getting the power all from a single source and then distributed. Furthermore, the power companies want you to think that way because it dispells you from producing some of your own power rather than buy theirs. The sad part of it all is that the power from the utilities is much cheaper than the renewable sources. A big advantage to having many smaller sources of power distributed around is that it relieves the strain on the grid system as less needs to go from point A where it's generated to point B where it is consumed, but most utilities are being forced to allow individuals to have renewable sources of power because the utilities resent not being in charge of it, making big profits from it, or owning it outright and they are making it very difficult at times for those that do have renewable sources of power. In fact, after you go through all of the trouble to save the planet at your big expense your local government comes by your home and says your home is now worth far more just because it can produce some power. Do note that not all places allow this as some have stopped the raising of taxes for those who have taken this plunge and it is a very expensive plunge and rarely does it even reach the point of payback in 20 years let alone the 10-12 years you've sited. BTW, when generating sites are spread out into many smaller ones instead of a few large ones, it would make it much more difficult for a terror attack to take out the whole system when physically attacking one generation point. Now software is another story as you may remember when a major part of the northeast went down a few years ago centering about the Niagra facillities and blame was placed onto one Ohio generating plant for the whole mess. I never bought that story.

[Dead_Parrot]

19. And what about the rest of it?

What about the steel, copper, aluminum and silicon smelters, the cement factories, the turbine production lines, the battery manufacturing & recycling plants, the telecomunication hubs, the hospitals, prisons and schools, the water and sewerage treatment plants, the food storage facilities, the factories for medicines, bicycles, Priuses, trains, clothing, paint, toothbrushes, CFL & LED lamps, inverters, pencils and paper, string, glass...

Do you plan on replicating all these things in your off-grid community?

Start small. Show us you can smelt 99.99% pure silicon at a community level using nothing but renewable energy, then we can talk about the rest.

[losthills]

20. People in my community are already doing it.

Sorry about your parrot....

[Dead_Parrot]

21. Really? Care to offer a link, or a name?

Or are we supposed to trust your impeccable track record?

[losthills]

22. Ask Uncle Dick...

That's where you get all your "information."

[Dead_Parrot]

23. Ahh, I thought so.

Just checking. :)