Electricity Price Increases

[ponytug]

Didn't Portugal and Spain just have a huge power outage when the wind dropped and it stayed cloudy for a long time?
Yes they did.

No, sorry, but the outage was caused by human incompetence in the system managers. Not surprisingly, it took them awhile to fess up.

All the best,

Peter

 

[WinterDeere]

Didn't Portugal and Spain just have a huge power outage when the wind dropped and it stayed cloudy for a long time?
Yes they did.

No. It was actually the opposite. Outage was caused by excessive voltage. There were no reports of insufficient power to the grid due to lack of supply, up to and including the time of the outage.

Bad implementation followed by bad management, not bad technology.

edit: sorry for redundant post... just saw @ponytug already posted the same.

 

[MossRoad]

Yep, read all about it.

2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Also, look at the weather there that day.... it was beautiful.

what was the weather like on the iberian peninsula On Monday, 28 April 2025 right before the blackout?


On Monday, April 28, 2025, just before the Iberian Peninsula blackout, the weather was
sunny, mild, and calm, with no extreme weather events reported. Early media speculation about a "rare atmospheric phenomenon" causing the power outage was denied by electricity officials and later attributed to a misunderstanding. The blackout was ultimately attributed to a surge in voltage within the electricity grid, not weather.

Weather before the blackout

• The blackout occurred at 12:33 CEST, or 11:33 WEST, in the early afternoon.
• The morning was described as a "normal Monday" with a "particularly nice: a sunny, mild spring" forecast.
• Reports from energy analysts confirmed that there was nothing unusual about the weather in Iberia on that day.
• A weather forecast for Monaco on April 28 described a sunny morning in the region, with afternoon thunderstorms expected in the nearby Alpes-Maritimes department of France. However, this was unrelated to the cause of the blackout in Spain and Portugal.

 

[kenmbz]

yet, from the local authorities:
Authorities have already taken steps, such as updating operational procedures to allow renewable energy sources to contribute more to voltage control, to prevent similar incidents in the future.

I love when government people contradict themselves.
They had a temperature increase the days leading up to the outage.

 

[WinterDeere]

I love when government people contradict themselves.
They had a temperature increase the days leading up to the outage.

First instinct of any government official or spokesperson is always CYA. They can adjust the facts to fit the story, later.

I'm not pretending wind is a flawless resource, but like everything else, just one more tool in the box.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

The issue isn't that wind doesn't work, it's the way it works. South Dakota is a great place for wind but when you get 39% of your power from wind that means that some of the time you get 100% from wind and other times you depend on other sources which could have operated almost 100% of the time. This means the capital cost of those other sources has to be recovered from a smaller amount of total generation, raising the overall cost of electricity. The math is pretty simple.

Natural gas is not free. Fossil fuel power eats more than it takes to build it. A wind turbine pays for itself in ~8 years. Fossil fuel power never does.

 

[WinterDeere]

The issue isn't that wind doesn't work, it's the way it works. South Dakota is a great place for wind but when you get 39% of your power from wind that means that some of the time you get 100% from wind and other times you depend on other sources which could have operated almost 100% of the time. This means the capital cost of those other sources has to be recovered from a smaller amount of total generation, raising the overall cost of electricity. The math is pretty simple.

I don’t follow the argument. Do you actually believe that any sane person has proposed getting 90% of our power from wind? Are you under some impression that we get such a large fraction of our energy from any single source, today?!?

Take anything to the point of absurdity, and you can make an argument against it, but that doesn’t make for intelligent conversation.

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

Wind power, The amount of power produce by renewable energy can be approximated by percentage of available up time. Around 22% some sites have 30%
Renewables will never provide base load power.

The link below allows you to click on any power plant to see its output and percentage of uptime. Wether Hydro, nuke, gas, solar or wind.
Edit: the link is an interactive map of the US power system producers.

Experience

 

[orezok]

Fortunately, I have solar (wonderful here in the desert). I just got my bill and it was $1.71 for the last month. Thats hard to beat considering Cali’s high rates.

 

[ultrarunner]

Since my 6kW array went live my only expense is the monthy meter fee around $15

My annual True Up check covers a year’s worth of meter fees and then some.

This may change as the equity push for solar to pay impact fees gains traction.

Sister in laws brother opted out of utility electricity during the build… the cost to run PGE did not pencil out when a neighbor rescinded permission for the underground feeder line which meant on a very long underground path many many times longer.