I was told that effectively Natural gas isn’t a issue, since it is often a by product of oil drilling and thus you have three choices:
Use it
Burn it off (really bad)
Let it escape into the atmosphere (also bad).
How true is that?
Here is a relevant John Oliver segment:
Ah. Well in my neighborhood the wire utilities are on poles, like God intended. 
Natural gas released unburnt into the atmosphere, is a BIG issue for global warming. Natural gas is approximately 30 times as bad as CO2 (technically greenhouse gas potential). So letting it escape into the atmosphere is 30 times worse than burn it.
The best use of Natural Gas (from a greenhouse gas perspective ) is to make hydrogen or power but capture the released Carbon Dioxide. This is called blue hydrogen.
Natural gas can be a by product but often it is one of the product or the product from drilling.
We have buried wiring, but upgrading our panel from 200A to 400A was 1 day and $8K.
The buried access box at the street already had 400A available, and it was only necessary to “mole” from there to the new (huge) breaker box.
SCE & PG&E were supposed to be taking those down and replacing with buried lines, but of course they’d rather pay dividends that do something constructive.
So after starting a lot of very destructive and deadly brushfires, they now just cut the power off to consumers with pole power lines during high winds.
Thanks! About what I heard, but not quite.
Windmills produce that for 4 to 6 hours (at night) and then stop or produce significantly less. Big fossil fuel or nuclear power plants do not like to be turned on and off like that.
Boilers are tubes containing steam - they need to be heated slowly and cooled slowly. Often the startup times are in days. Its like your favorite cast iron frying pan, when it is hot and if you try to cool it abruptly with water, it will crack.
The utilities are not trying to rip you off. Allowing Solar Panel folks to put power back on the grid, makes the people with No Solar Power subsidize the solar panel folks.
Allow me to give you an example.
Say Tom and Ray decide to build individual houses and go off grid. Say they build houses half a mile apart. Lets say that the peak requirement is 100kW for each of them. Lets look at 3 cases :
- Case 1 - Tom and Ray each buy 100kW generators and live happily,
- Case 2 - Tom buys a 100kW generator and lives happily. Ray buys a 100kW Solar Panel but only has power when the sun shines. Ray is not happy.
- Case 3 - Ray wants power all the time. He buys a 200kW Solar panel - and uses 100kW for himself and gives Tom 100kW when the sun is shining. But he makes Tom buy a 200kW generator. So when the Sun is not shining, Tom is making 200 kW ; using 100 kW for himself and giving Ray 100kW.
But Tom says : Hey I didn’t need to buy this big 200kW generator, I was happy with my 100 kW generator. Tom is subsidizing Ray’s solar panel.
The capacity factor for land turbines installed after 2014 is 41%.
We generated 39.2 quads of electricity in 2011 and 36.6 in 2021. Meanwhile we use over 24 quads of petroleum for vehicles. So there’s not much spare capacity compared to the potential need.
[“it” = natural gas]
Sometimes gas is the byproduct. Sometimes oil is the byproduct. It depends on the play. IIRC EIA defines the threshold for calling something an oil vs gas well as 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas per barrel of oil. States may use a different definition.
Why doesn’t wind have inherent inertia? The electrical power comes from a spinning generator.
Actually, if the solar power is from focusing sunlight onto a boiler to power a generator, then, same question.
Perhaps the ratio of angular momentum to electrical power is lower for these than for fossil fuel generators or hydroelectric dams? A low value of (kg-m2/s)/W, I guess, speaking of accursed units.
It is a messy question. It all comes back to the core problem of frequency stability. Wind generators don’t turn at a fixed rate, so somewhere in the system there is a conversion of frequency. This can be done in a number of clever ways, for instance driving the field coils of each generator at such a frequency that the combined effect is the correct frequency. The question is “how does the wind generator know exactly what frequency to run at?” It has to have the frequency exactly right (and the phase just right) otherwise it all goes pear shaped. So generators slave themselves to the grid. This goes for wind and solar, and actually everything else. (There is a chicken and egg problem, but we aren’t concerned with that.)
So, if everybody is slaving themselves to the grid, how is the grid stable at all? Well the big traditional rotating iron generators do have a lot of inertia, and they take significant time to both speed up and slow down, and they are directly coupled to the grid (no clever frequency converters) so they are charged with the task of keeping the pace nice and even. All the other generating devices - including wind and solar, but also things like high voltage DC interconnectors, slave to the frequency they see on the grid. (You can see why stability is so important here, it isn’t hard for everything to get out of whack, and it all ends in tears.)
Now wind and solar and the like can provide stability, but they need a separate control channel to exactly pace them. They need a local clock and a very well orchestrated control system that keeps everyone in check. So you get to things like GPS synchronised time or very stable clocks, and an agreed control protocol linking everyone together. That protocol needs to be very robust if these generators are providing inertia. If the system fails the individual generators can drop back to slaving their generation frequency off the grid, but they then can’t provide inertia again. If the protocol goes wrong, the entire grid can fail as everyone disconnects to protect themselves.
Then indeed it could.
And there’s another undocumented cost of EV ownership! Wake up, sheeple.
We had a manager in our office building who had all the light switches on the floors removed. You had to call security to get the lights turned on/off (there were of course scheduled times that covered most cases). He was trying to drive cost out of his budget - when you requested the lights on, it was charged to your organization. I’m pretty sure that 20 years later the cost of the new wiring has yet to be recouped (I think the lights are on much less at night, so there were some real savings).
No, the best use is option 4 that @DrDeth didn’t mention: Use less petroleum, so you never get the by-product gas at all.
As for stability, there’s stability at many different timescales. On timescales of days or longer, you can always fire up the boiler-based plants, so stability isn’t really an issue. On timescales of a second or so, the literal inertia of spinning metal can do the trick. For timescales in between, you’ve got a problem you need to solve, and there are many different solutions: It could be inductors, or flywheels, or capacitors, or batteries, or quick-response generators, or pumped storage, or probably a bunch of others I don’t know about.
Also note that stability doesn’t scale linearly with installed power capacity. Put one windmill on your grid, and it’s pretty unstable, because sometimes the wind is blowing, and sometimes it’s not. Put in ten thousand windmills, scattered across the continent, and there’s more instability, but not ten thousand times as much, because the wind doesn’t start and stop blowing at all places at the same time. Those ten thousand windmills will only have about a hundred times as much instability as a single windmill, or one hundredth the instability per total power.
Personal anecdote. This was around 2008, we had completed the engineering for converting a power generation facility which was burning fuel oil, to natural gas with 80% co2 capture. All but one stages of funding were complete and the final stage was with the Board.
At the Board meeting, someone brought along a scientist who said that the best is Option 4 : Use green Hydrogen and go totally green. The Board gave the scientist a paltry 100k as a research grant and put the 40 million dollar project on hold.
The messaging was “ We are investing in science to find the totally green solution before switching from fuel oil”
The plant is still operating on fuel oil!!
The lesson for green energy supporters is to not wait for the perfect green solution but go with the existing technology. Blue hydrogen and grey hydrogen are a lot better than coal and fuel oil and NGL. IPCC recommendations are also aligned with this.
This is also why many corporations are pledging to be Net 0 either now or in the near future. This makes the use current technologies and not wait for the perfect Option 4.
Wind is not scattered around the continent. It is actually in a narrow band that runs through the middle of NA
Do not have the time to address each of these things mentioned, but many of these power storage options do not scale well.
For example : flywheels were evaluated for use in home power storage but they needed to be spun at high speeds 50,000 rpm or such. And the risks associated with such a wheel coming loose (mechanical folks could not guarantee the integrity to the safety levels desired) was devastating. You won’t find fly wheels for storing solar power at home.
I never said “at home”. Most stability-storage solutions are best implemented at the utility level. As to which of them turn out to be the most practical, I don’t know, but flywheels are at least one option that has been explored, and there are probably at least a few pilot projects out there using them.
And yes, I did say “across the continent”. Sure, there’s more wind in the stack of states on the Great Plains, but that’s no reason to not also put in windmills in the rest of the country. Going by that map, wind speeds in most of the country are within a factor of 2ish of those best areas, anyway.
A factor of 2 is a huge deal, though. Power for a turbine goes up with the cube of wind speed.
Still, at least in the west, there are plenty of individual locations with decent wind speeds. And there’s also offshore.
We really need to beef up the grid with high capacity HVDC lines. The technology has been around for decades, and is in use in some places in the US (and all over the place in China). We just need to build more of it.
It’s true that big power plants don’t like to do anything other than be run at 100% power all the time, which is why smaller power plants (sometimes called peaker plants) that are generally gas turbine driven will cycle on and off when necessary. These smaller plants are far less efficient than the big always-on plants but serve their purpose supplementing the grid during peak usage. Currently, this is the niche that solar and wind power operates in. When the wind blows, they supplement the electrical grid. If the power isn’t needed locally it can be routed wherever it is needed, and now an inefficient peaker plant is unnecessary. As solar and wind power becomes more common it will continue to augment the grid to the point where we require fewer large backbone power plants, and hopefully eventually we require none.
Additionally, another benefit of electric vehicles is they are normally charged overnight, when demand is lower and electricity is cheaper. Shifting energy demand to nighttime will have the effect of smoothing out peaks and valleys in electrical demand, which in turn will make inefficient peaker plants less necessary.