Xebec
Well-known member
+1 - Permanently (30+ years) reducing your home energy bill is also a form of 'diversification' of invested assets..
AI data centers are forcing dirty ‘peaker’ power plants back into service
- Thread starter Daniel Nenni
- Start date
+1 - Permanently (30+ years) reducing your home energy bill is also a form of 'diversification' of invested assets..
From everything I’m seeing it’s both:
"We're going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars, it will be paid for by the oil companies directly. And we're going to get the oil flowing the way it should be," President Trump said in a public address on Saturday following the attack, in which the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
Even if the oil industry pays for the repairs and new capacity, US military spending is the off-books subsidy enabling that. Conversely, I don’t think we have any US military fighting for solar or wind installs in the world do we ?
Yep, that's not too far from my place, I enjoy going out there by the Pinnacles and Ballarat and driving by the little town of Trona where they have the only high school with an all dirt football field! That plant's still running and, well, there's no major population centers around there so nobody to complain and protest about keeping it running I guess. Cement plants by Tehachapi and Mojave not too far but fortunately, makes no impact on the air in my area but when you drive by their operations, you can see how the buildings are just covered in soot!
Spot on!Looks like there is still one captive (non-utility) coal-fired steam and electricity plant in CA, that is used to produce soda ash.
Argus Cogeneration Plant
Argus Cogeneration Plant is a 62.5-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power station owned and operated by Nirma - an Indian multinational chemicals and minerals corporation - near Trona, California. The plant provides power to Nirma's Searles Valley Minerals soda ash processing facility.www.gem.wiki
But when it comes to utility electricity generation, coal is long gone in CA. And even out-of-state imported electricity from coal is gone as well.
In-state coal generation
• California’s last in-state coal units were retired years ago, with the last in 2014, under state greenhouse gas and performance standards, leaving zero operating coal plants within state borders.
• Recent overviews of the state’s generation mix note that there are no coal-fired plants in operation in California’s current fleet.
Coal power imports
• Historically, California utilities contracted for coal power from out-of-state plants such as the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, and San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico.
• By late 2025, California had ended those coal import arrangements; Intermountain’s coal units that served Southern California shut down and the plant is being converted to gas/hydrogen, and current summaries state that coal power is no longer imported into California’s portfolio.
As noted, there are still some private (non-utility) industrial plants using coal, but only a handful that have to be phased out by 2045.
Power/industrial cogeneration
• Argus Cogeneration Plant (Trona, San Bernardino County) – An industrial cogeneration facility at the Searles Valley minerals operation; EIA notes this as the only site where coal still fuels a small amount of in‑state net generation, with coal delivered by rail from out of state.
Cement plants using coal/petcoke for heat
• CalPortland Redding cement plant (near Redding, Shasta County) – Reported as using a mix of coal, petroleum coke, tires, and natural gas for kiln fuel.
• Other California cement plants – Sector-wide analyses (not always naming each plant) indicate that major producers such as CalPortland, Lehigh Hanson, and CEMEX operate California kilns that historically rely primarily on coal and petroleum coke for process heat.
I don't see it as an oil subsidy...well, one that wouldn't help the US in any way. WTI's at $57 per barrel right now. Not really sustainable for domestic producers to stay in business at those prices. There's no need for oil prices to go down further, it'll just hurt Americans producers more, $60-$70 per barrel seems to be the ideal price per barrel for oil companies to be somewhat profitable while we still get cheap gas. Any higher, great for oil companies, worse for consumers, any lower, put on brakes for new wells which is necessary for tight oil ops while...are any of you guys bitching about gas price outside of California?
Trump says a lot of things out of his arse, I don't know what he means by taking over or taking control of Venezuela's oil reserves, but if history is any indication, Venezuela will figure out how to slap together a government, they'll auction out regions for exploration and take royalties from whatever is produced...like any other oil development around the world. We're not magically going to get free oil from Venezuela which seems to be the conclusion many (not saying anyone on here!) are suggesting, Orinoco Belt heavy crude isn't exactly cheap or easy to produce either, they'll have to invest easily tens of billions to modernize wells and refineries and bring up production to the rates they had decades ago.
Yeah, dust is a complete non issue. Never had problems with it, and I tried several experiments coating my panels with dust and sand to see what the impact is on output. It's on the order of a few percent. Panel cleaning services are just modern day snake oil salesmen IMO. If it's a little dirty, just grab a garden hose and spray it, not even worth the effort to scrub or wipe anything off. Never washed thereafter and same, years of data shows negligible impact for myself as well. I've seen studies showing it can be an issue in parts of China/India/Middle East/Northern Africa where PM10 numbers are off the charts and dust storms literally dump several millimeters of dust on everything, but I don't know of anywhere in the US that has a similar scenario...and even those studies suggested something like a maximum of 15% reduction from the dust on the panels alone, more of the reduction was from the solar irradiance reduction from the dust itself in the air. I don't see them cleaning the solar farms in California and a handful of them publish their monthly output figures, very little variance outside of the usual lengthening/shortening of the days...
I'm curious how much the military operation itself cost. Considering a day of the US military's existence costs nearly $3 billion dollars and how costly training exercises are, did we actually spend anything beyond normal operations for Maduro's ouster? And oil prices are determined by international markets, Canada provides over half of our imports, would it...or does it make sense to drastically increase imports from Venezuela? My only thought process is, since we had so many protestors complain about running a pipeline down in the Midwest to bring Athabascan crude down to the refineries in the gulf, maybe bringing in more from Venezuela would offset that or provide additional diversity to our supplies? We brought in nearly 1.5 billion barrels from Canada and around 50 million barrels from Venezuela last year, do we have shipping vessel capacity to divert sources like that? Look at the long timescales for EU trying to divert gas from Russia to the Middle East/US with infrastructure and vessel orders, the calculus is a little easier with Venezuelan crude but what real benefits does it bring? Keep in mind WCS from Canada is just $44 a barrel at the moment. Is it only oil? Or perhaps cartel activity and illicit transhipment of narcotics was a factor? Or stemming the tide of nearly 8 million Venezuelans that have fled the country in the past decade? The oppression and humanitarian crisis under Maduro's leadership? What I don't like is distilling these events and actions to singular causes, things are always more complicated than that.
As for the military fighting for solar and wind, that gave me a good chuckle! Just two years of the US military budget would be enough for 2 terawatts of deployed utility scale solar in the US, good enough to wean ourselves off fossil fuels for electricity generation. I'm being a little reductionist with my numbers not factoring storage, but it's a fun mental exercise in numbers!
A friend who lurks on this forum texted me this link last night. It made me laugh, as intended. You so-called experts are so misguided! Don't you know? You need to clean solar panels 2-4 times per year.
I'm forwarding some excerpts from the posts here to my neighbors, so that they can stop worrying about cleaning until there's a noticeable problem. If panels don't need to be cleaned in PHX, they probably don't need it regularly anywhere.
I’m just taking Trump’s explanations at how it’s going to improve things inside the US at face value - it’s about stopping drug trafficking (cocaine, not fentanyl if you look at the allegations against Maduro), and a greater flow of oil. But the early beneficiaries are more likely to be US oil companies vs the US public. He really hasn’t played up the return of Venezuelan immigrants, partially because many probably won’t want to go back until they have a functioning country again.
I only have a teeny system compared to your, but it was relatively inexpensive when I contracted it back in 2012 ($15k) - it's paid for itself about 3 times over already. Had it washed about 3 times during the 13 years of operation so far - only one of those gave a substantial boost, at the start of 2021, after the big fires in 2020 in NorCal. Have some construction going on now, that has taken the remote Tesla/SolarCity monitoring offline since mid-2025, but I can still see via local measurement system.
I have a teeny system compared to you. But it was relatively inexpensive back in 2012 when I contracted for it ($15K). Had it cleaned something like 3 times over the past 13 years of operation.
This is awesome. Grid-scale CO2 bubble batteries. Google is going to deploy them. Less compact, but overall better for the environment than lithium ion batteries.
spectrum.ieee.org
This Giant Bubble in Sardinia Stores Energy for the Grid. Here's How.
Google is betting big on CO2 batteries to power its data centers with clean energy.
spectrum.ieee.org
Xebec
Well-known member
I like alternatives like this, though it'll be interesting to see the real costs after it's in service for a while. The Chinese have really brought stationary battery storage prices down tremendously with LFP. (LFP batteries are also cobalt free).This is awesome. Grid-scale CO2 bubble batteries. Google is going to deploy them. Less compact, but overall better for the environment than lithium ion batteries.
This Giant Bubble in Sardinia Stores Energy for the Grid. Here's How.
Google is betting big on CO2 batteries to power its data centers with clean energy.
That's true for any large complex technology. You don't really know the total cost of ownership until it's been deployed for a while.
Perhaps Google will publish a comparative cost analysis with batteries once they get a few bubbles deployed.