The new job

[Matt]

I was wondering...Are the oil prices having any affect on your situation?

Not yet. Projects that are started have to be completed. Sustained low price might have the 2nd half of the year looking bleak.

[Borealis]

I was wondering...Are the oil prices having any affect on your situation?

Not yet. Projects that are started have to be completed. Sustained low price might have the 2nd half of the year looking bleak.

I had been thinking the same thing...

[Alleghenies]

Hey Matt,

I was at an ERCOT training seminar all weekend for the Transmission Operators here in Texas. We have a couple lectures about the Eagle Ford Shale area and the reliability issues of the electric grid down in that region due to all the expansion and was wondering if that is where you do all your driving now.

Apparently, that part of the grid is only built for 50 MW transmission, and with the very limited generation down south, we have to bring in all the power from elsewhere, you guys need like something over 200 MW right now down in that area. It also makes voltage control very hard because bringing on extra reactive resources causes the guys to exceed their thermal limits.

To help put it in perspective, they showed us satellite images at night, that whole area is lit up as much as Austin and San Antonio. It is crazy the expansion down there, even with the lower oil prices.

Anyway, I suspect that is where you were and was just curious as we I just has a lecture on that area.

The other highlights of my week have been "How to design your screens for maximizing situational awareness", "The dangers of renewable energy" and "Summer Weather Forecast for Texas". (80% chance of being cooler than average temperatures they say).

[Evas]

I am curious about the "The dangers of renewable energy".

Was it a presentation on wind turbines delivered by a bird?

[Leones]

That had me scratching my head too. :) Perhaps a lecture on how one does not want to get caught up in that whole supernova thing where the heavier elements such as uranium are produced?

From a strict physics point of view energy is not renewable just conserved.

[Denny]

Maybe it's the dangers to the livelihoods of those who work in the non-renewable energy field.

[Matt]

I mostly work in the Eagle Ford shale, usually around Cotulla. It's been a bit slower there recently for us, so working out in the Permian right now, around Pecos, Tx. Should be back in Cotulla next week.

The building that has gone on there is nuts. It's a strain on all the infrastructure. We have 40 ton sand trucks running up back roads that were built 50 years ago for pickup trucks. Needless to say, we are tearing the shit out of the roads. It is estimated the Eagle Ford shale area needs over a billion dollars in road work right now.

Hotels have gone up everywhere. Guys come down here to work, need a place to sleep. And your going to pay 130 a night if the hotel has an available room. Cotulla, where I work, was a dusty little town that you would completely miss if you blinked going down I-35 just 4 yrs ago. Now it has 3 truck stops, a dozen or more hotels, and shitloads of truck traffic. Fast food places opening all over the place, building still going on everywhere. It's nuts.

But what happens when the shale dries up? Those towns are going to go bust just as fast as they boomed. It's already slowing down a lot down there, and price competition is getting fierce in the oil services sector. We have some slow days now, and some periods where we are down completely a day or two with nothing to do. It's a tough environment in oil right now. Still making a decent wage, but we need oil prices to go up to get the business to pick up.

[Alleghenies]

Thanks for the insight Matt. I figured that is where you were at.

Regarding the dangers of renewable energy, I guess I should have explained that topic further. It is actually a serious problem.

One of the largest problems is that solar and wind power will never be as stable as other types of generation. It just isn't stable. When you have all the momentum of a generator fed by steam, it can easily absorb blips in the grid because of all that momentum, however, with the forever changing wind speed and the solar being converted from dc to ac, there is just so good it can get. Trying to regulate voltage with the farms is not fun. Not to mention the fact that they are not regulated, so any joe schmoe can be at their operations center. Then you try to call them when suffering from high voltage and ask them to take in 50 MVAR of reactive loading to help reduce voltage, the typical response you get is "You want me to do what now?" Don't have that problem at generation plants.

The most obvious and largest problem is electrical reserves. For every MW of energy supplied by renewable, we still have to have that same amount on the grid in various forms ready to go, because it turns out that wind speed and sunlight are highly variable, so the coal/gas/nuclear plants still all have to stay online or at the ready (spinning reserves) they call them, or else face large rolling brown/black outs. To make matters worse, the wind always blows the most at night, when the grid needs the least help. For solar power, even one simple cloud can reek havoc. With the way solar panels work, something like a 10% blockage in sunlight causes a 40-50% reduction in output.

So in conclusion, the more solar/wind we bring on the grid, it really isn't solving any problems. Not to mention all the bigger, stable power plants that are now told to back off their output, reducing their profit but they still have to be available to pick up the slack from renewable energy.

[Matt]

I thought about this after the fact the other night, but part of what you might be seeing on the satellite maps is the flares at night. They are burning off so much excess natural gas it's absolutely mind boggling.

I think the direction renewables have gone in has been the absolutely wrong approach. But that's the fault of capitalism. It's been left almost entirely up to big business, which has one simple motive, profit.

It has already been established that you can build a home, that, through a combination of proper design and the use of renewables, can be entirely energy self-sufficient. In fact, there are designs available where the home can actually use LESS power than it generates.

So why isn't it being done? Because outside of the original manufacturer of the home, no one else profits. If your not paying a $300 a month utility bill, utility companies become nearly obsolete. So what we end up with instead are wind farms and solar panel farms, which still allow the utilities to make handsome profits. (And both of which, due to their size, pose massive dangers to birds.) And utility companies are fighting tooth and nail to make it as cost prohibitive as possible for people to install solar or other renewables on their homes. Legislation has already been passed in some states raising taxes on solar installations or creating unnecessary bogus fees and permits in order to do an installation.

We have heard so much talk in recent years about how stressed and obsolete our power grid is, and how many billions (trillions?) of dollars it needs in order to be upgraded, yet the solution is right there. No power grid. Eliminate it through the use of renewables. But that's not going to happen in our lifetimes because corporations control the world, and if there is no profit in it for them, it isn't getting done.

[Evas]

I wouldn't be so pessimistic on people getting off the grid in the long term, Matt. It is slower going that a most would like, but it is definitely moving in that direction.

The biggest reason it isn't happening now is just the cost. It could easily run a family $20,000 for solar cells to power their house. But that only works during the day, if you live in an area with enough sunlight. The prices continue to come down, but for now, it just doesn't make sense for most people. Yet.

A big jump will be when home energy storage become simple and economical. Tesla is rumored to be entering that market soon with a home battery pack that would allow people to either buy electricity late at night when it is cheaper or store energy produced by solar or wind during they day. Once that starts to happen and the cost of it starts to come down, it will be come more and more wide spread.

It is already happening, just in slow motion.

[Alleghenies]

Yeah, I know from back when I was working as a field engineer with GE, they were working on a storage solution for commercial wind farms.

The bottom line is our technology just isn't there yet. Solar panels are getting better and cheaper, but it just isn't good enough for most to buy it for their homes yet when the investment would take 20 years to pay for itself.

Solar panels on a roof of a house are another safety concern. Most fire departments have a policy to just let your house burn if you have solar panels on the roof. If the sun is out, there is no way to turn off the power with solar so most firefighters would rather just not make the situation worse by also causing an electrical fire. Sure, there would be a disconnect switch for your house, but the roof will still be live.