PG&E's - Latest heatwave Performance..

UncleDave

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Ca.
Pretty much a full blown failure. With random failures throughout adding up about like below.

Day-1 of the heatwave - out 5 hours
Day-2 - 9
Day-3 6

All due to " equipment"

Gotta hand it to my Kohler 20KW driving the 5 ton AC like a champ while keeping 3 fridges, laundry, dishes , well pump, septic pump, purification 3 ceiling fans, + houseful of computers on a 117 degree day. Its a really sweet 1000CC Twin.

I was pretty pleased to see still very gold oil and it only consumed about 1 MM of 5-30 still right at full after 50 total hours on this OCI/FCI.

Check out the nat gas bill so far so good on feeding it that way. The price per hour feels reasonable for what I got from it vs lugging 4-5 5ers of gasoline for something like 2 honda 7K's or a predator 9000, but of course nowhere near as sweet as a little diesel.


Screen Shot 2022-09-23 at 1.01.20 PM.png
 
How many natural gas plants did they have to shut down out there in the last 20 years ???

Hmmmm....... Quite a few...

How many nuclear power stations are there left running ???

Ahhh one.... At Diablo Canyon... And them champions just extended that one being open a bit longer.

So... Let's forcefully shut down power production plants then try to replace them with non reliable power production and no where near the productive capacity to replace the shut down plants.

This is the exact same loony tunes idea I saw at a hospital I worked at.

Where a group of world champions create a problem out of thin air.... And the resulting problem was a massive one that them idiots created in the first place.

Management decides to have no more "agency" staff from outside come to our facility. We will magically " hire our own agency" people and then use them.

Well... The mental midget morons never hired enough of our own " agency" staff. Then they went ahead with their no outside " agency staff" edict. Put that in place as "the rule"...

Yeah... People got way, way overworked and overwhelmed at the hospital. People quit .. and kept quitting. Because we were so short on staff.

Eventually the moron leadership realized just how desperate things had become... And we finally ended that nonsense and brought back in "outside agency staff".

Looney tunes... Both these are perfect example of that.
 
Let a power company produce power in a real effective manner that a) actually works and has far, far, far, far more energy density b) and is reliable no matter what the weather is and c) has the ability to adjust power production NIGHT or day.
 
Blackouts occur for two reasons:
- planned events
- unplanned events

Planned event blackouts shoud be rare; a power company should be able to re-route transmission and distribution to elimintate (or at least greatly reduce) the disruption to customers. If it's equipment R&R, they should be able to plan ahead and be "ready" for quick actions. Planned blackouts should not last for 20 hours over three days.

Unplanned event blackouts are probably more common, unfortunately. Lack of proper upkeep and/or poor planning for demand increases for decades leads to outdated equipment and unreliable supply, all of which fails unpredicably (and also makes response time longer).

And to make matters worse, as I recall (and correct me if I'm wrong), PGE will occasionally shut off power on purpose simply because of high-wind days in certain regions. I believe the story goes that one of the massive CA fires was a result of a PGE transmission line being blown down, and catching the dry vegetation on fire. Because PGE was sued for that event, their mitigation response now is simply to shut off power when high winds will occur in certain high-risk areas. Because of this, the origin of the power (nat gas, coal, wind, solar, nuke) doesn't even matter! They will still shut off power in high-wind days regardless of the way the energy is produced! Maybe this does not happen often, but the fact that it happens at all means the distribution system is not reliable and needs updated.

I fail to understand how a state is so Hades-bent to commit to electrical-only systems of the future, when they cannot even manage the demad they have currently. I'm not debating the merits of Green; that's not my point. It's literally a matter of having the cart in front of the horse ... How can anyone believe they will survive comfortably when they cannot get reliable power now, and yet plan to greatly increase the demand in the very near future?
 
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5 ton AC for California. That's a big house ya got there.

You guys are lucky CA is doing something silly like trying to build 10 new nuclear plants.
 
5 ton AC for California. That's a big house ya got there.

You guys are lucky CA is doing something silly like trying to build 10 new nuclear plants.

Its a super common size.
This particular unit Is both variable capacity and speed and most often runs at about 1/3 capacity.
With the new roof Im going to predict 50% less usage overall.
 
How does therms and running economies compare to gas or diesel?

im sure your scheme will be outlawed soon..l

Diesel is till the king, especially red diesel, but this is cheaper than gasoline and a ton more convenient.

Tough to make a direct comparison.
 
Diesel is till the king, especially red diesel, but this is cheaper than gasoline and a ton more convenient.

Tough to make a direct comparison.
Of course it is. We have tons of experience with that in the VI where one actually has to rely upon their genset sometimes for months…

But a therm is an energy unit, like a gallon of gas or diesel, and the thermal efficiency of the engine on a fuel/the SFC should be available.

Then we can compare.
 
5 ton AC for California. That's a big house ya got there.

You guys are lucky CA is doing something silly like trying to build 10 new nuclear plants.

California is SHY 10 nuclear plants' worth of capacity on any given day. They're going to build "10 new nuclear plants"?? That might work....

In 20 more years, the population might have declined 30% or more (we won't count the folks coming across the border), so when those 10 new plants can be commissioned in 2052, they might only have a 10% shortfall in capacity.

But wait, all cars will be EV by then, sooooo.....
 
California is SHY 10 nuclear plants' worth of capacity on any given day. They're going to build "10 new nuclear plants"?? That might work....

In 20 more years, the population might have declined 30% or more (we won't count the folks coming across the border), so when those 10 new plants can be commissioned in 2052, they might only have a 10% shortfall in capacity.

But wait, all cars will be EV by then, sooooo.....
Could be more or less. The US only has around 93 which produce approx 20 percent total power. Extrapolate that out to whatever percentage you want. There's no way the US is going to commission 100 new nuke plants let alone 10 in California.
 
Of course it is. We have tons of experience with that in the VI where one actually has to rely upon their genset sometimes for months…

But a therm is an energy unit, like a gallon of gas or diesel, and the thermal efficiency of the engine on a fuel/the SFC should be available.

Then we can compare.
A high level comparison is easy -

I used about 6.1 therms of NG for power generation I paid about 17 dollars for.

Using a variety of on line tools that works out to about 5.2 gallons - of which would cost me 5.5 a gallon or about 26.8 plus the time and expesnse and effort to go get it and dump it into a tank.

getting into more details - the gasoline genset would probably be more efficient simply because of energy density, but would depend on what unit I had but in a straightforward comparison the setup I have is cheaper, and a whole lot easier to live with.
It was 117 that day - how would a gasoline unit have held up?- probably fine but it is a question.

The only gasoline unit I had that made this much power was a winco PTO setup driven by an oliver tractor.

This unit - burns 1.27 GPH at half load - so it would have definitely cost more to run that day.

www.centralmainediesel.com/order/Ford-20-kW-Gasoline-Generator.asp?page=F01709
 
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Could be more or less. The US only has around 93 which produce approx 20 percent total power. Extrapolate that out to whatever percentage you want. There's no way the US is going to commission 100 new nuke plants let alone 10 in California.

There's starting to be some pretty loud pushback about all the power companies across the US asking for rate increases.

This is only the beginning and it's nothing compared to what's coming in the next 5 years. I'm not sure more than 100 people in the US understand how bad off the current electrical grid infrastructure is, how much demand is coming and how much it's going to cost the consumer.
 
California is SHY 10 nuclear plants' worth of capacity on any given day. They're going to build "10 new nuclear plants"?? That might work....

In 20 more years, the population might have declined 30% or more (we won't count the folks coming across the border), so when those 10 new plants can be commissioned in 2052, they might only have a 10% shortfall in capacity.

But wait, all cars will be EV by then, sooooo.....
My gut feeling is California population has peeked due to home prices and cost of living. The low cost labors have already moved out which is why many of the restaurants etc can't find people to work. According to a friend who owns a boba tea place, they need to pay $21/hr to keep even the kids who don't know how to sweep floor, translate to about $8-10/cup of beverage.

These population don't move out of US, they are going to tax the grid the same way whether they are in CA or Oregon or Nevada.
 
There's starting to be some pretty loud pushback about all the power companies across the US asking for rate increases.

This is only the beginning and it's nothing compared to what's coming in the next 5 years. I'm not sure more than 100 people in the US understand how bad off the current electrical grid infrastructure is, how much demand is coming and how much it's going to cost the consumer.

Pretty much everyone in Nor cal knows how bad it is. We've lived it brutally the last few years.

Other places and utilities are better - DWP was way better than PGE so it isnt equal, but where its bad - its really bad.
 
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