Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

yes, i found similar data for the daily usage profile.
regarding generating costs, it hard to get solid reliable data, but if you assume the info in that " eia" table is not too distorted , then you can crunch some rough comparisons for construction and operating costs for new plant..
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/po ... table1.xls
Strangely, the variable operating costs ( fuel mainly) are not the biggest factor, but capital/installation costs amortized over the operating lifespan are much more influential on the final unit cost.
you have to make some assumptions as to the effective useful operating life, but there is info around for existing coal and gas systems. ( 30 -40 years) ... Solar and Wind are more of a guess with limited data, but 20 years would be a good run for that technology.
you also have to remember to compare equivalent output capacity ..GWh/yr and include whatever storage costs that may require.
My own "back of the envelope" estimates put the Gas CC systems well down at or below 2c/kWh,
..and Solar + storage up at 5+ c/kWh
I suspect there are many in government and influential positions who do not have a good understanding of the hard facts.

EDIT .. just picked up your linked video..
I guess the summary is you can get away with solar without storage , providing you have enough conventional supply to fill in when renewable s are not available ! ..

Two interesting (and pertinent) articles on this.
====================
World's biggest coal company closes 37 mines as solar power's influence grows

Plummeting price of renewable energy puts pressure on fossil fuel firms

Harriet Agerholm
The Independent
6/21/2017

The largest coal mining company in the world has announced it will close 37 mines because they are no longer economically viable.

Coal India, which produces around 82 per cent of India's coal, said the mines would be decommissioned by March 2018.

The closures, of around 9 per cent of the state-run firm's sites, will reportedly save around 8,000,000,000 rupees (£98m).

India's solar sector has received heavy international investment, and the plummeting price of solar electricity has increased pressure on fossil fuel companies in the country.

The government has announced it will not build any more coal plants after 2022 and predicts renewables will generate 57 per cent of its power by 2027 – a pledge far outstripping its commitment in the Paris climate change agreement.

Plans for nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations – about the same as the total amount in the UK – were scrapped in May, signalling a seismic shift in the India's energy market.
====================
Tesla battery packs power the Hawaiian island of Kauai after dark
Phil LeBeau
Wednesday, 8 Mar 2017
CNBC.com

While investors on Wall Street debate whether Tesla's ambitious transformation from electric car maker to sustainable energy company will pay off, its industrial power packs are already having an impact on at least one state.

In Hawaii, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) is now drawing energy from 272 Tesla power packs to provide electricity after dark. While the island previously relied on solar and other renewable energy during the day, it had no way to store the sun's power after it went down.

Using stored energy from Tesla's power packs is expected to save KIUC 1.6 million gallons of diesel fuel annually, which has traditionally been the way the utility generates power after dark.

Tesla says the power packs will cut KIUC costs per kilowatt hour from 15.5 cents down to 13.9 cents. The 13.9 cents is a fixed price for the next 20 years.
======================

I guess it all depends on which way you want to "spin" the news..
9% of the NUMBER of mines sounds interesting but..
...they are undoubtedly the least efficient, oldest (worked out), or with the lowest quality/yield....and hence no longer viable compared to the new mines they are developing at the same time !
...such as those in Africa, Indonesia and even here in Australia...

...A number of private Indian companies have also been investing in
foreign assets. There has been some interest in developing assets in the
undeveloped Galilee Basin in Australia. The largest of these projects is
Adani’s $16.5 billion Carmichael project. Once it has received all approvals,
the project could consist of six open cut mines and five underground mines;
a coal handling and processing plant; the development of water supply
infrastructure; a 189 kilometre rail line; a worker’s accommodation village
and an airport (Department of State Development 2015). In addition, Indian
infrastructure company GVK has been looking to invest in the Alpha and
Kevin’s Corner projects in the Galilee Basin. Adani has also developed
mines in Indonesia to feed its private power plant in Gujurat, preferring to
ship coal 6000 kilometres, rather than rail Indian coal 1500 kilometres. The
investment includes port and rail facilities in India.

Click to expand...

..also, being a State owned company, it could be as much a political decision as a commercial or strategic one.... a good news clip ?
Scrapping 14 GW of new coal plants , is little more than a small (5%) adjustment to their proposed plans.....

India’s government insists the new plants are needed to take care of the approximately 300 million people with no access to electricity.
Its 2015 INDC plans submitted before the Paris COP imply an increase of over 300 GW of coal by 2030. Taking the current US average size of a coal plant as a benchmark, that’d be nearly 600 new coal plants.
Indeed approximately 65 GW of new coal is under construction right now, and the existing pipeline of permitted and pre-permit projects is an additional 178 GW......

Click to expand...

Hillhater said:

9% of the NUMBER of mines sounds interesting but.....they are undoubtedly the least efficient, oldest (worked out), or with the lowest quality/yield....and hence no longer viable compared to the new mines they are developing at the same time !

Click to expand...

Definitely. As time goes on, the least profitable mines will close and the most profitable ones will hold on until the end.

..bill,..i just edited my above post to include some of India's new Coal mine investments.
India is a very tricky example, whilst they outwardly make a show of embracing Renewable s, ..which they will to a level that suits their international commitments,..they have a defined hard core policy and commitment to massive investment and expansion of coal generation, because they know its the only realistic way they can support the power demands of a rapid growing economy and a modernization of the living standards of its huge population.

.... The Kauai Island Cooperative Utility does not own the storage facility and the 55,000 solar panels, Tesla does. It has entered into a contract with the utility to supply it with power for 20 years at 13.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. That compares to the 15.5 cents per kilowatt-hour cost of electricity prior to the Tesla contract. It makes Tesla a power provider, not merely a battery storage company.

Click to expand...

some useful details from that..
Tesla have obviously costed this out for a continuous commercial supply , and have agreed at 13.9C/kWhr ..to the Utility Co
.............slightly different to the 2-3C/kWhr that other sources have suggested for Solar power ???
Also, the 20 yr contract term may be significant..not just from a commercial view, but also as a ROI and system life expectancy from Tesla ?
Edit..
Note that a 2nd Solar/Battery project is planned for Kauai next year, this one by AES ,.
this will be 28Mw of solar , 100MWh of storage, and selling power at 11C/kWh .

....AES Distributed Energy will build a solar-plus-storage "peaker plant" on the Hawaiian island of Kauai that stands out both in capacity and power price.

The project, if approved by state and local regulators, will combine 28 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with 20 megawatts of five-hour duration batteries. AES will own and operate the system, and has executed a power purchase agreement to sell power to the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) at 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. The project is expected to be operational by late 2018.

Once completed, the facility will generate 11 percent of the island's electricity and push the share of renewable generation above 50 percent, KIUC President and CEO David Bissell said in a statement.

Click to expand...

The uk had a scorcher of a week, we have topped out at 7-8gwh for around 2 hours at peak sun all week on solar alone,
But due to the increased heat aircon etc has pushed the grid to 40gwh peaks rather than the 30gwh peaks we see in milder weather so in theory when uk's weather is good enough for solar to peak it's offset with increased grid demand so ideal conditions for us are 5gwh on solar with windy conditions then the grid demand doesn't rocket with aircon and we still have decent solar production and wind to cover a large amount of grid demand but the chances of all this coming together only happens a few times a year at summer season so does solar really work for uk when you consider the short fall not really it does help bit we need more reliable constant energy sources that have the earth in mind not cost per kwh and political incentive.

Hillhater said:

Tesla have obviously costed this out for a continuous commercial supply , and have agreed at 13.9C/kWhr ..to the Utility Co
.............slightly different to the 2-3C/kWhr that other sources have suggested for Solar power ???

Click to expand...

Definitely. I assume they are charging what the market will bear - which in Hawaii, is quite a lot. Since it's also a fairly new system they won't be seeing any economies of scale yet.

If you estimate what solar costs, and battery cost /Mwh ..( all available from existing /current install costings ) , then you see that those figures are not much above a margin rate.
With Solar /Battery you dont get much advantage from scaling up, they tend to be almost modular for capacity and Capital cost with some benefit for staff/labour cost..which is a minor factor .
my fear is that some government decision makers are being misled on the true cost of renewable s, (distracted by the zero cost of fuel and influenced by distorted environmental arguments),.. in the hope of reducing energy costs,
..Sadly , Energy and Politics seem inextricably linked , so key strategy, technical, and pricing decisions, will always be politically influenced.
maybe , if solar/battery components drop in retail price enough, an off grid system may become viable..for those that can afford it and have suitable locations.

Seems wind has not had as much press in this thread Here in Ks there are lots of wind farms in the last 5 years . Wind tends to die down after daytime so same prob as solar.
Seems like we could do more with geo thermal. Not sure to call it. :? Seems we could tap into Yellowstone and Calif, Initial cost would be high maybe but it would run all night.

Another planned large Solar Farm in Australia with storage, and some costings..
https://www.gympietimes.com.au/news/breaking-australias-biggest-solar-farm-planned-for/3168073/#/0
Summary 350MW capacity with 4000MWh of storage (battery ?)...cost $2.0 bn
3 million panels, 17 sqr kms
I dont know what storage they plan To use , but 4000MW of batteries alone will cost more than their entire $2 bn budget !
..and i think pumped hydro would be even more...Must be a typo somewhere i suspect
Planned to deliver 735,000 MWh annually to the grid. Which works out to a nominal output of 84MW average !
Do the maths. How many years must it operate to recover that initial investment at $0.05 per kWh
I would love to see the business case for some of these projects and what impact they will have on future energy costs.

Hillhater said:

Another planned large Solar Farm in Australia with storage, and some costings..
https://www.gympietimes.com.au/news/breaking-australias-biggest-solar-farm-planned-for/3168073/#/0
Summary 350MW capacity with 4000MWh of storage (battery ?)...cost $2.0 bn
3 million panels, 17 sqr kms
I dont know what storage they plan To use , but 4000MW of batteries alone will cost more than their entire $2 bn budget !
..and i think pumped hydro would be even more...Must be a typo somewhere i suspect
Planned to deliver 735,000 MWh annually to the grid. Which works out to a nominal output of 84MW average !
Do the maths. How many years must it operate to recover that initial investment at $0.05 per kWh
I would love to see the business case for some of these projects and what impact they will have on future energy costs.

Click to expand...

In the comments of the article someone challenged the author with his major math discrepancy and the reply was better that than open another coal field ? Wtf type of stupid answer is that why are morons like this reporting such crap and some get revenue for it.
The article states 735,000MWh/ An
Do they not know the purpose of the prefix is to simplify so anyone who's used the figures knows it as 735GWh/An this shows the article as junk in my eyes
And it does work out to around 85Mwh roughly I'd say around a 20kw storage unit.
If you look at the tesla edisom plant in california that has 20Mw storage with 80Mwh discharge so expect a simular setup to that.

Hillhater said:

Another planned large Solar Farm in Australia with storage, and some costings..
https://www.gympietimes.com.au/news/breaking-australias-biggest-solar-farm-planned-for/3168073/#/0
Summary 350MW capacity with 4000MWh of storage (battery ?)...cost $2.0 bn
3 million panels, 17 sqr kms
I dont know what storage they plan To use , but 4000MW of batteries alone will cost more than their entire $2 bn budget !
..and i think pumped hydro would be even more...Must be a typo somewhere i suspect
Planned to deliver 735,000 MWh annually to the grid. Which works out to a nominal output of 84MW average !
Do the maths. How many years must it operate to recover that initial investment at $0.05 per kWh
I would love to see the business case for some of these projects and what impact they will have on future energy costs.

Click to expand...

Nice find Hillhater,
Looking at how green it is around that area I am dubious it will put out 84MW average power when comparing to desert level dry areas of the USA etc. I guess time will tell.
Look how green it is around there, in between two state forest areas that are loaded with tree, clearly the whole place could be dark green with trees if they wanted it to be.. https://goo.gl/maps/StLUY1ueeXL2

One thing I like about that article was they called it for what it is "construction jobs". When its being pimped its called "renewable-energy jobs". If the money going into this was a blackbox so you couldn't see where it was going it would be seen ultimately as wasted money, for example the difference is that the return on investment on "renewable-energy construction jobs" vs jobs on building a brand new road/building" project for example is really just that the RE project is mostly burden on the rest of society with expensive electricity prices, while a new road or office building is a truly valued investment that gives back to society.

The way I see it when Bill Gates nuclear reactor etc is a common thing the money that will be saved by the rest of the community/economy in general via cheaper power could be used to pay the folks who would have had those "renewable-energy" jobs to go full-time fishing/camping/whatever for the rest of their lives.

The real reason these are built is to keep the voters happy, most I see folks on Facebook all do big "likes" of this stuff but they don't have any solar panels on their own roof, my brother has a large single storey house and is a proud hardcore Australian Greens voter, after drilling him about the whole hypocrisy of it all it boils down to the general idea folks think its cheaper and better if they get the "government" to pay for it via giant solar farms then choosing to put down a bit of their own money directly and get some solar panels on the roof directly.

I have thought about the hypocrisy of it all for a while now and the fact is it's heaps easier to vote green energy and appear green (it makes you look cool/hip as well) then spend your own money directly.
Also when Solar farm stats are presented on Facebook they get juiced beyond a joke.

Also a lot of Australia is under native title and the government knows its 1,000 times easier to kick white Australians off their farming land even if its good farming land than it is to build a solar farm in an extremely dry area of Australia owned by indigenous folks.
http://mabonativetitle.com/map_Aust.shtml

Hey, I'm bored and have few minute to kill, so..I'd like to throw another chunk into the stew. Short-range Organic Rankine cycle (ORC).

The centralization of electrical generation is possible by the use of high-voltage alternating current. Whether coal-fired steam turbines, or nuclear-heated steam-turbines...it is the specification of high-voltage and alternating current that makes it even possible.

While keeping the principle of alternating current, and then lowering the voltage a bit...we arrive at a system where the electricity is generated for the entire city, but none of it is sent to any other city, and especially another state (distance matters).

ORC is pretty much "medium temperature steam", but instead of using water that boils at 212F / 100C...it uses a synthetic hydrocarbon compound of something similar to propane, which "boils" at a much lower temperature. I first became acquainted with ORC when studying solar energy, and found geothermal. There are parts of the world where if you dig down a few hundred feet, there is enough heat that ORC can provide a fairly constant source of electricity. The typical coal or nuclear plant produces about 350,000V which is helpful when it is transported across long distances. ORC would be a lower voltage and a shorter distance.

Just a thought...

TheBeastie said:

The real reason these are built is to keep the voters happy, most I see folks on Facebook all do big "likes" of this stuff but they don't have any solar panels on their own roof, my brother has a large single storey house and is a proud hardcore Australian Greens voter, after drilling him about the whole hypocrisy of it all it boils down to the general idea folks think its cheaper and better if they get the "government" to pay for it via giant solar farms then choosing to put down a bit of their own money directly and get some solar panels on the roof directly.

I have thought about the hypocrisy of it all for a while now and the fact is it's heaps easier to vote green energy and appear green (it makes you look cool/hip as well) then spend your own money directly.
Also when Solar farm stats are presented on Facebook they get juiced beyond a joke.

Also a lot of Australia is under native title and the government knows its 1,000 times easier to kick white Australians off their farming land even if its good farming land than it is to build a solar farm in an extremely dry area of Australia owned by indigenous folks.
http://mabonativetitle.com/map_Aust.shtml

Click to expand...

I'm a Greens sympathiser (wouldn't say voter, although I have voted for them before today) and I don't have solar panels on my roof. Because I'm a renter - the lowest form of life on the economic phylogenetic tree. Because I don't have a mortgage, politicians have nothing to offer me. Solar panels on my roof would help offset part of my electricity bill, but because the landlord has the conch, it's never going to happen. Would I install them if I could? Absolutely! Do I want large scale solar, perhaps subsidised by government? Yes of course! Every other gas or coal generator was subsidies in some way, so why not solar or wind?

Your comments about native title are pretty ignorant, I have to say. Native title represents a little over 15% of the continent, with most of it being arid land where no white man would choose to live. It is almost impossible to kick freehold landowners from their land - like my comments about landlords before, if you own land you're practically untouchable. The only way they can access your land is if you're sitting on top of a mineral resource and there is nothing stopping an act of parliament from changing that (except never getting elected). Beside, the business case for using your land to grow crops is far more compelling than using it to harvest electricity from the sun. Hardly a surprise farmers are generally quite happy to have a turbine or two on their property either - they get paid fairly for the inconvenience.

Hillhater, I'm quite certain any business people crossing the last planning hurdles on a $2 billion power plant have checked A) how much power it will produce and B) how much money it will make

You could too with only a few minutes research. Check out http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/. You can punch in a location, select relevant geo data for that site, configure the deployment and it will tell you with hourly accuracy real world results, including various losses, shading, downtime etc.

Go find any mortgage calculator, punch in $2 billion with a moderate rate of return for 20 years, that's how much power they need to sell which will determine the sell price of course. Why would they sell it for $0.05 when they could sell it for $0.12 in the current market?

TheBeastie said:

Looking at how green it is around that area I am dubious it will put out 84MW average power when comparing to desert level dry areas of the USA etc. I guess time will tell.
Look how green it is around there, in between two state forest areas that are loaded with tree, clearly the whole place could be dark green with trees if they wanted it to be.. https://goo.gl/maps/StLUY1ueeXL2

Click to expand...

You know what are very efficient solar collectors? Trees. The fact that there are lots should tell you something!

TheBeastie said:

I have thought about the hypocrisy of it all for a while now and the fact is it's heaps easier to vote green energy and appear green (it makes you look cool/hip as well) then spend your own money directly.
Also when Solar farm stats are presented on Facebook they get juiced beyond a joke.

Click to expand...

I've got a couple of non-grid tied panels on my roof exclusively for charging a big bank of recycled laptop cells for fast charging my bike. Unfortunately the angle of the rest of my roof, shading, alignment of the house etc are all quite poor for PV - otherwise I would absolutely put my money where my mouth is so to speak, assuming it stacked up financially. I do volunatarily pay a small premium to ensure that all of my kwh are sourced exclusively from renewable sources, though that's not very hard in NZ.

TheBeastie said:

Looking at how green it is around that area I am dubious it will put out 84MW average power when comparing to desert level dry areas of the USA etc. I guess time will tell.

Click to expand...

The best solar areas in the US have about 6.5 hours of equivalent direct sun a day; the worst have about 3.5. So less than a 2:1 range. Solar power in Phoenix is definitely more cost-effective than solar in NY for that reason - but not impossibly so. In Australia on the mainland the range is about 1.5 to 1, with the best areas being north and inland. (http://solargis.com/products/maps-and-gis-data/free/download/australia)

One thing I like about that article was they called it for what it is "construction jobs". When its being pimped its called "renewable-energy jobs". The way I see it when Bill Gates nuclear reactor etc is a common thing the money that will be saved by the rest of the community/economy in general via cheaper power could be used to pay the folks who would have had those "renewable-energy" jobs to go full-time fishing/camping/whatever for the rest of their lives.

Click to expand...

True of cheaper solar power as well. (And so far solar is a LOT cheaper than nuclear.)

The real reason these are built is to keep the voters happy . . .

Click to expand...

The real reason is that utilities really, really like dirt cheap power. Even if it is unreliable.

I have thought about the hypocrisy of it all for a while now and the fact is it's heaps easier to vote green energy and appear green (it makes you look cool/hip as well) then spend your own money directly.

Click to expand...

Hmm. Both the houses I've owned have had solar PV. (Which is good for me - now that we have two EV's, it's nice to not have to pay for power OR gasoline.)

Ohbse said:

Go find any mortgage calculator, punch in $2 billion with a moderate rate of return for 20 years, that's how much power they need to sell which will determine the sell price of course. Why would they sell it for $0.05 when they could sell it for $0.12 in the current market? .

Click to expand...

much simpler still, estimate what the simple interest alone would be on $2bn at say, 5% PA.. ?
... answer ...$100 ml PA
and using their planned output of 735,000 Mwh PA, you can estimate what the unit cost has to be ,...just to cover the interest. !
... answer ..$0.13 per kWh
and that is without any return of capital
so, either i have made a huge error, or there is a major typo in the project info, or someone is having a larf !
In Australia, the only reason "business"s are investing in solar, is because no financial institutes will loan funds for Fossil fueled generation plants, due to the social and political (shareholder) backlash they are likely to cop as a result of the environmental sensitivity currently prevalent.
..Oh yes, ..and of course the grants etc available for renewable investments !
They could build a 100MW gas fueled generator for a fraction of that cost (<$500m) ,and fuel it, for a unit cost under $0.05 kWh !

Australias renewable energy is all subsidized by the coal power station generators.
Even the royalties of digging up the coal is said to go directly into subsidizing renewable energy.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html
As shown above, the state government expected the Hazelwood power-station company to just eat the extra costs but instead, the company said it can't afford to operate due to its earnings going to subsidized renewable energy etc.
So Hazelwood shut down forever now. The industry expects blackouts next summer (Dec/Jan).
Because coal makes renewable energy "appear" cheap, when you actually shut down the real cheap coal energy generators it cannibalizes its self and thus when the coal power-station shuts down the electricity prices go up.

The sanity check (intelligence check?) to see if your under the control of pro-solar politics/media etc is that if solar is cheaper than coal then there is no reason for Australia to have a RET (Renewable Energy Target) or subsidize renewable energy anymore, because private investors are going to be all over like it hungry dogs, instead the expect huge government support to build these renewable energy farms. The reality is that removing RET/subsidization is so ridiculous (and instant death for renewable generators) that its not even up for discussion, the madness of it all, God help us.
And that's where the Chewbacca defense kicks in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clKi92j6eLE


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/power-rows-drive-surge-in-prices-equal-to-50-a-tonne-carbon-tax/news-story/76250cea38872e5789741256e00643a2

Apparently the full effect on retail electricity bills in Australia from Hazelwoods shut down has only started to kick in and should fully active peak in about another 2 months or so (at least for winter), its going to be interesting to see how Australians react once they feel the full force of shutting down a 1960s coal power station to slow vegetation from growing.
Hazelwood Wikipedia page for reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station

https://www.businessnews.com.au/article/DAP-approval-for-160m-Cunderdin-solar-farm

"Notably, the company had not applied for grants from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, with Professor Wills saying that solar was now reaching the point where it could compete without support"

Sure, take the subsidies away - it has to happen at some point. And it will still be cheaper. There's about a GW worth of solar projects in the pipeline already.

Combine this with a pumped hydro project in the Snowy and you've got enough capacity to shut down a few more coal generators.

jonescg said:

.....There's about a GW worth of solar projects in the pipeline already......

Click to expand...

That will sadly only produce an average of 0.25Gwh of useable energy...
..or less than half of one small old coal fired generator.

Hillhater said:

jonescg said:

.....There's about a GW worth of solar projects in the pipeline already......

Click to expand...

That will sadly only produce an average of 0.25Gwh of useable energy...
..or less than half of one small old coal fired generator.

Click to expand...

A 1GW plant will generate 1GW of POWER. A 1GW plant will generate 1GWhr of ENERGY an hour. A 1GW solar power plant in a good location in Australia will generate, on average, 6.5GWhr a day.

This is a good thing because power usage peaks during the day in most places.
This is a bad thing because people still need some power at night.

This is a good thing because it's very, very cheap.
This is a bad thing because utilities now have to manage unreliable generation - and that takes effort.

So from a comment earlier:

"if solar is cheaper than coal then there is no reason for Australia to have a RET (Renewable Energy Target) or subsidize renewable energy anymore, because private investors are going to be all over like it hungry dogs . . ."

They are all over it like hungry dogs. But those hungry dogs sometimes bite off more than they can chew, and although they love the taste of that cheap, cheap power, they have some work to do to be able to handle it in all its variable output, non-baseload glory. Some think it's easier to go with the older technology they understand and do not fear - and those people are the people who are amenable to incentives, because often they need an incentive to overcome their fear and move into the future.

In sunny NM coal plants are closing without delay. http://www.kob.com/new-mexico-news/...sident-donald-trump-climate-decision/4502790/
Although, there is not a lot of water in sunny and dry NM the ability to tap into a micro hydro power plant is huge. The Tularosa River starts at 10,000 feet in elevation and ends at the end of the Tularosa Basin into the White Sands. The water is used to irrigate the small village of Tularosa and provide drinking water. The potential to tap this energy is enormous and could easily supply the small county of Otero County population of 60,000. If someone wants to do the math for this potential energy source I would appreciate it.

wineboyrider said:

The Tularosa River starts at 10,000 feet in elevation and ends at the end of the Tularosa Basin into the White Sands.

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Holieeeee. . . . That's like being able to recharge the batteries on your bike from those silly friction generators against your tire.

Meanwhile, I could believe this was an episode of 'The Simpsons.' Back when it was FUNNY. But a 2 week internship? I think that was a publicity stunt, not anything to do with real hiring.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/26/world/nuclear-bikini-contest-trnd/index.html

wineboyrider said:

Although, there is not a lot of water in sunny and dry NM the ability to tap into a micro hydro power plant is huge. The Tularosa River starts at 10,000 feet in elevation and ends at the end of the Tularosa Basin into the White Sands. The water is used to irrigate the small village of Tularosa and provide drinking water. The potential to tap this energy is enormous and could easily supply the small county of Otero County population of 60,000. If someone wants to do the math for this potential energy source I would appreciate it.

Click to expand...

Couldn't find any stats on the Tularosa river flows at any given altitudes. Do you have any such info?

The whole Tularosa basin story is a sad one. When settlers first discovered it it was a huge grassland full of streams and small forests. Then they started using it as grazing land. It was overgrazed for about 70 years, after which all the grasses died, the topsoil dried up and blew away, the streams disappeared and the whole area turned into a desert.