Award Winning Asheville, NC Home Builder Saves Clients Over 10% On New Construction
We are an Asheville Based Custom Home Builder/Developer offering a range of "Build To Suit" packages to fulfill every home buyers needs ...
Youth Clean Energy Economy Forum Part II
Kentucky. And he said that he's concerned that most funding for green construction is for new construction and not for teaching people to ...
Why Baseload is irrelevant to the power discussion
Mr. Wellinghoff of the FERC famously said “I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do.” Since then the debate between those that believe baseload is, for the foreseeable future, required and those that believe, like Mr. Wellinghoff that baseload is an anachronism of the 20th century. In fact, recently a paper published by an economist at Duke University claims that North Carolina (apparently serving as a proxy for the entire country) does not require any baseload capacity and that wind and solar can pretty much take care of everything. I have some issues with this latest paper. The author makes some rather sweeping assumptions at the outset regarding a 28% reduction in TOTAL consumption based on his observations of 100 houses and how large the impact of demand response can be from smartgrid initiatives.
As usual, I decided to “do the math” on this issue using government data or, at least, reasonably reputable data for my research. Because I’m no expert on the detailed workings of power generation, and neither are most of my readers, I’m going to make some extremely simplistic assumptions just to try to get at an understanding of the trend and reasonableness of energy generation claims.
First, we need to establish both the history and a mutually understood and accepted forecast of electricity usage in the state of North Carolina.
The history is easily obtained using data from the EIA that provides annual energy consumption, including electrical consumption for 1990-2008 for every state in the union. Downloading and graphing this data provides a visual understanding of electrical consumption trends in NC.
Forecast data proved a bit more difficult as...