Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
I know it is a shock to most people when they first learn about total primary energy consumption and I am sorry. But it is important to know about.
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So many people that even think about these things have the impression that all we have to do is replace electricity (they call it POWER) with solar and wind and then we will have it made. But this, as challenging as it is, only gets us 1/5 of the way there to continuing our current growth based economy.
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In another forum I follow, I saw the following posted:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37233
What surprised me was that states with the largest portion of their power coming from wind tended to have about average utility rates. California and Vermont were outliers, and I wonder if that suggests that solar is expensive. Anyhow, I figured high adoption of solar/wind would correlate with higher utility rates since that's what happened in Germany (50% increase in 10 years).
Price of electricity by state:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electri...ates-by-state/
Source of electricity by state:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.d44570a3c35b
One thing that stands out from this data is that states with the highest portion of electricity coming from coal all have cheaper electricity than average.
States with large natural gas electricity generation tend to be lower than average utility rates.
Hydro heavy states tended to have cheap electricity too, with Vermont being an outlier. Perhaps Vermont loves to "feel the Bern"
Wind heavy states seem about average.
Nuclear heavy states also seem about average.
Solar is such a small fraction of electrical generation that it's hard to attribute cost to them.
Hawaii gets 67% of their energy from oil, and they have the highest electricity rates by far.