Rate of return is good in several respects, it gives utilities great incentives to build good stuff. The more they invest, the more they earn. Also regulators do watch them carefully for spending on non essential items. Rate increases in that world are hard to come by and lots of people are involved in proving them to be needed. We see rate decreases as often as increases in the ROR regulated utilities here. I think it is ideal for true monopolies. Not so good when multiple suppliers compete in an area.
From: Mark Radabaugh Sent: Saturday, February 20, 2021 9:15 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post It’s not really all that different than how it works in the rest of the country, it’s just that the market area is too small for there to be much stability in it. There is a lot of spin in the story that I think you read - I think it’s the same one I saw. It seems like it was written by a utility company that wants to go back to the old guaranteed rate of return model where you get rate increases by being as inefficient as possible and then showing up with your losses on the books and get to ask for another rate increase. And you get this shit: https://www.energyandpolicy.org/firstenergy-service-company/ For a mere 60 Million you can buy the best politicians and get yourself a billion dollar bailout. But hey, at least the lights stayed on. Where the market is much larger than half of texas the fuel cost becomes the driving factor in the minimum electric price and there is decent stability. The system does need either a very large market area where large power sources are available that set the minimum rate. At least in our area there are a number of small natural gas peaking plants that sit idle much of the time but when needed they fire up and charge a hell of a lot of money for what they generate. They make enough on that to pay for the plant to sit idle much of the time. Mark On Feb 20, 2021, at 12:40 AM, Steve Jones <thatoneguyst...@gmail.com> wrote: holy cow, do you texans smoke crack? Ive been reading about this variable rate power contracts? multiple thousands of dollars? Ho is there no cap on the variable rate and how is the consumer at the mercy of an inept production and distribution system? That ould be like us telling customers their rates will vary based on the percentage of our network capacity remaining, so we dont upgrade our upstreams, and then take some backhauls offline. customers usage doesnt increase but their bill does. wait now that I think about it, texas is spot on. imma bring this plan up to the boss, more revenue, less work, my incompetence will now be a profit driver On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 10:32 AM Chuck McCown via AF <af@af.afmug.com> wrote: The intertie converter stations have filters to convert square waves to sine waves. Not sure how much total harmonic distortion they produce but there are output filters on them. I used to have a schematic of the system. From: Jan-GAMs Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 12:45 PM To: Chuck McCown via AF Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post Induction is was happens when the sine wave is in transition. Wire-wound induction motors and transformers really don't like square waves. Especially RF equipment. The resulting spikes of the square waves would be near impossible to filter out. A simple radio-jammer can be made from a car distributor, coil, points and a battery with a hand-crank or motor to keep it spinning On 2/17/21 10:18 AM, Chuck McCown via AF wrote: Just consider all the wasted area on a sine wave if you square it up. The line has to support peak voltage. So may as well run it at full peak. You get an average of 37% more average voltage. Which is squared to produce 2X the power by just converting to DC. (1.414 ^2) From: Bill Prince Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 11:09 AM To: af@af.afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post Fascinating how we've come full circle. I think edison originally tried to run a small grid with DC, but it crapped out when the distances got too big. I think it was Westinghouse that overcame the technology of the day when they started doing AC. Now the power levels have gotten so large, that we've run into the limits of AC transmission, and can lose less energy in transmission by doing DC. Just get the volts up high enough. I think China has one DC intertie that runs over a million volts. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>On 2/17/2021 9:37 AM, Chuck McCown via AF wrote: +/- 560kV 3410A (3800MW) Today From: Chuck McCown via AF Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 10:35 AM To: af@af.afmug.com Cc: Chuck McCown Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post I grew up next to the Pacific Intertie that was built in the 70’. Was a palace of a place that was air conditioned so a good place for a kid to go hang out in the summer when not working. Never anyone there (public) so I had the run of all the public places. It converted AC from The Dalles Dam and shipped it to Sylmar CA. It does 2000 amps at 1000 volts or more. Originally had vacuum tubes for rectifiers and switching inverters at the ends. They tried it as ground return but I don’t know if they kept it that way. Caused problems for phone lines and cars could get charged up if you parked under it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie From: Bill Prince Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 9:53 AM To: af@af.afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post I was reading back at least a couple years ago about the physics of going to DC transmission lines. Super high voltages, but relatively low current. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>On 2/17/2021 8:40 AM, Chuck McCown via AF wrote: I was thinking air insulated, but I guess there is a 6” cable that will do 500 kV and 2000A. I would not want to be in the tunnel with this thing. <image[1].png> From: Chuck McCown via AF Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 9:35 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Cc: Chuck McCown Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post Make that 10’ in diameter. New Zealand has some under sea transmission lines that are superconductors I think due to the limits of high voltage transmission. From: Chuck McCown via AF Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2021 7:52 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group Cc: Chuck McCown Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Texas electric grid was at the mercy of cold weather - The Washington Post Capacitance causes power loss in underground lines. Also the higher the voltage the larger the line. Underground transmission lines would have to be in pressurized tubes 10-20” in diameter. And you can’t work on them live. Sent from my iPhone On Feb 16, 2021, at 9:54 PM, Steve Jones mailto:thatoneguyst...@gmail.com wrote: It's crazy, if we actually built some gen 3 IV reactors, both sides of the argument wouldnt have anything to argue about, they'd be warm, and wed be eating the prior reactor waste. That is the production issue resolved for the foreseeable future and yucca mountain could be turned into an Airbnb hotspot. We have a loose pocket fed right now so the state can get federal disaster relief to fix the distribution. I dont know enough about distribution to understand why it is we can bury a billion miles of fiber to get porn to the masses but we keep putting our electrical distribution on poles. Earthquakes aside not much happens in the dirt, and I bet errant backhoe operators are a little more careful when it comes to electrocution vs interrupting pornhub. On Tue, Feb 16, 2021, 9:46 PM Jaime Solorza <losguyswirel...@gmail.com> wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/16/ercot-texas-electric-grid-failure/ -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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