Former Toyota Exec: skeptic on electric

There is no valid rationale to penalize you for pollution you cause. There is more than ample justification to expect you to clean up your mess.

No penalties, just taxation of externalities.
The distinction is important.

 

For someone who was an AGW denialist up till a year of so ago, you are inappropriately confident in your opinions.

 

I agree with the distinction, but my use of "penalize" was a general term of not allowing me to pollute at all without significant fines or other regulatory enforcement. Certainly not true today, but hopefully true in the future. Just like smoking at work was allowed decades ago, it is penalized now.

 

Because?

 

As a highly-paid executive, I doubt he could appreciate the satisfaction of filling the gas tank for less than $30.

 

Because it ends up being a value judgement. On the other hand, leaving the e.g. air no dirtier than you found it has a firm basis in law: your rights stop where there impinge the rights of your neighbors. This is easily translated into "clean up your mess."

 

Newly published industry-funded study shows the Texas grid would benefit from massive utility-grade distributed battery storage.

Customer bills, system reliability, and grid balancing would benefit with 9-15 gWh of battery storage at an installed cost of $350/kWh. This would be presumably even better if some portion of the batteries come from used vehicle packs rather than newly manufactured cells.

http://www.brattle.com/system/news/pdfs/000/000/749/original/The_Value_of_Distributed_Electricity_Storage_in_Texas.pdf?1415631708

 

The parent company of the battery maker funded that 'study,' and is currently in BK proceedings while trying to convince Texas regulators to change anti-competitive rules regarding power-plant ownership based on a 'promise' to invest $2B in the Texas grid. While they are bankrupt, mind you.

Take the study results with a grain of salt.

 

Wut?

The study was funded by Oncor which is an energy distribution utility for the Texas electric grid. It doesn't make batteries.

Oncor's parent company, Energy Future Holdings (former TXU), filed for bankruptcy as a KK&R leveraged buyout victim. It was apparently the largest leveraged buyout in history. KK&R and Goldman Sachs bought it in 2007 and loaded it up with debt.

Energy Future Holdings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm not seeing a conspiracy by Big Battery.

 

helpful link to your first point, this doesn't have much to do with txu

Texas Utility Plans $2 Billion Battery Fix for Wavering Wind and Solar Power - Bloomberg

The idea is oncor wants to reduce the need for new fossil plants, and wants regulators to let it make money on the time spread.

The more renewables in west texas that they move across the state the more money oncore makes. The other option is more natural gas power plants, as the population of Texas grows. West texas is much better for renewables than central texas where much of the population lives, coastal wind can serve Houston. Regulators are allowing some utilities to try battery buffers to see how regulation on ERCOT should work.

Key here is price of the batteries versus the ccgt natural gas plant construction and natural gas costs. Peak demand was in august of 2011, during the drought, which caused large demands for air conditioning at 68 GW, there are 11 GW of wind installed so far. That 5 GW could buffer a good percentage of today's and future wind.

 

...apparently there is a new "climate change" bill coming to Congress that try to will say states are not allowed to dirty up the air heading to other states via prevailing winds. I am intersted to see how this works, but when we lived in NJ we were certainly victims of being at the end-of-the -pipe as far as air quality. The acid-rain damaged Adirondacks is another example.