Keystone pipeline springs leak in South Dakota

[Benton]

(11-27-2017, 03:39 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Yeah, I mean it's an interesting thing they did. I just think it's ultimately a waste of money.

Agreed peak power is an issue in terms of cost, but if you spend $50m in order to save enough energy for 30,000 homes for 1 hour (before the battery starts degrading) then is it really going to save you money after all? You're still paying the $50m in the long run.

Say 3 people per home in an area of 1.7m and that means you need 19 of them just to save your area 1 hour of electricity. That's $950m for something that's going to last you less than a decade. It probably is cheaper to replace all the batteries since some of that cost is in building a facility and running the lines and all that, but still. It'd be just 1 hour's worth of power. Might be good to reduce brownouts, but I can hardly see it solving the issue.

Is that really a savings in the long run? Don't know yet. That $950m figure out be about $559 per person (that's including children and such, so if you figure per taxpayer, it would probably be much closer to $1k.) Does ~$200/taxpayer/year for that 1 hours worth of battery time save you enough to offset the peak hour prices per yet? I don't know.

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I'm not saying coal is the answer (I think updated/safer/more efficient nuclear energy is the way, advancing/perfecting the way until we move to Helium-3) but Australia is actually already a massive exporter of coal, so honestly from a pure financial standpoint, it'd likely be the cheapest solution.

In fact they're the #1 world exporter of coal and the #2 world exporter of liquid natural gas, I believe. Their energy problems are 100% all self inflicted.

No idea on the cost saving. I would hope someone did the math before investing $50 million to make sure it solves their problem (storing cheaper power for use later). 

I wouldn't get too hung up on the 30,000 homes for one hour. That's are nice round numbers to digest, but you may only be talking about 0 homes for 20 hours; then 1,000 homes for 1 hour; then 5,000 homes for 2 hours; then 500 homes for the last hour. Or it could exceed that number in the first five minutes and be the most expensive pre-brown out backup ever. Or those watts may be split and a few thousand homes for a few hours in the morning, a few thousand homes for a couple hours in the evening.