Quote:
Originally Posted by lezard
How do you know they don't make sense? It's your opinion, just as it's my opinion that they do.
To your second paragraph: wrong, that wasn't my first point. I don't know what you are arguing against there. That's all Site C is for? To gouge California?
To your third paragraph: of course a dam's capacity is dependent on the reservoir level. But that is exactly my point. We can influence reservoir levels by pumping water back up to store it again. Windfarms are ideally suited to provide the energy necessary.
To your fourth paragraph: Windfarms do make their capital costs back when applied intelligently. And they do provide significant amounts of capacity. In the EU, windfarms of all types contribute to about 4% of total generating capacity. And they are pushing for even more of them, the fools. Do they know nothing of scalability and money?
Conservation can provide significant amounts of spare capacity. Whether it will be enough to compensate for rising demand is open to debate. But combined with all the other options that have proposed on this board, it may very well suffice and maybe even allow us to rip California off again and again. Conservation measures would have to apply to new demand. Reducing how many computers we use, reducing individual transit in favour of mass transit. Giving up poptarts. Etc...
I don't care if you take me seriously, I do care that you read what I write if you're going to rip me a new one. In any event, my voicing opposition to Site C has made it impossible for Gordo's fellow travelers on here to take me seriously. I believe in Unicorns, don't you know.
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Again, we don't need to pump power back up into the dam, we can just cut the flow to the generators when were not using it. Most of our power infrastructure has minimum required allowed flow rates for environmental reasons. Besides that you can't just pump river back into a dam, you'd need a downstream lake. As far as I know most dams in BC don't have this.
A good chunk of our power would go direct to California regardless of the source. Since we can turn our generators on or off whenever we feel like it, we can sell the states expensive power, and buy back
more off peak power while still making money off the transaction. That's how BC hydro makes money and main reason why hydroelectric dams are so economical. The addition of Site C would let us actually produce as much power as were using. We currently use more power than we produce, hence why BC is a net importer of power right now.
You didn't mention wind farms. You mentioned using wind as an add on to other infrastructure and buildings. The economics with wind power is all related to scale. With wind, big is cost efficient. 3MW was huge a few years ago, now 10MW generators are coming online. These things are 500' tall and require tonnes of room.
Without economics factored in, we could power 20% (ish) of the grid (at peak wind power production) with wind and not loose grid stability. With the wind production factor taken into account this would only produce about 4-6% of our total power production.
Cheap power is also a huge competitive advantage that we shouldn't be trying to take away from BC industry. A lot of industry we have is sensitive to cheap power. Because BC is not an otherwise cheap place to operate in, taking away this advantage might just drive a lot of employment away. I know some mining operations that are very sensitive to power pricing, and specifically negotiate with hydro because of this. When you're drawing more than 10MW with some industrial machines the costs add up really quickly.