Toyota to buy clean power from a $1.1B solar farm in Texas
electrek.co
electrek.co
The word "matching" is what carries the implications. They could be saying that during optimal weather conditions when solar/wind is flooding the grid and the prices are at the lowest, they will pay an additional to 45% of their purchased power, in order to "compensate" during periods of suboptimal weather when gas, goal and oil is the primary energy (which also mean when the power supply is low and prices are high).
To give some more context, Texas has already started to curtail around 10% of solar production because of overproduction. That brings an other aspects to the question if we are getting net zero if a company match solar energy production to their fossil fuel consumption. Do we get fossil fuel displacement by producing energy that no one is willing to buy at even zero cost? To be fair it is likely a non-zero number, but it seems logical that as overproduction increases that numbers get closer to zero.
I will add this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1451) as a additional data point with this quote: "Here, I show that the average pattern across most nations of the world over the past fifty years is one where each unit of total national energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focusing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity"
They just greenwash literally anything just to keep the money flowing.
Or their Beyond Zero campaign.
Look into Climate Town videos on Toyota's practices regarding this topic.
I actually looked at Climate Town Toyota but the guy just seems to be waffling about politics.
Seems kind of expensive at this scale
At 10% interest and 4c/kwh guess at a wholesale price:
You pay $135 interest for $350 of power.
So there is room for profit and operational cost.
$1.10B * 10% / 851000kW = $130
365 * 24 * $0.04 = $350
$1.10B * 10% / 815000kW = $135
Ok, energy costs $0.1 per kWh (h is important) and that's operational cost, while the number above is the infrastructure cost of creating an installation able to supply the wattage above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Coal is $4000 per kW
This solar project is right on the average at $1,327, although NREL says it can cost upto 2743.
Some investment group says a 1MW coal plan would cost similar or upto 4x the cost: >estimates suggest that the construction cost of a coal-fired thermal power plant can range from less than $1,000 to $4,500 per each kilowatt of installed capacity. https://esfccompany.com/en/articles/thermal-energy/coal-fire...
So, seems just about average and on just the construction cost - cheaper than coal.
My comment was based on 1kW panel on Amazon.com is $500 delivered but there's likely a lot of nuance in quality and lifetime and labor for these projects
Coal runs 24/7 pretty predictably. 1kw of coal means 1kw of power 24/7.
Solar output varies heavily throughout the year, with only limited times where 1kw will be produced by that panel. On average, you’d be lucky to get 2-3 hrs a day at that capacity, and 8 hrs total of any significant output.
Also, the output from that panel needs to be converted/inverted to be used, and those inverters are expensive too.
If you want to produce electricity 24/7 from those panels, you’ll also need batteries.
So figure 5-10x the cost of a single panel to somewhat reliably produce that panels equivalent in energy 24/7 - assuming you have the space.
This is where the cost calculations of solar fall apart to the point of being outright fraud. You need to add the cost of the natural gas peaker plant you build and keep around for nights and “seasonal” energy troughs before the number makes any sort of sense whatsoever.
I’ve said it before - but solar power has been the easiest ever to predict investment I’ve ever made so far in life. The investment was into natural gas.
Solar is cheap until you reach a saturation point that is already there in some areas - rapidly approaching in others. Battery deployments currently are measured in the hours of duck curve they cover at the moment, not nights or number of days they can cover in totally predictable seasonal energy shortage scenarios. It’s trivial when you can ignore and socialize the actual expensive hard problems to solve.
I love solar and wind - they should be primary generation sources for humanity. I hate the utterly rampant financial fraud going on sold to the public by professional grifters.
It is because of this. Literally. You’ll need to do your own math though, because it’s too politically embarrassing to acknowledge. After all, California now has ‘too much solar’!
It’s also why California is keeping their Nuke plant alive (doing a strong about face), and building a ton of natural gas peaker plants, and Germany imports massive amounts of electricity during certain times of day and year - and has been keeping coal around a lot longer than they were supposed to.
Because this is a way harder problem than naive back of the envelope calculations suggest. But that would be awkward to acknowledge. So, we don’t.
Or is it really ‘there is no way they could be lying to us, or doing something stupid! That would be crazy!’?. Because if so, I’ve got some math that shows it literally could be no other way.