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Like I said at the top, commodities are extremely volatile. Always have been. Their prices are driven by countless factors.
Any political hack dipshit who comes along and tries to use a single point in time as a snapshot to tell you how things are going to be in the future is one clueless fuck.
Speak for yourself. I am doing quite well. Maybe if you get off the coach, clean the beer cans out of the front yard, and look for a job, you can prosper. LOLObama has no intention of letting Americans prosper.
Don't worry about the price of coal and natural gas. Both will be replaced by renewables for electrical generation. Plenty of other uses for natural gas, but large scale coal mining and use is dead. The present prices of solar and wind, plus the developing technology of grid scale storage makes that a certainty.
Cheapest Solar Ever Austin Energy Gets 1.2 Gigawatts of Solar Bids for Less Than 4 Cents Greentech Media
June 30, 2015
A lot more cheap solar is coming for Austin, Texas.
The city's utility, Austin Energy, just released new data on developer bids for PV projects as part of a 600-megawatt procurement. The numbers show how far solar prices have come down over the last year -- and will continue to drop.
According to Khalil Shalabi, Austin Energy's vice president of resource planning, the utility received offers for 7,976 megawatts of projects after issuing a request for bids in April. Out of those bids, 1,295 megawatts of projects were priced below 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
"The technology is getting better and the prices are decreasing with time," said Shalabi during a presentation in front of the Austin city council last week.
Shalabi displayed the chart below showing an "exponentially declining curve" for PV projects in Texas.
"If you continue the curve, you can see that if the cost points continue along this sort of exponentially declining curve. We expect to see prices out in the future that are possibly below $20 a megawatt-hour," he said.
And this will tranlate into less increase, already seeing that, and then cheaper rates for all of us.
Why should there be a fossil fuel backup? Grid scale storage will make wind and solar 24/7, as well as increase the stability, and make the grid much more robust. Go ahead and live in the 20th Century, Mr. Bripat, the rest of us are ready for the 21st Century.
http://www.brattle.com/system/news/..._Distributed_Electricity_Storage_in_Texas.pdf
Our analysis shows that deploying electricity storage on distribution systems across Texas could provide substantial net benefits to the state. We estimate that up to 5,000 MW (15,000 MWh, assuming a three-to-one ratio of storage to discharge capability) of grid-integrated, distributed electricity storage would be cost effective from an ERCOT system-wide societal perspective based on a forecast of installed cost of storage of approximately $350/kWh. Our analysis assumes that the storage deployment plan will be developed to capture as much benefits as possible by integrating value from increasing customer reliability, improving the T&D systems, and transacting in the wholesale power markets. Our analysis accounts for the net impact that deploying storage would have on generation investments in ERCOT’s “energy-only” wholesale electricity market. The resulting generation investment response sustains market prices sufficient to support the development of the generating capacity necessary to maintain ERCOT’s resource adequacy.
We also evaluate the benefits of grid-integrated storage deployed by TDSPs from an average
electricity customer’s perspective. Our analysis shows that deploying 3,000 MW (9,000 MWh) of storage across ERCOT (with 1,000 MW on Oncor’s system) would reduce residential customer bills slightly and provide additional reliability benefits in the form of reduced power outages for customers located in areas where storage is installed. Considering both the impact on electricity bills and improved reliability of grid-integrated storage, total customer benefits would significantly exceed costs. However, while beneficial from an integrated, system-wide
perspective, an efficient scale of storage deployment would not be reached if deployed solely by
merchant developers in the wholesale market, by retail customers, or only for capturing T&D
benefits.
Storage investments could not be undertaken at an efficient scale solely by merchant developers in the Texas restructured electricity market because the value that a merchant storage developer can capture and monetize through transacting in the wholesale power market alone is too low compared to costs. For instance, we find that approximately 30–40% of the total system-wide benefits of storage investments are associated with reliability, transmission, and distribution functions that are not reflected in wholesale market prices and, therefore, cannot be captured by meutility mrchant storage investors. Even at the low projected storage costs, the opportunity to arbitrage wholesale power market prices and sell ancillary services would not likely attract merchant storage investments at a significant scale. This means that relying only on merchant investors to develop storage in ERCOT would result in under-investment in storage from a state-wide perspective. Moreover, without being integrated in T&D planning and operations, merchant electricity storage would be under-utilized and unable to capture the high additional value offered by targeted deployment within the state’s transmission and distribution systems.
Well, Mr. Bripat, I think these people's opinions carry more weight.
Why should there be a fossil fuel backup? Grid scale storage will make wind and solar 24/7, as well as increase the stability, and make the grid much more robust. Go ahead and live in the 20th Century, Mr. Bripat, the rest of us are ready for the 21st Century.
Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price Dollars per Million Btu
You can see the price of gas going back to 1997.
Take a good look at that. Look at the price of gas in March 1997.
$1.89.
The OP attributes the current $3.00 price to the surge in fracking. Then how does one explain the lower price in 1997?
The price of natural gas spiked under Bush in 2005. $13.42.
This is why I say the OP is negative wishful thinking. They aren't just satisfied with whining about current events, the want something to pre-emptively whine about!
There are many, many factors which drive the price of a commodity.
Mmmmmmmm . . . the lower price in 1997 is probably due to the fact that we've had almost 20 years of inflation since then and the price of everything has almost doubled.
Too bad for you the prices in that link, including the 1997 $1.89, are already adjusted for inflation.
Try again.
The price of natural gas "spiked" before fracking because it was in short supply.
Manufactured bullshit.
Here's a picture even a five year old can understand. As you can see, after adjusting for inflation, natural gas is the same price it was nearly 20 years ago.That's so simple a 5-year-old could understand it.
