Even more insidiously, the fact that the wind farm is now sitting idle achieves oil companies' secondary goal of making green energy look bad and unreliable. Thus keeping people divided on whether to support other green power initiatives and allowing our reliance on oil to continue. Profits protected.
I don't think I'm giving them too much credit.
Much more likely there is a room at Chevron where someone said "Wait who the fuck was responsible for negotiating that contract?" than "We're going to spend a bunch of money building a windfarm in Casper in order to get some small amount of good publicity, and the purposefully not operate it ?to make wind energy look bad?"
Much as nuclear energy is both green, reliable and safe - it's also hard to imagine it becoming cost-competitive at the scale that wind and solar are. Better regulation might help a bit, but even in places like South Korea where nuclear costs are unusually low and solar/wind costs unusually high they're basically competitive - and I wouldn't be surprised for solar+wind to fall in price there too, once they've slightly more mass in the market.
The focus on wind+solar over nuclear is less due to greenwashing that due to penny-pinching.
That's not as bad as I expected, and probably looks even better when you factor in the difference in uptime (e.g. including storage into the cost of solar).
I have no numbers but I've heard lots of times that "green" energy like wind and solar get a lot, and nuclear not so much.
The government is paying for 50% of the nuclear plant, and there's a 30% write-off on solar.
But thank you for your valuable contribution.
If you want details from someone who can do a quick Google search, instead, I offer: It seems like there was a politically led moratorium for several decades, then allowed but regulated into impracticality. Meanwhile the reactors they built have operated well for about 40 years and provide a large portion of the country's annual electrical generation.
Anyway, don't worry about it. It's not the most important thing happening in the world :)
Source: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical
It's currently 16:31 GMT, and the 'live' feed says 17.8 % of the UK grid is currently running on wind as I'm typing this.
Source: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
You must be delusional if you think wind power is greenwashing.
Some do yes, but it's not a hard and fast rule. What I notice is that when oil companies start green energy projects, people immediately question their motives as if it's anything more complicated than wanting to make more money in a new industry. They ought to be commended.
For the argument Ballmer didn't waste a decade but setup MS up for the success it's seeing today.
Can you imagine the cost of revamping all of that? And then they have to explain to their shareholders why their profits are a fraction of what they normally are, otherwise their stock price will sink which will affect the company in myriad ways.
There's so much to this space that I'm ignorant of, but I know enough to know that it's really not that simple.
Kodak was a film company. They made the first digital camera. Theyre dead now.
Failing at green energy might be profitable enough if it drives up costs for other green energy companies.
You assume that Chevron will act rationally. Whether it would be profitable is far from the only question.
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not because they can’t.
It’s because all that they have built up from hard work has resulted in responsibilities to a lot of people that also now hold them back.
If anything, large companies are better positioned than startups to enter new capital-intensive verticals, and I think history bears this out.
I'm guessing this was just some greenwashing by Chevron to avoid being forced to actually cleanup their nuclear waste.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/28/abandoned-oil-wells-...
The people that complain about water table corruption and the people that complain about view corruption are in the same boat: the governments of Texas don’t care. Perhaps they’ll vote in a government more interested in regulation someday, but until then — or, at least, until four years from now — Texas voters are the sole group able to take action to change that approach. 40% didn’t vote this month, so there’s lots of opportunity there!
“Partial non-operation occurred because there are transmission constraints
and firm transmission service in not available to transmit power generated
at Casper Wind Farm.”
There are hundreds of potential projects like this they could invest in. It's very likely that one of those other projects is way more likely to succeed, so they pick those projects, and take this one as a writeoff. They could possibly still come back to it, but probably not.
What is "transmission capacity"?
To tie in a major new source of energy, you need to make sure the wires and stuff can handle it, which involves physical construction and planning at a level above an individual operator. The US regulator estimates that 2,500GW of clean energy projects, like this one, are already built and stuck in the backlog of interconnection requests.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/transmission-inter...
That does seem to fit in with the idea that this was merely a greenwashing project, and not an actual effort.
Yeah, on that headline picture - it’s the turbines that are the “eyesore”, sure.
Somebody’s agenda is showing.
As a result they have nowhere to send the power right now for the same reason you can't install a 50MWh generator on your property, toss some wires up, and start pumping electricity into the grid - even if you wanted to do it for free.
This is a great example of garbage journalism. The story reports "the facts" but completely fails to put anything in context. The story completely misses this point and acts like the government is at fault for approving the permit to install the turbines and that the nay-sayers and NIMBYs were correct because it turns out wind turbines are just a boondoggle after all.
The actual story is Chevron made incompetent business decisions by failing to sign up as a generator earlier and failing to temporarily renew their PacifiCorp power purchase agreement, thus forcing them to idle an expensive asset while they fix their mistake.
wyofile.com is a better source for energy and environmental reporting.
Is that connecting renewables to the grid is time consuming, and shouldn't be. A few years ago, I determined that they payoff of grid-scale batteries is extremely fast, BUT, connecting to the grid is so frustrating that I decided I didn't want to peruse the opportunity.
I don't know if I'd use the word "incompetent."
This is Chevron being garbage, which should surprise no one.
What do you mean by all this? Anything specific? The parent comment seems to imply they just haven’t built interconnect yet
In order to financially make this work, there are a whole litany of agreements + commitments in place, as well as some "free market magic". (Remember a few years ago when spot prices for electricity spiked into obscene territory?)
Renewables provide unique challenges for these operations, as you cannot simply turn sun and wind off and on. Similarly, you can't just pump uncontrolled electricity into the grid w/o the operator's coordination.