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57 comments on More on Natural Gas

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Leanan on November 21, 2005 - 8:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
They didn't seem like bad choices at the time.  Those new power plants were likely built at least partly as a result of the dot-com boom.  The Internet explosion resulted in a surge in electricity demand.  Not so much for the home PCs, but for the massive server farms that power sites like eBay and Amazon.  The Internet, along with air-conditioning, are the big changes in energy use.  (IMO, this is a classic example of "diminishing returns," or at least the hidden costs of technology.  The Internet has given us a way to save energy: telecommuting.  But how much energy does it take to keep the Internet up and running?)

And until about 2000, the energy industry truly believed that we had hundreds of years worth of natural gas.  They knew about depletion, and after what happened with oil, they surely knew it would happen with natural gas as well...but they honestly believed that it was decades, even centuries distant.  

That's what I find really scary.  They didn't see it coming, even with the best technology money could buy, and more info that we have about any other area on earth.  If they didn't see the peaks for U.S. oil or North American gas until they hit them, why should we believe them when they say we have hundreds of years worth of coal left...or that Saudi Arabia has hundreds of years worth of oil?

BTW, originally they had lots more natural gas fired power plants planned.  They were cancelled, at a cost of millions, when they realized they wouldn't have any fuel for them.

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Twilight on November 21, 2005 - 9:20pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'd like to see data showing that the Internet is responsible for significant electrical energy use increases.  I'm pretty skeptical.  I'm betting it would barely show up compared to other uses of energy, such as the huge numbers of air-conditioned homes and businesses - and that's even if you include the server farms.  But I'll keep an open mind!
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flankp on November 21, 2005 - 9:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revisions/downloads/computer/ReducingPCPowerC onsumption.pdf

This pretty interesting, and kinda related.

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Leanan on November 22, 2005 - 10:55am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Of course, server farms must be massively air-conditioned, because those computers throw off a lot of heat, and will fry if you let it get too warm.  (My office didn't have air-conditioning until we started using a lot of computers.  They were willing to let us sweat, but the computers need to be coddled.) Some large server farms have their own power plants.  

Some links:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/06/04/BU85569.DTL&type=te ch

Exodus' Bay Area operations consume 12 megawatts of electricity -- as much as 12,000 houses. And data farms typically rely on diesel backup generators in case of a blackout, which generate more pollution than most power plants.

http://www.io.com/~stack/viridian/archive/2001_03_18_viridian-archive.html

A giant server farm can suck up as much energy as a steel mill. Seattle, Austin, and Phoenix are all experiencing over ten percent growth in power demand annually.

http://www.kingcountyjournal.com/sited/story/html/37943

Twenty-seven or more Internet ``server farms'' proposed for the area could consume nearly as much electricity as Seattle and greatly magnify Northwest energy problems within two years.

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Stuart Staniford on November 22, 2005 - 5:13am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Their problem seems to have been in part who they listened to.  If you believed CERA,


Nevertheless, CERA expects supply to begin to show year-over-year increases in the United States toward the end of 2000, and in Canada supply growth is at last expected to be evident this spring.

CERA does believe that there is the gas supply potential to meet the challenges of increased demand from power generation at a price that would not discourage that market development. It is very important to avoid short-term government intervention in the market that would discourage investment in supply.

On the other hand, had they listened to Matt Simmons, they'd have known that depletion was a big issue, and a rather unlikely explosion in the rig count was required to match demand, and that therefore prices were likely to rise a lot.  Just as they did.

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Whitehall on November 22, 2005 - 2:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"They didn't seem like bad choices at the time."

Depends on what horse you were riding.

Clinton/Gore made NG-fueled generators a campaign plank in '91.  Wall Street jumped on it because NG/CCGT and dereg looked like a fast buck.  The environmentalists signed off because it looked better than coal and nuclear.  So long as there was plenty of cheap gas, it did have appeal I will grant.

From my position inside the nuclear utility business, I always saw it as a short term fix - a sugar rush.  I argued with management when the rush began back in the early '90s about it all blowing up in our faces and it did.  My former employer is just now getting out of bankrupcy.

Mr. Maul's powerpoint needs to be understood within the context of California politics.  Arnold is behind LNG terminals but the guys at the California Energy Commission (CEC) where Maul works are not about to give Schwartzenegger any support or ammunition.  The CEC has been living in a dream world since birth and has yet to understand or recognize the energy needs of the state.  Note that there is hardly any mention of Alberta or its depletion rates - we get about a quarter of our gas there.

The Rockies do offer hope for a big gas resource for us but Clinton locked most of it up and what's left is being drawn to the East - Kinder Morgan has announced a big new pipeline for Wyoming to Chicago to tap into the gas that California has been thinking was for us - another point Maul ignores.

It sure seems obvious to me that California needs a bunch (4?) new reactors and we needed to start last year.  And that's in addition to Arnold's LNG terminals.

Here's my take on California's energy situation:
http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=788

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57 comments on More on Natural Gas

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