Comment by tills13
1 year ago
I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.
> At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
No, I know the plant will pay for its usage. But to me, the net benefit of the dam is effectively zeroed out from the onset. The province was barely able to carry the project through to completion in the first place. Now we gotta start the process over again with a new government and people on both sides are upset at the completion.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
The LNG facility will presumably produce some jobs, and bring in a lot of taxes (from exporting large quantities of natgas overseas.) So, the dam is basically an investment for the state, which will pay dividends for decades to come. That’s on top of what the plant will pay for electricity, which, presumably, in itself is enough to, over time, pay off the investment and then some.
> OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs.
In a lot of countries companies also pay much less for electricity, usually due to a lower tax on said electricity.
>At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong.
>And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol
So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
> And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils).
So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
Sorry... FOR PROFIT government entities? Where do profits go?
To the owner, that is the state. No reason why dividends can not be returned to some government entity that then moves them to general budget. It is not actually horrible model if free market people are to be believed. Companies are more efficient than government. So separating companies from bureaucrats should be improvement.
Do you have a source for that?
By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)
LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.
So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.
Sorry for the confusion. It's not necessarily preallocated but it just so happens that the new dam will generate x mwh per year and the LNG plant will consume close to x mwh per year. They are also within a few hundred km iirc. The public utility says that the dam's generation goes into the provincial pool and the plant's draw comes from the pool and I have no reason to not believe them...
But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.