A ten-year old natural gas power plant in California to be shut down!

[thewayne]

But wait a minute! Don't we like natural gas plants?

The problem is that the plant was built with General Electric 7H gas turbines, which take FIFTEEN HOURS to spin up - it was designed as a baseload power plant, that is, to run continuously. And it can't compete with solar and wind. And with a 15 hour spin-up time, it can't function as a peak-load plant to take up the slack when solar and wind suffer dips. GE now has a gas turbine called a 7HA which is air-cooled and spins up much faster, and when used in conjunction with a big battery backup, makes for a great peak-load plant.

But that's not what this plant is, so after a decade, it is going bye-bye. That's going to be a heck of a write-off, it was supposed to run for 30 years, so there's no way they're remotely close to having recovered costs.

It apparently is going to be sold to a battery plant and turned in to something like the monster Tesla peak-load plant that they built in Australia that is very popular. After all, the site already has all the electric grid interconnects and nice big buildings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/in-california-a-young-natural-gas-plant-closes-down-as-renewables-get-cheaper/

Comments

[silveradept]

If it can effectively make costs back and provide cheap energy to the state and some surrounding states, then they'll all be the rage, much as I dislike the person running Tesla. Green power is good. (There's something about all the rare earth mining it would take, but maybe if they were exceedingly long-lasting, it would give the planet time enough for us to heal it and deal with the waste products.)