Part of the subtext seems to be that constructing these turbines was a greenwashing campaign on Chevron's part. This kind of project helps to bolster the naive impression that these are "energy companies", as one commenter alluded, not just "oil companies". So in a sense these turbines have fulfilled their purpose.
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.
The idea that Chevron is purposefully building wind farms not to operate them sounds dubious to me at best. My guess is they bungled something up because wind energy isn't their core competency.
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?"
Nuclear energy is green and it’s very reliable. The problem is that people seem to think wind is a good idea, when it’s really a highly visible form of greenwashing.
Let's not downplay the simple fact that wind energy has the lowest levelized cost of electricty and has for over a decade now (in the US and AFAIK on average worldwide, not universally). As an intermittent source it's never going to be a silver bullet, but it's hardly surprising that a power source that's not just cheap but also has a long track record of being _consistently_ cheap gets a lot of usage. And the only other real competition is solar, which would likely have the same issues as wind in the specific case of the original article.
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.
By "green" are you referring to the radioactive sludge it produces? ;)
I'm not anti-nuclear energy, but it comes with a host of problems and costs that many nuclear energy supporters tend to gloss right over. Chief among them is that no one wants these facilities in their backyard or anywhere near their backyard. Part of this is just NIMBY-ism, but the other part is a well-warranted fear of an accident or negligence leading to contamination. It's all great until the private equity firms take over.
$4 billion for 500MW, or $8 per watt. That's 2-4x the cost per watt of solar.
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).
Sorry, it felt like some kind of a leading "gotcha" question. Why are you wondering about nuclear power in Spain, specifically? And why only from someone living there? Both seem entirely out of context with the discussion thread, which didn't mention Spain before your comment.
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.
Logically, yes, but it doesn't always happen. Ballmer forgot MS was a software company, thought it was only a Windows company, and wasted a decade. Oil execs look at the cost of change, and decide they're not energy companies, only oil because that's what they know.
If Microsoft is the wrong answer Kodak, who squelched their own digital photography stuff because they made so much from film, is a classic cautionary tale about a company getting too wed to its business model and allowing itself to become obsolete.
Yeah, I've read that, but I lived through it and even worked for them for 6 months during the period. No, Ballmer was not an underrated CEO. He was an overrated COO and a terrible CEO.
> Oil execs look at the cost of change, and decide they're not energy companies, only oil because that's what they know.
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.
Yes, I agree it doesn't always happen, but in aggregate it typically does. For example, Borders didn't get on with the digital trend, but B&N did. I agree that any one oil company might not be forward-looking enough, but overall, there will those that do and those that don't, and you can't assume any one company is in the latter group just because of their current industry.
Except probably 99% of their profits come from oil. 99% of their infrastructure is setup for oil which has been honed and put into place over decades.
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.
They don't need to revamp. They have access to billions in revenue that can be put in to setting themselves up as key players in yet another industry. Many of them are doing just that. Eventually, they all probably want to dominate the battery / grid renewables industry as well. Why wouldn't they? They are uniquely positioned to do so.
Chevron is an oil and natural gas company, not an electricity production company. Directly producing green energy is a bit like Apple selling Windows PCs.
There must be some difference, as otherwise my washing machine would be a computer too since it has a screen, input, and an operating system; and conversely that the Windows phone wouldn’t have had such a brief existence.
Chevron is a profit-making company, and will do anything that makes it money. The only relevant question is whether they'd have any advantage in green energy, or would they lose margin to competition.
Failing at green energy might be profitable enough if it drives up costs for other green energy companies.
Absolutely, and this is a common pitfall of large companies. However, history also shows us that many large companies can and do adapt and do go on to dominate newer fields. For example, American express was a shipping company (and a massive one at that) before it started venturing into novel financial services.
If anything, large companies are better positioned than startups to enter new capital-intensive verticals, and I think history bears this out.
The government, local, state, or federal, should have the opportunity to nationalize unused infrastructure like this. Give Chevron an opportunity to tear it down or turn it on, but otherwise pay a market rate just like with eminent domain and let the turbines spin.
I'm guessing this was just some greenwashing by Chevron to avoid being forced to actually cleanup their nuclear waste.
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!
I have a little experience on this aspect. There are tons of local governments who weigh in on the location of these lines and that can be a contentious process to get buy-in from them.
The government, local, state, or federal, should have the opportunity to allow the owner to sell to people who want the electricity. Most of the investment is done.
It's in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of other empty land in the area. If Chevron owns that land, then the government should fuck right off and let them do what they want with it.
“Partial non-operation occurred because there are transmission constraints
and firm transmission service in not available to transmit power generated
at Casper Wind Farm.”
You don't need to know anything else. There's no transmission capacity and nobody wants to pay for it.
The usual reasons: maintenance costs on the old unused gear, environmental concerns of new construction, locals who don't want it, partnering with a transmission company, partnering with a distribution company, getting the capital to pay for it all & the feasibility of financial return, among many others.
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.
Infrastructure to physically carry the energy away from the power station, aggregate it with other stations’ energy, and transmit it safely to the customers who can use it.
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.
Pretty unrelated outside of it's about wind turbines, but couple days ago I watched this and it was super fascinating + fun, recommend it as somethingto put on in the background - Why Toronto has that one, weird wind turbine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn-w_zohw6Y (~16 minutes)
tl;dr: Chevron owns the turbines. They originally signed an agreement with PacifiCorp to buy the power generated. When the agreement was up Chevron decided not to renew it and instead pursue registering as a generator to sell the power directly to buyers on the Western Interconnect.
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.
This is Cowboy State Daily, one of the few news sources from Wyoming.They publish a lot of stories with a significant amount of bad faith, particularly concerning energy and environmental issues.
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 would expect a company whose business is building and operating power plants, to be more adept at navigating the red tape surrounding the grid that they operate than you are.
Chevron did everything wrong on this wind farm even before they built it. This is not a wind issue, this is not a government issue, and this is not a PacifiCorp issue.
This is Chevron being garbage, which should surprise no one.
> Chevron did everything wrong on this wind farm even before they built it. This is not a wind issue, this is not a government issue, and this is not a PacifiCorp issue.
What do you mean by all this? Anything specific? The parent comment seems to imply they just haven’t built interconnect yet
Do you have any book recommendations to help understand the electrical grid and why you can’t just start pumping electricity into it? I find these type of systems fascinating.
Fundamentally, Grid operators have to realtime-match demand + generation, and have a bunch of grid-scale devices along the way to sink excess generation temporarily, or have (expensive) peaker plants to ramp up generation temporarily. For example, natural gas can respond quicker to demands, but nuclear power plants typically cannot. Typically nuclear plants will feed into the average 'base load' and the more responsive plants will handle temporary peaks.
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.
Wind power is not their core business, so they don't even seem to be trying. Someone decided that doing some wind power would be good publicity, and then did a token effort with this farm. Someone's friend who needed a job but couldn't be trusted to run anything serious in Chevron was then hired to run wind business with predictable results.
Part of the subtext seems to be that constructing these turbines was a greenwashing campaign on Chevron's part. This kind of project helps to bolster the naive impression that these are "energy companies", as one commenter alluded, not just "oil companies". So in a sense these turbines have fulfilled their purpose.
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.
The idea that Chevron is purposefully building wind farms not to operate them sounds dubious to me at best. My guess is they bungled something up because wind energy isn't their core competency.
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?"
Giving them too much credit?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Chevron
Nuclear energy is green and it’s very reliable. The problem is that people seem to think wind is a good idea, when it’s really a highly visible form of greenwashing.
Let's not downplay the simple fact that wind energy has the lowest levelized cost of electricty and has for over a decade now (in the US and AFAIK on average worldwide, not universally). As an intermittent source it's never going to be a silver bullet, but it's hardly surprising that a power source that's not just cheap but also has a long track record of being _consistently_ cheap gets a lot of usage. And the only other real competition is solar, which would likely have the same issues as wind in the specific case of the original article.
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.
By "green" are you referring to the radioactive sludge it produces? ;) I'm not anti-nuclear energy, but it comes with a host of problems and costs that many nuclear energy supporters tend to gloss right over. Chief among them is that no one wants these facilities in their backyard or anywhere near their backyard. Part of this is just NIMBY-ism, but the other part is a well-warranted fear of an accident or negligence leading to contamination. It's all great until the private equity firms take over.
Unfortunately, the best time to build a nuclear plant was 20 years ago. Shame.
The next best time is today. Fortunately for Wyoming, a new nuclear plant started construction just this year. Kemmerer isn't that far from Casper. https://energycommunities.gov/terrapower-nuclear-plant/
$4 billion for 500MW, or $8 per watt. That's 2-4x the cost per watt of solar.
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).
With or without subsidies?
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.
How's the nuclear power production in Spain?
From a quick Google, seems fine? Other than Public perception messing with the market
Seems fine? I actually wanted some level of detail from someone living in Spain.
But thank you for your valuable contribution.
Sorry, it felt like some kind of a leading "gotcha" question. Why are you wondering about nuclear power in Spain, specifically? And why only from someone living there? Both seem entirely out of context with the discussion thread, which didn't mention Spain before your comment.
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.
Because that's where Brian is posting from. I was asking him.
Anyway, don't worry about it. It's not the most important thing happening in the world :)
"Don't trust an oil company to disrupt their own business model with renewables" seems to be the lesson here.
Why? They're all energy companies, not oil companies. Companies pivot all the time. As long as there's profit to be made, they'll even engage in both.
Logically, yes, but it doesn't always happen. Ballmer forgot MS was a software company, thought it was only a Windows company, and wasted a decade. Oil execs look at the cost of change, and decide they're not energy companies, only oil because that's what they know.
https://danluu.com/ballmer/
For the argument Ballmer didn't waste a decade but setup MS up for the success it's seeing today.
If Microsoft is the wrong answer Kodak, who squelched their own digital photography stuff because they made so much from film, is a classic cautionary tale about a company getting too wed to its business model and allowing itself to become obsolete.
Yeah, I've read that, but I lived through it and even worked for them for 6 months during the period. No, Ballmer was not an underrated CEO. He was an overrated COO and a terrible CEO.
> Oil execs look at the cost of change, and decide they're not energy companies, only oil because that's what they know.
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.
Yes, I agree it doesn't always happen, but in aggregate it typically does. For example, Borders didn't get on with the digital trend, but B&N did. I agree that any one oil company might not be forward-looking enough, but overall, there will those that do and those that don't, and you can't assume any one company is in the latter group just because of their current industry.
Except probably 99% of their profits come from oil. 99% of their infrastructure is setup for oil which has been honed and put into place over decades.
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.
They don't need to revamp. They have access to billions in revenue that can be put in to setting themselves up as key players in yet another industry. Many of them are doing just that. Eventually, they all probably want to dominate the battery / grid renewables industry as well. Why wouldn't they? They are uniquely positioned to do so.
Chevron is an oil and natural gas company, not an electricity production company. Directly producing green energy is a bit like Apple selling Windows PCs.
Apple was a computer company and now their biggest business is selling mobile phones.
Not was, is. They didnt undermine their first market in the slightest.
Kodak was a film company. They made the first digital camera. Theyre dead now.
Which are what if not computers?
There must be some difference, as otherwise my washing machine would be a computer too since it has a screen, input, and an operating system; and conversely that the Windows phone wouldn’t have had such a brief existence.
Perhaps the difference between a phone and a washing machine is, uh, the plumbing?
Chevron is a profit-making company, and will do anything that makes it money. The only relevant question is whether they'd have any advantage in green energy, or would they lose margin to competition.
Failing at green energy might be profitable enough if it drives up costs for other green energy companies.
> Chevron is a profit-making company, and will do anything that makes it money
You assume that Chevron will act rationally. Whether it would be profitable is far from the only question.
There is a reason why newer companies and younger people tend to make bigger changes…
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.
Absolutely, and this is a common pitfall of large companies. However, history also shows us that many large companies can and do adapt and do go on to dominate newer fields. For example, American express was a shipping company (and a massive one at that) before it started venturing into novel financial services.
If anything, large companies are better positioned than startups to enter new capital-intensive verticals, and I think history bears this out.
If the profits or barriers to entry are less favorable they might be disinclined to do that.
companies are made of people, and generalally all of the execs in charge cut their teeth in the oil and gas sphere
People regularly engage in profit seeking behavior in different industries.
The government, local, state, or federal, should have the opportunity to nationalize unused infrastructure like this. Give Chevron an opportunity to tear it down or turn it on, but otherwise pay a market rate just like with eminent domain and let the turbines spin.
I'm guessing this was just some greenwashing by Chevron to avoid being forced to actually cleanup their nuclear waste.
Note that Texas has a long history of taking a “hands off” approach to energy companies abusing the public commons:
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!
The same government that is prohibiting construction of the transmission lines to move that power to where it would be used?
I have a little experience on this aspect. There are tons of local governments who weigh in on the location of these lines and that can be a contentious process to get buy-in from them.
The government, local, state, or federal, should have the opportunity to allow the owner to sell to people who want the electricity. Most of the investment is done.
Maybe one could even say that this is a kind of blight and a reason to use eminent domain, so that it could be done without any changes in law.
It's in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of other empty land in the area. If Chevron owns that land, then the government should fuck right off and let them do what they want with it.
I'd love to know why an "energy company" was unable to surmount these hurdles.
The usual reasons: maintenance costs on the old unused gear, environmental concerns of new construction, locals who don't want it, partnering with a transmission company, partnering with a distribution company, getting the capital to pay for it all & the feasibility of financial return, among many others.
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.
> There's no transmission capacity
What is "transmission capacity"?
Infrastructure to physically carry the energy away from the power station, aggregate it with other stations’ energy, and transmit it safely to the customers who can use it.
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...
Pretty unrelated outside of it's about wind turbines, but couple days ago I watched this and it was super fascinating + fun, recommend it as somethingto put on in the background - Why Toronto has that one, weird wind turbine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn-w_zohw6Y (~16 minutes)
“Now, some say they are an eyesore that has idled for at least three years.”
Yeah, on that headline picture - it’s the turbines that are the “eyesore”, sure.
Somebody’s agenda is showing.
tl;dr: Chevron owns the turbines. They originally signed an agreement with PacifiCorp to buy the power generated. When the agreement was up Chevron decided not to renew it and instead pursue registering as a generator to sell the power directly to buyers on the Western Interconnect.
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.
This is Cowboy State Daily, one of the few news sources from Wyoming.They publish a lot of stories with a significant amount of bad faith, particularly concerning energy and environmental issues.
wyofile.com is a better source for energy and environmental reporting.
Thankyou. I will use more articles from that site from now on.
> The actual story is...
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."
No, they have an interconnection agreement. They're already connected to the grid.
I would expect a company whose business is building and operating power plants, to be more adept at navigating the red tape surrounding the grid that they operate than you are.
Chevron did everything wrong on this wind farm even before they built it. This is not a wind issue, this is not a government issue, and this is not a PacifiCorp issue.
This is Chevron being garbage, which should surprise no one.
> Chevron did everything wrong on this wind farm even before they built it. This is not a wind issue, this is not a government issue, and this is not a PacifiCorp issue.
What do you mean by all this? Anything specific? The parent comment seems to imply they just haven’t built interconnect yet
Do you have any book recommendations to help understand the electrical grid and why you can’t just start pumping electricity into it? I find these type of systems fascinating.
Fundamentally, Grid operators have to realtime-match demand + generation, and have a bunch of grid-scale devices along the way to sink excess generation temporarily, or have (expensive) peaker plants to ramp up generation temporarily. For example, natural gas can respond quicker to demands, but nuclear power plants typically cannot. Typically nuclear plants will feed into the average 'base load' and the more responsive plants will handle temporary peaks.
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.
Wind power is not their core business, so they don't even seem to be trying. Someone decided that doing some wind power would be good publicity, and then did a token effort with this farm. Someone's friend who needed a job but couldn't be trusted to run anything serious in Chevron was then hired to run wind business with predictable results.
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