 charges of 6.92 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is the cost from providers, which in turn is passed straight through to consumers.
The average costs per tier, which is the way electricity is scaled up to discourage consumption:
- $0.16 – tier 1
- $0.23 – tier 2
- $0.29 – tier 3
My average cost for August was 21.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
So this storage facility would add costs of 13.5 cents compared to the 6.9 cents of generation costs or 21.6 cents average cost.
Unless I made a serious math mistake (which is possible) or a serious conceptual error (which is a significant possibility), looks to me like this project will significantly increase costs to consumers.
The above analysis doesn’t count the cost of filling the reservoirs with 4,000 or 5,000 acre feet of water. Also doesn’t count the cost of annual evaporation.
Storage analysis above doesn’t count the loss in power of transmitting the electricity to the site, or the loss from pumping the water uphill, or the loss in converting falling water into electricity, or the friction loss of transmitting the power back across the grid a second time.
Oh, since the northern plains are still digging out from a nasty blizzard on Christmas day and still in freezing temperatures, how does a water storage project work when temperatures are below freezing, say in the sub-zero range?
My little brain knows that lakes freeze so hard in North Dakota that you can drive a truck across them. They are frozen hard for several months at a time. How do you transfer water between reservoirs in sub-zero temps when the top several inches of each reservoir are frozen solid?
Editorial comment from MDW
As happens so often, hat tip for finding the above story goes to The Million Dollar Way in an article on 12/22: Interesting $1 Billion Science Project Okayed For Martinsville, Montana.
Oh, one final editorial comment on 12/24 from The Million Dollar Way. The blog mentioned the blizzard that was then expected to clobber most of North Dakota on Christmas Day:
Blizzard warning for southwestern North Dakota. Wind farms will be off-line during the blizzard. It’s fortunate that we have solar farms backing up wind farms. LOL.
Lots of wind
farms plants in that corner of the state. Keep in mind that if the winds are too strong, turbines must be taken off-line to avoid damage. Thus, there will be no electricity generated during this very windy time.
There is a high probability that the expected 8 or 12 inches of accumulation might, perhaps, possibly have an adverse affect on output from solar
farms plants. Degradation of output from solar farms plants might possibly continue until some distant warming trend (on Tuesday and Wednesday temperature were forecast to climb to only 27 and there were one sunny and two mostly sunny days forecast in the following two weeks). Might take a while for all that snow accumulating on top of solar panels across the upper Mid-west to melt off.
Update: Post got a comment at Million Dollar Way: TGIF -Last Friday of 2016. Thanks for the mention!