As long as the exact same electrons go right back to Mexico in the next few milliseconds it should be fine.
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Still shilling for Westinghouse, are ya? 
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I’m uncertain.
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Whoa. Suddenly everything’s working way better. Thanks for the tip.
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He probably has it equipped with grow lights.
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So first up, let me admit that I haven’t looked at the details of this particular auction, so it’s possible that some of what I’m about to say doesn’t apply here. That said, I think it probably does (and I have worked on bids for some of the auctions shown in the graph at the top of the article).
The way these auctions typically work, they ask for bids and once the bids are submitted, they announce the bidders and the amounts bid. Then the media gets all excited and reports that whoever has the lowest bid has won the auction and consumers will get electricity for X cents/kWh. And that might be true, but it isn’t necessarily.
Take the previous record-low Saudi auction. The winner will not actually be declared until January or February, after Saudi authorities have had a chance to review all of the bids, though you wouldn’t know that from most reports. They will likely choose the lowest one they have confidence in, which may or may not be the lowest (though I expect in this case it will, since Masdar is involved with the low bid). If they think the low bid has unrealistic assumptions or serious technical flaws, they could still reject it.
It’s also possible that they are making assumptions about the future that will not come to pass. This has been a big story in Indian auctions this year, where bidders assumed they would be able to get solar panels at about 2/3 the price they actually will be able to. Some of those projects will now probably be either canceled or re-bid, since the original bidders can’t build them without losing a whole bunch of money.
Speaking of unrealistic assumptions, the author of the Electrek article bases his estimate of 1 cent/kWh prices in 2019 on 23% record solar cell efficiencies in the laboratory vs 16-17% solar module efficiencies today. There is a big difference between cell and module efficiencies, and there is an even bigger one between laboratory and production efficiencies. I’m not saying bid prices won’t hit 1 cent/kWh by 2019, but I am saying that if it happens, it won’t be because of a 42% increase in solar module efficiencies like Electrek speculates.
Not that I’m suggesting people don’t get excited about this. It’s still a big deal, even if the lowest bid doesn’t win in the end. But I have a strong vested interest in cheap solar power and too many times I’ve seen misreporting and overpromising work to the detriment of that objective, so I can be a bit sensitive…
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Run the lines along it. Not only can Mexico pay for Trumps electric wall, they can power it for free too.
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Hey! New idea! ELECTRIC FENCE
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Edward Bernays hadn’t mastered propaganda when buggy whips dominated the market.
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A space elevator is only going to mass a few thousand tons; it’s the size of a meter-wide sheet of saran wrap, albeit 100,000 km long. Even if we put up dozens of them, that’s only a few minutes worth of our 9 gigaton annual carbon emissions.
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psh. Sure, colorado has a little more of it, but the DANKEST sunlight comes from central oregon.
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He’ll probably try to tell them they should up the price so they can use the surplus to pay for his wall.
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That only works because cows don’t have alligator clips.
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But at the same time alligators don’t have cow clips either, so it all balances out in the long run.
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I’d worry less about the buggy-whip manufacturers, and more about places like Saudi Arabia which has depended on it for decades and is armed to the teeth with the third largest military spending after the US and China.
Also note that most of the actual labour in Saudi is done by foreigners, and they will leave. Then there’s the religious dogma police, epidemic rates of depression etc. and they’re going to want to blame it all on somebody. And, they stopped trying to grow any of their own food - they buy everything. That’s going to be an issue if food markets change in a warming world.
We can already see what’s happening in Venezuela. Russia is another country with high (something like 65%) dependence on fossil fuels (and very little put into manufacturing, which is pretty much an open air museum) and being a Mafia state really has conflicting business laws (allowing them to control business owners) etc.
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By the way, Jigar Shah of the Energy Gang podcast, makes the bold prediction that much of the Fossil Fuel industry will go the way of the Buggy whip industry by 2030.
Obviously they could see the light and move into other industries, but the buggy whip industry didn’t do that either.
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What you did there, see it I do
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I am trying to understand the Mexican electricity tariff vs. retail cost issue. There seems to be a multi-tiered rate system for residential users, with the lowest rate at 5.66 cents per kwh and the highest 23.50 cents per khw plus a fee of $69.00.
If it is accurate that they can produce or sell solar for 1 cent per kwh, that seem like a very big deal. But I am not an expert. I would think that the cost of solar is mostly initial equipment purchase and installation, averaged over the projected life of the equipment, plus maintenance cost and the cost of the transmission system.
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I get 363, but ok.
The Sabatier reaction requires dihydrogen: CO2 + 4 H2 → CH4 + 2 H2O. Where are you getting it?
Because currently, the most common and most efficient way to make dihydrogen is steam reformation followed by the water gas shift reaction:
CH4 + H2O → CO + 3 H2
CO + H2O → CO2 + H2
In words, the exact reverse of the Sabatier. For every molecule of CO2 you sequester and turn into CH4, somebody else needed to burn a molecule of CH4 and release a molecule of CO2 to give you the necessary dihydrogen, and you’ve accomplished nothing overall to reduce atmospheric CO2.
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