The Energy Thread

[All-American]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has filed applications for their fusion power plant to be located in and generate power for Northern Virginia, with plans to be generating power in the “early 2030’s.”

https://cfs.energy/chesterfield/overview

Fusion is now always only ten years away.

[Moliere]

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has filed applications for their fusion power plant to be located in and generate power for Northern Virginia, with plans to be generating power in the “early 2030’s.”

https://cfs.energy/chesterfield/overview

Fusion is now always only ten years away.

Maybe it can power all those data centers in Virginia…in ten years

[Moliere]

In other news, the UAE has left OPEC. This is a pretty big deal in oil and gas sectors and the consensus seems to be that this will ultimately lead to a general reduction in oil prices as the emirates ramps up production they kept down due to the cartel. UAE was pretty much the only other swing capacity producer in OPEC other than Saudi Arabia.

[Moliere]

Fuel Mix

I'm not sure if this page link will work, or maybe it's updated every day, but it's amazing to me what Texas has done in regard to alternative energy sources. For most of this summer, during peak day times (9am to 6pm) Texas is generating about 1/3 of its power from solar energy. There have been times when solar was over 50% of the energy produced. It's really quite amazing and seems a bit ironic given the levels of oil and gas produced in the Permian basin.

What's also pretty cool is that Texas has also figured out, to a point, how to alleviate the sudden drop off in solar power when the sun goes down. You can see in the chart the amount of power discharged from batteries (which were charged when solar was generating its peak amount of energy) basically fills in most of that gap until the power needs decline. All of this an my power bill has, for the most part, stayed fairly consistent year over year.