| I was speaking to this: > You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline. The war in Ukraine spiking natural gas prices aren't increasing your costs if you're using waste gas. Your costs are the same regardless of whatever the global market of gas prices are, because you're not selling this gas on the market nor are you buying from the market. And for the vast majority of markets the war led to utility rates increasing, not decreasing, so chances are your self-generation rate was less than the grid not more. > Self-generating still means your turning power over to the market That's an assumption, but depending on the setup it might be true or it might not be true. One could self generate just for their own local usage and not be tied to the grid. I agree with the idea of it potentially not being competitive with renewables, once again you're talking potential lost opportunity when talking about renewables coming in cheaper. But the fact renewables came in cheaper some days doesn't make your costs increase, it just makes it less competitive than the grid power. The grid going negative doesn't change your costs if you're not connected to the grid, it just means you're spending more than you potentially needed to. And I agree its this risk of the price of electricity going lower than the costs of actually gathering and burning this gas for electricity that leads to it being flared and vented instead of put to something useful. But still, from the perspective of self-generation your costs aren't changing from grid conditions. Say it costs you like $0.05/kWh to self generate with the waste gas. The grid goes down to only $0.02/kWh. Did your costs to generate go up? No, its still $0.05/kWh. Sure, you're overpaying by $0.03/kWh compared to just using the grid power but your costs were still the same. |