Tommy Vitolo

Representing Brookline at the State House has been an incredible honor, and I’m delighted that I’ll have the opportunity to do so for another term. Thank you Brookline voters.

@xiaowang1984 What’s the opportunity cost of the natural gas itself? That would be part of the marginal cost…

I want to understand this "zero marginal cost" thing a little better. If I have a natty gas plant that I place right at the natty well and I spend fixed costs developing the well that lasts say 10-20 years but I own both the well and the plant. Do I have a near zero marginal cost resource now? Isn't this based on the principle of capital investment giving returns of commodities. So is the entire function of zero marginal cost based on the fact that there is no where else to store and deliver the electricity unlike in natty? So no middleman supplier handling the transport and storage to buy from?

We're proud to endorse these STEM champions running for state, local, and municipal office. Their expertise and leadership are crucial to finding real solutions in their communities—ones based on facts and data. We’re proud to support these candidates!

@xiaowang1984 @ItsSteveBee @grok Consistently cheaper than oil is $-fine if we’re replacing oil all the heating hours. But we’re not. Most heating hours were not burning oil for electricity. And that’s in a state where heating oil consumption and natural gas for heating consumption have both been declining.

We don't need a fixed price context for gas for it to make sense either. We just need it to be consistently cheaper than oil. And for the pipeline constraints to lower the incredibly fast rate the piped gas rises. Spending ratepayer money to ratebase a 1bcf pipe would have been far more cost effective than ratebasing the NECEC line

Impressive we've burned through about 40 million gallons of fuel oil in ISO-NE the last ten days or so..this represents about 1600GWh of fuel energy or about 600GWh or so of electrical energy

@xiaowang1984 @ItsSteveBee @grok Again, they’re locking in price for the energy, delivered. A gas pipeline simply doesn’t do that. Not comparable.

@TommyVitolo @ItsSteveBee @grok By the same token does any offshore wind or solar developer want to take merchant risk to develop for us without the security of a ratepayer backed 20 year PPA?

@xiaowang1984 @ItsSteveBee @grok NECEC is economic, under a wide variety of permutations, and has a fixed price contract. Unless the gas pipeline builders are willing to offer a 20-year fixed price on the gas, they’re simply not comparable.

@TommyVitolo @ItsSteveBee @grok And as for an economic pipeline, did hq fund the transmission line for necec or did the ma ratepayers? Are we going to engage in 20 year electricity offtake agreement with the gas plants so they build the pipe like we would with the hydro?

@xiaowang1984 @ItsSteveBee @grok We have not frozen nor been in the dark. An economic pipeline should have no shortage of investors ready to buy with their money, not ratepayer money. Every PV panel, every wind turbine, every HVDC line from Canada, every battery is part of a lower $ lower CO2 long-term play.

@ItsSteveBee @grok @TommyVitolo I think this year, last year and 2022 make payback math for a pipe much better

@xiaowang1984 @JigarShahDC A few hundred MW of capacity a year, several years in a row… journey of 1,000 steps or some such.

@TommyVitolo @JigarShahDC Except the scale of the energy is tiny in comparison

@xiaowang1984 @JigarShahDC If the goal is to solve that one problem, and siting oil on site is ok, sure maybe. But batteries also provide a huge list of benefits the other 350+ days a year, on system stressed days and days with plenty of adequacy, in high-PV deployment places places 2x a day or more. 🤷🏽‍♂️

@JigarShahDC Wouldn't dual fuel be more effective?

@xiaowang1984 More load shifting, batteries, and (in some places) wind allows for even more solar PV to do even more squashing!

Solar squashing the gas and coal peaks without making too big a duck shape is the most efficient way to run the system ngl.

This fun #photo is courtesy of Anthony Kesaris & was taken at Clam Box in Quincy. Duke is w/ Quincy's Mayor Tobin. Wish we could turn back clock to those menu prices! Hope u can order copy of The Duke #book A great read! a.co/d/gx2bpc4 @BostonGlobe #booktwt #Boston

@xiaowang1984 Not at the moment, but surely it will be included in the total market understanding for their next contract.

@TommyVitolo But then the price suppression effect isn't saving the local ratepayers money if they have an existing bilateral right

These climate people always focus on the cost of the gen sold by the generator when it's available when that's the wrong framing. The correct framing is what is the cost of procuring generation for all hours of the load, *including* the hours when the cheap gen isn't available.

@xiaowang1984 Sorry I’m having a hard time tracking which “they” is “they.” Zero marginal cost supply in IL suppresses the LMP in IL (for those hours). Someone might be losing money in the transaction b/c LMP < long-term contract, but that doesn’t change the price suppression effect.

It depends on the nature of the offtake contracts in Illinois. If they can take the cheap renewable generation on the market they can save the money. If they are locked into long term purchase agreements then it doesn't. And if they aren't and take the cheap gen then they gotta make sure the stuff they do need for RA continues to be paid enough

@xiaowang1984 It doesn’t. I’m not a fan of that hand-waving. That play does, however, help to suppress energy prices during RE-generating hours in and near Illinois, however, which is a good thing for Illinois ratepayers.

@TommyVitolo If you do the city of Cambridge thing and buy a ppa somewhere in Illinois how does that help resource adequacy here

@xiaowang1984 Your counter to “this product wins in one kind of market” is “yeah but it doesn’t in a different one?” Well sure. Straw man away I guess.

@TommyVitolo No I'm pointing out broadly that renewables are pretty ineffective at serving capacity when capacity itself is needed to avoid prices blowing up in your load zone and you can't just used an annualized REC and you're still going to build the gas plants

@xiaowang1984 Yes of course, and yet here you are grousing on RE broadly instead of narrowing it to out-of-the-money RE contracts…

It all depends on if you got favorable offtake conditions on the wind..just because the market price is low doesn't mean it was actually cheap for ratepayers. Wind and solar in Texas funded by tech company RECs? Drive prices down for ratepayers. Wind and solar in mass funded by ratepayers? Far less so.

@xiaowang1984 It’s considerably worse than the one-day-in-ten-years standard.

31.6 hrs a year is still 99.65% uptime. Let's see that from your powerwall system!

@xiaowang1984 That HP customers be curtailed? Seems that we’d be having a different conversation, no?

Also is there any question that if heat pumps were actually adopted at the scale proposed that we would be having the exact same conversation?

Damn I guess this means build more natty? Maybe with dual fuel... But it is interesting seeing that Google seems to be the org that is the most committed to the green vision, by being more open to flexibility while also underwriting special investments through novel utility arrangements

@SamEBEnergy @xiaowang1984 @ShanuMathew93 My “the stuff” I meant all the things you billet pointed that weren’t a lack of actual space.

@TommyVitolo @xiaowang1984 @ShanuMathew93 If by "the stuff" you mean the grid, that's only one of the factors. The rest is geography (which in the energy world, is destiny, imo)

If you’re a single power generation type, maximalist, please answer these questions when only talking about your solution. Every gen type has issues, and why we need them all! Gas: tell me how you’ll get a turbine and EPC at fast and fair cost, have a gas line built, and what’s the glide path for emissions longer term? Nuclear: what’s your risk capital backstop, how do you plan to execute to <10yr build schedule and prevent cost overruns? Solar/Wind + Storage: how much capacity are you going to firm with storage and what’s the cost? Do you need to fund/build TX in order to do so and what’s the plan for executing that? Coal: how do you plan to compete economically w/o subsidies? What happens when we start to enforce environmental considerations again?