[ausev] Apples and Energy

[Gil Dawson]

At 9:05 P -0600 1/14/08, John Penry at Texrocks wrote:
>
>If you were selling apples, and you had a basket of Granny Smith Apples, and
>a basket of Delicious Apples, I could choose to pay more for the Granny
>Smith apples, because I would get them from the Granny Smith basket.  But if
>I cut the apples into pieces, and made a Waldorf Salad, you couldn't sell
>two identical plates of salad and call one of them a Granny Smith Waldorf
>Salad.
>

I love analogies...

There's this apple market where all the apples are absolutely 
identical.  There's no Granny Smit, no Delicious, no concept of a 
kind of apple.  They's just apples.

You do get to choose which apple grower gets paid, and you pay a 
different price depending on which grower you choose.  If you buy ten 
apples and say you want to credit Farmer John, you will pay the price 
set by Farmer John and Farmer John will get yor payment, minus 
commissions.  If instead you say your payment must go to Rancher 
Bill, then you pay the price set by Rancher Bill and Rancher Bill 
gets paid.  The apples are in all cases identical, so no one really 
cares where any individual apple came from.  What you are really 
saying is that you'd like your money for apples to go to Farmer John 
or Rancher Bill, for whatever reason, and pay a different price, 
depending on which source you care to favor.

In a power distribution arrangement, the apples are, of course, 
kilowatthours.  One thing a little different from the apple market is 
that kilowatthours cannot be stored inside the market.  Every 
kilowatthour produced has to go immediately into some customer's 
meter, or be burned up in transmission losses.

If one apple farmer cannot one day grow enough apples for his 
committed customers, then he might buy some from another grower, 
which is perfectly OK with his customers because all the apples are 
identical.  If he grows too many apples, then I'm not sure what 
happens.  I imagine the bookkeeping system must be rather complicated.