And the media who scammed us with this renewable crap.
TANSTAAFL...
Those who curse God are surprised when His blessings don’t flow. Go figure.
The Bible puts it this way, the wisdom of men is foolishness to God.
The “progressives” have a reverse Midas touch, anything that is good, turns to manure when they touch it. Like Regan said, its not that Leftists don’t know anything, its just that so much that they know is wrong.
Have a buddy with some solar panels on his place in Northern California, 95 hot and sunny in the very long summer - other than a couple of hours at high noon they don’t produce
Odd that.
My son lives in TExas and buys nothing but wind power. He also pays for a line charge.
Some months, the cost of his electric is $0. He only pays the line charge.
The power company (Exelon?) has shut in two coal-fired plants and a Nuke pant because they cannot sell the power as cheap as the wind farms.
( see https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/exelon-puts-texas-plants-totaling-3500-mw-bankruptcy)
Maybe it’s a Texas thing.
With the advent of very efficient LED lighting technology and nuclear batteries like the Toshiba 4S
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
All you would need is some large underground used up salt mine that has has a constant “near room temperature” ambient temp.
The nuclear battery can provide cheap electrical energy for waste and water processing/reprocessing and the cheap LED lighting can provide energy to plant growing chambers.
These two techs can basically make underground settlements feasible and at some point to escape the tyranny of the socialist fools on the surface I can see people “grabbing a shovel” to escape the lunacy above.
I just want to get away from all these dumb liberal socialist schemes like global warming, renewable over subsidized crap...
A few points:
1. Wind stops blowing and sun doesn’t shine every single night. So you need the SAME CAPACITY conventional power plant backing the up! In other words you need to build TWICE the capacity as if you’d built a gas-fired or coal-fired plant alone. You simply cannot “dispatch” the power from wind and solar, so it takes TWICE the amount of capital and TWICE the number of plant operators. This doesn’t change even if you have large-scale energy storage systems - you need to first build the generation capacity and also build the storage capacity. You are still building TWICE the capacity you had to build if you used gas or coal alone.
2. Solar and Wind are highly distributed, low energy density generation technologies. They require MILES of transmission conductors not needed with central stations to collect the power from all over and deliver it to a major transmission line.
3. The amount of materials required to build wind turbines is vastly larger than the amount of materials needed to build conventional gas or coal fired power plants.
4. Wind turbines have switched to generators that use permanent magnets thus eliminating the need for gearboxes. But this means they consume HUGE amounts of very expensive rare earth elements which are used in small quantities in coal and gas fired power plants. High temperature turbines and boilers use large amounts of chromium, but it is not as scarce as the rare earths in high power magnets.
5. Wind and Solar are inherently very low-density energy sources unlike fossil fuels. It will take far more resources to deliver the same amount of energy from low-density sources than it does from high-energy-density sources like gas, oil and coal.
Wind and Solar will simply never be as economical as gas, oil and coal. Period. To think otherwise means you are smoking crack.
A couple of thoughts. You can't form a reliable gird with PV and wind for reasons that are obvious. There are always fossil generators backing them up. That's a tidbit the greenies never like to mention.
Semi related is the stability of PV and wind. They produce ‘dirty’ power which has to be dealt with. Previously, grids didn't deal with it because it was such a small fraction and it could be accounted for.
Now the market/grids are correcting that issue (and others) with energy storage, ie batteries, and you need a lot of zeros to buy enough batteries to store even 1 MWH of energy.
I guess my point is that it's a complex topic. Pushing personal bias as the reason why things are the way they are, either for or against, is foolish.
Solar panel are so toxic to make they are no longer made in the USA. We have no problem though with poisoning the Chinese people to “be friends of the earth”
Work with a 30 y.o. guy from China who says he can’t go back to his village because of the pollution.
The environmental movement.... We use emotions over common sense!!! It’s what the globalist told us to do!!!!
Liberals are dumb. No other way to explain it. Same thing happening with cars. Too many electric cars so the tax revenue goes down so what are they going to do? Tax by the mile. That is coming to the 50 states within 5 years. I literally can’t stand liberals.
We’re nearly in an energy glut and CA forces us to use this crap at inflated rates.
“And the media who scammed us with this renewable crap.”
You know what’s sick ... I’d bet, at the end of the day, the only reason the Ds hate oil is due to political contributions. If “Big Oil” was funding more Ds and less Rs, you’d probably see lots of scientific evidence that car exhaust is the reason why your typical person will live to be 100 ... longer if more gas is consumed by automobiles.
The Democratic Party would tell the Marxist “Green” true believers to piss off if that were the case.
Marked. Thanks for posting.
Just wait until Government orders everyone to buy Electric Cars, we’ll need 200% more oil to make all the Electricity
Managers, suppliers and controlling interests will continue to make electricity more expensive with or without solar or wind.
If you want out of slavery, install your own alternative power plant and learn to use less energy. Otherwise, you’ll be completely without power after the nukes fly anyway. And consider the fact that the cheap oil supply isn’t infinite, either. There are hundreds of millions more potential drivers in China and India.
Shit up idiot
And keep paying your masters
If you want to be free from them
Put in solar
I Know, really
Reminds me of the first phony gas shortage in the fall of 1973, Orange & Rockland, our utility co. put out a series of newspaper ads and PSA’s on the local radio station to conserve gas and electricity. I helped my dear old Dad put up clear plastic over the windows, my Mom would make sure none of us would dare walk out of a room without turning off the lights and TV, she also turned the thermostat down to around 65, warning us not to even think about laying a finger on it. Sure enough, the gas & electric bill went down. But then the chairman of O&R got on the radio and had the chutzpah to say that they petitioned the NY public utility commission, and received permission to raise the rates, because everyone did such a good job conserving energy, their bottom line was negatively impacted.
You have to spend money, to save money! Or something like that...
Save for reference
The price might be falling but that is the cost of power under peak conditions. And solar and wind are never available at peak conditions 24 hours a day.
This was always the fraud of solar and wind. Unless you’re willing to only use electricity during that 1/3 to 1/2 of the day when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, then you need to have a separate set of generators that provide backup. Meaning, you are paying twice for your installed base. And the most efficient part of the base is not the primary source of electricity but is the backup (facepalm).
You have to include the cost of the backup with the cost of electricity that you charge your customers.
Using numbers — the duty factor of solar is about 25% of peak over a 24 hour period, on average, over a year. The duty factor of a gas-burning generator is 99.5%.