[detective]

An excellent article. All the talk about “green energy” and “green jobs” is essentially fraudulent.

Electricity in the US is generated primarily using coal(and some nuclear) for baseload and natural gas for peaking. Alternative energy cannot replace any of these. All it can do is provide small amounts of unreliable electricity that at best offsets a small amount of the incremental cost of coal fired generation.

It requires not only investment in generating facilities but huge investments in transmission and distribution facilities that can only be used at a very low load factor.

In short it makes no economic sense. The only reason the alternative industry exists is because it gets huge subsidies from taxpayers. Even then, it causes the average cost per kwh to consumers to go up dramatically.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Electricity in the US is generated primarily using coal(and some nuclear) for baseload and natural gas for peaking. Alternative energy cannot replace any of these. All it can do is provide small amounts of unreliable electricity that at best offsets a small amount of the incremental cost of coal fired generation.

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Small quibble. The WSJ ran an article this week reporting on the Texas experience. Surprisingly, or not, as wind in TX grew from something like 1 to 3% of Texas’s total, coal and nuclear stayed the same and it was Natural gas that went down.

You’d think that the wind would be used to replace coal but this was decidedly not the case - it was natural gas that went down. I think this may be related to possibly two factors.

- As mentioned before coal plants exist to provide the base load and Natural gas tends to provide the fluctuations. Adding wind into the mix, is treated by the grid perhaps as less demand and therefore NG goes down.
- It may be related to marginal costs and perhaps the marginal cost of gas is more.

But whatever the reasons coal didn’t decline one iota, it was NG that went down as wind ramped up.