Cheap energy is why we have good lives. Just now in Australia the cost of electricity is going to rise twenty percent on July 1st. Twenty percent increase. If only they had built nuke plants but now it is just about too late.
Cheap energy is why we have good lives. Just now in Australia the cost of electricity is going to rise twenty percent on July 1st. Twenty percent increase. If only they had built nuke plants but now it is just about too late.
Those numbers are most likely just the Cost of Electricity (COE) ignoring the massive changes needed to make the grid work with renewables and the massive cost of backup plants. The wind and solar have a capacity factor (actual average output divided by nameplate rating) in the 28% to 30% range. So you need to build almost 3X more conventional capacity that sits there idle a lot just waiting to fill in when the wind dies and the sun doesn’t shine. The grid system was designed for stable, high capacity factor electricity sources and is not suitable for intermittent, unreliable sources. There was a report this week that the US alone needs 47,000 MILES of new transmission lines to support “green” energy. But just ONE 700 mile transmission line from Montana to California took 18 YEARS just to get the permits and only a small portion of it has been completed.
People are waking up to the fact that not only will the “viewsheds” in the USA be destroyed by windmills and solar panels, but tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines must cross the country to aggregate and deliver the “green” power.
This is a colossal trillion dollar disaster.
The film "The China Syndrome" starring Jane Fonda has something to do with that.