From your essay:: "Coal-fired generators are being prematurely retired to comply with the state’s 100 percent clean electricity mandate as well as the Biden administration’s unworkable greenhouse gas standards for coal-fired power plants. Solar and wind aren’t being built fast enough to keep up with demand — and their weather-dependent and intermittent technology would be unable to provide enough electricity anyway."
This quote presents three phrases, one about coal retired early, one about renewables construction can't keep up, and the third about being unable to provide the juice. One simple question: WHY? In the face of expert testimony, why are we retiring plants early? Why do we wish to accelerate the building of a solution that won't work? Why do we cry that something is existential, then deny its obviously best solution because it might leak in a million years? Why, why, why....
Carl Sagan once observed that "one of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
We gave that charlatan power with a largesse of subsidies in the IRA, and now even some Republicans don't want to give it back. Mark Twain is credited with the saying, "under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." This is one of those circumstances.
Intermittent renewable generation requires some for of backup to "fill in the blanks" when the intermittent generation produces low/no output. That backup is glowingly described as "Distributed Emission-Free Resources" (DEFRs). Batteries and "Green Hydrogen" are dependent DEFRs, since they are charged and recharged using surplus intermittent generation output. Hydro and small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are independent DEFRs, since they do not rely on output from the intermittent generators for their operation. Of course, if there is sufficient independent DEFR capacity, there is no need for intermittent renewables. They are redundant capacity and redundancy costs.
I work in the ONG industry and watch the six inch tube, with or without the pumpjack, silently deliver clean, cheap energy all day long. And then I turn and look at Chinese made toxic solar panels deliver nothing but toxicity on our precious farmland(in MN).
From your essay:: "Coal-fired generators are being prematurely retired to comply with the state’s 100 percent clean electricity mandate as well as the Biden administration’s unworkable greenhouse gas standards for coal-fired power plants. Solar and wind aren’t being built fast enough to keep up with demand — and their weather-dependent and intermittent technology would be unable to provide enough electricity anyway."
This quote presents three phrases, one about coal retired early, one about renewables construction can't keep up, and the third about being unable to provide the juice. One simple question: WHY? In the face of expert testimony, why are we retiring plants early? Why do we wish to accelerate the building of a solution that won't work? Why do we cry that something is existential, then deny its obviously best solution because it might leak in a million years? Why, why, why....
Carl Sagan once observed that "one of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
We gave that charlatan power with a largesse of subsidies in the IRA, and now even some Republicans don't want to give it back. Mark Twain is credited with the saying, "under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." This is one of those circumstances.
I laughed at your comment here, even though I shouldn't! Minnesota seems to be a poster child of being bamboozled.
Intermittent renewable generation requires some for of backup to "fill in the blanks" when the intermittent generation produces low/no output. That backup is glowingly described as "Distributed Emission-Free Resources" (DEFRs). Batteries and "Green Hydrogen" are dependent DEFRs, since they are charged and recharged using surplus intermittent generation output. Hydro and small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are independent DEFRs, since they do not rely on output from the intermittent generators for their operation. Of course, if there is sufficient independent DEFR capacity, there is no need for intermittent renewables. They are redundant capacity and redundancy costs.
Precisely! Backup is such an enormous problem to deal with.
I work in the ONG industry and watch the six inch tube, with or without the pumpjack, silently deliver clean, cheap energy all day long. And then I turn and look at Chinese made toxic solar panels deliver nothing but toxicity on our precious farmland(in MN).
Communism ain't pretty folks.