4 ms·
From what I've eked out over the years: - Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind
by iaw 10y ago
From what I've eked out over the years:
- Wind is not that good of an energy source but in some areas can provide offsetting capacity. Built at any scale wind becomes useless due to numerous factors, especially predicting production and storage.
- Solar in some very specific areas makes perfect sense (Mexica, Southern US, etc) but in most places will never be economic. While a little more predictable than wind it's still not ideal and suffers from similar storage problems. At scale it does serious damage to the environment (Mojave desert installation is a good example...)
- Hydro & Geothermals are phenomenal in the few areas where they exist (e.g. Canada).
- Coal is pretty bad both for the miners pulling it out of the ground and the environment we burn it into. It's an economic powerhouse and a ton of capacity exists so it's going to be hard to get away from.
- Gas Turbines are horribly inefficient but will probably become more and more common as the political will to solve the underlying problems is lacking and they are the only feasible stopgap.
- Nuclear Fission is between a rock and a hard place. On one side, too much regulation is preventing active development. On the other side, without sufficient regulation the companies will play fast and loose with a seriously dangerous substance. Deepwater horizon can give you an idea of how much buck-shifting could occur. Sadly, fission is the only resource that is currently practical and won't exacerbate an already tenuous climate.
Nuclear Fusion is the holy grail of power generation but there are serious engineering challenges behind it. We are as far from economically viable controlled fusion now as we were from the moon in mid-1962 but there's no JFK swinging the force of a nation-state behind the technology making it's likelihood of realization low.
In short, we're screwed.