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The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply

The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply that storage. AKA today you say wind is X dollars a MWh, but in order to actually be free of NG or other fossil fuels it needs to be built at some multiple of total demand (say 3X) to compensate for low periods. Then there you need sufficient storage (4 hours is a joke) to smooth it all out. In the end the actual cost is ballpark an order of magnitude more per MWh if one actually tried to run 100% renewables. You need only dig up the recent TX ERCOT generation numbers to see just how useless wind/solar can be. It was functioning at less than 1/10 of its installed capacity for the entire week. During most of the winter months its a good 1/3 of its summer peaks/etc. And that is one of the leading wind providers in the entire world. Nukes are really the only technology we could deploy in the next 5-10 year to completely eliminate CO2 production in the electricity grid. Build enough of them to supply peak generation and rather than trying to load follow use the excess energy for syngas production via CO2 recapture and it would be possible to turn a part of the vehicle fleet carbon neutral as well.

afterburner 6y ago
Are you seriously bringing up the wind turbines that ERCOT repeatedly failed to winterize and failed in a major storm as evidence that wind turbines are bad? This is an extremely bad faith argument. Wind turbines in the rest of the country where it's even colder aren't failing, because they're actually built for the weather, and the power company didn't cheap out.
- StillBored 6y ago
  It was mostly the NG plants the didn't get winterized and weren't available, in some cases due to lack of NG. The wind actually was after some initial glitches AFAIK working as expected. Pretty much everything failed (including a nuke). My point wasn't that there were failures, its that the wind capacity was pretty poor leading up to the failures too. Why that is, isn't clear to me other than its apparently not unusual to have significantly less during the winter in TX. This isn't usually a problem because the demand is low as well. (random link with graphs, these are a bit harder than the one I was looking for but are good enough https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas-storm-power-generation-charts.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas...) edit: maybe the first graph here https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-light-on-the-ercot-power-crisis/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-li... shows just how poorly the wind was performing, even before the storm relative to its peak.

afterburner 6y ago

Are you seriously bringing up the wind turbines that ERCOT repeatedly failed to winterize and failed in a major storm as evidence that wind turbines are bad? This is an extremely bad faith argument. Wind turbines in the rest of the country where it's even colder aren't failing, because they're actually built for the weather, and the power company didn't cheap out.

StillBored 6y ago
It was mostly the NG plants the didn't get winterized and weren't available, in some cases due to lack of NG. The wind actually was after some initial glitches AFAIK working as expected. Pretty much everything failed (including a nuke). My point wasn't that there were failures, its that the wind capacity was pretty poor leading up to the failures too. Why that is, isn't clear to me other than its apparently not unusual to have significantly less during the winter in TX. This isn't usually a problem because the demand is low as well. (random link with graphs, these are a bit harder than the one I was looking for but are good enough https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas-storm-power-generation-charts.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas...) edit: maybe the first graph here https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-light-on-the-ercot-power-crisis/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-li... shows just how poorly the wind was performing, even before the storm relative to its peak.