Video above takes on some of the more common, and of course, bogus, objections to wind turbines.
Wind energy is one of the cleanest, most abundant, sustainable — and increasingly cost-effective — ways to generate electricity. It is also one of the fastest growing electricity sources around the globe. In the United States alone, more than 13,000 megawatts of new capacity was installed in 2012, and by the year’s end, there were enough wind turbines to power 15 million typical American homes — without toxic pollutants or carbon emissions.
Still, wind has its detractors. One of the most prominent is Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based, pro-market, anti-government think tank backed by ExxonMobil and Charles Koch, the billionaire co-owner of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries. Over the last few years, Bryce has been bashing wind energy in the pages of the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications, charging that wind turbines are, among other things, ugly, noisy and a threat to public health.
But what really seems to stick in his craw is their purported impact on birds.
Bryce’s Oct.11, 2013, Wall Street Journal column is typical, rehashing an argument he made in a September 2009 column in the same newspaper, in the National Review last May and the Wall Street Journal again last February. Bryce contends that the wind industry kills a “vast” number of birds every year — especially eagles — and insists the administration of President Barack Obama is playing favorites, allowing wind developers to go scot-free while “aggressively” prosecuting the oil and gas industry for the same infraction. He calls it a “pernicious double standard.”
But before you let Bryce’s charges ruffle your feathers, you should know that they’re wildly overblown. Yes, wind turbines unfortunately do kill some birds, including eagles, and the industry needs to address that fact. But how big a threat do they pose compared with other culprits? You wouldn’t know by reading Bryce. Nor would you know that, if you compare the damage various energy technologies do to the environment, wildlife, public health and the climate, wind is one of the most benign.
In other words, context is everything, and Bryce doesn’t provide it.
The main culprits
Given how Bryce portrays the wind industry, one would assume it’s one of the nation’s top bird killers. In fact, wind turbines are way down in the pecking order.
Besides habitat degradation and destruction, the top human-built environmental threat to our feathered friends are buildings. As many as 970 million birds crash into them annually, according to a June 2013 study in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. Other studies, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), estimate that every year as many as 175 million birds die by flying into power lines, which electrocute tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands more; 72 million are poisoned by misapplied pesticides; nearly 6.6 million perish by hitting communications towers; and as many as 1 million birds die in oil and gas industry fluid waste pits.
By contrast, a March 2013 study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimates that land-based wind turbines killed as many as 573,000 birds in 2012. That’s not insignificant, but certainly not the scourge that Bryce implies.
What about the threat wind turbines pose to bald and golden eagles? Turbines certainly are a particular problem for raptors. When they’re hunting, they primarily train their eyes on the ground, scanning for prey, and they can be distracted by other raptors encroaching on their territory. Eagles also have limited peripheral vision. All of these factors can spell trouble, especially given the fact that turbine blade tips can spin as fast as 180 miles per hour.
In his October 11 column, Bryce cited a study in the September 2013 issue of the Journal of Raptor Research that found that wind turbines in 10 states killed 85 eagles between 1997 and the end of June 2012 — 79 golden eagles and six bald eagles. That’s an average of less than six a year, but most of the deaths occurred between 2008 and 2012 due to industry growth, and the study’s authors were quick to point out that the number of turbine-related eagle deaths is likely much higher. The study didn’t include wind industry-related eagle deaths in three other states as well at the 1980s-era Altamont Pass in Northern California, which has been killing an average of 67 eagles a year.
For discussion’s sake, let’s add the 67 eagle deaths a year at Altamont Pass to the 85 the study confirmed. Over a 15-and-a-half-year period, that would amount to 1,124 dead eagles. That sounds like a lot. But how does that compare with overall non-natural eagle deaths?
When an eagle is killed and people find a carcass, FWS asks them to send it to the National Wildlife Property Repository near Denver. About 2,500 show up every year, according to FWS, although certainly more go unreported. Using that number as a benchmark, the number of dead eagles annually from 1997 through June 2012 would amount to approximately 38,750 birds. Based on these admittedly crude estimations, at least 97 percent of the eagle deaths were attributable to causes other than commercial, land-based wind turbines. Often FWS can’t determine the exact cause of death, but apparently poachers, transmission lines, pesticides and lead poisoning from bullet-ridden carrion killed significantly more than turbines.
Same old, same old
FWS is currently investigating 18 wind-industry-related bird-death cases and has referred seven of them to the Justice Department. Even so, as Bryce constantly complains, the Obama administration has yet to prosecute a wind developer under the two main federal bird protection laws, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (Eagle Act). Both the Eagle Act and the MBTA, which covers more than 800 bird species, prohibit anyone from “taking” — hunting, capturing, selling or killing — a bird without a permit.
As Bryce acknowledges, however, no previous Justice Department — not even under the fossil fuel-friendly George W. Bush administration — ever took a wind developer to court for violating either bird law. Building and communications tower owners also have been spared. Meanwhile, federal prosecution of the oil and gas industry and pesticide applicators goes back to the 1970s, and the government brought its first case against an electric utility for electrocuting birds in 1998. So perhaps there’s a better explanation for the way the laws have been applied than what Bryce calls an Obama administration double standard.
The MBTA, which was enacted in 1918, is a strict liability law. That means if you accidentally kill a migratory bird with your car, for example, or a bird slams into your living room picture window, technically you have committed a misdemeanor, despite the fact it was unintentional. But it’s impractical to enforce the law that way. The Justice Department will consider legal action only if a violator repeatedly breaks the law and is in a position to take reasonable steps to prevent further harm. Oil and gas companies can easily prevent birds from dying in their waste pits by stretching nets over them. Electric utilities can insulate their transmission poles to prevent electrocutions. But it is much more difficult to remediate skyscrapers or communication towers — or wind turbines, for that matter — once they are in place.
Unlike the MBTA, the Eagle Act, which was enacted in 1940, doesn’t protect eagles from lawful activities that kill them unintentionally. It only applies to individuals or corporations without a permit that “knowingly, or with wanton disregard for the consequences” take a bald or golden eagle. That makes it much more difficult for the government to prosecute violators than under the MBTA.
As Bryce acknowledges, however, no previous Justice Department — not even under the fossil fuel-friendly George W. Bush administration — ever took a wind developer to court for violating either bird law. Building and communications tower owners also have been spared. Meanwhile, federal prosecution of the oil and gas industry and pesticide applicators goes back to the 1970s, and the government brought its first case against an electric utility for electrocuting birds in 1998. So perhaps there’s a better explanation for the way the laws have been applied than what Bryce calls an Obama administration double standard.
The MBTA, which was enacted in 1918, is a strict liability law. That means if you accidentally kill a migratory bird with your car, for example, or a bird slams into your living room picture window, technically you have committed a misdemeanor, despite the fact it was unintentional. But it’s impractical to enforce the law that way. The Justice Department will consider legal action only if a violator repeatedly breaks the law and is in a position to take reasonable steps to prevent further harm. Oil and gas companies can easily prevent birds from dying in their waste pits by stretching nets over them. Electric utilities can insulate their transmission poles to prevent electrocutions. But it is much more difficult to remediate skyscrapers or communication towers — or wind turbines, for that matter — once they are in place.
Unlike the MBTA, the Eagle Act, which was enacted in 1940, doesn’t protect eagles from lawful activities that kill them unintentionally. It only applies to individuals or corporations without a permit that “knowingly, or with wanton disregard for the consequences” take a bald or golden eagle. That makes it much more difficult for the government to prosecute violators than under the MBTA.
Prosecution as a last resort
With either law, prosecution is a last resort. FWS — which has only 230 field agents monitoring wildlife deaths nationwide — tries to work with violators to fix the problem before it refers a case to the Justice Department.
For example, for decades FWS inspectors have been routinely checking for bird carcasses in oil and gas company liquid-waste pits, which kill as many as a million birds annually. When FWS agents discover dead birds, they generally notify the responsible company and give it the opportunity to rectify the problem by installing netting or screening to keep birds from landing on the pits. If the company pays a modest fine — usually $500 and an additional $250 per bird — and corrects the problem, FWS will not file a case with a U.S. Attorney’s office. That happens only after repeated violations. And even if a company is ultimately convicted and put on probation, the fine is relatively small.
Bryce actually cited one of these cases involving repeat offenders as evidence that the Obama administration is “aggressively” prosecuting the oil and gas industry, but he left out some key information that would have undermined his argument.
In 2011, FWS filed criminal charges against three companies drilling in North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation. “One of those companies, Continental Resources, was indicted for killing a single bird” that died in one of its waste pits, Bryce squawked in the Wall Street Journal in February and again in the National Review in May.
One bird?! Pretty outrageous, no? But Bryce failed to mention that Continental Resources and the two other companies, Brigham Oil & Gas and Newfield Production Co., had been flouting the law — and killing birds — for years. The Justice Department merely charged them with violations based on the number of dead birds FWS agents found when they made their last site visit following years of imploring the companies to install nets. No matter, the district court ultimately dismissed the charges, issuing a ruling that squarely conflicts with how the government has traditionally interpreted the MBTA.
Making turbines more bird-friendly
In his zeal to disparage wind power, Bryce also doesn’t credit the Obama administration and the wind industry for what they’re doing to address the problem. In response to concerns about increasing turbine-related bird deaths, FWS issued new voluntary guidelines in March 2012 for wind developers to minimize harm to birds and their habitats. The guidelines, which cover siting, construction, monitoring and operation, were developed with the help of an advisory committee composed of experts from universities, industry, government agencies and conservation groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the National Audubon Society. (Some groups, such as the American Bird Conservancy, insist those guidelines should be mandatory.)
Besides collaborating on the FWS guidelines for new wind farms, the industry is working with conservationists, science groups and government agencies to make their currently operating facilities more bird-friendly. For example, a number of leading wind companies and other industry players are partners in the American Wind Wildlife Institute, which the Union of Concerned Scientists helped launch in 2008. The institute’s mission is to “facilitate timely and responsible development of wind energy, while protecting wildlife and wildlife habitat.” The main point? You can do both.
Other remediation efforts, some admittedly due to lawsuits, also are underway. As a part of a settlement with the California state government and environmental groups, for example, the largest wind power company in the Altamont Pass is replacing thousands of outdated turbines with a lot fewer, taller, more-efficient ones that pose less of a threat to the golden eagles, hawks and other birds that patrol the skies in the area. So far those efforts and other modifications appear to be producing results.
Finally, there’s one last critical point that Robert Bryce conveniently ignores: Climate change threatens hundreds of migratory bird species, which are already stressed by habitat loss, invasive species and other environmental threats. A 2010 report by FWS and other federal agencies, in collaboration with such conservation groups as the National Audubon Society and American Bird Conservancy, found that global warming will have an increasingly devastating effect on migratory birds in all habitats. And earlier this year, the National Wildlife Federation published a similar report that concludes unequivocally that climate change today is the most serious threat facing America’s migratory birds.
Regardless, Bryce — who has called himself an “agnostic” on climate science — likely will continue to attack renewable energy at every opportunity on behalf of his benefactors. And I’m sure the ideologically driven editors at the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section and the National Review will continue to run his columns. But there’s no getting around the fact that the world has to wean itself off fossil fuels as soon as possible, and one of the answers, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
Update: I posted this blog on Friday morning, Nov. 22, and at the time, no U.S. wind energy company had ever been prosecuted for violating federal bird protection laws. That changed later in the day when the Justice Department announced it had reached a settlement with Duke Energy, which pleaded guilty to killing 14 eagles and 149 other birds at two Wyoming wind farms. As I mentioned in my blog, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been investigating 18 wind-industry-related bird-death cases and referred seven of them to the Justice Department. Presumably one of those seven was the case against Duke. For more on the Duke plea agreement, click here.
The video has been blocked by GEMA, so I cannot watch it here in Germany 🙁
You might be intersted in this Guardian article about onshore wind though. IT seems the prime minister, David Cameron has tried to cap the amount of onshore wind farms being built in Britain. The man is a fool.
It’s certainly starting to look that way. To support fracking for natural gas – which will contribute to climate change – is supposed to be a patriotic duty; whereas setting up wind farms, which are clean and secrure, is an unwarranted intrusion on the aesthetic loveliness of rural (mostly Conservative supporting) areas.
As a lifelong Conservative, it pains me to say it, but the interpretation is unavoidable: protecting our children and grandchildren is less important than fending off UKIP.
Good news hot off the presses
Clegg blocks Cameron’s plan for windfarm cap
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/01/clegg-blocks-cameron-plan-windfarm-cap?CMP=twt_fd
Clegg blocks Cameron’s plan for windfarm cap
Lib Dems claim leader rejected Tory proposal to limit the number of new onshore turbines
Rowena Mason, political correspondent
theguardian.com, Tuesday 1 April 2014 07.13 EDT
Jump to comments (206)
A Lib Dem source said that the proposal to cap the number of onshore windfarms would cause damaging uncertainty to the renewable energy industry. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA
Nick Clegg has blocked a proposal by David Cameron to restrict the construction of onshore windfarms, a Liberal Democrat source has said.
It is understood the prime minister presented Clegg with the plans more than a week ago, which would have put an overall cap on the number of turbines built in the countryside.
However, the deputy prime minister told Cameron on Monday that he would not allow a further assault on onshore windfarms after previous cuts to subsidies for the industry.
The Lib Dem source said Tory claims to be green were now dead in the water.
Clegg agreed to look at the proposal but found absolutely no case for it, especially since the subsidy cuts and felt it could cause damaging uncertainty to the renewable energy industry, the source said.
They added: “Nick Clegg was simply not going to allow the Tories to move the goalposts on green energy again.
Hopefully it’s not an April fools day joke but then again the Lib-Dem/Tory coalition has been the entire time.
Having failed in the marketplace, opponents are resorting to politics.
An excellent (and definitive) article that says it all, and is not news to those who are educated about the man-related causes of bird deaths.
Unfortunately, the people like Bryce who whore for the fossil fuel interests will continue to do so until the Koch’s money runs out, and that will not happen any time soon. This is just another area in which the truth must be told more aggressively to the uninformed public in order to counter the lies.
PS I was getting worried that the piece had missed the prosecution of a wind turbine company under the MBTA. The update at the end took care of that.
“Bryce — who has called himself an ‘agnostic’ on climate science”
While appearing on a Climate One panel at The Commonwealth Club, Paul Deiro, lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Association, was asked if he thought that climate change is real. He replied, “I am no scientist, I’ll have the scientists answer that question.” The normally sedate audience cracked up.
This is the “noise” that folks in Falmouth MA are complaining about?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi-tMI40hSg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWb1MG-DNPU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWtbu4AoSa8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_YXNkhme0U
Big whoop—leave your earplugs at home. The closest I’ve aver gotten to a wind farm was at Atlantic City, NJ—at a few hundred yards, I heard NO turbine noise.
I think the problem (noise) with the third video is that the wind turbine was turning backwards. It is the only way to explain the beeping backup sound.
I note the strange device to the right of the turbine. Perhaps that’s the source? A UFO? 🙂
It is unfortunate when birds are killed by wind turbines, as it is when they are killed by flying into any large structure, but the risks seem quite low and most authorities have guidelines for avoiding building turbines on popular bird flight paths or in known nesting areas, and accidental deaths can be mitigated by various methods. Do not the objectors realize or care that bird extinction with fossil fuel caused global warming poses a far greater risk ?
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/aboutcc/problems/impacts/species/cc_and_birds/
Wind turbines offer a great opportunity to Africa where 600 million ate without grid access and power
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/03/can-africa-leapfrog-carbon-ener-201433114400319289.html
Richard Branson via Zayed Future Energy Prize to encourage small business to use green energy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rewocbBhSw&list=UURAwQrZD2992w2nzetXYgog
What an Earth comics quote:
ExxonMobil says “The risk of climate change is clear and the risk warrants action” …but they plan on burning all of their their oil reserves.
HOLY #%*&*!!! DID THEY ACTUALLY JUST SAY THAT?!?!
Holy #@$! indeed
http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil-releases-reports-shareholders-managing-climate-risk
Wonder how many birds die every year from getting hit by a car or airplane?
This says ~60 million for cars—way behind flying into windows, getten eaten by cats, and flying into high tension lines.
http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
I know we want to justify our favorite things, but scale up wind power (as we all want) and the 573,000 dead birds figure will scale up concurrently. Additional power lines with economic growth will result in higher losses as well.
Granted, bird and bat deaths are hyped by coal industry people to confuse the issue. They don’t give two farts about wildlife – they just know it’ll throw another wrench in the debate. They ignore the bird deaths from coal and natural gas production and consumption:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/05/20/why-coal-and-nuclear-plants-kill-far-more-birds-than-wind-power/
But, wind turbines are not the birds’ best friend. Not using the power in the first place is the best thing we could do for the birds.
I rank wind over hydropower because there are a lot of environmental costs from damming up river systems, and I rank both wind and hydro far above fossil fuels on environmental cost terms:
http://www.internationalrivers.org/environmental-impacts-of-dams
However, it’s a mistake to think we’re not doing damage to the environment from any energy source. All of them have costs – some much less than others, absolutely, but I don’t think we should minimize any loss.
Speaking for myself, I don’t minimize ANY loss or damage to the biosphere that is caused by man’s activities. We are in the proverbial “water filled balloon” situation, where any mitigating push on the balloon in one spot merely causes it to bulge somewhere else, and the balloon is filled nearly to the bursting point.
Obviously, the best solution for the biosphere would be to have NO impact from “modern” man beyond what existed back in mankind’s hunter-gatherer days. When man was just another mammal living in small herds, it could be said we were “in tune with nature”, and living “in balance” with the other components of the biosphere.
For the last 10,000 years or so, things have been getting progressively more “out of tune”, and we will soon (in geologic time) reap the whirlwind. In the meantime, we will exercise our allegedly “superior” brains arguing about politics, economics, and religion, none of which matters one rat’s rear end in the greater scheme of things. More importantly, we will continue to deny science, and that will be fatal.
If you make a ‘zero impact” assumption, then the only choice you have is culling the herd and back to the caves.
I challenge people to look at the alternatives we have, not some alternative reality.
I don’t quite understand what you’re saying. The “laws of nature” will, if ignored, “cull the herd” and send the remnants “back to the caves”, and that’s not really a matter of “choice” for most humans.
And I’m not sure what “alternative reality” you refer to. Do you maintain that man is NOT subject to the same population dynamics as all living things? Man’s impact may not have been zero up to the beginnings of the modern industrial age, but it WAS reasonably sustainable. ALL the evidence points to that no longer being true, and it’s happening in an eye blink of geologic time. We are whistling past the graveyard.
Peter, there is no such thing as zero impact, first off. It’s an unfortunate part of our condition. There is only lesser vs. greater impact. I’m 100% on board with replacing those practices that have greater impacts than lesser, but where I worry we possibly diverge is in the total sum of impact.
What will have a lesser environmental impact – a person choosing to move to a walkable community and riding a bike and using mass transport, or a person choosing to stay in the suburbs and buy an EV? When looking a environmental costs, it’s the cumulative effect of all actions globally. I think we have the suicidally ignorant view that we can maintain our current lifestyle in some ‘green’ future if we just swap our technology, when that is just one part of the equation – and it’s a far less effective solution than reducing or dropping usage altogether.
We simply don’t need 90% of what we currently have in the West. We like this stuff, like watching Price is Right on huge flatscreens while eating congealed hamburger paste from McDonald’s, but in real terms we don’t need it, we just want it.
The ‘back to the caves’ argument, honestly, should be relegated to the Roy Spencer’s of the world. As far as I’m aware, most of humanity didn’t live in caves in the 1750’s, the Amish don’t currently live in caves, and those who today choose live of greatly reduced impact also don’t usually opt for the cave lifestyle themselves.
I understand that it is ‘alternate reality’ to think our society will actively choose such an approach. There are very few to no signs that we will – we’ll just plow along as ever.
But that leaves a future more along the lines of what oldguy is saying. Thinking otherwise, to me, is an even more dangerous ‘alternate reality’ than the misplaced hope that we’ll collectively choose voluntary material reduction.
I believe the biggest problem is “how do you sell this idea”? No replacement tech can work unless its practically based on recycling itself which is practically impossible due to loss to entropy. But I guess Peter is aiming that whatever we choose as our path, even if its a low energy one, we are better off with windmills than fossil fuels to have any chance at fixing the biosphere.
Society is filled to the brim with all kinds of inefficiencies, so how do we go about improving that and at what pace? At the extreme end of optimization you aim towards something absurd like Lenin type of rationalism where there is a plan for everything manufactured. That’s an experiment that didn’t turn out out well though, even the idea was perhaps a good one from a conservatism viewpoint. No doubt it was based on the idea of everyone living a pretty high living standard and in the end there was resource constraints and costs that couldn’t be met. I guess in some way we are approaching those same limits now but through a free market approach instead (which generally means we get there quicker due to the insane waste and inefficiencies).
No matter what the future brings, its still important to inform people that windmills aren’t as bad as some people make them – and they will certainly be part of our energy mix for the future. But lets hope we find a more sustainable use of energy and the whole complexity of society as replacing our current one 1:1 will certainly not be possible.
John – if I have to sell what should be common sense to every person on Earth then we are truly screwed.
Any expansion of the economy extracts from natural resources and the biosphere. It should be built into our very nature to know this instinctively, but sadly it is not. As such, I rate the highest probability for humanity as catastrophe, with no exact given timeline.
The lightest footprint is not more technology, it is figuring when and where technology and resource use is truly needed. Now, I tend to hope that I’m not an idiot – I know full well that we have to exist, and that to do so and have reasonably comfortable and civil lives we have to extract from nature. In these cases, we should place full emphasis on those technologies and extractions that produce the lightest effect (like wind power versus coal power, and walkable communities and biking over suburbs and EVs).
Instead, our emphasis as a society is on cost efficiency, competitive advantage, and material self indulgence, which can only lead to greater and greater destruction. I can’t sell an idea that has no currency in this culture, because the current mindset is so fundamentally insane.
On two extremes. One has green tech, but no limits to growth. That can’t work, it just delays the inevitable. The other says no impact. That is impossible because we already changed climate thousands of years ago by cultivation and felling trees. In the middle somewhere is a combination of sustainability, low or no growth, and green technologies. There is plenty of potential for improvement now, and newer technologies and methods will appear in the decades ahead. Further, while future planning for low carbon is good, we must face the reality of dwindling resources and GW impacts now, expanding renewables. The difficulty of prediction is exacerbated by the exponential nature of developments. Most have been surprised by the exponential development of wind solar and storage.
http://rameznaam.com/2013/11/14/solar-power-is-dropping-faster-than-i-projected/
A picture is emerging of combined effects of all of these, including the surprise that AGW impacts are already clearly registered.
As some have pointed out, dwindling FF may not be used at maximum predicted scenarios because the EROI kills economic growth. Neither should we take the resource depletion scenario as a cause for GW optimism. Rather, it causes the transition to be more difficult. As many have noted, it would have been better, if like some nations, we had chosen to transition gracefully, rather than being drawn into the whirlpool by resource and GW circumstances, uncontrolled.
http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/why-are-climate-scientists-ignoring-peak-oil-and-coal/
There is no technology without side-effects. There is no large-scale technology without significant and harmfull effect. Does not matter which technology. Large-scale wind energy is not harmless, it IS less harmless than large-scale coal or gas or oil.
The same for solar. Or electric bateries for that matter. We need lower consumption with a small help from renewables to fill the energy gap. But the decline is inevitable. We are in ecological overshoot anyway…
Alex
Negative pricing is a result of bad regulation. In the future with a lot of solar panels the utility company should be able to start/stop individual solar panels and wind turbines to make the output optimal. Even now wind turbines are sometimes stopped to make the production meet the demand. In the future this problem will be meet with more storage facilities and much more smart solutions. For example, I have solar panels and if my heat pump knew when I export electricity it could use it to warm water for later use.
Peter, you said:
This is not true. There’s no such thing as an intermittent heap of coal or reservoir of water. There’s a difference in kind between a flow and a reservoir. Sunlight and wind are power flows; lakes, heaps of coal, and tanks of sun-melted salt are energy reservoirs.
Having made an error in categorization, you go even further afield:
The Grand Coulee dam is by no means intermittent in the way that the same region’s wind generation is.
Which ignores the vast difference in kind between the availability of energy driving wind farms and PV panels compared to a nuclear reactor, which fuels up for 18-24 months at a time. But it gets worse:
The radical changes demanded of the grid by those who want more wind and solar prove that it emphatically is NOT, at least not in the way you mean. The grid is designed, and generators are operated, to be able to stay up even if the biggest generator in an area goes off-line; “spinning reserve” is maintained just in case of such an event. That’s a completely different thing from having the bulk of generation come from “renewables” which vary their input up and down according to the whims of passing fronts and clouds.
The capacity factor of nuclear plants which are not down for major repairs (e.g. Crystal River, SONGS) is upwards of 90% including refueling. That isn’t availabilty, that’s fraction of rated output delivered to the grid.
But capacity factor (actual generation divided by nameplate rating * time) of just 35% is considered VERY good.
Entire wind farms, and often whole regions of wind farms, are becalmed at once. It’s not unusual for hundreds on hundreds of wind turbines to be in perfect working order, but unable to generate a watt due to lack of wind. It’s hardly honest to pass over that point. Just what kind of game are you playing here?
Not nearly predictable enough; the almost-blackout in Texas a while ago should have been a wake-up call, but only a few insiders know about it.
An all-RE grid would have nothing to adjust with, except shutting things off. Going back to kerosene lanterns because the sun’s down and the wind died isn’t most people’s idea of progress. In practice, the “adjustment” is done by something that burns fossil carbon. I thought that was what “Climate Crocks” was most opposed to, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps CC is, like the Greens of Germany, about killing nuclear energy at any cost, including the climate.
I end my transcript and critique here. Others can take it up.
FTA:
Why are “greens” unwilling to admit that (a) timely and responsible development of nuclear energy has a far smaller footprint, (b) the exclusion zone around nuclear plants produces ideal wildlife habitat, and (c) the worst-case accident in the world thus far has produced excellent conditions for some endangered species, because the humans left?
This presumes that wind energy is the answer to anthropogenic climate change. The actual emissions performance of wind-leader Denmark, at 261 g/kWh as I write this, says otherwise. To limit atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppm, we need to cut emissions by no less than 80% (down to ~150 g/kWh); to return to 350 ppm, net emissions must go negative. Denmark, which is currently mining forest biomass to burn for energy, is not a model to be emulated world-wide even if it were possible.
Sweden is. But Greens don’t want to talk about Sweden.