Myths of “Baseload power” are blown away by real world experience.
What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?
That’s a question that wind power skeptics or critics frequently ask. While coal, nuclear and gas plants theoretically run uninterrupted whenever they are called upon, humans have no control over when wind turbines stop and start spinning. Some utility and power company officials say this is a reason that “reliable,” baseload power should be valued more than wind.
But in a report released Thursday and an accompanying webinar, experts with the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) explained how wind can actually be seen as a more reliable source than conventional power plants — one that contributes to rather than inhibits the stability of the grid as a whole.
This is good news given that wind is considered a lynchpin of meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon reduction goals in the Clean Power Plan. No one disputes that wind is a zero-carbon and low-cost source of energy, but AWEA’s report underscores that it is also a reliable way to “keep the lights on.”
Overwrought concerns about wind’s reliability often center on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the grid works, the report indicates. Since its inception more than a century ago, the grid has inherently handled a constant flux of supply and demand. All power sources involve some level of variability, and demand can vary greatly minute by minute. For example, AWEA points to energy demand during a 1990 World Cup game between England and Germany when demand spiked sharply during breaks, presumably as people quickly turned on appliances or electronics then turned them off once the game resumed.
Fluctuations in supply or demand from any given source do not matter to grid operators, said report author and AWEA research director Michael Goggin. All they care about is the total supply and demand on the grid at any given moment. As the AWEA report puts it, “The total variability is far less than the sum of its parts.”
“Grid operators only care about total variability on the power system,” Goggin said. “They don’t care what any one wind plant is doing or even what all wind plants are doing.”
Hence variations in the level of wind energy output are easily smoothed out over the grid as demand also rises and falls frequently and often unpredictably, and as output levels from other energy sources fluctuate. And the more wind power is added to the grid, the less variable wind energy as a whole becomes.
Wind output variations “are being canceled out by totally unrelated changes in supply and demand,” Goggin said. “What happens is you get a very smoothed-down profile across all these sources of variability.”
Goggin said that the variable output of wind is actually in some ways less problematic than variability from conventional power plants. That’s because changes in wind energy can be predicted in advance with considerable accuracy, whereas an outage at a power plant is usually sudden, unexpected and involves a more drastic reduction in power.
Since wind’s variability is more predictable and involves a smaller amount of megawatts than the potential variability of power plants, less reserve electricity is needed on hand to guard against wind variability. The AWEA report cites data from Texas’ grid operator ERCOT showing that the need for wind reserves adds an extra four cents to utility bills, compared to 76 cents as a hedge against power plant outages.
ERCOT has more than 10,000 MW of capacity in the system, but only needs about 50 MW of fast-acting reserves on hand to compensate for wind variations, the AWEA report says. Midwestern grid operator MISO considers it needs “little to none” in the way of fast-acting reserves to protect against the variability of wind, the report says. PJM, the grid operator covering parts of Illinois and stretching east, has 3,350 MW of fast-acting reserves to guard against outages in baseload power plants. If PJM added a full 28,000 MW of new wind power, it would need only an additional 360 MW of fast-acting reserves.
The report notes that wind variability does increase the need for more slower-acting reserves, but those reserve sources of power are less expensive to have on hand than fast-acting reserves.
“Conventional power-plant failures most often happen in a fraction of a second with no warning; the variability of wind is both gradual and predictable,” Goggin said. “Gradual changes in wind output are relatively easy for grid operators to accommodate. On the other hand, rapid changes in electricity supply caused by traditional power plant failures require very fast-acting reserve generation. Twenty-four-seven, you don’t know when a traditional power plant will go down. With wind you can do forecasting, you know tomorrow between 2 or 3 p.m. there will be a reduction.”
The AWEA report indicates that focusing on the need for large amounts of “baseload” power is misleading. A better way to understand the system, AWEA says, is to break down the grid’s needs into three components: energy, capacity and flexibility. Energy is the actual megawatt hours of electricity flowing on the grid, capacity is the ability to generate more when needed, and flexibility is the ability to respond quickly to rises or dips in demand.
Wind is the lowest cost source of generation on the grid. And it could provide flexibility, although that would entail intentionally keeping wind resources offline so that they could be called on to quickly increase electricity availability when needed. Since wind is such a low-cost power source, it would generally not be economically wise to do this. Though as more wind power capacity is added, there’s greater chance that it would make sense to use some of it for flexibility.
“If you provide flexibility, you need to reduce the amount of energy you’re providing” during “normal” operations, Goggin said. “It’s not worth reducing low-cost resources to do so. Wind can provide flexibility but you would have to throw away zero-cost energy.”
With sophisticated electronics, wind turbines also have an impressive ability to control the voltage at which they feed power onto the grid and to “ride through” disturbances in the flow of electricity on the grid, Goggin said.
There has been much attention paid to efforts to develop more energy storage on the grid. This is considered an important way to increase the grid’s efficiency, reduce the need for baseload coal or nuclear plants and help shift the grid toward a more decentralized and nimble system. But Goggin said the idea that more energy storage is crucial to increasing wind capacity is a fallacy. The report notes that all power sources on the grid essentially act as storage, since taken together they compensate for the fluctuations or failings of other sources.
Demanding more storage on the grid specifically to accommodate wind farms would be akin to placing a battery between the grid and your house to make sure that your house draws the same amount of energy from the grid at all times, Goggin said.
“It would be highly inefficient and counterproductive to have a dedicated resource accommodating fluctuations in the electricity demand at your house, as nearly all of those changes are canceled out anyway by other changes on the aggregate grid,” the AWEA report says.
The report notes the strikingly large amounts of wind energy that are already being used in some states. In 2013, Iowa and South Dakota both got more than a quarter of their energy from wind and nine states got more than 12 percent. Texas got 10 percent of its energy from wind last year, an amount expected to increase to 15 or 20 percent by 2017.
Wind provided crucial power during the “polar vortex” last winter that saw coal plants shutting down and natural gas supplies interrupted as gas pipelines were overwhelmed delivering fuel for heat. Wind’s reliability during that crisis saved ratepayers in the PJM alone more than a billion dollars compared to the cost of generation that would have been tapped otherwise, AWEA says.
Very important post. Should be widely disseminated, not least in the foot-dragging UK.
PS – the link to the MEN article doesn’t seem to work.
I live near the Dallas Tx area, and I continue to enjoy my very cheap energy consisting of 100% wind at, as of my last bill, 6.4 cents per kWh total, including taxes and delivery charges. My last bill was $28 dollars.
Enjoy your cheap ELECTRICITY in TX (here in NO VA, mine costs ~11 cents per kWh, and my last bill was around $75).
Would you care to talk about the fact that TX is by far the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions among the states? It’s nice that you have lots of cheap wind power—-too bad you’re not being forced to pay a carbon tax on all that GHG pollution to even out the true costs.
I won’t make any excuses for Texas’ CO2 pollution, and I welcome a carbon tax (but not just for Texans of course). Texas does produce the most CO2 per state, but we are not the state that has the highest per capita CO2, in fact we are 15th from the top. Wyoming is the top, followed by N. Dakota, W. VA, AK, LA,MT,KY,IN,NE,OK,IA,NM,KS,AL.
I also will not take any personal responsibility for Texas’ CO2 levels beyond what I personally produce, which is a hell of a lot less than the average person in the U.S. due to the fact that I drive very little, conserve whenever I can, use 100% wind electricity (my choice, which in the past has caused me to pay higher than average but I did it anyway on principle) I have voted for the most progressive candidates who accept AGW, but keep getting outvoted, and I speak out about AGW, and alternative energy to anyone who will listen.
I won’t pay a carbon tax for OTHER people’s pollution just because of an accident of geography. That makes no sense. The incentive/tax to conserve/reduce should be tied directly to the thing that the individual is using, buying, contributing to, not just “You are a part of that tribe, so all of you are guilty at the same level, and are equally to be held accountable”. That is just another form of prejudice.
A tax is paid on what you buy; it is generally not paid on what you don’t buy. No prejudice required.
To be clear, I was trying to include taxing on purchases, and incentives to reduce in the same sentence. The prejudice that I was referring to was what I was perceiving from dumboldguy’s comment against Texans as a group.
Texas has work to do, but it does have the fastest growing wind industry in the nation. In fact, it still amazes me that wind is doing so well here considering how regressive our politics are. Now we have to embrace solar as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Top_Five_US_Wind_States.svg
There’s certainly a lot of wind power that has been built up and I’m sure it’s saving some natural gas, but I remain skeptical as to whether it’s the cheapest form of new generation. AFAIK they’re still built with an investment tax credit. The new turbines look sleek now, but what happens when the paint starts to peel? And I see no evidence that they can replace baseload power. They’re still just a minor fraction of total generation.
http://d.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2016/03/3057311-inline-us-wind.jpg
The states with high wind percentages are low population and low density.
Planning Engineer explains it well:
https://judithcurry.com/2016/03/19/week-in-review-energy-edition-3/#comment-772975
IMO the future is nuclear.
I was puzzled about where Canman was coming from when I saw him talking about “the future is nuclear” and giving a link to some maundering moron on Judith Curry’s site in adjacent sentences. Not being familiar with Canman (has he commented on Crock before?), I checked his Gravatar profile and went from there.
I am sorry to report that he appears to be yet another denier charlatan, even though he operates at a much higher level of sophistication, obfuscation, and subterfuge than Master Bates, Adrian Vance, or Russell Crook. He is quite active on the web, and to me the most entertaining of his writings are his many book reviews for Amazon. I say entertaining because he gushes over the brilliance of people like Mark Steyn and gives bad reviews to Merchants of Doubt, Michael Mann, and other leading climate scientists—-the laugh comes when at most only 1/5 of those who read his biased crap “find it useful” (except for the 2 of 2 that thought his analysis of Steyn was useful). He also loves WUWT and Anthony Watts, and obviously Judith Curry.
Canman is a denier, plain and simple, and I suspect his support for nuclear is a ploy—-intended to distract us from renewables and thereby keep fossil fuels alive a bit longer. He knows that the road to deploying more nuclear is going to be long and hard (until SHTF time).
So, if anyone has time to spare, track Canman down and see for yourself.
D.O.G. (one of my mottoes is “I track down the deniers so you don’t have to”)
Arrrggghhhh, and we thanks ye for yerz endeevors for our sakes, ye big wee furry bowser.
I counted my Amazon helpful votes as 136 out of 358 or 38%. How did you get 1/5? I review a lot of books I disagree with, so I’m not going to have a high ratio.
How did I get 1/5, you ask? I got it from scanning your “helpful” ratings on Amazon and using one of your own denier tricks against you—except that I did not outright lie and seriously distort truth as you and other deniers do, but merely over-exaggerated a bit. It’s a good fishing technique, as proven by the fact that you are now flopping on the dock and whining.
Since I’m waiting for it to warm up before I go our and do some yard work, I had time to do some actual math on your ratings, and found that:
1) You are 63/72 or 88% “helpful” when you review denier and right wing crap by morons like Steyn and Goldberg and their ilk. The WUWT lemmings nod in agreement with you.
2) You are 66/276 or only 23% “helpful” when you review serious and intelligent writings by or about recognized climate scientists and climate writers. To wit:
Nye—-5/13
Oreskes and Conway—-11/32 and 7/31
Hansen—-1/5
Mann—-20/112 (18% and more than 1/3 of all your ratings)
McKibben—-0/3
3) It’s obvious that the non-WUWT folks think little of your biased opinions. I fact, I would bet that those who check Amazon reviews regularly are likely to read the books you pan and NOT read the ones you like.
PS Thanks for my morning laugh—-“I review a lot of books I disagree with, so I’m not going to have a high ratio”. Is that your little whore’s niche in the denier world? Find positive books that you KNOW you will “disagree with” and spread your lying BS about them? I noticed you saying good things about Heartland in some comments—-are you on their payroll too? Their head Amazon Book Review Troll?
So you “merely over-exaggerated a bit”. Instead of 15%, I got 23.9% (truncating instead of rounding, huh) … from the authors you agree with! That’s a 34% exaggeration (with truncating instead of rounding). Digitally, it’s going to take a lot more than a bit to store that.
At least my whining is more concise.
You’re still flopping on the dock whining, because I hooked you AGAIN.
If you had half a brain, you’d shut up and go away rather than argue against the obvious truth that you’re a denier whore, who is playing the “nitpick the numbers” game and obfuscating rather than dealing with that truth.
Keep it up—perhaps some Crockers will waste the time to check you out and prove it to themselves. That would be a win for you because every second spent screwing with you is a second that could be better spent studying AGW.
DNFTT, folks—-instead go to Page 3 of the Washington Post today where Chris Mooney reports on Hansen’s et al paper.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/22/we-had-all-better-hope-these-scientists-are-wrong-about-the-planets-future/
I’ll confess to being a troll. But let’s face it. A blog can either have trolls or it can be an echo chamber. As much as we all claim to hate trolls, deep down we really love to have a good snark fight with an ideological opponent. The real loser is the one who has to resort to name calling and imputing evil motives. By that standard, you’re the one left hanging on a hook.
More whining and even feverish thumbsucking while hunched in a corner by Canman as he tries to justify his evil behavior and project it on me by saying “The real loser is the one who has to resort to name calling and imputing evil motives. By that standard, you’re the one left hanging on a hook”. LMAO! The level of self-delusion among denier trolls never ceases to amaze me. Just because Canman can sit at his computer, type ignorant bullshit, and send it out into the ether, he thinks it has meaning and value to anyone other than other self-deluded deniers? WRONG!
The only echo chambers of the climate change world are the sites like Canman’s usual home—-WUWT—-where nothing but agreement with denier lies is tolerated, and anyone who tries to speak scientific or moral truth is banned. Sites like Crock concentrate on exploring the scientific truths surrounding climate change, and the only “debates” that occur here are over how bad it is, how fast it’s getting worse, and how we are (or are not) taking adequate steps to combat it. Canman has no place here except as a bad example and someone to ridicule and abuse for his arrogance and ignorance.
It is not possible to have a “good fight” of any kind with someone like Canman, any more than one can find a good face to put on stepping in a pile of dog s**t while mowing the lawn. And the idea of Canman setting himself up as anyone’s “ideological opponent” is the second laugh of the day. He is less of an “opponent” than the dog s**t on the shoe—the DS is hard to ignore and it takes work to clean it off the shoe. Canman is a nonentity in comparison.
Yes, Canman is at least smart enough to say “I’ll confess to being a troll”, since to deny it would be like saying “The sun doesn’t come up every day”. He is more than that, though—-he and other deniers are actually war criminals—-guilty of crimes against the human race and the biosphere. When Judgment Day arrives and Canman and friends are put in the dock, I will be in the front row of the gallery, with both thumbs down.
DumbOldGuy reminds me of a saying I’ve recently run across.
“Conservatives think liberals are stupid, while liberals think conservatives are evil”.
Stop trying to be clever. Go away. Go back to WUWT where you and this comment fit in perfectly.
John Stuart Mill said it best:
“Not all conservatives are stupid people, but most stupid people are conservative”
I like this saying that was popular in the eighties:
A young man who is a conservative has no heart. An old man who is a liberal has no brain.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. Abraham Lincoln
Fool!
I get it about the grids and statistics. But what about nighttime, when both solar and wind tend to diminish?
The article does not address solar, but the “intermittence” meme is nonetheless groundless. Germany, for instance, which is getting a third or so of its electricity from renewables, has a grid 10 times as reliable as the US. Technology and policy in action.
actually, wind is more powerful at night than day time. For that reason, many Texas consumers get free energy at night.
http://climatecrocks.com/2015/11/09/the-price-of-renewables-how-does-free-grab-you/
energy storage, which is calling in price at the same pace as solar, will eventually have a role, but we are a long way from actually needing it.
Thanks for your reply, Peter. Just so you know, I am solidly behind climate science. I am just trying to pin down a detail. You said,
“actually, wind is more powerful at night than day time”
That is not my experience. Maybe it depends on where you live. In CA by the sea and in NM at 7000 ft. altitude, my experience is that wind is definitely stronger on average during the day. See here for two explanations of why days are usually more windy.
http://wxguys.ssec.wisc.edu/2013/11/18/why-does-the-wind-diminish-after-sunset/
http://www.answers.com/Q/Why_is_it_more_windy_at_night
I also found an article from Livermore that claimed the opposite.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/power-generation-blowing-wind
So, I dunno. Maybe Livermore is different, or maybe my locations are different. As a minimum, I would say that it depends on where you live.
It is certainly credible that you could have 30% wind and solar as Germany does. 50% is highly likely. The RMI video you presented shows some other fill in methods. Maybe.
Let us consider, hypothetically, 50% solar and 50% wind. After dark, you would be reduced to 40-60%, depending on wind power. Is that sufficient for winter heat or summer air conditioning? I guess not So then you might need energy storage or base load.
My point was, by addressing only grids and statistics, this article does not by itself refute the need for base load or storage. A more complete analysis is needed.
Anyway, I think we have time to figure out how much base load and how much storage, if any, is needed, because base-load will not be terminated immediately. As the RMI video says, this should not be an impediment to moving forward with renewables.
Thanks for your detailed response, Peter.
In my experience, wind is significantly reduced at night in CA near the ocean and in NM at 7000 ft. Most sites dealing with weather confirm this. I found one Livermore article that claimed the opposite. I guess it depends on your location.
Consider 100% renewables with 50% solar and 50% wind. That means that the available power would be reduced to 40%-60% at night, depending on your assumptions about wind at night. I still think that, depending on heating and AC requirements at night, you may need some base load or storage.
The video you presented suggests that the gaps can be filed in. Maybe. I would take a more wait-and-see approach. Base load will not be shut off immediately. We can determine base load and storage requirements if necessary after we get up to a much higher capacity of renewables. We should not let the base load argument diminish the need for developing renewables.
If we look at Texas as a microcosm – wind tends to be strong during the day in West Texas, less at night, but at that time, coastal winds come up and the offshore turbines do well.
You note that power production from solar is reduced at night – My friend Michael Osborne, head of the Austin Texas Electric Utility Commission, reminds us that power demand is vastly reduced at night, when the sun has the good sense not to shine.
One of the reasons Texas is offering free, or even negative cost electricity – is the lack of good transmission to grids outside the state – something that is being addressed, and must be addressed if for not other reason than the US grid is rapidly approaching third world condition.
With good transmission of energy – the variability issue simply evaporates – as wind is always blowing somewhere, and the US plains, midwest, and coastal areas make up an inexhaustible resource.
There is no shortage of models showing how to deal with variability without energy storage, but the fact is, storage is becoming economical much more quickly than anyone would have believed even a few years ago, – so long before anyone runs into any limitations on renewable expansion, those technologies will be available to further firm the grid.
Here is statistic of German grid of January 2015.
https://planeetta.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/saksan_sahko_2015_tammikuu.png
There are days when wind is producing about half of the demand. There are also several days in a row when wind+solar are near zero. I don’t understand how this could be managed without fossil fuels AND without massive storage capacity, or without load-following nuclear power. Could some one explain?
For now you would indeed need fossil fuel backup to fill in the gaps, along with as diverse sources of renewables as possible. As the article says: the gaps are predictable and every grid already has more traditional (fossil) capacity than peak use so you don’t need to build new ones, just fire up a cold plant just in time you expect to need the added capacity. Storage is interesting, though, as it will increasingly be cheaper and more effective than traditional plants for backup.
When renewables increase even further the you’d need to use them not only for negative capacity control (i.e. curtailment), but for positive control as well, which means that you don’t use all potential capacity under normal conditions.
Both methods will possibly need new market schemes that e.g. value availability capacity as well, next to the current primary/secondary control quality markets and more sophisticated grid codes as well.
europe has a connected grid.
Sometimes scandinavian hydro can firm up other countries, sometimes French nuclear steps up, sometimes German wind fills in for French nuclear, for instance during heat waves when the N-plants have to close to avoid boiling rivers.
Better transmission, integrated grid, distributed generationi = more security in the age of asymmetrical war, such as it is.
I think Germany, last time I checked, is a net exporter of power, with a grid 10 times as reliable as the US.
Yes, Germany is a net exporter of electricity. See: https://energy-charts.de/trade.htm
Change to English then select ‘sum of countries’ and ‘Energy (TWh)’.
Btw, Germany also regularly steps in to help France when it’s hit by a cold snap and French consumption increases dramatically due to resistance heating and demand is much more than the capacity of it’s nuclear fleet (nuclear reactors are too expensive for cold-reserve).
We are aiming for 100% CO2-free energy, right? Imagine that there would be only wind, solar and hydropower in Europe. The fluctuation of wind and solar is real, as shown in the chart above. There will be times when wind and solar is near zero not only in Germany but in whole Europe, and there are simply not enough megawatts of hydro to serve as back up power.
The bigger penetration of wind and solar is, the bigger will the problem of their intermittency be. If this where not an issue, then why is there in Germany the same amount of conventional (coal+gas+nuclear) capacity as there were at year 2002 ?
https://planeetta.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/saksan_asennettu_teho_2015.png
Capacity of wind and solar has grown by a factor of almost six since then, but still all the conventional capacity is needed.
Yes, another one of those pretty graphs that the bright-sided like to look at because wind and solar are growing so nicely. Why does no one notice that brown coal, hard coal, and gas have hardly declined over the past 15 years? And that the Germans have foolishly cut back on nuclear because some fools in Japan forgot about earthquakes and tsunamis (neither of which are much of a problem in Germany).
It hardly matters what 80,000,000 Germans do anyway, considering that the real problem lies with the 2,500,000,000+ Chinese and Indians and their plans for reducing carbon emissions Will we win the race to decarbonize before atmospheric SO2 concentration rise to irretrievable levels? Doubt it.
“…nighttime, when both solar and wind tend to diminish?”
So does demand.
Sorry, premature epostulation.
What I meant to say was:
“…nighttime, when both solar and [er, never mind… solar] tend to diminish?”
So does demand.
And any society dumb enough to build a grid entirely out of solar PV and wind deserves to have down times, followed by elections of smarter people. Including efficiency, conservation, more ecological lives, and ACES and other passive heating and cooling methods to reduce grid use in the first place, and hydro, micro-hydro, geothermal, 24/7 solar thermal, waste biomass and other forms of dispatchable renewable energy should provide all we need for a 80-90% reduction in fossil fuel use on the grid, Meanwhile other, larger changes will be taking place–changes to completely zero-energy or energy-producing building stock, changes in the landscape (shorter to zero work-home commutes) and a move to public EVs and high speed trains powered by solar and wind along the rights of way, and finally, storage when we do finally need it–batteries, pumped storage, etc.
Of course if we expect to be able to do all this before changing climate makes us unable to bake bread, we better get going right now, and stop paying attention to anti-renewable ideologues.
No wind, no power. Then what?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/11358770/Proof-that-the-wind-industry-cannot-be-relied-upon-for-our-electricity.html
Then we die, of course. Only cowards complain – suck it up.
“Imagine that there would be only wind, solar and hydropower in Europe.”
No, imagine there are only horses turning big wooden turbines, and they get tired at night.
Why imagine something so moronic, you say? Well, point taken. You’d have to be on Dellingpole or Whatsup to get anywhere with an argument like that.
Your questions have all been answered multiple times, before you asked them and since; I hope you’ve been following along.
Your link goes to an article by an obvious anti-renewable zealot who whines about wind subsidies but says nothing about fossil and fissile fuel subsidies.
UK becomes only G7 country to increase fossil fuel subsidies
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/12/uk-breaks-pledge-to-become-only-g7-country-increase-fossil-fuel-subsidies
UK cuts to renewable energy make a mockery of its pledge at Paris climate talks
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2015/dec/17/uk-cuts-renewable-energy-make-a-mockery-of-its-pledge-paris-climate-talks
Government finally admits it is subsidising nuclear – while cutting help for renewables
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2015/oct/22/hinkley-point-uk-energy-policy-is-now-hunkering-in-a-nuclear-bunker
I don’t know, but if asked which makes more sense to subsidize–harmful, unpopular high-carbon industries that have been around for between 65 and 150+ years, or absolutely-crucial-for-the-survival-of-civilization, low- (and soon zero-) carbon industries just getting established and competing against serious Chinese and other competition (when home-grown industries are also generally lower carbon)… I’d guess the new, low-carbon ones. How bout you?
What do you think you will achieve with that arrogance? I’m a strong advocate for CO2-free energy and strongly against fossil fuels.
It’s very unlikely that renewable energy alone will solve the energy part of the climate crisis. I think that all tools in the box should be used. You obviously think that we can afford not to use all of them and take the risk that we will fail. So which one takes the problem more seriously? James Hansen and many others shares my opinion.
There’s actually two problems. First one is climate skeptics, Delingpole, those on WUWT and others. The second problem are those who understand the first problem but when discussed about solutions, energy especially, are in the same type of denial mode as climate sceptics. This conversation was again a prefect prove about the situation. As well as this blog post.
Reblogged this on A Green Road Daily News.
Peter,
I think you should post all articles about renewables 2 or 3 times–especially the ones about baseload being an obsolete concept. Presumably, the same anti-renewable ideologues and morons who skip to the end of the article (while not watching the video) and then post comments about how renewables can’t work because they don’t supply baseload will post the same comments on each one. But if you keep posting the articles, sooner or later most of them will read one, some will even understand it, and eventually they should give up and go post comments on how heavier-than-air travel will never work.
good analogy