South Australia powerless as wind generators don't work.

Cheap? Tell us about mountain top removal and coal miner deaths and don't forget the meythl mercury spread in the air by coal-burning generation.

 

all power plants make noise, have some impact on the environment and even upset local wildlife. renewables are an alternative and in areas like the south west, solar is a viable supplement, especially during the summer months when air conditioning is a must

 

Are you saying they don't?

 

There are several fallacies with your birds flying into windows. Windmills kill far more birds and bats than any other type of power generation and how many windows are there compared to wind farms? Windmills take up a minuscule area compared to all of the worlds windows. A couple years ago one windmill farm was about to get fined for all the eagles killed, but with a wave of his scepter, Obama gave them immunity for all the eagles killed in the next 30 years.

 

1) Texas holds the record for all time wind energy production Feb 18 2016
2) Texas was the first state to reach 10K Megawatts in generating capacity

 

How come folks become pseudo environmentalist when it comes to wind farms and say nothing about coal and oil. The Gulf Coast is still suffering from the oil spill and the fish in my river are contaminated with mercury from coal. So please don't insult my intelligence by suddenly becoming an environmentalist.

 

Texas produces more from wind than the #2 and 3 states, combined.

His head would probably explode if he was told Oklahoma is #2. Conservatism leading the country in wind energy. Huh.

 

Translation: South Australia shows what not to do with renewable energy.

 

Did you read your own posted article?

 

So we have all these ugly wind generators out in West Texas, thousands of them. Do you know how they get that electricity from West Texas to population centers in the rest of the state? (Hint: Transmission lines - the electrical equivalent of pipelines). Do you know the envirowackos have demonstrated against and tried to block the construction of transmission lines because of their perceived damage to the environment? Yes, I know, it doesn't hurt to be crazy when you are an envirowacko by demanding wind power then denying the means to get it where its needed, but that is the nature of envirowackos.

 

Ignoring that my post was intended to be sarcastic you do bring up a good point. Yes, it is extremism to try and obstruct the means to transmit "green power" to where it is needed and no, I am not going to defend that level of ignorance and stupidity.

However I am curious as to where you heard about this. Do you have a link?

 

Why YES, YES IT IS!. And the cost of that standby power station to spin up quickly when the wind doesn't blow just adds to the already exorbitant cost of "renewable energy"
Britain mandated that they have 20% of national power needs supplied by "renewables". ANNNNND they found out that the wind doesn't blow reliably. So, they had to build gas fired generation plants that could be spun up quickly when wind wasn't providing the required amount of energy. Then they found that, in order to provide power when needed, the gas generators had to be kept running at low power. Then they found out that running at low speed, the generators put more pollutants into the air as it was less efficient than if operating at full speed (like a car is less efficient at 30mph than at 60mph). So the net is that the pollution they were proposing to eliminate from gas fired power plants by the use of wind energy was not reduced measurably at all.

But, never mind the real world problems. For envirowackos, their faith is all that matters.

 

all they had to do was switch the power source which they didnt, which also was in the article

 

I have to search for one, not much info as it was primarily a local issue, but billionaire T Boone Pickens bought a whole bunch of land north of Abilene 5 or so years ago to build a big wind farm. Aside from some objections from local ranchers, he got tied up in legal action from envirowackos about the building of transmission lines. Eventually he abandoned the project, partly because its viability depended on extension of government subsidies. http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/262097-pickens-sells-stake-in-wind-farm The "permitting problems" spoken of reflect the issues involving the power lines.

 

Did you read the quote I posted from the article? Like I said in a previous post, there would surely be attempts at blame deflecting when the primary issue was the failure of wind energy to deliver reliable power at a time of great need.

 

Yeah, let a rancher kill an eagle that is killing his livestock and he can go to jail. However, a favored leftist energy source can kill thousands of them and other birds and we are supposed to think that an eagle killed by a wind generator or the Ivanpah solar plant is less dead than one killed by a rancher. Envirowackos are crazy, but they are hypocrites too, so......

 

Its not quick conversion to environmental extremism by pointing out the hypocrisy of the environmental extremists.

The massive Ivanpah solar/renewable energy power plant in California which has never reached its rated capacity would generate less electricity on 2500 acres of desert it occupies than a coal fired power plant would generate on 40 acres. I understand that Ivanpah ignored or waived a lot of Endangered Species Act requirements regarding some kind or another of lizard on the property because narrative.

And, well who cares about a few birds when saving the earth, right?

[video=youtube;FFBlvS-AXEw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFBlvS-AXEw[/video]

 

And here is information how the UK has to have multiple reliable sources of energy to be quickly spun up when the wind power isn't available. http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/uk-must-use-diesel-generators-to-back-up-wind-turbines/

Hey, its expensive and uncomfortable saving the planet from a non-existent problem because of a religious belief in that problem.

 

??
I find it astounding that you would compare solar vs. coal on the basis of the power plant foot print.

To start with, perhaps you should move the coal mine to that 40 acres as well as the power plant - lol!

Beyond that, you should by now be aware that coal kills, too.


The Ivanpah plant is not the only large scale solar plant design. The plant in Morocco has a design that does not use mirrors to reflect solar power to a central heat collector. Instead, heat is collected at ground level by heating pipes containing sodium. These pipes then move heat to the power plant. One advantage of this is that the pipes full of liquid sodium retain enough heat that the power plan can run day and night.

But, the main problem with the Ivanpah plant is that the cost of solar panels has plummeted. And, of course, there is the fact that we subsidize oil and gas.

The main point here should be that solar technology is advancing rapidly.

Unfortunately, the major exporter of wind and solar technology is China. Plus, their "alternative" power industry is advancing as demonstrated by their lead in patents. Somehow, the US just hasn't taken off in terms of energy technology like some other countries have.

 

How do we subsidize oil and gas? Are there tax credits? Direct checks going to oil and gas operations? I hope you are not complaining about deductions of legitimate expenses that all other business use as "subsidies".

China is opening something like one coal fired power plant a month. http://www.reuters.com/article/china-coal-idUSL3N0K90H720140107

And one coal mine can supply multiple 40 acre coal fired plants. Many of them are completely underground. One in southern Utah that was killed when Bill Clinton declared the area it was in a national monument to help his campaign donor Riady family cronies would have been fully underground, with a source of low sulfur coal shipped out on existing infrastructure. Tell me Ivanpah isn't ugly blight on the landscape.

 

What disturbs me about these sorts of spin stories is that even you yourself call them "a couple of enviro-wackos" but somehow that becomes iconic of everything not on the right. That becomes emblematic of every environmental concern

Has it ever occurred to you that those "envirowackos" might have been fronts hired by energy producers who did not want to see more competition in the market??

 

[According to research by GigaOm analyst Adam Lesser, buried in a 2011 report from the International Energy Agency is the fact that fossil fuels currently receive subsidies via "at least 250 mechanisms."[1]

In June 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said $557 billion was spent to subsidize fossil fuels globally in 2008, compared to $43 billion in support of renewable energy. In a July 2011 EIA report on federal fossil fuel subsidies, coal was estimated to have tax expenditures (provisions in the federal tax code that reduce the tax liability of firms) with an estimated value of $561 million in FY 2010, down from $3.3 billion in FY 2007.[2]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Federal_coal_subsidies

And China is rapidly winding back it's coal fired power generation

http://www.afr.com/news/policy/fore...f-85-coalfired-power-stations-20170117-gtszld

 

the wind energy was there. fyi, blackouts occur during summer even with fossil fuel based power plants

 

What is happening with power generation and distribution is that we are finally replacing an outdated aging system that has been around for since early last century. The power systems needed to be upgraded because they were vulnerable and unreliable - (does it really make sense to have an essential supply with no reserve?)

Big power grids leave you vulnerable to attacks, outages over large areas, and natural disasters. Micro grids with power storage capacity have fewer issues

 

The downside of large scale RE is that you will never be able to cover 100% of the grid with RE. RE is not stable enough. Wind and Sun come and go and the energy cannot be stored at that scale. Large scale plants have to operate at very high AC voltages. Otherwise line loss will kill the industry with heat issues all along the power lines. We can store energy at home with batteries, but if individual people and companies are going to store and use their own electricity and be responsible for the equipment, they have no need for the grid. People who cannot or will not make their own electricity will be left paying for the grid at a greater individual cost or the government will have to tax everybody and hose those who took care of their own power needs.

The best we can do without people leaving the grid is to generate RE commercially and locally by consumers, but promote grid intertied RE by consumers. The consumers can use the grid as a storage facility with net metering to decide their bills at the end of each month. Most people don't know how to maintain large battery systems and they have to be replaced frequently. There will always have to be generators to stabilize the grid at 60Hz(in America), but it can be done the most environmental way with nuclear or natural gas plants or maybe even the new clean coal plants. If people went off of the grid and provided their own electricity, they would have to either over engineer their system or have a backup generator. Millions of backup generators would be an EPA enforcement nightmare, but millions of individual systems would be absolutely impossible to hack from a terrorist perspective.

I don't know exactly what Australia has, but these are the problems they are facing and I think they will eventually come to the same conclusion I have. It's just a matter of how to best get there. I work on emergency power equipment for a living and it all works in conjunction with the utility grid at the company level for their data centers. I deal with batteries, chargers, inverters, static switches, and Power Distribution Units. Just so you know where I am coming from.