Posted on 07/25/2019 8:00:33 PM PDT by cba123
Mosquitoes and other biting insects are all cheering ...
He’s definitely not the superhero he is made out to be. He is the one to blame when Texas goes Blue, as it will happen. Of course, he isn’t going to be effected by that political shift, so he doesn’t care.
Wind power did empower the Netherlands to pump itself dry. It’s wrong as a fetish — it’s right as an ingenious solution in its niche. And surely with the right will to do it, the units could be built so as to be much less risky to avian wildlife. The hypocrisy in modern fads of “green” is never more obvious than in modern wind turbine power.
Wind power did empower the Netherlands to pump itself dry. It’s wrong as a fetish — it’s right as an ingenious solution in its niche. And surely with the right will to do it, the units could be built so as to be much less risky to avian wildlife. The hypocrisy in modern fads of “green” is never more obvious than in modern wind turbine power.
Make a killing with the subsidies you get to build it, walk away leaving the operation to some sap to deal with the inevitable loss.
Great tax racket business model. Sucks for everyone else though.
Required minimum of 25% by state law, paid for through subsidies and jacked-up utility rates, captive customers. The deregulation of Texas power was only a windfall for the electric companies.
They can increase the wind power even more by attaching tiny fans to the back of cows and make use of all that methane output....then they can look at further miniaturization for chickens...and maybe to put beside the mic’s in front of Dem mouths....
We live in Bakersfield. I WISH we had on average $310 electric bills. The latest one is $476 and that’s before the heat hit. And hubby insists on setting the thermostat at 74 or 75 degrees! I walk down the hall and bump it up to 77. Then he walks down the hall and bumps it down to 74. All summer long. I call it our yearly ac wars. lol We have done everything we could to make our 1978 2000 sq ft home more energy efficient. New high dollar double pane windows. New ac unit. New Energy efficient pool pump, etc. etc. Nothing helps. If you save energy they just jack the prices up. I have just given up.
So much disinformation here.
Wind may be cheaper than coal but only for 4 to 6 hours AT NIGHT when demand is lowest. Still needs natural gas power backup so have to pay price of redundant power.
Coal has to be imported into Texas. Wind power needs no cost fuel imported from other states and so wind energy keeps all of its energy production inside the state (fuel, power plant, etc). I’m no fan of wind power but self reliant energy sources are what Texas is apparently seeking.
ERCOT, the Texas energy grid system, is self-contained and has no way of buying imported electricity but it can buy imported fuel to run in its power plants.
Texas is a Plains State and does not need wind and solar power to reduce air pollution from power plants as does, say, California, which is a Basin State where smog and pollution is trapped. So cleaner air is not the apparent objective in Texas, but self reliant energy sources apparently is.
But the turbines take up good farmland. They are noisy, and make annoying shadows if you live close to them. They kill birds. And in Iowa, on a yearly basis, the wind blows the most in April, which is the lowest electric need time (with moderate temps) and least in August (high temps). And on a daily basis, the wind aloft blows the most at sunrise, (not much going on then) and least around 5PM (when everybody is getting home and firing up stuff)
On the good news side, it is cheap power, I believe power companies can get long term contracts for it for under 2 cents per KWH. Nukes and coal can't compete at that price. So those plants are getting shut down in Iowa. And what is getting built are natural gas fired plants, which are easy to bring up and down as the wind comes and goes.
Yeah, I can see that for Bakersfield. It's why I mentioned our average summer highs, which aren't that high, and a big reason why people settled into Silicon Valley decades ago. Many people would kill for those more moderate summer temperatures, yet probably wouldn't be too happy with the resulting energy bill.
Our new 3,250 sq ft home here in central Texas benefits from being extremely energy efficient and with the low energy rates. We just had an electrical meter read this week, and I estimate our electricity bill for the prior month will be around $170-$180. Thermostat set to 73-74 degrees during the day, 71 while sleeping. While the highs here are lower than in Bakersfield, it's the humidity that gets you to run the AC more often.
Our ac bills in our previous 1100 sq ft home ran $175 in the summer.....25 years ago. Lol
How much energy is invested in production of a concrete and steel base to allow erecting a giant wind turbine? At what point does the feed-in tariff (subsidy) pay for the investment? Does the turbine produce enough energy in it’s relatively short life (before recurrent repair) to justify installation? What does one do with a wind farm abandoned due to maintenance cost exceeding income, once the period (15 years?) of subsidy expires?
Mutiple DC interconnects (Oklaunion, Monticello, and Eagle Pass) exist between ERCOT and other generating districts. How much power is moving between any two regions, which direction, one must do a deep dig.
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