Bottom line- There are only two alternatives that offer cheap, in mass available, reliable, nationally produced electrical power, coal or nuclear. That’s it.
The rest is sound good garbage, where just like in Germany, just like in California today you will end up with a costly mess. Such policy leads to inflated costs, rolling brownouts in the summer, industry burdened by high energy costs and left to compete on international markets disadvantaged……. Plain folk talk - It’s stupid.
Ideally nuclear is the direction where we should have gone years ago and a successful example is France, which has demonstrated it works. But after 3-mile Island and Chernobyl, what politician will support a new nuclear plant? As I have stated, and you can easily fact check, for nearly 30 years nobody received a federal license to build such a plant in the US until 2007, ironically China is buying US nuclear power plants while we shut them down. Why? Because stupid pandering to stupid people, a non-pragmatic policy towards energy led by politicians who today are all gone anyway! What politician is concerned about 30 years from now in all reality? They are concerned with their next election, and what 50.01% of the populace “feel” is right in that moment. I wonder what the people felt in LA when their power went out in the summer?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/17/business/nuke.php (Sad, in the US we want to crawl into caves and in China they eagerly jump all over it!)
Energy alternatives fail because they “all” run into issues in one or more of these aspects: cost (Your wind costs more that three times per KW/h than nuclear 1.4 vs. 4.6 cents; facts based on California’s cost of power by source), reliability, availability to those alternative means in that area, ease of mass production, power storage requirements, and power by weight or volume. Some of these alternatives are simply not really that clean or environmentally sound especially in large scale, but that’s a topic all of its own
Example: http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/AP1000/AP600-Licensed_predecessor.shtm
It’s cheap; reliable; lots of power from a small space; no storage requirements of power; geographically, weather, and season independent; massive output; nationally produced….. No, you don’t get that with your “wind farm”, sorry. How many wind turbines does it take to produce a constant 1,300+ MW for nearly 30 years with a few maintenance interruptions?