Everywhere these monstrosities are placed they drive the local people wild. This article, although biased in favor of solar power, shows how absolutely destructive it is to communities. Wind power is just as bad because living next to windmills is pure hell. Also, the idea that we are going to suddenly become energy independent by going over to solar and wind ignores the fact that nearly all of the equipment for both boondoggles comes from Red China. So, we end up going from a situation where our energy supplies are partly controlled by not necessarily hostile powers, like Saudi Arabia, to a situation where the equipment needed for energy supplies is basically provided to us by our most dangerous enemy, Red China. In addition, the intermittency of both solar and wind means that backup power in the form of things like gas plants is absolutely essential.
Just compare either a gas plant or a nuclear power plant to solar and wind and you find there is vastly less adverse environmental impact from either. This whole green businesses is pure communist insanity designed to turn us into a communist country where most of us are poorer and many of us are starving. It's pure anti-American hell.
The conflict is one of many urban-rural divides, in which rural areas dominated by Republicans are being asked to transform their landscapes to make electricity that will mainly serve cities dominated by Democrats.
And the tone of the debate often reflects the way Trump has changed what’s acceptable public discourse, with attacks that are more personal.
Mark signed his lease three years ago, when the developer was putting together the land to propose the project. The lease payments would be five times what he earns from renting out the land to someone to farm it
For windmills, the contract says they will remove the concrete to a depth of 18 inches at the end of the lease. Does anyone believe there will be money for that?
Mark Schein sings from the back row, aware that many of the people in the other pews view him as their enemy.
His wife, Toni, stands by his side, but the rows around them are all empty.
The hymn at this May service, backed by a pipe organ, is “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” about perseverance in the face of great challenges.
Excellent, concise, and highly accurate post, LS. Very good.
You wrote “...backup power in the form of things like gas plants is absolutely essential”
Exactly right. The insane thing is you now have to build THREE separate power plants to replace ONE conventional plant:
Plant #1: the solar plant and/or wind plant
Plant #2: the energy storage system (batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air caverns, etc)
Plant #3: the conventional natural gas fired combustion turbines for backup when there is no sun or wind and the storage system is empty.
Basic common sense tells you that building THREE power plants to do the job of a SINGLE conventional plant makes zero economic sense. Plus the new system is vastly more complex than the conventional system, uses up many times the land area of the conventional system, uses many times the mass of materials of the conventional system, and produces highly toxic, non-recyclable waste at the end of its life.
To open a new surface mine, you must post a reclamation bond at the beginning of the project to restore the site when operations are completed. No such bonds are required for wind or solar, so the economic playing field is highly tilted toward them. Just imagine those thousands of acres of solar panels at the end of their life 20 years from now and the company has gone out of business. Who cleans up the mess?
It is easy to see a ten billion dollar Superfund II coming to fleece the taxpayer to remove the obsolete and worn-out monstrosities.
Once you reach age 70 like me, you realize that 20 years goes by in the blink of an eye. People in their 20s see the next 20 years as an eternity.
The irony is that people are wanting to “go green” to prevent a one degree rise in global temperatures 100 years from now. But the toxic waste and abandoned plant messes from “green” equipment will be upon us in only 20 years.
I was looking at the impact of electric vehicles on the utility secondary distribution system. A secondary transformer serves ten houses on average. The secondary distribution system design standards were created in the 1960s, long before EVs. If you have two or three families charging EVs, you need to roughly DOUBLE the distribution transformer size AND DOUBLE the size of the wires in the neighborhood.
So, to electrify the economy, you meed to massively overbuild the power distribution infrastructure and build three times as many power plants.
Absolutely NOTHING about “green” power makes sense.
“Up until December, Mark and Toni were joined at church by their son, George, a lawyer and the 2000 valedictorian of the local high school. George had left Williamsport for college and his career and then moved back, with his husband and their daughter....”
Gee, who would guess they were liberals?
Insanity is the shorthand version of the laundry list of holes you can poke in the whole “renewable” idea.
It is closer to alchemy than reality.