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.
Sounds like you need more of our food supply in your gas tank.
“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.”
Oh, so true. I am 79 and have had exactly the same experience. Having had an aortic valve replaced about six months ago, I have a definite sense of my own mortality.
“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.”
Exactly correct.
The key point is “common sense”. Liberals don’t have any. That’s why “man made global warming/climate change” makes sense to them. Never mind that “man made global warming/climate change” is IMPOSSIBLE.
The erf is YUGE. The oceans are VAST. Puny humans CAN NOT affect the world climate if they tried to.
DO THE MATH.
Anything puny humans do to try and reduce emissions is quickly undone by one volcanic eruption, whether above ground where we can see it or under the oceans where we can’t.
“the greatest number of the Earth’s volcanoes are hidden from view, occurring on the ocean floor along spreading ridges.”
ANYONE who has flown over this great country on a clear day can testify to the VAST vegetation (trees) covering the landscape from coast to coast (except deserts). (They have even MORE trees in Canada).
Nuclear power has the smallest environmental footprint of ANY kind of power. It is the cleanest/cheapest type of energy other than hydro.
“man made global warming/climate change” is a HOAX and is IMPOSSIBLE for puny humans to fix, even if it were possible, which it isn’t.
True, but it makes great finanacial sense for the companies being paid tax dollars to contsruct them.