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I worked with Meredith. I didn’t know she had written that book. She is highly credible and respected. Thanks for letting me know about her book.

I’ve been pointing out the same thing for years. You need TWICE the capital investment to get one kWh from “green” that you do from conventional. You have to build TWO complete power plants with “green” compared to the one you have to build with conventional fossil, hydro, or nuke. You need to either 1) back up “green” with conventional (as you say) or 2) build massive and ultra expensive energy storage systems for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow (compressed air energy storage, batteries, pumped hydro, ultra capacitors, flywheels, etc).

Huge amounts of research have been done on all these for decades and there really has been limited progress. The USA just doesn’t have enough sites for pumped hydro or compressed air energy storage.

The other thing never talked about is what happens to the beautiful landscape vistas when the USA is covered with ten million windmills. Then, when they are all worn out in 30 short years, what happens to ten million derelict towers with one or two snagged-toothed blades hanging by a thread and the companies that built them are all bankrupt and long gone? Traditional coal surface mines have to post surety bonds to reclaim the land when the mi es close. The same surety bonds need to be posted for “green” plants that destroy the landscape as sure as surface coal mines do. Except those ten million wind turbines will leave behind ONE BILLION TONS of buried concrete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDL40wstWj8

I didn’t recognize Meredith Angwin’s name but when Ixquicked it, I ran into this 53 minute interview by The Rational View. I’ll pick up a copy of the book and read that too.

For the record, I’ve worked on the fringes of energy analysis for decades and the primary issue that is my hot button is just how useless wind and solar are.... and by useless, what I mean is that they don’t actually provide produce a NET increase in electrical supply, or if they do it is so miniscule to be inconsequential. Here is why (and since this is a complicated subject, I’ll take a lot of shortcuts with what follows so don’t be looking for this to be either precise and definitive). This is meant as a very general statement but for a more detailed review, I think that what you’ll find is that this can be easily substantiated....

Wind and solar are variable loads and as such, they have to be accommodated by something else that is variable. When wind and solar are up, something else has to be backed down. When wind and solar are down, that something else has to ramp up. The grid always has to be satisfied to meet the demand. Thus it goes without saying that whatever is ‘backing up the grid’ has to have the features of variability to accommodate the unpredictable and unreliable nature of wind/solar (which for the most part have priority access to the grid). Wind and solar are totally unreliable but they are the tail wagging the dog... and that is the crux of the problem.

Nuclear basically can’t be ramped up and down to accommodate the randomness of wind/solar... not in any kind of practical way (although the French have developed some technology in that regard). Hydraulic power can be varied but all that means is that the water is diverted around the turbines... this is called ‘spilling the water’ and how stupid is that. This leaves coal and gas fired generation and they ramp up and down just fine (within limitations). Here’s the problem and I’ll just refer to natural gas for this.... in order to accommodate the ups and downs of wind/solar, the gas turbines used will very likely have to be run in simple-cycle (open loop) mode so that they can vary quickly up and down with their generation capacity. This is as opposed to combined-cycle mode (which takes a long time to adjust to meet the load). Here’s where the rubber hits the road.... there is a huge difference in the efficiency of simple-cycle versus combined cycle... to throw out some rough numbers, the efficiency difference goes from 40% to 60%. To summarize how important this point is..... in order to accommodate the ups and downs of wind/solar, the gas turbines that are trying to make up the demands on the grid are burning that much more gas to generate the same amount of electricity i.e. commensurate with the difference in efficiency, 40% to 60%.

When I listen to folks extolling the virtues of wind/solar as far as what it contributes to the overall grid, here are the questions I ask them.... “So how much gas was wasted due to operating the gas turbines in simple-cycle mode to accommodate the wind/solar? And how much electrical energy could the gas turbines have generated IF they had of been operated in their more efficient combined-cycle mode? How much wind/solar would NOT have been required if the gas turbines had of not been forced to run in the less efficient simple-cycle mode?

If the numbers are crunched through, it’s absolutely shocking how useless wind/solar are. It’s not a difficult analysis..... when I crunched through it recently, the difference for a new state of the art Siemens SGT6-9000HL gas turbine was such that in simple-cycle mode, it had a gross power output of 440 MW. In combined-cycle mode, it had a gross power output of 655 MW. That difference of 215 MW is equivalent to approximately 350 wind turbines... the assumption for this is that the wind turbines have a max output of 2 MW each and are able to operate 30% of the time (capacity factor).

Even then, there is a significant difference in reliability because there are times when there is simply no wind blowing so all 350 wind turbines could be down. And don’t bother to get me started on what the maintenance and reliability costs are of having all this equipment ramping up and down like yo-yos....

Here’s where you can find the specs for the particular gas turbine used in the example above... there’s enough information here that anyone can do this sort of cursory analyis... https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/offerings/power-generation/gas-turbines/sgt6-9000hl.html