[drbuzzard]

I agree that we should be building nuclear plants. But there are issues with those. Nuclear plants are not responsive enough to deal with fluctuating demand. It takes timeframes on the order of weeks to change the output of a nuclear plant. Wind, combined with energy storage technologies can be responsive to this demand. I'm an engineer. I deal with making the peg and the hole fit together. Putting up windmills for the sake of putting up windmills is a square peg, round hole thing. But putting up windmills with a defined storage strategy that makes them fill a niche in the power generation industry is good engineering and makes use of the resources available to us.

I don't know who sold you this nonsense, but they won on the deal. Solar and wind are both extremely temperamental power sources. They cannot guarantee peak performance when you need it, and storage options are extremely limited for any power they do produce. I also don't get where you say that nuclear is not adjustable. If you simply adjust the dampening of the reaction, you can reduce the power output. Remember those control rod things? You know, how they managed the reactors altogether? Even if it were, say, a pebble bed reactor and didn't have control rods, you don't HAVE to push all the heat energy through the generator turbines. You can just dump heat after all. You simply design design the reactor for the peak load you expect and scale down generation from that point down to need.

Waving being an engineer around as if it were a badge of competence doesn't carry any weight with me. I've got plenty of engineering degrees myself, and have known plenty of engineers which couldn't get the round hole square peg issue down right.

[BlazingArizona]

olar and wind are both extremely temperamental power sources. They cannot guarantee peak performance when you need it, and storage options are extremely limited for any power they do produce.

Though fluctuating energy sources don't belong on the grid, there are uses for which they can be matched. Examples: charging electric vehicles, desalinating seawater for coastal cities, and the oldest use for windmills, pumping water.

[CPT Clay]

Coal and nuclear for “base load” and nat gas for the “peak” times.

Wind and Solar will never add up to much of the output.