Discussion about this post

User's avatar
GREG BROWN's avatar

When real investors put real money into renewables - THAT'S when you'll know the economics is at least promising. As long as they're taxpayer subsidized - fuhgeddabout it

Expand full comment
Kern's avatar

The simple truth about renewable energy showed its ugly head in Texas this past week. The truth is this: To avoid shortages you must have sufficient reliable weather-independent backup power to compensate for the total loss of the renewable sector. As you increase the percentage of wind/solar you must back it up with an equal amount of non-renewable capacity. Furthermore, the backup must be able to come on stream very quickly to avoid outages. This generally means natural gas powered turbine generators.

There is a complicating factor where wind is concerned that no one wants to talk about: Wind generators fail over time and are not easily nor economically feasible to fix. Drive by any wind farm and you see this - a high percentage of the blades are not turning. These towers are broken and impossible to fix without bringing in huge high capacity cranes to fix them. Put simply if the time to tower failure is ten years then you loose 10% of your wind farm capacity each year. Under today's incentives it is cheaper to build new wind farms than fix old ones. In the Pacific Northwest, where I live, we are starting to see abandoned wind farms.

Expand full comment
15 more comments...

No posts