L'Emmerdeur wrote:Listen to the unsupported blithering above, or a reputable source like Bloomberg? Hmm.
"Economics to Keep Wind and Solar Energy Thriving With Trump"
On the plains of West Texas, new wind farms can be built for just $22 a megawatt-hour. In the Arizona and Nevada deserts, solar projects are less than $40 a megawatt-hour. Compare those figures with the U.S. average lifetime cost of $52 for natural gas plants and about $65 for coal.
Notice the subtle deception here. Wind farms can be
built for $22/MWh. But that's not the "average lifetime cost", that's the cost of building them. The cost of maintaining hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of individual turbines/generators is much, much higher than maintaining single installations. The infrastructure itself (ie: the blades and internal workings like bearings and windings) have finite lives and whereas a typical coal/gas plant might have four to six generators one wind farm alone has HUNDREDS of them, all of which must be maintained. It's perfectly ordinary to drive past mile after mile of wind farm in the US (as I just did on my trip) and see 30 to 90 percent of the windmills standing still with blades feathered
because the companies can't afford to keep them maintained. They can't even find a sufficient number of trained technicians willing to climb 300 foot tall towers to work on them. At Tehachapi Pass there are hundreds of windmills polluting the environment and of the several hundred I could see
only three were turning and it wasn't because of a lack of wind. I saw that repeated time and time again in the more than 3000 miles I've driven this November alone.
Even NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado, which has something like ten windmills of varying design they used for research can't keep them running. They have enough megawattage in their taxpayer-funded windmills to run all of NREL and a bunch of homes to boot but those windmills are almost NEVER turning, and when they are, only one of them turns at a time. I've NEVER seen them all turning.
Environmental rules and government subsidies are no longer the key drivers for clean power. Economics are.
No, physics is. Wind farms only work when the wind blows, assuming they work at all. Wind farms will NEVER replace coal, gas or nuclear power because they are unreliable.
Wind farms are built on government subsidies, driven by environmental rules and nothing else, and they are quickly abandoned once the developer has made his profit and the facilities get turned over to someone else who can't afford to maintain them.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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What are you a greeny now? Since when do you give one shit about any organism on the planet other than you? Not least fictional blind birds?
