One may ignore all the fluff about the talented comedian (but energy clueless) Jimmy Fallon and go straight to the second page of this article in Forbes for the reasons why sun and wind energy is unsuitable and often counter-productive. The numbers from the heavily invested in sun and wind Germany are startling. One can't run an industry, city or country with such swings in energy supply!
Sometimes sun and wind in Germany can cover 25% of the demand for electricity. Other times they supply only 2.5%. Overall in a year these renewable sources of energy can be "dependent upon" to produce only about 5% of the country's needs despite the hundreds of billions invested. In fact Energiewende is expected to cost close to $1.4 billion by 2040!
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3 comments:
This comment points out the first problem with with the article:
"you flattened the total production by having it MONTHY and made the renewable more intermittent by showing it DAILY. Average them both monthly or have them both daily. Any daily chart is going to be spikey when overlaid on a monthly chart."
Granted, solar or wind might never supply 100% of the electricity demanded, but neither does any other source. In economics they talk about the learning curve which brings down the cost of technology as a result of improvements in human capital, and the effects of scale which decrease the cost of physical capital. Renewables are still growing and only if you ignore every past technological change society has gone through does it seem likely that they won't surpass fossil fuels by 2030.
The infrastructure for fossil fuels is already in place and there are expected costs in creating new infrastructures. What is the cost of the subsidies that the fossil fuel industry recieved and has recieved for decades versus the cost for renewables in the last 10 years?
"But, neither would any other source"
Why does every seem to forget about the greenest source of power generation (that's been available for quite some time now). Nuclear. But, Oahu would never go for that
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