don't slam a solution that can't do what's promised? Why? It's obviously failing on all levels...
"hurt the cause" facts tend to do that when promises aren't met and people suffer.
"hurt the cause" facts tend to do that when promises aren't met and people suffer.
The point is to have an array of energy sources. If there's no wind, solar can compensate. If there's no sun, nuclear can compensate. If nuclear goes down, then you can tap into natural gas. If there's no natural gas, then go for coal or whatever.
Except... There can be a large part of the day when there is neither wind nor sun.
> If there's no natural gas, then go for coal or whatever.
Uh huh, but those coal plants aren't just sitting there waiting for you to use them. They have a long startup period and have to run pretty much all the time to make sense.
I think you're missing how badly we've screwed up base load and creating a reliability problem as we decommission coal plants and think we can replace them with wind.
If people stopped wasting money on EV's and bought residential batteries instead...
Are you proposing that we build some worldwide network of transmission lines to move solar power from Africa -> North America when it is night time in the latter?
Also with coal in particular it can take days to ramp them up - coal is for base load, not demand.
If it were only as simple as you are postulating - which is why these 2nd level effects of blindly pushing renewables without taking the whole system into account are causing issues like we are seeing in Texas, California and many other places too.
Our transition to wind and other intermittent sources instead of building base load is creating a worsening reliability crisis.
It seems that people forgot that we still don't have many good ways to store energy.
If we incentivized efficiency we’d be much better off but instead we champion mocking that as something Californian.
Meanwhile, 48 more states in the union have a variety of significantly more or less regulated energy sectors than either Texas or California and how many of them have rolling blackouts every year?
I don't know why people keep pretending Texas's and California's problems are anything more than the stupidity, or willfull negligence of their respective governments.
Umm, I think you're missing something big here. The only reason this was "economical" were huge tax benefits/subsidies.
Decentralized energy production that involves a bunch of large moving parts will NEVER be as efficient as centralized energy production.