The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[Loren Pechtel]

Well, you cold say soar is not renewable, the Sun will not go on forever.

For all practical purposes solar is called renewable because to us it is inextinguishable.

It is semantics. Wood for fuel is renewable, plant more as you harvest. Natural gas, and coal are not renewable.

From the solar power industry alternative energy sources can not completely replace existing fossil fuel plants.

We need a new grid that integrates renewables and nuclear or natural gas..

No. Solar and wind are the only major renewables, both are quite intermittent. And nuke does not throttle well (when a pile goes from high power to low power it will get some xenon poisoning, which makes the throttle overshoot when powering it back up. This is what destroyed Chernobyl--they tried to bring the power up too fast, then the guy in charge refused to power down when the plant got too hot), so it does not mix well with intermittent sources.

Nuke or renewables, not both unless there's a major breakthrough in storage.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

All of the above economic analysis is carefully hidden from consumers by government subsidies; We pay not only through our utility bills, but also through taxation, making a direct comparison of costs (deliberately) difficult*, and through price guarantee deals - grids are often required by law to pay for electricity from specified generators at no less than a minimum price, regardless of the actual prevailing market price, leading to other generators seeing negative wholesale prices - a cost to their businesses which is necessarily passed on to consumers via even greater utility bill prices. This is why the recent proliferation of wind and solar has not only failed to lower prices (as many naïvely expect from looking at fuel cost alone), but has actually seen prices soar.

Yup. Pro-solar ballot initiative. The electric company warned that passing it would raise rates. It passed, rates went up, people were screaming at the power company.

 

[steve_bank]

In both Hawaii and Ca I think utilities had programs that guaranteed a rate for buying excess power from home solar. The idea being to stimulate solar by guaranteeing a predicable return on investment.

There was enough excess power put into the grid that it upset the rate structures. Unforeseen consequences.

The integration of customer-generated (behind-the-meter) solar or other energy sources into the grid
upsets traditional utility rate structures by creating a mismatch between fixed costs and variable revenue. This dynamic can lead to a "utility death spiral" and necessitates rate design changes.

Our free market system dies not allow for or makes it difficult to make creative solutions to energy problems.

We have all the technology we need t make a grid tingeing wind and solarr backed by nuclear and or a minimum of fossil fuels.

Maximizing local solar and wind makes a distributed system more tolerant to failures and sabotage.

We did large scale long term infrastructure projects before. Rural electrification and the Tennessee

Valley Authority. And the national highway system.

I was a kid in Ct wen the I95 interstate came through town replacing d the old Boston Post Road,.

The Boston Post Road was a system of mail-delivery routes between New York City and Boston, Massachusetts, that evolved into one of the first major highways in the United States.

Tennessee Valley Authority - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally-owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. While owned by the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding and operates similarly to a private for-profit company. It is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is the sixth-largest power supplier and largest public utility in the country.[1][2]

With a generating capacity of approximately 35 gigawatts (GW), TVA has the sixth highest generation capacity of any utility company in the United States and the third largest nuclear power fleet, with seven units at three sites.[1][15] In addition, it also operates four coal-fired power plants, 29 hydroelectric dams, nine simple-cycle natural gas combustion turbine plants, nine combined cycle gas plants, 1 pumped storage hydroelectric plant, 1 wind energy site, and 14 solar energy sites.[16] In fiscal year 2020, nuclear generation made up about 41% of TVA's total energy production, natural gas 26%, coal 14%, hydroelectric 13%, and wind and solar 3%.[16] TVA purchases about 15% of the power it sells from other power producers, which includes power from combined cycle natural gas plants, coal plants, and wind installations, and other renewables.[17] The cost of Purchased Power is part of the "Fuel Cost Adjustment" (FCA) charge that is separate from the TVA Rate. In addition, the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant is the only facility in the country to industrially produce tritium, which is used by the National Nuclear Security Administration for nuclear weapons, where it is used to supercharge and boost the explosive yield of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.[18]

https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/nuclear

Our nuclear plants generate enough low-cost, clean, and reliable energy to power about a third of our customers—more than 4.5 million homes and businesses. With a top priority of safety and security, nuclear power is key to achieving TVA’s mission of energy, environmental stewardship, and economic development to make life better for the Tennessee Valley.
Our Plants

We operate three nuclear plants capable of generating an average of 8,275 megawatts of electricity:

Browns Ferry, near Athens, Alabama
Sequoyah, in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee
Watts Bar, near Spring City, Tennessee

https://www.tva.com/energy/valley-renewable-energy

9,766 MW Operating and Contracted Renewables Capacity
1,952 MW utility-scale solar agreements with 8 projects in operation
Renewable Energy from solar, wind, hydroelectric and biomass

We need it on a national scale.

 

[bilby]

Maximizing local solar and wind makes a distributed system more tolerant to failures

And FAR more prone to them. Wind plus solar is guaranteed to fail on a calm night. If you have a nuclear plant ready to go, that can cover that failure, then you could have just been running the nuke 24x7 at barely any greater cost, and saved the money it cost to buy and install the wind turbines and solar panels. If you don't, then you have no choice but to burn fossil fuel.

We need it on a national scale.

You don't need it at all; It's a collossal waste of money, and is fundamentally incapable of achieving the objective of eliminating fossil fuel use, without massive increases in electricity prices.

Or do you have a different objective in mind?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You don't need it at all; It's a collossal waste of money, and is fundamentally incapable of achieving the objective of eliminating fossil fuel use, without massive increases in electricity prices.

Or do you have a different objective in mind?

Nuke is big. They want small. Thus solar/wind. What they want must be possible, so it must work. Faith.

And Moscow simply wants to fuck up our economy.

 

[lpetrich]

‘Windmills are a disgrace’: Inside Trump’s war against a growing U.S. industry - POLITICO - "Efforts to avoid conflict and seek help from GOP moderates didn't spare wind companies from the president's attacks."

Since Trump returned to the White House, his regulators have moved to withdraw permits for six offshore wind projects along the East Coast and halted construction of two others, including one south of New England that was 80 percent complete. He has also wiped out federal tax credits supporting wind and solar, while his agencies have opened reviews of the wind industry’s national security implications and alleged health hazards and erected barriers to turbine projects on both water and land.

The uprooting of wind projects is especially striking at a time when political leaders from both parties are calling for a massive increase in electricity generation nationwide, citing rising consumer prices and the soaring power demands of data centers. And the ferocity of the president’s attacks stunned executives who had assumed they could work with him, even after a 2024 campaign in which Trump baselessly alleged that wind power causes cancer and has killed hundreds of whales.

The Trump Admin?

“President Trump has been extremely transparent: wind energy is the scam of the century,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement.

“Reversing the Green New Scam was a very popular promise President Trump made on the campaign trail to the American people, who were tired of the Left’s radical and expensive climate agenda,” she added. “President Trump issued very direct policy guidance on offshore wind on day one, which the administration has been working diligently to carry out.”

Trump denounces wind power just about every chance he gets, including during the White House’s July 4 picnic for military families, his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September, last month’s U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, and numerous posts on his social media network, Truth Social.

“Wind is the worst,” Trump said Tuesday night at a rally in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. “That’s a scam. They ruin your valleys. They ruin your peaks. And [it’s] the most expensive energy.”

What got him started?

The decision to halt Empire Wind was one of the first signs that the wind policies of Trump’s second term would be dramatically different from those of his first. But the administration’s efforts reached new heights over the summer after Trump traveled to Scotland for a diplomatic summit with European leaders.

The trip included a stop at Aberdeenshire, the site of one of Trump’s Scottish golf courses. Nearly a dozen offshore wind turbines tower on the horizon, a visual reminder of the unsuccessful decade-long campaign Trump waged before he was president to prevent their construction.

“Windmills are a disgrace,” Trump told reporters during the trip. “They hurt everything they touch.”

When the president got home, a regulatory blitz followed.

...
“He got back from Scotland. It reminded him how much he hated these windmills and he asked why the hell they haven’t been shut down yet,” said one of the people familiar with the White House’s deliberations.

...
“He really just hates wind,” the person said.