Wind power is lucrative only because grid operators are forced to buy it first, and at any price, regardless of what it is actually worth. The wholesale price of electricity in Europe is now frequently negative when the wind blows - the power produced by those windmills is literally worth less than nothing - but the grid operators are required to buy it anyway for political reasons. The problem here is that the politicians are keen to be seen to do something to increase the use of renewable energy - rather than being keen to actually do something to decrease CO
2 emissions, which is a completely different objective.
Compare France and Germany on
this map. France has low CO
2 emissions; Germany spends a LOT of money on increasing the amount of renewable energy used. It is VERY clear which of these is an effective strategy for the environment.
I don't think that's true anymore regarding wind. Sure, it's limited to where it is windy (duh). Denmark is windy as hell. Soon half of Denmark's power consumption will be from off shore wind farms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
Poland is another place very windy. They're expanding wind power aggressively. Now about 5% of all their power consumption is wind. And this is a development just, the last couple of years. Nah, you're sitting on old information. They've solved the wind engineering problems now. Whatever issues they had regarding scale has been solved. They're churning these out now and they're all getting their money back. It's all about size. Small wind power plants is hard to make a profit on. But it's a different thing entirely for the big ones. In the 90'ies a common comment was that no wind power plants had generated more electricity than it had taken to put them up. Well... duh. If you're at that moment rapidly expanding wind power capabilities, and take a mean, the newer wind power stations are going to to warp the data. But now 25 years later, we're still expanding wind power capabilities aggressively, but the proportion of new power plants is smaller than the overall capacity. So now the numbers look completely different. A wind power station has a 25 year lifespan. So now we have the numbers on those 90'ies power stations, and it's looking way better than expected.
This reads like you saw that I was objecting to wind power, and delivered a knee-jerk response based on the incorrect assumption that I believe that windmills don't generate lots of electricity.
They do. But they generate it when it is needless, and as a result is worth less than nothing. Because when the wind blows in Denmark, it blows EVERYWHERE in Denmark. And when the wind is calm in Denmark, all of Denmark is becalmed. Electricity prices follow that trend; so Danish wind power is only worth paying for when it isn't available.
As far as the difference between France and Germany. France has aggressively pursued nuclear power. While not renewable, we're not going to run out of uranium for millennia. We've got places on Earth heated because of spontaneously reacting uranium.
I'm a pragmatic. I'm for whatever works. Obviously we need to get away from coal and oil because... the planet. As long as we replace it with something that doesn't churn out CO2, I'm less interested in how we do it. Why not nuclear AND renewables?
That's fine. But the proportion of renewables in that mix can only be very small before they become non-viable economically.
Fun fact, France is only aggressively pursuing nuclear because they don't have oil or coal.
France had plenty of coal; And they are NOT pursuing nuclear power at all - they are edging away from it, after several decades of trouble-free, cheap, low-carbon power generation. Which is bloody stupid.
Poland has loads of coal. I find it interesting how countries with a certain resource will find a way to justify the morality of using it, and denounce other countries immorality. Climate change denial seems to be more related to what cheap power the country has access to, rather than any actual care about the environment. And it's population will parrot the same opinions. That is worrying.
Yeah, there's loads of bullshit about. But it all serves to obscure two simple, obvious, and easily checked facts:
1) The goal needs to be minimizing emissions (and not just at certain optimum points in time, but throughout the long term), while keeping the lights on. Maximizing renewables may not be a good way to achieve that.
2) The nations that have low emissions are all using nuclear power, or hydro power, or both. The ONLY generation technologies that show a clear negative correlation with long-term (ie monthly or longer) CO
2 emissions are nuclear and hydro power.
Sweden can afford being all green since it has loads of water power. Denmark is windy as fuck.
Sweden also has lots of nuclear power. Norway is green without nuclear, but Sweden and Norway are uniquely suited to large scale hydro power. Neither country is making power from the wind to a significant degree.
Denmark sometimes makes lots of wind power; But when it is calm, Danish power is either gas power, or coal power purchased from Germany. Gas is better than coal, but then, EVERYTHING is better than coal; That doesn't make gas a good option.
Check out that link from my last post. That's real time data, so check it once in a while, and see which strategies are ACTUALLY green - which countries actually produce low CO
2 power, consistently. CO
2 is all that matters. Bullshit about 'wind generated 150% of our requirements yesterday' is just that - I don't care about one day, I care about overall emissions over the long term, because that is the ONLY thing that actually affects the climate.
