And putting those numbers into context, the US currently generates 400 GW, and your 64% increase for wind/solar is an increase of around 15 GW (2 GW increase for natural gas from your cite). So…that’s not even a drop in the bucket. It SOUNDS impressive, a 64% increase, but it’s just talking about new production and not even scratching current production.
Renewables aren’t ‘already dominating’, they are just increasing new production faster than natural gas. This doesn’t demonstrate that they have won anything, and there is still that pesky problem that they can’t possibly replace sources like natural gas. They can just make gains around the edges, and this will be the case for decades to come. Sorry, but if we are actually talking about losing 19% of our production currently done by nuclear in the next few decades, then a large percentage of that is going to be natural gas. Same with if we are talking about reducing coal. Some of it will be wind and solar, to be sure, but even if all of it was you are still talking about going from a green source we already have to a new one that has to be produced.
I’m not seeing a ton of natural gas retirements either. It’s a silly comparison that seems a bit disingenuous to me, as do the stats used the way you are trying to use them. New production being done by wind and solar doesn’t do anything to current production wrt CO2 emissions, and nothing you’ve shown demonstrates that renewables have ‘won’ anything, nor even how they could replace the core production. That’s the thing that always seems to be missing from these discussions. Simple really…explain how wind and solar COULD replace, on any sort of realistic timeline, natural gas or even our current nuclear power production. You seemed to be saying we’d just build solar and wind farms across the country and shuffle energy all around, but that’s not a solution that works in the real world. So…how do you get wind and solar to replace natural gas, coal or nuclear? Because, from where I’m looking, it doesn’t seem possible without some new as yet developed or scaled technology using batteries or some other energy storage method.
The anti-nukes won, as I said. And their victory means we get natural gas, which, granted, is better than coal, but it’s not going to really save us from massive climate change. Wind and solar, alone, won’t save us, and won’t actually cut into the core production which WILL be fossil fuel if it’s not nuclear.
i think in the near term (the next 20 years), we should focus on retrofitting existing coal plants to natural gas, as this can be done cheaply and natural gas emits way less CO2 than coal. Secondly, there is very promising carbon capture technology coming to natural gas. See: Fossil fuel electricity, without pollution: Texas has a new power plant - Vox
We could apply this to all natural gas generators and bring our CO2 output close to zero. This would be huge for the environment and could be done cheaply and quickly. We should continue to add renewables at the pace we are on now and upgrade the grid and start adding energy storage as part of our renewable push. I like nuclear power and I think that with modern technology it could be way better than 50 year old plants. But they are expensive and decommission is expensive.
It’s over 3% of total capacity. At that rate, 30 years until total replacement. Just think how far along we’d be if we’d gotten serious 20 years ago.
Of course, eliminating the last couple tens of percent of fossil generation is going to be hard. But there’s also no reason to believe that at the current renewable penetration, the expansion rate can’t be further increased. As I’ve said before, a huge advantage to renewables is the low barrier to entry, particularly with capital costs, but more generally as well.
The rate of change tells you where things are going. This entire discussion is about the future. The rate of change–and the change in rate of change–tells you much more about where we’ll be than the current state of affairs.
And you’re simply wrong that renewables can’t replace natural gas. Not in every situation today at a given price, but price and technology changes. And in a way that’s much more favorable to renewables than natural gas.
Yes, of course. We’re in this whole mess because people forgot that a few decades isn’t very long at all.
I want to be clear about one thing: I generally oppose closing down nuclear plants. This is not a symmetrical situation at all; an operational nuclear plant has already paid most of the cost (not just dollars, but in NIMBY capital, regulatory hurdles, etc.), and so keeping it running as long as possible is a very good idea. Opening new plants–or spending $9B to fail to open a new plant–is not a good idea.
It’s not disingenuous at all. We are interested in net expansion. The news is good about coal: massive plant retirement and zero expansion. For natural gas it’s mixed; they do see significant expansion, but some of that is countered by retirement. For renewables, it’s all good news: massive expansion that isn’t negated by retirement.
You can go on and on about “that’s not a solution that works in the real world”, and yet that’s what’s happening. We do need pumped hydro, big batteries, and other storage systems. These are already known to work at scale, but need to be deployed more widely. We do need a beefier grid to transport energy across the country. That stuff is easy, relatively speaking–we’ve been doing it for decades, and just need to spend more capital on it. We need more efficiency. We need a smart grid where we can shut down heavy but optional use (like aluminum smelting) if the load is too high. We need all these things and more.
And finally, we will probably still have some natural gas use, but it will be infrequent and very expensive because it will only be needed when all the other systems fail, and so there will be strong motivation to reduce the usage as much as possible (as long as we don’t let energy monopolies form).
I agree that the short term should focus on replacing coal with natural gas. I said that in a thread I started a couple of weeks ago. You get an instant 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and natural gas power can be set up faster than any other energy source.
My idea is to start phasing out coal by replacing it with natural gas. This is politically palatable because the frackers will love it and they will drive the Republicans towards this solution. At the same time, we start construction of new nuclear plants, and as new ones come online they can replace the coal/natural gas plants. Some of the natural gas remains for load-following, and the other turbines can be moved to the next area to be converted. The grid doesn’t have to change in any way, and we can rapidly get rid of a significant percentage of CO2 at a reasonable cost in the shortest period of time.
As a medium term solution we can continue to build out wind and solar, and where it makes sense to insert it into the mix we do so. Eventually, the natural gas is used only for load following and home heating and small applications, and we are mainly nuclear with wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and natural gas fitting in wherever they make the most sense.
I honestly think the biggest problem with a plan like this is that the left doesn’t want it because it doesn’t represent the kind of big societal changes they are trying to implement under the guise of global warming. It doesn’t require fundamentally rejecting Capitalism, or lower income inequality, or empower much bigger government. It keeps big energy companies in the mix, it’s not small and local and pastoral and run by co-ops, and that’s their vision of a ‘green’ future.
And there it is. We can’t have a sensible green energy plan because the commies were hoping to use it to take over.
In fact, only one party is letting ideology trump reality, and it’s the one that continues to deny climate change.
The current state of affairs is essentially *already *as you describe: phase out coal, build out renewables as fast as we can, and build natural gas plants to take the slack. As time goes on, renewables will take over natural gas too, but in the meantime every watt of coal generation converted to natural gas is a net win. And this is all in spite of the people trying to make coal great again. Imagine how much progress we’d make if it weren’t for them.
You of all participants should understand the fallacy of extrapolating a curve like this into the future. Early adoption curves almost always look exponential. The reason is because there is low-hanging fruit, and it gets exploited first. There is no evidence that the adoption of renewables will accelerate, and a lot of good logic that says the opposite will happen as we have to implement it in increasingly dubious regions.
For example, solar power first started being implemented in the south. This makes total sense as the south gets the most solar insolation and has much higher capacity factors because the difference between seasons is smaller. But now we are trying to implement it in Alberta, which gets half the solar insolation as the equator and has a factor of three difference between the amount of available solar power in winter vs summer - a much more expensive proposition.
The same is true with wind. The economics of wind are highly dependent on location. You need winds that are high, but not too high, and as steady as possible. There simply aren’t enough of those prime places located near population centers in easily buildable areas. We’re already putting them in the best places, but the rate of new power generation will slow as we have to start using more marginal locations.
Likewise, there is no evidence that the rate of production that is sustained at current levels can be easily scaled to produce say, 10X as much without creating major shortages and price spikes of raw materials which will drive up the price of renewables, slowing demand.
Another reason why we can expect adoption to slow as its gains a large percentage is that most renewable power today is heavily subsidized through tax credits, manufacturer subsidies, feed-in tariffs, mandates and the like. This may be affordable when you are only subsidizing 5% of your power, but those subsidies will decline over time and eventually go away as you can’t afford to subsidize everyone. Even if renewables are a grid parity, losing the subsidies will lower demand.
Then when you get to about 30% of grid power you run into capacity factor problems with solar, unless you build enough solar to provide maybe twice as much energy as needed in summer. You also run into grid stability problems, which has been plaguing Australia, Germany, and Ontario after they included a significant percentage of intermittent power. Germany has resorted to paying factories to close because they couldn’t provide enough power to keep them running.
And so far, the rate of adoption of renewables has not even been fast enough to keep up with world energy growth, let alone replace current energy sources. Even at the growth rates of renewables we’ve seen so far, global GHG emissions are still increasing. I see no evidence that this pattern will change.
At the current renewable penetration, fossil fuels will continue to be burned in about the same amount they are now, although the amount of renewables as a percentage of energy remains about the same.
In a complex adaptive system, measurements of instantaneous slopes of trends mean very little. Malthus, the Club of Rome, Paul Erlich and environmentalists in general tried to terrify us with stories of mass starvation by 2000 due to linearly extrapolating population growth curves. Their predictions look ridiculous today, because being able to read a curve does not turn you into a fortune teller who can see the future. The demographic transition came along, and no one saw it coming. Complex systems are full of noise and chaos, and inside noise and chaos can be found all sorts of patterns - mostly meaningless in terms of predicting what will happen in the future.
They can’t replace natural gas for load-following or for baseload power. With wind and solar you get what you get in that amount, and tough luck. So on sunny days Germany generates so much power that the spot price of electricity goes to zero, meaning they can’t sell that excess profitably. Then when it’s dark or in winter they have to import natural gas to make up the shortfall. This is one reason why Germans pay the highest electricity prices of any large country in Europe. And the only reason they can sell any at all is because their neighbors have not followed suit. If all of Europe relied on wind and solar, they would produce about 3X what they need in summer, and would have nowhere to sell it. And in winter they’d have shortages, and no convenient nuclear powers next door to buy it from.
Maybe a technology will come along that makes all this better. But we don’t have it today, and if we have to urgently get started on changing the grid, we can’t just hand-wave that problem away as something we will fix in the undefined future.
No, it isn’t. In terms of engineering, if we wanted to get to 100% renewable in two decades we’d already have to have the whole design and be well on the way towards breaking ground for every facility we’d need - many thousands of them. We are still at the point where we are debating what to do, and we’ve now mired the debate in partisan politics thanks to people like OCS tying climate change to ‘fundamental transformations of society’. That will ensure that nothing substantial will EVER be done. We’ll continue to fiddle away on the margins and bicker until it’s too late to do anything.
Would you accept a plan to accelerate nuclear utilization through modernizing existing plants or building a new plant on the same site, therefore avoiding a number of regulatory or NIMBY hurdles? That seems like at least a reasonable place to start. We could begin construction of new plants on the sites where existing plants are, and if they come online while the existing plant is still working we can feed both into the grid. Then when the old plant needs to be decommissioned, the new one can just take its place.
That’s quite an unfair comparison as most renewable power is quite new and you wouldn’t expect to retire it, while most nuclear and coal plants are getting long in the tooth. Let’s see how those numbers look in 20 years. Wind power stations are designed for lifespans of 20-30 years. But they may not show up in decommissioning numbers because the turbines can be replaced piecemeal as they fail. So a station might not be decommissioned for 50 years, but by then it may have turned over its entire array of turbines two or three times. The cost is there, it just doesn’t show up in the statistic you are using.
All of which add more cost and more inefficiency. Pumped hydro loses energy at the pump, through friction in the pipes, evaporation in the reservoir, friction coming down the pipes, and generation losses. All in, you’re probably losing 20-40% of your energy to storage losses. The same goes for batteries. What does this technology due to the grid parity of wind and solar? It makes it much harder to achieve.
Things we’ve really never done at scale, with unknown effects on the economy. Clean, undisturbed, constant power is a vital input to our manufacturing economy. It is dangerous to screw with it. One of the reasons America’s manufacturing is so efficient is because of access to cheap reliable power. If we take that for granted like Germany has, we could pay a big price.
Why would it be expensive? The majority cost of a natural gas plant is fuel cost, and if the demand for natural gas declines the cost of it will decline until there’s a new equilibrium. Under your scenario natural gas would decline in price to whatever the cheapest source is, so long as it is sufficient to fill demand.
Are you saying that prominent voices on the left are NOT attempting to tie climate change to other left-wing social policies like eliminating income inequality, public health care, and other big government programs? Because they are. Have you read the ‘Green New Deal’? It’s about 25% climate change, and 75% left-wing dream list. That’s not my fault or the Republican’s fault, but the fault of those trying to use climate change to push a larger agenda - thereby making support for climate change policies incredibly partisan and much harder to achieve.
For example:
IF we can’t fix climate change until we fix the ‘racial wealth gap’, be prepared for fixing climate change approximately never.
There are two ways to let your ideology trump the reality of climate change. One, which the Republicans are doing, is to deny that the problem even exists. The other, which Democrats are doing, is to claim that Climate Change is an existential threat, but then propose policies that will do nothing to help climate change and which are politically or scientifically impossible or incredibly difficult technologically when other solutions exist that they won’t consider for ideological reasons.
Imagine how much progress we’d make if we were building nuclear plants at the same rate we did from 1970 to 1990, when about 370 new nuclear plants came online.
I’m not going to argue in favor of every renewable project out there–clearly, some of them are dumb. The entire German solar experiment is dumb, IMO.
But at the same time, the US in particular has a tremendous amount of land available for PV. More than enough to supply the entire continent if desired. It’s dumb to produce solar in Alberta when it can be produced in New Mexico and shipped north. We can build a grid intertie that moves the power around. And Canada has excellent hydroelectric resources that I suspect an be exploited further for long term storage, so a grid link will work well in both directions.
We’ve hardly started on offshore wind farms, and that’s an absolutely prime location. Yeah, there will be complaints–both from Martha’s Vineyard types and misguided greenies–but I don’t expect this to be a serious obstacle in the long run.
We don’t need 10x. As noted, the current rate will get us there in ~30 years. It would be nice to halve this, say. 2x does not seem a huge stretch.
Spot prices during peak production for renewables will be much lower than gas and others, even without subsidies. Storage will push the average prices back up, but the cost effects will still be disruptive.
In some sense, this is exactly what we want: low productivity factories stop working when they can’t afford the current price of energy. The way you phrase it, “paying factories to close” sounds like politically charged language, and I don’t know what the real meaning is there. But the basic principle that renewables bring larger variation in prices and there may be times of day when some consumers are better off shutting down is completely legitimate.
It’s kept up in the US. Different nations face different problems, so what holds true here may not hold true elsewhere.
It feels like your data is coming from a decade or two ago. Renewables are already being built at a massive scale. And unlike coal and nuclear which require an enormous lead time, we don’t know–or have to know–about solar/wind projects just a few years out.
In principle, sure. But where’s the example of this happening anywhere? Instead, we can barely keep plants open that have been running fine for years. Maybe stanch the blood on those first.
So? This is no more relevant than saying half of all coal energy goes up the flue as low-grade heat. Sure, it would be nice to capture that lost energy, but it’s a meaningless number by itself.
Also, your numbers, while not exactly wrong, are on the pessimistic side. >80% is achievable and I think <70% is uncommon.
Too bad, but we don’t have a choice. It’s wishful thinking that we’ll make it through the next few decades with zero economic disruptions, and we need to be thinking of solutions that will very likely ameliorate the worst effects instead of approaches that have a slim probability of letting us continue the current usage model and a high probability of failing utterly and exposing us to the worst effects.
The majority cost of a natural gas plant that’s running most of the time is fuel. Not so for one running a small percentage of the time, which would be the case if solar is providing cheap power during daylight hours and wind is supplying somewhat variable nighttime power.
We already have peaker plants for similar scenarios, and they are very expensive. So expensive that batteries can already take over their role much of the time.
The context that allowed Dr. Strangelove to say that:
“massive plant retirement and zero expansion. For natural gas it’s mixed; they do see significant expansion, but some of that is countered by retirement. For renewables, it’s all good news: massive expansion that isn’t negated by retirement.”
Was that overall there are no massive decommissions or closures of wind power plants. Now, that there are very old ones that do need decommission because they are based on old tech compared to the new ones that will be put in larger numbers there or elsewhere is understandable, except of course when the idea of conservative media is to keep the narrative that wind is not a good idea.
With the cite corrected one can see that that Britain still has plans to get more of its energy supplies from offshore wind than any other country.
So, yeah, 2 turbines in a pilot program. Decommissioning that is a very underwhelming example to bring when the idea is to counter reports that many more turbines are being deployed elsewhere or that they are doing next to nothing about this issue.
The right is absolutely obsessed with AOC. I live deep in liberal land, with the only right-wingers I encounter regularly being my family, and it’s only the right that brings her up.
When I talk climate change with Bay Area types, it’s about the science, economics, and technology. We need to get from here to there with a set of tools that are improving over time. The disagreements come from our weighting and confidence in those factors, not whether they uphold some kind of left-wing ideological agenda. The Green New Deal never enters into it.
The left deserves much blame for stopping that buildout. But inevitable economic factors would have come up no matter what.
In case it’s not clear, I wish that nuclear had fulfilled its cost promises. But wishful thinking rarely achieves much. Maybe future generation reactors like LFTR will bring a resurgence in nuclear by massively increasing the safety margins. Until then, we should be focusing on renewables.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to claim that no wind turbines have ever been decommissioned in the history of the world. Just that we can see wind isn’t being deployed at such a tiny scale that we aren’t going backwards.
The fact that most wind farms aren’t old enough be decommissioned yet is essentially the point. It is still in a massive growth phase. The small projects from the 70s that some like to point to are completely irrelevant in scale to what’s being built today.
Except, again, you can’t do it. Not sure why you keep ignoring this, but until and unless you fix the intermittent nature of wind and solar they can’t be used to completely or even mostly replace the power generation methods that are steady.
And even if we assume the rate will remain unchanged for 30 years (you don’t actually believe this, do you? :dubious:), I thought we needed to be at a much lower CO2 production in less than 12 years. Doesn’t seem we’d be on that even if we did manage to stay on this trajectory.
How? I’m not wrong about this and you are merely asserting it. So, tell me how you can replace an energy production system that is 24/7/365 with ones that aren’t and never can be. Are you implying city sized battery systems? Some other energy storage? Are you just handwaving this issue away? Do you not understand there is an issue? I don’t know because you haven’t said. From where I’m sitting, you are telling me I’m wrong without actually understanding what the problem is, or what it would realistically take to fix it. And on what time table. And you are projecting growth into the future without understanding the issue, which is silly. Wind and solar aren’t going to grow or start to make serious inroads on steady power production systems until and unless those issues are actually addressed. And they aren’t being addressed today, except in some very small scale and prototype circumstances. There ISN’T a full production solution to this today…which means we are decades from getting one, if ever.
And pushing things out and hoping that the technology is developed and it, again hopefully scales up several decades down the road is what you really believe is the best way to combat the mess?? This is the WTF disconnect I always feel in these discussions.
I totally agree, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you or I think about this. Production plants have been and will continue to be shut down, often long before they are EOL. I believe California is pushing to shut the last few of them down right now in fact, if they haven’t already. That means something is going to have to take the place of 19% of our total electrical production in the next few decades…maybe in the next decade. Replacing green energy with…well, hopefully some of that WILL be wind and solar or something else that’s green, but some of it is going to be natural gas. So, net negative, no matter how you slice it, as even green energy systems cost carbon to build and install, as you imply here.
Well, except you still haven’t talked about how it solves the elephant in the room issue. It IS good news (in the US) wrt coal…it’s lost in the market, regardless of what our idiot president attempted to do. But the real winner is going to be natural gas. It’s going to replace a lot of the coal and a lot of the nuclear, because it’s the only thing we have that scales to meet our needs and requirements. Wind and solar will also continue to rise, of course, but they won’t be the primary production systems unless the gaps in their abilities are addressed. The only non-fossil fuel and green system that does scale and meets our requirements is nuclear…and that’s a dead parrot at this point.
No, it isn’t what’s happening. What’s happening is we are expanding wind and solar without those things. We are testing prototypes at small scales for some of those things (i.e. big batteries or pumped hydro). As I said, when you see one brought online for, oh, say LA or New York THEN you can assume we are perhaps 10 years or so out for a scalable system that can actually allow wind and solar to meet our requirements. When we start massively upgrading the grid and you see smart grid technology and low loss transport THEN you can start to talk about continent systems that can shunt power from the daylight side of the country or the windy part to the parts that are dark or calm, but we are decades from that too. Those things MIGHT happen in the future, but it’s going to be a hell of a long time before you see them implemented on large scales because the costs are unreal. And in the mean time, it’s going to be fossil fuels because the anti-nuclear side has made it so that they are the only actual, viable alternative today, in the real world, to meet our core requirements for power. Wind and solar definitely help, but they can’t scale up or meet our needs and won’t be able too until and unless your big batteries and pumped hydro or whatever energy storage system you want to speculate on becomes a wide spread and scalable reality.
Why? Why is cost an issue wrt nuclear, but not wrt renewables? I mean, you seem to acknowledge that to make wind and solar work we are going to need big batteries, as you put it, or some other means of energy storage. What do you think those will cost? What will a new grid cost? Why is cost important, even vital when we talk about nuclear, but not when we talk about all this other pie in the sky? I mean, think of it just from a complexity standpoint. You are talking about, with renewables, a huge system that’s widely distributed over a huge foot print (with all of the consummate ecological and logistical issues that implies) and also needing a large and expensive energy storage system to make it work the way we need it to work and for which we currently have a few small scale prototypes or, in some cases just theories. Verse a relatively compact and proven system that we have had for literally decades and already meets our collective needs using our current grid (though can be used just as easily on some future grid as well) and simply has a larger up front capital cost. But cost wise, wind and solar if you couple those with the massive energy storage systems you’d need to make them work is going to be a hell of a lot. So, why should we be focused on renewables from a cost perspective when the technology to make them work doesn’t even exist at the scales we need today, and might not for decades…and will cost at least as much when we actually get to it? How does this make any sort of sense to you, economic, environmental or engineering wise??
Consider…they haven’t built this yet (Tesla has actually done a small city battery trial btw in Australia or New Zealand IIRC). And it will be for…32,000 homes for 24 hours. That’s great and all, but it would need to be for 2 orders of magnitude at least just for Florida to go to this, let alone, let alone the country. And it’s got to be for more than 24 hours even in this case, since there are all those hurricane thingies in Florida (plus night and all). To really replace fossil fuels it’s got to meet these parameters at a minimum…and it doesn’t. It’s great they are doing this, and I hope it works for them…in fact, you should update the thread when they actually get it working and up and running, as it’s very interesting. But this in no way shows anything more than a potential solution…maybe…sometime down the road. And Tesla has already done this in any case on I think a similar scale (i.e. I think their system also was for around 20-30K houses).
The point was that the problem that you talk about is fixed when one is referring about theory, experimentation and practical use in some areas. (Again, the problem is when you talk in absolutes like with the “unless you fix this” was, it is more than just empty talk that one can say that it is fixed; now deploying them is a related but not the same issue) We are now dealing with the deployment, and as pointed many times before, a lot is being delayed by deniers in power that do not want to add the real cost of releasing carbon in the atmosphere and regulation that will also increase the use of demonstrated solutions such as the use of batteries with solar and wind power.
No. It’s not fixed. It’s a prototype and it doesn’t scale. Which is exactly what I said. I never said there wasn’t a prototype…hell, I was following the Tesla deployment very closely and I HAVE A FREAKING TESLA WALL IN MY HOUSE TO GO WITH MY SOLAR PANEL SYSTEM. But we are talking small scale prototypes and test deployments at this time.
Again, get back to me when we are talking 360,000 homes, not 36,000…and then get back to me when we are talking 3.6 million homes. Then, get back to me when we are talking 39 million homes. Then, when we are talking over 100 million homes. Oh, and the 100’s of millions of apartments, businesses and other stuff that uses power. That’s the thing. At this stage, we are looking at decades before we get the the 2 orders of magnitude level at this point. And we need 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more than that if we are really going to go all wind and solar. And it’s going to cost a fuckton of money…a lot more than nuclear would have. Of course, nuclear is off the table, so the reality is…natural gas. Sure, we’ll get some of that bad nuclear energy done by wind and solar, but not all of it. And we won’t get much of a switch out of natural gas either, not until we are talking systems that do 360,000, or 3.6 million or 39 million…or several hundred million. Lastly, it needs to do it for better than 24 hours as well. Especially in Florida. I’m guessing that if we were going to actually do this, we’d need backup systems that could potentially back up the grid for weeks (or have natural gas or some other fossil fuel system on standby I guess…but I have no idea what that would cost or how realistic it is to have that sort of capacity just sitting there, unused but ready to be switched on if needed).
Well, besides not saying that you said “prototype”, I also did not said that it was already deployed at a large scale, and that is a problem. Precisely the point I made. Of course I also pointed at the solution. And it is not just me, in previous discussions and research I noticed how many in the power industry point out that larger deployments of batteries are right now being push back because they still have economically viable natural gas plants, if only there was some regulation and an increase on the costs of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere so then it would be more effective for us to use solutions like that…
Again your problem was that it was really silly to talk about no fixes being there.
I think what we should do in all this speculation is kind of what we did in one of the long ass Peak Oil threads. Revive this sucker in 10 years and see where we are at. If, at that time, we have some sort of energy storage system (battery, hydro pumped, zero point nano-blah blah blah magic tech, whatever) at, oh, let’s say 300,000 homes capacity, then that will show something. Perhaps it will show that we are getting there. If we don’t have that, then this will show something as well…probably that we are fucked and we were idiots for trying to force wind and solar before it was ready to meet our needs and requirements. If I’m wrong about this, I have no problem (assuming I’m still alive at that point :p) in eating crow for my pessimism. Of course, if I’m not wrong then…well, we are probably fucked. But who knows? 10 years is a long time tech wise, so we really don’t know what might be on the horizon. There are new battery technologies being explored, and then there is fusion…maybe the technology that’s always 30 years away will actually only be 20 years away at that point. Or, maybe nuclear fission will get a new lease on life and start to make an impact or a come back or something.
This is the WTF disconnect I always feel in these discussions.