Wait, aren’t you Foghorn Leghorn?
Abandoned windmills are cute.
About those blinkin’ strobe lights atop the windmills: I’ve noticed something in at least one wind farm that seems peculiar to me. Having driven through the Montezuma Hills farm several times at night (that’s the farm just west of Rio Vista, Ca.) I’ve noticed that, as far as the eye can see, from horizon to horizon, the lights on the towers all blink simultaneously.
They’re all wired together with just one blinker timer somewhere. It’s odd that they aren’t all just separate independent blinking lights.
Is it done that way for a reason? Would a sea of independently blinking lights be disorienting to night-time airplane pilots, or something?
FTR, all the wind turbines I’ve seen had red, not white, lights on them. Less light pollution, IMHO.
the right sort of nuclear plants could solve all this. The transmission networks are already in place. Avoid more coal trains, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, etc. just build new nuclear plants on old coal sites (if they are appropriate).
I believe the modern nuclear plant design is far safer and more reliable and cheaper than anything from the past.
If you can’t make the public smart enough to accept nuclear, then, at least, build solar farms in the south as fast as the panels can be manufactured. We should be talking about building a few hundred one square mile facilities in the next ten years.
the recent Shia/Sunni war in the middle east spotlights the need to get out of the energy import business once and for all.
On the subject of ‘switching coal on and off’ - I worked some with electric utilities and part of their cost control strategy is to supplement ‘base load’ generation using coal with more expensive oil powered generation during periods of high demand. Apparently there is a bit more flexibility in turning oil generation on/off. (You can switch off the oil feed, you can’t blow out a coal fire.)
One of James Fenimore Cooper’s books has the leader of a small town strongly hoping that they’ll discover a nearby coal seam soon, because the forests they’re currently using to provide fuel will quickly be depleted, but a coal seam would last the town forever. Rather quaint, from our point of view.
Wind energy can’t do it, because no single technology can do it. Put many of them together, though, and we can. Wind power might not be the whole solution, but it’s certainly a part of it.
Too bad Cecil doesn’t mention costs associated with diseases and deaths caused by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, not to mention things like rising sea levels and so on. The externalized costs of coal and natural gas, if accounted for, probably tip the scales in favor of wind.
Those are cool, but unless vanadium becomes much cheaper, those will probably only be able to fill a niche. A 1 Megawatt-hour flow battery made out of cheap iron and chromium is being tested right now- it seems to work and the manufacturers claim it will last for 20+ years. They claim these will cost 20% what a vanadium flow battery costs.
Cheaper still, but more in the realm of research, is the quinone flow battery. These could potentially cost less than $100/kwh and be scalable to virtually any size, so whether you are backing up intermittent sources like wind and solar or just trying to cut down on your coal burning, they look like they could be a winner.
Is it that big a difference? I thought coal-powered plants ran on pulverised coal, continuously fed to the burners almost as if a fluid anyway.
Wind PPA’s for new facilities on the Great Plains are being signed currently at $20 MW/H, unsubsidized that’s $43 MW/H. We are talking about facilities that are getting +50% NCF.
This last spring ERCOT integrated +40% wind into the grid more than once.
Yes, there are still technical challenges to high levels of wind penetration, but RTO’s are being forced to figure it out purely because wind is becoming more and more economical.