America's Wind Power Production Drops For the First Time In 25 Years (yahoo.com) 110
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. wind power slipped last year for the first time in a quarter-century due to weaker-than-normal Midwest breezes, underscoring the challenge of integrating volatile renewable energy sources into the grid. Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity, according to a government report Tuesday. The capacity factor for the country's wind fleet -- how much energy it's actually generating versus its maximum possible output -- declined to an eight-year low of 33.5%. Most of that decline was driven by the central US, a region densely dotted with turbines.
Wind is a key component of the effort to cut carbon emissions, but the data highlights the downside of relying on intermittent energy sources tied to the effects of global weather. Last year's low wind speeds came during El Nino, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to weaken trade winds. La Nina, the Pacific cooling pattern that dominated in 2022 and is poised to return later this year, usually has the opposite effect. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shared the findings in a report published earlier today.
Wind is a key component of the effort to cut carbon emissions, but the data highlights the downside of relying on intermittent energy sources tied to the effects of global weather. Last year's low wind speeds came during El Nino, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to weaken trade winds. La Nina, the Pacific cooling pattern that dominated in 2022 and is poised to return later this year, usually has the opposite effect. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shared the findings in a report published earlier today.
Red herring (Score:2)
For wind, the problem isn't year to year fluctuation. The problem is fluctuations within the same day.
It's for the stable producers that year to year change is the primary one that matters. Not so for intermittent ones.
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Day to day fluctuations in wind power output can be addressed with batteries, year to year fluctuations could be handled by hydro (or pumped hydro) if the climate and geography allow for a proper water reservoir. What seems to be lost on some people is that this also applies to most any electricity production, such as coal power. Once a battery is on the grid it can store up electricity from anything on the grid, and then provide electricity to anything on the grid.
Seeing a fall in wind power output was i
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>Day to day fluctuations in wind power output can be addressed with batteries
Magical thinking. "If I believe it can be addressed, it can be addressed".
Reality check: batteries on that scale are not realistic. Citation: People who are responsible for getting materials out of the ground to enable these magically scalable batteries.
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I make a point of not linking something that is exactly one google search away. Instead provide what you should search for that will enable those that want to find out what reality is to find what it is.
And let trolls such as yourself melt down over "not providing sources". It's a guilty pleasure of mine.
Something given has no value. You have to earn the information. In this case, by going to your favourite search engine and searching for thing I suggested. It's about as minimal of an effort as there can be
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I make a point of not linking something that is exactly one google search away. Instead provide what you should search for that will enable those that want to find out what reality is to find what it is.
No. It is YOUR job to back up your claims by showing your sources. It is not my job to research your claims.
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This appears to be you telling on yourself. It's not a job for me to post on slashdot, it's a hobby.
Re: Red herring (Score:2)
Why is everyone thinking battery storage needs to be one big giant battery?
Imagine 10 000 residential single family houses. Then imagine:
- Each has a 20 kWh battery installed (200 MWh)
- For every fiftieth household, a 2 MWh buffer is installed (400 MWh)
- For every 1000th household a 20 MWh town buffer is installed (200 MWh)
- For every 10 000th household a 200 MWh battery is installed
So 1 GWh storage in total for 10 000 households for a total cost of perhaps $25k per house. Unrealistic?
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Projection is real.
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Now you've got a ton of maintenance points.
Better to have one big facility, IF you can design it worth a shit so the whole thing doesn't catch fire at once. There have been a couple of failures like that, they are embarrassing and stupid.
Just another job for shipping containers.
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Imagine the automotive solid state battery arrives. That would be the 750 mile (Toyota) or 900 mile (Porsche) promises for maybe 3 - 5 years from now.
Imagine everyone charging at home. Since EV's are going to get from 3 to 4 miles per KwH, that means that these batteries are going to be in the vicinity of 750 / 3 = 250 KwH, to maybe 900 / 4 = 225 KwH. Imagine millions of these rigged to not only charge from the grid, but to support the grid in times of not-so-plenty wind and solar.
Delving a bit furthe
Re: Red herring (Score:1)
You solved 1h out of the next 365 days. We are talking about several GWy missing annually because the wind doesnâ(TM)t always blow, we had a particular hot and windy decade, but the El Niño winds are slowing down, as can be predicted. What do you do when the wind doesnâ(TM)t blow as hard for a decade that you lose 10% of your power production. They are missing 2% on top of what they are capable of building out, which means the entire investment they are doing right now is not going to p
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> Reality check: batteries on that scale are not realistic.
Form energy says that it can produce iron/air batteries with the cost of of 1/10 of Lithium batteries. The "Big battery" installed by Tesla in Australia cost 200 million dollars. "It holds enough power for 8,000 homes for 24 hours". So I assume we could roughly estimate that with Form energy batteries, we could power 8000 homes, for 24 hours, with the cost of 20 million dollars. USA has about 333300000/2,5 = 133320000 households, so we would need
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>Form energy says
And if batteries ran on words, we wouldn't need any other materials.
>Military budget for USA is $849.8 billion.
And if batteries ran on money, we wouldn't need any other materials either.
>My conclusion
"Magical thinking".
Re: Red herring (Score:2)
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Which assertion are you contesting?
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This is the epitome of magical thinking. You inverted burden of proof.
I stand on existing reality. The sole reason you have a computer that can send messages that I can see? You have a stable power grid, and so does slashdot and so do I. There are no meaningful batteries on this grid. Backup is almost 100% ran on spinning reserve.
You're suggesting a magical revolutionary technology that completely removes spinning reserve, at scale, using something that we already know and understand and just need to build
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You don't have high enough slashdot ID to get to claim that you haven't seen many, many stories about new upcoming battery tech that will solve the scalability problem.
Only to hear nothing about it afterwards.
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Yes. Those studies were right here, on slashdot. They also usually came with a novel battery tech that needed investment to do that.
And to absolute shock and surprise of... well no one, nothing came out of any of them.
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>I'm referring instead to studies on the possibility
Magical thinking. It ALWAYS comes back to magical thinking.
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That makes it worse, not better.
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You literally stated an assertion in the quote. And not even the assertion of what is, but an assertion that it maybe, perhaps, could be possible...
And now, you're projecting this flaw in your argument me. Again.
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>> And if batteries ran on words
Form Energy is building a battery plant in West Virginia so it is more than just words. It is claimed that the batteries will cost about $20 per kilowatt-hour and those are words, but very likely there is also evidence.
https://formenergy.com/form-fa... [formenergy.com]
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>It is claimed that the batteries will cost about $20 per kilowatt-hour and those are words
We appear to be in agreement.
Units Matter (Score:2)
it can produce 500 MW batteries per year
Batteries are typically rated in units of energy i.e. joules or more typically MWh. While they do have a maximum power drain (and charge) raiting that's generally not a helpful number to quote since there is a huge difference in a battery that provides 500MW for 1s vs. 1 day whereas a 500MWh battery can easily be configured for multiple different power draws.
So either you mean 500MWh or else the company you quote are releasing meaningless numbers either because they do not know any better (and this is h
Re: Units Matter (Score:1)
It is probably MWh of battery output per year in production capacity. So for the 10 or so GWy that needs to be backed up when the wind doesnâ(TM)t blow as hard one year you only need 10,000 MW worth of (charged up) batteries every hour.
Re: Red herring (Score:1)
Hydro is just a big battery, it doesnâ(TM)t address year-long issues. 10GW is not something you put in terms of hydro, that is 10 small nuclear reactors worth of power.
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Could small turbines be cost efficient? (Score:2)
I'm thinking small enough to put in a backyard of maybe a rooftop. I know very little about such things but we get a lot of wind where I live.
Even if I only saved a few bucks during windy months would such a thing be so expensive at to make it even worth considering? Or would such a turbine be way too expensive for such purposes?
Even if I only wasted a little money over a few years it just might be cool enough to be worth it.
Solar panels would probably be better. Why not both?
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WIND GENERATORS [homedepot.com]
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Depends not only on where you live, but how you live.
If you are using 30kWh or more a day, then a small private wind generator, is probably not worth it.
This guy here made the math, but it is perhaps out dated: https://www.engineering.com/st... [engineering.com]
Re:Could small turbines be cost efficient? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Solar panels would probably be better. Why not both?"
Because
1.) you are a private person and you collect the solar energy at the same height level as a commercial operator and this will not interfere with your kWh/mÂ/a - which is in contrast to
2.) Wind Power where a commercial operator collects the windpower .. m a height you will not reach, but where wind is known to blow much stronger
at 80-100-
Even es you might not understand german - just have a look at the wind profile curve - and turn "meters" into your favourite length unit
https://wind-data.ch/tools/pro... [wind-data.ch]
And the major problem, that arrises for you from that profile is that wind energy is kinetic energy and the formula: E= 1/2 * m * vÂ
states: half your wind speed fourth your Energy
(Along with the fact, that the reason for height-run in wind power is that in the ground area you get turbulence, but that aside)
3.) Wind rotors have physics behind them
it goes simplified:
where wind-speed (v) worked in squares towards (energy/power)
radius/diameter works in cubes, you with your backyard operation are bitten by those cubes.
4.) And your neighbar will bite you or like your helicopter:
a.) the more blades your rotor has -> the higher the torque -> the lower the rotational speed
b.) the less blades your rotor has -> the lower the torque -> the higher the rotational speed
c.) smaller diameter -> faster rotation
(just google "speed number" for wind mills)
These small turbines make a lot of noise.
And well a fast spinning rotor on a pole has some potential hazzards.
[b]conclusion[/b]
For private use: solar
- silent
- easy to setup/install
- less ocupational hazzards / good literature and guidelines available
- inverters with battery backup and emergency power or island operator avail for the cheap.
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My recommendation is to get records of the wind in your area for a year's time. Some areas, the wind becomes useless for power generation for the summer months, like central/south Texas where, once the heat dome settles in place in the summer, nothing moves except maybe a 1-2 mph breeze.
From there, if you can, elevate the turbine. If in an area with a lot of trees, a lot of the wind energy will be absorbed by those, so if you can get the turbine over the treetops, do it... but that may be dangerous to imp
Oh for fucks sake (Score:3, Insightful)
Wind Energy Bonds are the reason (Score:3)
Apparently,many green energy projects sell a percent of the money received by selling their electricity in the form or revenue bonds.
Those bonds have a value based on the future production revenue of the energy project.
This is why the financial news site Bloomberg is reporting on it. It will be reported on for a while leading up to 'how to invest in the trade of the decade in wind energy bonds' stories come out to draw in the retail investor as the last person holding the bag on declining value unwanted wi
Securitization of everythng - money in motion (Score:1)
Could be another "money in motion" by Wall Street to profit off of turning everything into a financial security, selling it, leveraging it, selling insurance against it, selling commodity futures on it.....
Funding (Score:2)
Or it's way to fund enormously expensive projects. All giant projects are funded with bonds. They always have been.
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Re:Oh for fucks sake (Score:4, Interesting)
It's 2%.
It's a 2% loss in output while new capacity has been added. The fine article said something like 6 GW of new capacity was added but didn't put that in terms of percentage of capacity from the previous year. They also mentioned this was an unusually low average capacity factor of 33.5%, which looks like a fairly average capacity factor for wind power to me but is somehow noteworthy to someone.
But from normal human standpoints you just build out a little bit of extra capacity.
They were building out a "little bit of extra capacity" and still ended up with a loss, or at least that appears to be why this is noteworthy. I don't know just how much "little bit" is needed to cover these year to year fluctuations but I do know this comes at a cost, those windmills are not free. Overbuild too much and that's wasted generating capacity that can't be sold, or perhaps won't sell at high enough prices to be profitable. Overbuild too little and there could be fees, fines, lost contracts, or something for not meeting stated goals on electricity production that year.
I suspect the margins on electricity production is very thin. For grins and giggles I thought I'd calculate how much it would cost me to produce the electricity I used at home with a natural gas generator than use electricity from the utility. I discovered that if I got a generator for free, installed for free, and paid nothing in maintenance, then I'd break even with what I pay the electric utility given what I'd pay the natural gas utility for fuel. This makes sense given how natural gas is where much of my electricity comes from (especially after the nuclear power plant closed) and that the electric utility would be buying natural gas at bulk rates, with high efficiency turbines, have to cover costs of maintaining the power lines, and so forth. They just need to keep their costs to consumers low enough that people like me won't consider running a generator instead of buying their electricity. With economy of scale they can almost certainly do that.
Now, if there's a bad year for wind power and they see a 2% shortfall in wind capacity from what is expected then that can mean losing a lot of money in buying extra fuel for their natural gas turbines. If this happens again then they might see large electricity consumers looking at running their own generators to save on costs. This is on the scale of gigawatts and billions of kWh, in a market with thin margins for profit.
What is their profit margin on the electricity they sell? 7%? 15%? Maybe 2%? That shortfall in electricity production might have flushed away all profits that year.
Re:Oh for fucks sake (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, the article made it seem like the 33.5% was a notable decrease (lowest in 8 years) but in reality it was a only a small fluctuation.
2014 34.0
2015 32.2
2016 34.5
2017 34.6
2018 34.6
2019 34.4
2020 35.3
2021 34.4
2022 35.9
2023 33.5
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If a “small fluctuation” was all it took to eradicate 6.2 gigawatts of additional capacity on top of an overall 2% loss, then someone better be backing up the wind turbine manufacturers up against the wall to make them prove those efficiency and ROI claims.
Good luck explaining to the Board how a “small fluctuation” resulted in that kind of project loss.
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ROI claims
No one has said anyone has lost money, nor that the variance was not accounted for in the project financial plan. Why are you complaining about irrelevant things?
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Endless growth is preferable to endless decline.
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While the absurdity is real, it's not 2%. It's 2% - 6.2GW which is quite a bit more.
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The headline should be that the US is still installing too little wind. It would be putting in orders of magnitude more than this, to exploit all available resources as quickly as possible. It also demonstrates why off-shore wind is so important, it being more consistent than on-shore.
That’s no 2%. (Score:2)
2% my ass.
Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity
That does not describe a mere 2% drop. What that does describe is a full justification to force wind manufacturers to prove their hardware ROI claims, because it appears that 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity was made 100% irrelevant by “weaker-than-normal” breezes? Are you fucking kidding me? THAT is all it takes to shoot a nuke-sized hole right through a years worth of project work?
6.2 gigawatts of additional effort, was basically all for nothing. ALL of that combined is your actual
Re: That’s no 2%. (Score:2)
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you just build out a little bit of extra capacity.
There's a reason I call "just" a 4 letter word, and this highlights exactly why.
Gotta say, the headline surprised me (Score:3)
What with this being an election year and all.
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Maybe the world doesn't give a shit that you think every 4 years headlines only promote political viewpoints.
News at 10! Weather exists! (Score:2)
Variation year to year is hardly news. An energy provider gets the fun of allocating resources to generation and storage options.
I personally am looking at adding batteries to my home because my electricity provider charges by time of day and the batteries would let me shift my usage to the cheap hours. I did the sums and concluded it could pay for itself pretty quick. $200/month saving - I am a heavy user - I have computers, minisplits and two EVs. It could pay for itself in a couple of years.
Add in solar
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If one starts with something, the battery bank is the best thing to start off with anyway, even if it only is a gigantic, whole-house UPS, but ideally something that can take mains power, charge the batteries, while the house is fed from the inverter(s). This way, you know you are getting clean power, no matter what craziness happens at the power company. Once that is paid off, adding solar panels, and charge controllers isn't too difficult, even if one wants a hybrid system where once the batteries are c
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If one starts with something, the cheapest thing to start with is everything but the batteries. Then you start saving money right away by using less grid input.
You also do not want to be building batteries with a spot welder. You want to use cells that have screw terminals, not a bunch of little bitty things. Not only will it be cheaper, but it's more serviceable. If you have a cell failure with your welded battery you're going to have extra work to do comparatively. It makes sense to weld a pack for an ebi
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The pre-built rackmount battery+BMS boxes from China are pretty compelling. 5KWh ish per box and they can be stacked.
The shit show that is inverter options is what I'm stuck on right now. If I'm dropping a few grand on this, I want to know it's going to work.
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Inverter options are "meh". There are tons of them out there. However, GOOD inverters are hard to find... ones that are well built, will keep a sine wave even under maximum load (like when an A/C compressor decides to pull its full locked rotor amps), and so on.
When in doubt, just prepare for the pain and go Victron for smaller applications. Not sure what scales from there that is solid, but I've seen a number of decent options.
With All The Hot Air Being Blown From D.C. (Score:2)
Area, I assumed wind power was just fine and probably increasing.
All the best sites are gone (Score:4, Interesting)
So all the best sites were built on early on using outdated tech. Now the new sites that are being built on are less suitable so the capacity factor for the whole fleet drops.
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Europe experienced the opposite effect. As the technology developed it became possible to deploy in more difficult locations that also had better wind resources. That is particularly true of off-shore wind, where very tall deep sea turbines are delivering a capacity factor of over 50% already, with even bigger prototypes pushing towards 70%.
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Offshore wind appears to be weirdly controversial in the US.
I've stayed on the Norfolk coast in view of the Greater Gabbard farm and I would say that the objections are wildly overblown (as it were).
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I think off-shore wind looks really great, adds something to the sea views. The ones further out can't be seen from land, but the shallow water ones are lovely.
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Greater Gabbard is about 20km offshore according to the internet. There's a sort of lazy waving in the distance from the turbines which is nice to watch. I find most of the objections to be mindlessly reactionary. For some reason the ugly road which brings people to the "unspoiled" view never seems to be commented on.
Capacity is still ramping up (Score:1)
Meanwhile (Score:4, Interesting)
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Bullshit. And I'm betting the "lulls" keep happening right at peaker plant max profit point. Probably scheduling windmill maintenance right for max profitability.
Wait, what?
If the operator of the windmills and the peaker plants are competitors, why would the windmill operator give up revenue to benefit the peaker plants?
If they're not competitors (e.g. in the same company), shutting down cheap power generation in favor of more expensive power generation would decrease profit, not maximize it.
I can't think of any reasonable structure in which your theory could work. What am I missing?
Money (Score:2)
By any measure, wind energy is super cheap. Even if we have bad years for wind power, there is financial incentive to produce power with wind turbines. Can wind alone supply an industrialized nation with power? Not today, and perhaps not ever. But as long as energy production is a for-profit venture it is tough to stop wind turbines from going up. Sorry that they are ugly to look at.
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How cheap when you add a storage battery?
Re: Money (Score:1)
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We weren't discussing crop failure, but hey nice try to deflect and distract.
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If energy cost is negative during peak solar, a battery is a means to harvest free money. The cost of your battery system represents how much capital you want to invest into harvesting free money. The economics are not difficult to understand.
But when you're grid tied, you don't really need batteries to make a profit on wind power. We know this because we have examples. Businesses have been doing wind turbine installations successfully, and at scale, since the 1990's.
That said. As an owner of my own registe
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Put some numbers on it. And we were discussing wind, not solar. Also no fair ignoring upfront costs, long term maintenance, and intermittancy.
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I'm discussing wind too.
Feel free to look up your own numbers. People have been making money on this shit literally for decades. I don't know what more you want out of this discussion but I'm out.
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Dude what
How can you say it's cheap and then tell people to "feel free to look up their own numbers"? What a cop out.
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Don't put words in my mouth. I never said batteries were cheap. I said wind is cheap. It's very very cheap. Both land-based and off-shore, but the $/MWh for land-based wind has fallen below natural gas and solar concentrator. Solar photovoltaic is roughly the same or a little cheaper than wind now, but the two can complement one another in regions that have reliable winds that come in just as solar is ramping down for the evening.
As to your battery question. Feel free to look it up if you want to know the e
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If you don't have storage then you have intermittancy issues. It makes no sense to push wind or solar onto the grid without batteries.
Some groups even sell (or at least price) compressed air systems as alternatives to lion batteries storage. Hopefully the sodium batteries coming onto the market can offer a cheap replacement for lion batteries in installations where size and weight are less relevant.
In any case, solar/wind with battery could be a viable solution that might not even require natgas or nukes
Not enough breeze? (Score:2)
Wind, solar, geothermal, etc.? (Score:2)
So far, renewables are delivering far better on their promises than clean coal, carbon capture, hydrogen, etc..
Maintenance, Lifetime (Score:3)
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You should point out those parts of the electrical grid that do not require maintenance or have infinite lifetime, or to people who ever claimed this would be true of wind. Wind has required maintenance, same as any other part of the grid, as long as it has existed. It isn't "starting to happen".
Related phenomena? (Score:2)
Does anyone know if there's any effect between wildfire smoke and wind production?
Easy solution (Score:1)
A Demonstration of the Success of Wind Power (Score:2)
The headline statistic predictably has brought in the posters decrying "See, you can't use wind for power!" but unless you think that the average wind capacity factor cannot fluctuate at all from year to year any mature wind power system is going to see small annual production dips and jumps from year to year. Everyone always knew this so it is no revelation.
U.S. wind capacity is now 151 GW so the annual incremental addition now so the annual addition now of about 4% a year can be slightly offset some years
see other article on tornado-groupings (Score:2)
I'm sure the drop in wind power has nothing to do with the surprising increase in the number of tornadoes striking in May