State of green energy in Texas
(archive.is)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (28)
sorted by:
I'm not anti wind power at all and think windmills are cool. I don't suspect they pay themselves back though and all in all I like to approach energy as a business decision.
It's the same with solar, sure they are neat and all and it's not a horrible thing to distribute power load down to a rooftop that is just sitting there otherwise. When I looked into it even with the government paying me a tax credit for it, the payback was totally unreasonable compared to what I pay to get power off the electric grid, the majority of which comes from natural gas and nuclear. I'd essentially have to bet on getting more than the expected useful life from the panels to break even.
I think nuclear and natural gas is the way to go. Nuclear is slow to spin up and down, so make it cover the base load along with the existing coal plants. Supplement as needed in high demand times with natural gas. Leave wind and solar for small applications unless it gets cheap enough to be viable without subsidies. Yeah I know it won't happen because everyone is afraid of nuclear because the Soviets screwed it up and the Japanese built them in risky areas.
Nuclear reactors can follow loads much more quickly, but our legacy fleet is running 50 year old designs that can’t.
Just out of curiosity, what's the point in windmills if they don't pay for themselves? Is it a long-term interest or infrastructure fail-over or what?
I might not have been clear enough about me liking windmills. I do like them as my inner nerd and engineer person. You know, "hey we built this cool device to capture the wind and turn it into electricity!" An similar example would be my mechanical watches, sure I could get a quartz watch for a fraction of the cost and it is better at keeping time. But I like the mechanical ones because they are cool and have tiny gears in them and keep the time for me with no power other than me moving.
On a large scale practical business perspective, presuming they don't have a payback at all, then well they should be avoided.