House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi doubled-down on former President Barack Obama’s “war on coal” this week; unveiling her plan to shutter over 30% of US coal plants by 2020 should her party retake control of Congress.
“Under President Obama, we went on to pass the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in the House. But we were stopped in the Senate by the coal industry,” Pelosi said Thursday.
“For this and other reasons, I’m so grateful to [Former New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Beyond Coal’ initiative working with the Sierra Club. It is so essential,” she added.
“[Beyond Coal] advocates retiring a third of the nation’s coal plants by 2020, replacing most retired coal plants with “clean energy solutions such as wind, solar, and geothermal” and ‘keeping coal in the ground in places like Appalachia and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin,’” writes Fox News.
Someone once told me that wind must blow 13 miles an hour for 13 years and one other thing that had to be done for 13 years just to recoup the energy it takes to build, fabricate, shipped, installed them.,and that’s not counting maintenance.
Energy yield ratios of 21 and 23 were found for a small and large scale wind turbine, respectively. This represents an 11% increase in the energy yield ratio of the larger turbine over that of the smaller turbine. The embodied energy component was found to be more significant than in previous studies, emphasised here due to the innovative use of a hybrid embodied energy analysis method. The life-cycle energy requirements were shown to be offset by the energy produced within the first 12 months of operation.
Subsidies are supposed to be used to buy votes, not provide the country with a clean and healthy source of electricity.
Right?
The answer is that wind and solar are of limited utility unless we develop more energy storage. As for why more aren’t being built, wind might be the fastest growing energy source. It’s been expanding rapidly.
Question: If a utility has many customers who have solar and sell excess production back to the utility, doesn’t that help the utility from having to expand other methods of production?
Kind of. Energy consumption is relatively predictable and has two massive spikes first thing in the morning and through much of the evening. The energy company needs to have enough capacity to supply that energy during those spikes even if wind/solar are unavailable.
That’s bull ■■■■■ While this is a radical plan with a ridiculously short timeline, coal is BY FAR the dirtiest most damaging kind of energy resource we have, spreading mercury all over the world just for starters. That is what the “war” is on.
But then, you knew that already.
The coal plants need to be closed, but on a more reasonable timeline. Most coal workers are skilled technicians these days and can operate all kinds of high tech equipment etc., who could easily transition to other fields if the right plans were put in place.
