I count the whole system, including the redundancies and the thermodynamic losses of shutting dangerous fossil fuel plants down and restarting them.
I have an idea. Boil a pot of water as the sun goes down. When it falls below the horizon, turn the burner off. When the sun rises over the horizon, turn the heat back on. Does the water boil instantly, or do you have to invest as much heat in it as you did at dusk?
My recent posts on thermodynamics in this space, although some of the graphics have been lost because of a change in software at the originating source have convinced me that I am not making the point strongly enough.
(Of course, if one thinks of one self in Cassandriac terms, one should not expect one's points to be believed, true or not.)
The wind industry is a disaster, pure and simple, a scheme to provide quite literally a smoke screen for the fossil fuel industry.
Again, and again and again, and again: Humanity spent a trillion dollars on this crap in the last decade that will be landfill in less than two decades.
The result speaks for itself:
Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Week beginning on May 19, 2019: 414.74 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 411.44 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 390.53 ppm
Last updated: June 1, 2019
I don't have all that much time left on this planet; I reflect on my mortality constantly, so I have no horse in this race, other than the fact that I am ashamed of the ridiculous myths my generation has bough into.
One of the most pernicious of these myths is that cheering for putting huge steel towers, access roads and similar stuff worthy of industrial parks in pristine wilderness is "environmentalism." It isn't.
I'm a scientist, and my commitment to my craft is not to elevate theory over experiment. If the theory disagrees with the experiment, there is something wrong with the theory.
I've heard the theory that wind would save the day my whole damned adult life. When the experiment began, again at a cost higher than the GDP of Indonesia, a nation with more than a quarter of a billion people in it, I believed it would work.
It didn't work. It isn't working. It won't work.
As it didn't work, and isn't working, I've spent a lot of time looking into the basis of the theory and have convinced myself that the theory, and not the experimental result is wrong, and since future generations are being screwed out of their rightful inheritance of a safe and beautiful planet, it makes me angry.
Say what you will about me, but I provide references, not just hand waving rhetoric.
= new reply since forum marked as read
