[regarding whether using windmills for twenty years is a waste of money:]
Sure, all the floppy disks would have been worn out by then, and we would have nothing to turn to except the safe good-old-days way. Which just happens to require exactly what is sold by the paper-ledger-industry lobbying group represented by Bernard McNamee.
Yeah boy trump threatens an aid cut help to GM cuz of what the Occupant sees as a personal affrontâŚ
trump bragged during the campaign he was gonna bring jobs back to Ohio at GM. Afterward he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum directly harming GM and other car makers, The market forces GM to change and trump takes it as a personal insult directed at him alone. Paraphrasing now⌠"These people (GM) don;t know who (trump I assume) they are dealing with.
trump, as we all are aware, thinks everything revolves around his immediate and personal needs. When reality doesnât conform to his brag then he must lash out at someone ⌠usually the most vulnerable one he can find. Surprisingly he didnât place blame on those pre-verbal children in dog cages in Texas.
Panel Advances Trump Energy Pick Who Said Renewable Energy âScrews Upâ Grid my bottom line profits
Fixed it
I do admit being a bit wistful for some olden days in terms of security. But for the little I did with them, I do not miss paper ledgers at all. I do sort of miss green bar print outs though. I think that is because I got so used to reading reports and code that way it still feels natural.
That NREL paper that you linked gives good information on life cycle assessment of the environmental impact via greenhouse gases of different forms of energy. One obvious point is that windâs greenhouse-gas impact is almost all (86%) in construction, just 9% in operation/maintenance during a unitâs working lifetime, and 5% decommissioning cost. Coal, by comparison, emits over 98% of its greenhouse gases in mining, fuel delivery, and operation/maintenance; less than one percent of a coal plantâs impact is in construction, less than one percent in decommissioning and mine rehab.
While the paper doesnât discuss costs exactly, that might tie into the value of replacing wind plants. If you spend a hundred million dollars on wind turbine replacements, however many dollars per kilowatt of capacity, you manufacture parts once but improve the efficiency for decades. If you spend a hundred million dollars modernizing coal plants (whether carbon-capture tech or just replacing worn-out hardware), do you spend more or less per kilowatt of capacity, and do you make more improvement? Coal-plant parts used to be big and strong but simple; now carbon-capture tech costs tens of millions of dollars and doesnât pay for itself yet. With so much of coal miningâs impact coming through mining and moving coal in ways that wouldnât be helped by this investment, those dollars would buy a smaller improvement in emissions. If a carbon tax comes into force nationwide, those unimproved operating costs will rise, and that may make it more affordable to spend a higher share of budgets on wind and to spend less on coal-burning. Eventually more utilities will find it cheaper to tear down plants and close coal mines than to keep upgrading.
Multi-line ASCII art, on greenbar paper, had a feel that emojis on a smartphone screen canât match.
Oh, thatâs just a silly little thing she and Suzie Madoff like to say when they have no objectively reasonable pretext for the departure from their professed ostensible norms they were always going to going to do anyway.
To be less subtle than @brian512 :
Millions of dollars in Alaska gubernatorial (to her father) and senatorial (to her) campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry.
And to every one of her constituents, too.
Just saw a banner headline on cnn
Trump disapproval falls to 60%
Now I am not the language police usually but I would have thought the disapproval level had risen to 60%âŚunless of course it had been higher than 60% in which case the GOP would be dropping trump like a hot rock in July.
Fortunately, the price of renewable energy AND storage is plummeting. Economics are what is going to kill coal. Government policies load the gun, economics pulls the trigger.
I should have said âhundreds of millionsâ.
From the Wikipedia article:
You know what makes wind turbines significantly more expensive? Steel tariffs, wink wink.
Aluminum tariffs affect some models of wind turbines and support towers, too. Hmmm.
In Denmark good positions for Windmills are at a premium and the cabliing etc. expensive, so windmills are replaced, usually with fewer, but larger mills. Just this morning I saw the MHI-Vestas (Japanese-Danish joint venture) had won a big order (800 MWatt) for offshore mills south of Marthaâs Vineyard.