Solar power is the most expensive method of generating electricity. It's piddle power.
Wind comes at 2nd most expensive. It's piddle power.
Oil is renewable.
Natural gas is renewable.
Coal is unknown, but there is plenty of it.
All are far cheaper than solar or wind. Even a nuke is cheaper.
It's impossible to reason with the likes of Nutberg, they are totally impervious to logic and scientific argument.
However there are some on the Left that are more rational and able to learn from past mistakes.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, a socialist magazine, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. He is also an unlikely advocate for nuclear energy.
In a new article for The Guardian, Sunkara draws on Environmental Progress research which found that, in its first full month without Indian Point nuclear power plant, New York’s carbon emissions from in-state electricity generation rose 35 percent over the state’s pre-covid shutdown levels.
The same analysis found that the carbon intensity of New York’s electricity, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity, rose 46 percent. And the share of electricity from renewables, including hydroelectric dams, actually declined between 2019 and 2021.
Sunkara’s article comes at a time when a growing number of progressives, socialists, and Democrats are speaking out for nuclear power. A few weeks ago, Emmet Penney, a founding member of Santa Fe’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter, noted that “Nuclear plants bring wealth and meaning to their host communities” and, in a turn of phrase that elicited strongly positive responses from readers, Penney added, “They are American industrial cathedrals.”
Part of the reason for growing progressive support for nuclear is because of the research and advocacy of pro-nuclear organizations including Environmental Progress, which has forced renewable energy advocates, and now the industry itself, to admit that solar panels and wind turbines do not substitute for fossil fuels.
A new global study by a new renewable energy industry coalition finds that, over the last decade, the share of energy from fossil fuels was nearly unchanged, going from 80.3% to 80.2%. The reason is because, as my colleagues and I have documented over the last five years, unreliable, weather-dependent energies can’t replace reliable energies.
EP’s has done ground-breaking research on decarbonization since our founding in 2016. Environmental Progress in 2017 found that there was no correlation between solar or wind and the “carbon intensity” of energy — CO2 emissions per unit of energy — at an aggregated level.
By contrast, the deployment of nuclear plants and hydro-electric dams was strongly correlated with declining carbon intensity of energy. Why? Because both are reliable, and can thus replace coal and nat gas plants, where solar panels and wind turbines cannot. They can only operate alongside fossil fuels.
One year later, in 2018, Environmental Progress found that California and Germany could have mostly or completely decarbonized their electricity sectors had their investments in renewables been used for new nuclear instead.
“Environmental Progress,” wrote New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter, “estimated what California’s power sector would look like had the opposition from antinuclear forces — including Governor Jerry Brown — not undone the state’s deployment of nuclear energy, starting in the 1970s.”
Noted Porter, “The power from San Onofre and the Rancho Seco nuclear generation station near Sacramento, both now shuttered, added to that from the never-built Sundesert nuclear plant in the Mojave Desert and three planned-but-not-built units at Diablo Canyon on the state’s central coast, would add a total of 77,000 gigawatt-hours of zero-carbon power to California’s supply.
“Only 27 percent of the power produced in California would come from fossil sources, other things remaining equal, as opposed to 66 percent today. And carbon emissions from power generation would be only 40 percent of what they are today.”
And, as I told the United States Senate a few weeks ago, adding weather-dependent solar and wind to electrical grids diverted money away from reliable energy sources, namely nuclear and natural gas plants, which could have prevented the deadly and costly blackouts in California and Texas.
Read more:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/22062021-finally-they-admit-renewables-dont-replace-fossil-fuels-oped/
