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Thread: Joe Biden’s Climate Plan Will Make Us Even More Dependent on China

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    Default Joe Biden’s Climate Plan Will Make Us Even More Dependent on China

    .
    Excellent article by Steve Milloy, let's see one of you bullshitters try to argue with him!

    People disagree on climate science and the magnitude and effects of climate change. That said, there is one thing on which we should all be able to agree: Joe Biden’s climate plan will put America at the mercy of its superpower rival, China.

    Joe Biden’s climate agenda involves replacing the coal and gas plants powering our electrical grid with wind and solar farms. He also wants to replace gasoline-powered cars, buses and trucks with electric vehicles.


    A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” lays out the national security implications of this plan.

    The technologies involved in wind and solar power and electric vehicles are much more reliant than their conventional alternatives on metals and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite chromium, molybdenum, zinc, rare-earths and silicon.

    Wind and solar technologies require about three to eight times more of these materials per megawatt of electricity than coal and natural gas plants. Electric cars require about five times more of these materials than conventional cars.

    Putting aside the very significant issue of how the world could possibly ramp up the production of these essential materials in the quantities that would be required not only by the U.S. but around the world, where these materials come from should be a threshold concern.

    The IEA reports that China is one of the top three locations for the mining of copper, nickel, rare-earths and lithium. When it comes to mining rare-earths, China is responsible for 60% of global extraction. But there’s more to these essential materials than mining; they must be processed as well.

    When it comes to processing the ores, China is the leader for all of them plus cobalt, the latter of which is mostly mined in the Congo. China processes about 35% of the global nickel supply, 40% of copper, 55% of lithium, 65% of cobalt and 85% of rare-earths.

    So thanks to its low-wage and slave labor and lack of environmental regulations, China has successfully positioned itself to have a stranglehold on the global production of raw materials essential for the goal of the climate agenda.

    Does this matter to the U.S.? Yes. We get, for example, 80% of our rare-earths from China. And no “clean energy” technology happens without rare-earths. So rare-earths alone are a potential game stopper.

    Would China weaponize its production of these materials? Last October 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, “A new law will allow China to ban exports to protect national security.” In February of this year, Bloomberg reported, “China may ban the export of rare-earths refining technology to countries or companies it deems as a threat on state security concerns.” The U.S. is China’s main rival, so yes, that threat matters.

    But would China really retaliate against the U.S.? One look no further than the ongoing one-sided trade war between China and Australia. For daring to criticize China over its handling of coronavirus, China has blocked or tariffed the import of a variety of Australian imports. Australian coal ships and their crews and have actually been stranded in Chinese waters for as long as 269 days waiting to unload their cargo.

    Keep in mind that while Biden’s goal is for the U.S. to be at net-zero emissions by 2050, China’s goal is to be the lone global superpower by 2049.
    https://www.realclearenergy.org/arti...na_779801.html

    https://junkscience.com/2021/06/joe-...dent-on-china/
    Last edited by cancel2 2022; 06-03-2021 at 05:54 AM.

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    Yeah, that's been the goal of "green" energy for the last 30 years. It's a Buganese ploy. And it's worked wonderfully, all our natural resource reserves have to stay in the ground, too environmentally hazardous to use them. Can't manufacture stuff, too dirty. But we can grow metric fucktons of corn and soybeans for them.
    WATERMARK, GREATEST OF THE TRINITY, ON CHIK-FIL-A
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    The fields of mediocre chicken sandwiches shall be sowed with salt, so that nothing may ever grow there again.
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    Horse is out of the barn, Prima ballerina spends every waking hour nailing the door shut.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Micawber View Post
    Horse is out of the barn, Prima ballerina spends every waking hour nailing the door shut.
    I bet cunts like you have backup diesel generators, amirite, shit for brains?
    Last edited by cancel2 2022; 06-03-2021 at 06:39 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Geeko Sportivo View Post


    Took you off ignore just to see if you'd grown up, alas no, even more of a cunt if that's possible.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Primavera View Post
    Took you off ignore just to see if you'd grown up, alas no, even more of a cunt if that's possible.
    PLEASE PUT ME BACK ON IGNORE!


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    Excellent article by Steve Milloy, let's see one of you bullshitters try to argue with him!

    People disagree on climate science and the magnitude and effects of climate change. That said, there is one thing on which we should all be able to agree: Joe Biden’s climate plan will put America at the mercy of its superpower rival, China.

    Joe Biden’s climate agenda involves replacing the coal and gas plants powering our electrical grid with wind and solar farms. He also wants to replace gasoline-powered cars, buses and trucks with electric vehicles.


    A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” lays out the national security implications of this plan.

    The technologies involved in wind and solar power and electric vehicles are much more reliant than their conventional alternatives on metals and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite chromium, molybdenum, zinc, rare-earths and silicon.

    Wind and solar technologies require about three to eight times more of these materials per megawatt of electricity than coal and natural gas plants. Electric cars require about five times more of these materials than conventional cars.

    Putting aside the very significant issue of how the world could possibly ramp up the production of these essential materials in the quantities that would be required not only by the U.S. but around the world, where these materials come from should be a threshold concern.

    The IEA reports that China is one of the top three locations for the mining of copper, nickel, rare-earths and lithium. When it comes to mining rare-earths, China is responsible for 60% of global extraction. But there’s more to these essential materials than mining; they must be processed as well.

    When it comes to processing the ores, China is the leader for all of them plus cobalt, the latter of which is mostly mined in the Congo. China processes about 35% of the global nickel supply, 40% of copper, 55% of lithium, 65% of cobalt and 85% of rare-earths.

    So thanks to its low-wage and slave labor and lack of environmental regulations, China has successfully positioned itself to have a stranglehold on the global production of raw materials essential for the goal of the climate agenda.

    Does this matter to the U.S.? Yes. We get, for example, 80% of our rare-earths from China. And no “clean energy” technology happens without rare-earths. So rare-earths alone are a potential game stopper.

    Would China weaponize its production of these materials? Last October 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, “A new law will allow China to ban exports to protect national security.” In February of this year, Bloomberg reported, “China may ban the export of rare-earths refining technology to countries or companies it deems as a threat on state security concerns.” The U.S. is China’s main rival, so yes, that threat matters.

    But would China really retaliate against the U.S.? One look no further than the ongoing one-sided trade war between China and Australia. For daring to criticize China over its handling of coronavirus, China has blocked or tariffed the import of a variety of Australian imports. Australian coal ships and their crews and have actually been stranded in Chinese waters for as long as 269 days waiting to unload their cargo.

    Keep in mind that while Biden’s goal is for the U.S. to be at net-zero emissions by 2050, China’s goal is to be the lone global superpower by 2049.



    https://www.realclearenergy.org/arti...na_779801.html

    https://junkscience.com/2021/06/joe-...dent-on-china/
    Last edited by cancel2 2022; 06-22-2021 at 07:07 PM.

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    Some most excellent points on China..
    "There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone," McConnell wrote. "His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended."



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    We get, for example, 80% of our rare-earths from China. And no “clean energy” technology happens without rare-earths. So rare-earths alone are a potential game stopper.

    Would China weaponize its production of these materials? Last October 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, “A new law will allow China to ban exports to protect national security.” In February of this year, Bloomberg reported, “China may ban the export of rare-earths refining technology to countries or companies it deems as a threat on state security concerns.” The U.S. is China’s main rival, so yes, that threat matters.

    But would China really retaliate against the U.S.? One look no further than the ongoing one-sided trade war between China and Australia. For daring to criticize China over its handling of coronavirus, China has blocked or tariffed the import of a variety of Australian imports....
    Keep in mind that while Biden’s goal is for the U.S. to be at net-zero emissions by 2050, China’s goal is to be the lone global superpower by 2049.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill View Post
    Some most excellent points on China..
    Yes there are and what's more people are starting to wake up.

    Why Everything They Said About Solar Was Wrong

    Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds

    Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs.

    My reporting was near-universally denounced. The most influential financial analyst of the solar industry called my article, “a fine example of 'prove RE [renewable energy] is terrible by linking lots of reports which don't actually support your point but do show that the RE industry in the West considers and documents its limited impacts extremely thoroughly.’” An energy analyst who is both pro-nuclear and pro-solar agreed with her, saying “I looked into this waste issue in the past and concur with [her].”

    The Guardian said solar panel waste was a “somewhat ironic concern from [me], a proponent of nuclear power, which has a rather bigger toxic waste problem” adding that “broken panels… are relatively rare except perhaps in the wake of a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.”

    But when reporters eventually looked into the issue they came to the same conclusions I had. In 2019, The New York Times published a long article about toxic old solar panels and batteries causing “harm to people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand” in poor African communities. In 2020, Discover magazine confirmed that “it is often cheaper to discard them in landfills or send them to developing countries. As solar panels sit in dumps, the toxic metals they contain can leach out into the environment and possibly pose a public health hazard if they get into the groundwater supply.”

    Still, each of those articles stressed that some solar panels were already being recycled, and that more of them one day would be, which was what many of my original critics had pointed out. “The European Union requires solar companies to collect and recycle their panels,” noted Discover magazine, “with the cost of recycling built into the selling price.” The solar analyst who accused me of making unsubstantiated claims said the reason “there are few solar panels being recycled to date [is] because most of them are still working fine.”

    But a major new study of the economics of solar, published in Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that the waste produced by solar panels will make electricity from solar panels four times more expensive than the world’s leading energy analysts thought. “The economics of solar,” write Atalay Atasu and Luk N. Van Wassenhove of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Serasu Duran of the University of Calgary, will “darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."

    Conventional wisdom today holds that the world will quadruple the number of solar panels in the world over the next decade. “And that’s not even taking into consideration the further impact of possible new regulations and incentives launched by the green-friendly Biden administration,” Atasu, Wassenhove, and Duran write in HBR.

    But the volume of solar panel waste will destroy the economics of solar even with the subsidies, they say. "By 2035,” write the three economists, “discarded panels would outweigh new units sold by 2.56 times. In turn, this would catapult the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, a measure of the overall cost of an energy-producing asset over its lifetime) to four times the current projection.”

    The solar industry, and even supposedly neutral energy agencies, grossly underestimated how much waste solar panels would produce. The HBR authors, all of whom are business school professors, looked at the economics from the point of view of the customer, and past trends, and calculated that customers would replace panels far sooner than every 30 years, as the industry assumes.

    “If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model,” they write, solar panels “can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than [International Renewable Energy Agency] IRENA anticipates.”

    The HBR authors found that the price of panels, the amount solar panel owners are paid by the local electric company, and sunlight-to-electricity efficiency determined how quickly people replaced their panels.

    “Alarming as they are,” they write, “these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.”

    What about recycling? It’s not worth the expense, note the HBR authors. “While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material,” they note. As a result, it costs 10 to 30 times more to recycle than to send panels to the landfill.

    The problem is the sheer quantity of the hazardous waste, which far exceeds the waste produced by iPhones, laptops, and other electronics. The volume of waste expected from the solar industry, found a team of Indian researchers in 2020, was far higher than from other electronics.

    “The totality of these unforeseen costs could crush industry competitiveness,” conclude the HBR authors. “If we plot future installations according to a logistic growth curve capped at 700 GW by 2050 (NREL’s estimated ceiling for the U.S. residential market) alongside the early replacement curve, we see the volume of waste surpassing that of new installations by the year 2031.”

    It’s not just solar. “The same problem is looming for other renewable-energy technologies. For example, barring a major increase in processing capability, experts expect that more than 720,000 tons worth of gargantuan wind turbine blades will end up in U.S. landfills over the next 20 years. According to prevailing estimates, only five percent of electric-vehicle batteries are currently recycled – a lag that automakers are racing to rectify as sales figures for electric cars continue to rise as much as 40% year-on-year.”

    But the toxic nature of solar panels makes their environmental impacts worse than just the quantity of waste. Solar panels are delicate and break easily. When they do, they instantly become hazardous, and classified as such, due to their heavy metal contents. Hence, used solar panels are classified as hazardous waste. The authors note that “this classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions — hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.”

    Beyond the shocking nature of the finding itself is what it says about the integrity and credibility of IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency. It is an intergovernmental organization like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, funded by taxpayers from the developed nations of Europe, North America, and Asia, and expected to provide objective information. Instead, it employed unrealistic assumptions to produce results more supportive of solar panels.

    IRENA acted like an industry association rather than as a public interest one. IRENA, noted the HBR reporters, “describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat.” IRENA almost certainly knew better. For decades, consumers in Germany, California, Japan and other major member nations of IRENA, have been replacing solar panels just 10 or 15 years old. But IRENA hadn’t even modeled solar panel replacements in those time frames.

    IRENA wasn’t the only organization that put out rose-tinted forecasts to greenwash solar. For years, the solar industry and its spokespersons have claimed that panels only “degrade” — reduce how much electricity they produce — at a rate of 0.5% per year.

    But new research finds that solar panels in use degrade twice as fast as the industry claimed. And that report came on the heels of a separate report which found that solar panels have been suffering a rising failure rate even before entering service. “One in three manufacturers experienced safety failures relating to junction box defects, an increase from one in five last year,” noted an industry reporter. The “majority of failures were prior to testing, straight from the box.

    Dealing with the problem requires that government regulators clamp down on solar. “A first step to forestalling disaster,” write the HBR authors, “may be for solar panel producers to start lobbying for similar legislation in the United States immediately, instead of waiting for solar panels to start clogging landfills.”

    But that’s unlikely since such legislation would significantly increase the cost of solar, and thin profit margins mean that many solar companies would likely go bankrupt. The result is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. “If legislation comes too late, the remaining players may be forced to deal with the expensive mess that erstwhile Chinese producers left behind.”

    As such, taxpayers will likely have to subsidize the clean up of solar panel waste. “Government subsidies are probably the only way to quickly develop capacity commensurate with the magnitude of the looming waste problem,” they write.

    None of this means there’s no role whatsoever for solar panels, nor that they are not ingenious machines. Like many others I have long been filled by a sense of wonder in how they convert sunlight, photons, into electrons, and I have solar panels in my backyard. Solar panels power satellites. And they can be an important way to generate electricity in off-grid areas.

    But solar panels cannot be a primary energy source like nuclear, natural gas, or coal, for inherently physical reasons relating to the unreliable and dilute nature of their “fuel,” sunlight. Low power densities must induce higher material intensity and spatial requirements, and thus higher physical costs.

    Even as the cost of solar panels has come down, the cost of producing reliable grid electricity with solar panels has risen, due to their weather-dependent nature, something that became evident in 2018, was recognized by University of Chicago economists in 2019, and was further supported by spiraling costs in renewables-heavy Germany and California in 2020.

    The new research on the coming solar waste crisis, along with rising blackouts from renewables, reinforces the inherent flaws in solar and other forms of renewable energy. Over-relying on solar panels, and underestimating the need for nuclear and natural gas, resulted in California’s blackouts last summer. It’s now clear that China made solar appear cheap with coal, subsidies, and forced labor. And in the U.S., we pay one-quarter of solar’s costs through taxes and often much more in subsidies at the state and local level.

    And none of this even addresses the biggest threat facing solar power today, which are revelations that perhaps both key raw materials and the panels themselves are being made by forced labor in Xinjiang province in China.

    The subsidies that China gave solar panel makers had a purpose beyond bankrupting solar companies in the U.S. and Europe. The subsidies also enticed solar panel makers to participate in the repression of the Uyghur Muslim population, including using tactics that the US and German governments have called “genocide.”

    Today, many companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, buy immense quantities of solar panels with no awareness of their impact. “I tried to bring up this issue [of solar waste] when I worked at Microsoft,” said a former employee. “I was told ‘That's not the problem we're trying to solve.’"

    The Guardian reporter claimed, “it’s valid to note that end-of-life solar panel recycling and disposal is an issue that we’ll have to address smartly, but unlike climate change, it’s not a big or urgent concern,” but the Harvard Business Review study shows that this was never the case.

    The idea that humankind should turn our gaze away from urgent problems like genocide, toxic waste, and land use impacts because they complicate longer-term concerns is precisely the kind of unsustainable thinking that allowed the world to become dependent on toxic solar genocide panels in the first place.

    https://michaelshellenberger.substac...id-about-solar
    Last edited by cancel2 2022; 06-22-2021 at 11:38 PM.

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    I don't honestly think it is all BS etc......... Out on the trail for multiple days it is very handy for charging cameras & such, so there is a place IMHO....
    "There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone," McConnell wrote. "His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended."



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    It's so nice to wake up every morning and re-realize the orange deranged clown is back in Florida golfing.
    It was just a 4 year nightmare.

    Meanwhile, Joe Biden is bowling a perfect game.

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    .

    Texas Starts Waking Up To The Issue Of The Full Costs Of "Renewables"


    The promoters of the climate scam have a variety of deceptions to get the gullible to accede to their socialist plans. Those deceptions range from the quite sophisticated to the completely preposterous.

    At the sophisticated end of the scale we have what I have called The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — the deception by which 50 and 100 year old temperature records are altered (reduced) by impenetrable computer algorithms to make it seem like global warming has been much greater than the reality. At the preposterous end of the scale we have the claim that the fashionable “renewable” sources of electric power, wind and solar, are actually cheaper than fossil fuels to generate electricity.

    I call this claim preposterous because the fundamental deception is so obvious that you would think that no one of any intelligence could possibly fall for it. And yet you have undoubtedly read numerous articles in the past few years asserting that wind and solar-generated electricity is now as cheap or cheaper than electricity from natural gas or coal. To make the claim, the promoters of wind and solar simply omit from their calculations the single biggest part of the cost of those sources. That would the cost of intermittency, otherwise known as the cost of providing sufficient backup or storage to run a stable electrical grid while generation from the wind and sun fluctuates wildly. (As wind and solar become a bigger and bigger part of power generation on the grid, the cost of necessary backup and/or storage could easily multiply the cost of electricity by a factor of five or more. For instance, see my post here.).

    To divert your attention from this elephant in the room, somebody has come up with the concept of “levelized cost of energy,” or LCOE, supposedly to make fair apples-to-apples comparisons of the total costs of one energy sources versus another. There are seemingly sophisticated and technical discussions of life cycles and discount rates. But then, when putting a cost on wind and solar, they just completely omit the costs of intermittency. I suppose they hope that you won’t notice.

    If you don’t believe me, check out this Wikipedia piece on “Cost of electricity by source.” The piece cites some five studies of comparative costs of different generation sources. The five studies come from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Lazard, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the IPCC and OECD. Representative of the conclusions reached is this from BNEF:
    .
    In March 2021, Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that "renewables are the cheapest power option for 71% of global GDP and 85% of global power generation. It is now cheaper to build a new solar or wind farm to meet rising electricity demand or replace a retiring generator, than it is to build a new fossil fuel-fired power plant. ...
    .
    Feel free to click through to verify my assertion that they simply omit all costs of intermittency when calculating the costs of generation from wind and solar.

    The state of Texas, with its own power grid separate from the rest of the country, has been a leader in developing generation capacity from the intermittent renewables, particularly wind. While production from these facilities can vary greatly from month to month (depending on wind conditions), in typical months Texas has been getting about 20-25% of its electricity from wind and solar. (It was 23% in October 2020.).

    Then came February 2021, when Texas had a record cold spell, and the wind and sun died for several days running. Some natural gas and nuclear facilities were also out during that period. The result was a tremendous spike in spot market prices and rolling blackouts imposed by the grid operator (known as ERCOT).

    Apparently the February event has caused some people in Texas finally to wake up to the issue of the true costs of the renewables. In March a bill called SB 1278 was introduced in the Texas state senate by Senator Kelly Hancock of Fort Worth to require the renewable generation sources to bear the extra costs imposed by their intermittency. Here is the relevant language of the proposed statute:
    .
    “[ERCOT] shall ensure that ancillary services necessary to facilitate the transmission of electric energy are available at reasonable prices … [and] ancillary services costs incurred by the ERCOT … to address reliability issues arising from the operation of intermittent wind and solar resources must be directly assigned by the ERCOT … to those resources. . . .”
    The bill passed the Texas State Senate on April 14 by a bipartisan vote of 18-13. However, the bill got held up in the Texas House of Representatives, and apparently the legislature has now adjourned without further action on the bill. Nevertheless, it appears that the legislature has a good deal of unfinished business, and will be called back into special session at some point later in the year.

    The delay has given renewables advocates a chance to regroup. A piece on May 17 at something called Utility Dive gives many of these advocates a chance to present their arguments.

    Most of them are BS. But I think there is a significant flaw in the language of the bill as drafted, which is that it puts the burden on the regulator, ERCOT, to figure out what particular costs are attributable to intermittency issues. That task is not necessarily so easy to do with precision in a mixed system of fossil fuel and renewable sources. A guy named Michael Jewell of something called Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation makes the point when he says this:
    “[C]ost causation here is unclear because reliability needs vary with customer demand and, like wind and solar, traditional generators can [also] go offline."
    A far better structure would be for the grid operator to set up a bidding system where bidders offering power from wind and solar sources must combine their bids with sufficient backup and/or storage to provide some fixed amount of firm power over some reasonable period of time, say 24 hours. In a post back in July 2018 I phrased it this way:
    .
    [T]he grid operator should seek only offers of power that are firm and reliable for some reasonable period, say 24 hours at a time. If you want to sell wind power to the grid operator, it's then on you to also provide the mix of backup sources (could be fossil fuel power plants, could be batteries, could be whatever else you come up with) to make your offer reliable for the requisite period.

    With that market structure, the wind and solar operators themselves would be required to recognize and calculate the costs of the intermittency of their assets. The structure would also give those operators the incentive to reduce the costs of intermittency (that is, of backup and/or storage) to the extent they can.
    Someday, the world will come around to adopting my proposal. Meanwhile, I’m glad to report that Texas has at least woken up to the existence of this issue.

    https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/...-of-renewables
    Last edited by cancel2 2022; 06-23-2021 at 08:56 AM.

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