There’s no alternative energy source that can replace the old, faithful, coal-fired electric plant built with 1930s-era technology, Shannon Love reminds us, which is why alternative power is and will remain useless:
An obsolete coal plant using 80-year-old technology can provide power where and when you need it. It can be positioned almost anywhere from the equator to the tundra. (It will even work aboard ships.) It can be positioned immediately adjacent to the point of consumption. It works around the clock and in all types of weather. It can easily store weeks or months of coal reserves in a big pile outside. 99% of its offline time is scheduled and it is trivial to build in redundancy to compensate for both scheduled and unscheduled offline time. For the last 80 years, this type of technology has chugged out the electricity all over the world without pause.“Alternative” energy sources have none of these attributes. They can only be built in specific locations, and those locations are wholly unrelated to the points of consumption. They can only operate under specific weather/environmental conditions, so they cannot fulfill the when of the point of consumption need.
They operate on nature’s schedule not ours. If we could easily operate on mother nature’s schedule, we wouldn’t need the energy in the first place, because we primarily use the energy to alter natural environmental conditions to keep ourselves alive.
“Alternative” energy is really Weather-Dependent Energy and it has all of the hazards posed by being exposed to the vagaries of weather. Wind turbines only generate power in certain locations, within certain wind speed ranges and only when the wind blows in the specified speed range. Solar panels only generates significant power in certain locations, in certain latitudes, in certain environmental conditions (deserts mostly). It only generates significant power in the daytime, only during certain hours in the day, and random weather conditions like thunderstorms, ice storms or sandstorms can knock it offline completely. (Even hydroelectric power is weather dependent and can be seriously crippled by drought or flood.)
To even begin to replace the 80-year-old coal plant with weather dependent technology, you have to invest resources on a massive scale.
If he had simply argued that alternative energy is useless — or even that it is and will remain useless until we have better transmission and storage — I’d have largely agreed, but I felt he went too far. New technologies can improve exponentially, and their early glacial pace of improvement “suddenly” turns into another Moore’s Law.
And, more importantly, an alternative energy source does not have to replace a coal plant to be useful:
We currently rely on a portfolio of energy sources, not just coal plants, and something like cheap solar power could clearly play a role, even without cheap storage to make it reliable around the clock, because we really, really need electricity on hot sunny days, and spending over $1,000 per additional kilowatt of coal-plant capacity isn’t necessarily justified.
A solar-thermal plant in Arizona or Southern California could presumably provide power during peak demand. (California ISO reports peak loads from 1998 through 2009 in the 41–50 gigawatt range, from occurring from 2:30 to 4:52 PM, from late June to early September.) Even a photovoltaic system with enough distributed nodes and a wee bit of storage could conceivably provide reliable enough power during peak demand.
We’re definitely not there yet, but such a system could make economic sense, even with a price-per-
Or, alternatively, if photovoltaic power gets cheap — really cheap — the cost of capital (per kWh) for a solar site might drop below the cost of coal (per kWh), in which case we would want to use solar whenever possible, with coal and natural gas filling in the gaps.
We’re definitely not there, but such a future is hardly inconceivable.
Anyway, I made the mistake of poking the beehive, and I got denounced as just another left-wing nutjob — which reminds us of the nature of the Net.