Still get a foul taste saying those two words - the guy thought he was an intellectual but in reality, he was just a narcissistic tool of radical socialists. Absolutely classical case of Dunning-Kruger Effect. From Watts Up With That.
The post is about yet another failure of a much-touted alternative energy scheme:
It is in the news, as expected Crescent Dunes, the world largest concentrated solar power plant featuring 10 hours of molten salt thermal energy storage, just went bust.
https://www.cato.org/blog/crescent-dunes-another-green-flop
From the Infogalactic entry for Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project
Dividing One Billion Dollars (total cost so far) by the 418,849 MW-h brings us the cost to the customer of the electricity. I will scale it to the more familiar kiloWatt per hour. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we pay about 10¢ per 1kW-h. The cost of the electricity generated by this facility is $2.38 kW-h. All of the overruns and expenses are coming out of our wallets - this is all tax-payer subsidies. The projected cost to market of this electricity was 0.08kW-h. Fat Chance.
This is why alt.energy will never work. It is not reliable. It doesn't operate at night. It is not baseload. This last is the most important. The dirty little secret is that for every 100MW (100,000,000,000 watts) of alt.energy generation capacity, there is another 100MW of natural gas turbine running on standby for when the wind stops blowing or when the sky gets cloudy.
Modern nuclear is the way to go. Every single nuclear accident that has happened so far has been with a reactor whose basic design is more than 60 years old. Think of the progress of technology - computers, cell phones, televisions, medical equipment, etc... Imagine what a modern nuclear reactor would be like - smaller, cheaper and walk-away safe. We have them, we need to show the political will to build them.
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