29 Jun 2023 1:10 pm
Fifty years ago in high school, our teachers were teaching us about solar and wind and nuclear energy.sootedupCyndi » 29 Jun 2023, 12:28 pm » wrote: ↑ Sorry to laugh but i did.
Nebraska solar panels ruined by one hail storm.
What blind sided the futurists of 1973 was the Obama administration approving gas fracking that in just a few years made the USA a net exporter of oil and gas, and lowered the cost of natural gas power generation to where coal, is a dead tech walking.
I can remember fifty years ago our teachers expecting solar to be dominant over wind energy.
That photo of those busted panels is one reason solar isn’t winning. That field also is useless except for power generation.
There were wind turbine farms fifty years ago, that look about like wind farms today.
The do gooders complain they kill birds, which they do, and the right wingers make up all kinds of bull **** about wind turbines causing cancer, which they don’t.
—-In Montana, wind energy is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, especially coal. In fact, wind energy is less much less expensive than coal for customers of NorthWestern Energy – the state’s largest utility.The graph below comes from data from the Montana Public Service Commission and it compares the costs of various resources in NorthWestern’s portfolio. The Judith Gap wind facility is about $32.11 per megawatt-hour (or 3.1 cents per kilowatt-hour) while the coal-fired Colstrip Unit 4 is about $64.55 per megawatt-hour or (6.4 cents per kilowatt hour).
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Even those numbers are about ten years out of date.
New build wind plants make juice for two cents an hour.
And before you pity the farmers who endure looking at the wind turbines, they are praying their farm is selected. They’ll get a royalty check for a thousand a month for each turbine, and still have use of the land.