Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency | U.S. | Reuters
This is an old story by this point, but it is enough to scare me off windmills as a good source of stable, steady energy source. I wouldn't mind if we have batteries or electricity storage capacity to even out the distribution of electricity. But we don't. Solar and wind have peak production times and no-production times. Not natural gas. Not coal. Just shovel more coal and you have more electricity. Regardless of the whims of mother nature.
The secret to wind power is that you need to have natural gas or coal on emergency backup. One estimate that I heard suggested that it needs to use nearly 90% of the energy that using natural gas and coal as the primary source.
Ten percent is nothing to sneeze at, but why waste billions of dollars to make low marginal savings that could be spent on increasing the fossil fuels efficiencies?
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