...in Texas. Ercot posts graphics every fucking day while assholes cheer for the unreliable industry. At noon today, the energy demand on the Ercot Grid was 67,010 MW. In the "percent talk" that anti-nukes use to obscure their indifference to climate change, the people it kills, and air pollution and the people that kills, this works out 3.7% of Texas power.
At noon today, the solar scam spread over stretches of destroyed wilderness like that pictured in the OP, 8,952 MW, near the peak for the day or in "percent talk" 13.7% of the electricity. In "percent talk" this means that 82.7% of the electricity in Texas was not supplied by solar or wind.
The Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, in two relatively small buildings, operated at 100% capacity utilization, at 2,400 MW, just about equal to all the wind turbines in Texas operating at noon, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness, and the South Texas Project nuclear plant, producing 2,580 MW, again in two small buildings, again at 100% capacity utilization, and again more power than all the wind turbines in Texas were producing at noon, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness.
At 4:25 PM, power demand on the Ercot grid peaked at 70,462 MW, with the wind industry producing a prodigious, 8,877 MW, or in "percent talk" 12.6% of Texas demand, and the future electronic waste solar industry was producing 7,618 MW, or 10.8% of Texas energy demand. (Solar and wind figures are reported hourly on the Ercot graphics.) This means that 76.6%, in "percent talk" was not produced by the solar and wind scam, spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness, all of it junk that will need to be hauled away and dumped in 20-25 years, by today's toddlers just as they are entering into their careers.
At midnight tonight, the temperatures in Austin, Texas will be 36°C (96°F), hot enough to kill a sleeping man or woman without air conditioning if they get dehydrated. The solar scam, spread over thousands of square miles will be producing zero MW. The demand is anticipated by Ercot to be on the order of 53,000 MW. (Happily the wind is predicted to be blowing tonight, but that doesn't mean it will blow every night.) At midnight tonight, the two nuclear plants will still be producing 4,980 MW. They will be doing so at 6:00 AM tomorrow, noon tomorrow, and every hour of every day all through the summer, independent of the weather.
Now, of course, I can fully expect some asshole to pipe in that "solar and wind are better than nothing," you know, from the sort of person who has spent 43 years whining about Three Mile Island because we might find out that someone has died because of it, while hundreds of millions people died from air pollution without a fucking peep of concern.
I don't agree. Unreliable energy is a crap shoot played with human lives as the chips on the table. A disgusting mountain of batteries the size of Guadalupe Peak will not address that lack of reliability.
I note that every time a dangerous fossil fuel plant has to restart because the wind was blowing for a few hours, and the temperature outside is 40°C or more at midnight, energy is wasted and the system is strained.
Texas has plenty of coast line and could easily construct enough reliable nuclear plants - with life times of over half a century, restore all that trashed wilderness, not depend on destabilized weather, desalinate water and perhaps, in supercritical situations with a new generation of nuclear plants - even clean some of that oily shit out of the Gulf of Mexico.
All it would take is a little bit of respect for engineering and science, and perhaps a whiff of unselfish concern for future generations.
In the meantime, the amount of dangerous fossil fuel waste that Texas dumps into the planetary atmosphere will be at the mercy of the wind blowing. That is, in any conversation I would consider rational, - and let's face it, one can not expect rationality from people willing to bet human lives on the wind - unacceptable.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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