More than 68% of New European Electricity Capacity Came From Wind and Solar in 2011

[kristopher]

46. Why do you have so much trouble just making an honest argument?

The Rio Earth Summit was held in 1992 and marks the real beginning of our global effort to turn the tide of fossil fuel use. It took until 1994 to craft an international agreement to deal with the problem, and another 3 years to shape and pass a treaty binding nations to the agreement. It wasn't until 2005 that the treaty went into force.

Your numbers reflect the inertia of where we are coming from. The graph in the OP reflects where we are going - which is precisely why it is significant. The numbers for new coal capacity have been steadily declining both in the EU and the US. In fact, in the US coal's share of the electrical services market has declined 25% between 2005 and 2010. Sure, most of that is due to natural gas, but as has been repeatedly shown, that is in conjunction with a dramatic increase in the manufacturing and supply chain infrastructure for renewables and a steadily increasing rate of deployment for those technologies.



I'm still waiting for your reply to post 29

As I said, if your reference to shutting down nuclear en masse was in response to the link in post 3 then your reply was a red herring since that is an example of how the transition to a carbon free infrastructure will shake out with ever increasing renewable penetration.

That is why I asked you to relate how the interplay of these technologies will unfold as we move away from carbon. Why don't you lay out how the hoped for transition will occur? Since you say that I'm trying to "defend natural gas" explain how preserving large scale centralized thermal (nuclear and coal) is preferable to restructuring our energy machine (the grid) to make it hospitable to renewables while also getting immediate reductions in emissions.

I'd really love to hear your vision of how that works.

Now