Nuclear is clearly getting killed based on finances alone. Natural gas has become such a cheap producer of electricity that it makes zero financial sense to build new nuclear. The big boys running the big energy companies have publicly stated that as a fact.

Wind is getting built. Yes, some of the impetus for building wind other than for financial reasons, at least short term financial reasons. Right now the wholesale price of wind is about the same as the wholesale price of natural gas. Plus wind does not pump more carbon into the environment, which natural gas certainly does. In the long term wind is vastly cheaper than NG because it helps us avoid the incredible expense of climate change.

We’re building a lot of NG production. The ‘old fossils’ believe in fossil fuel and boiling water to make electricity. And right now the NG numbers look good to them.

For those of us concerned about our future, NG is a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because it reduces substances like mercury in our environment and produces some less CO2 per unit of electricity as compared to coal.

And it’s dispatchable. That means that whenever there is ample wind and/or solar on the grid the gas valve will be closed. NG has a fuel price, wind and solar do not. That’s better than dealing with a coal plant which can’t be quickly shut down or brought back on line.

Of course NG is also a curse. It does produce CO2. It leaks methane. Fracking for NG is screwing up our water supply.

If we can get the fracking problem under control and greatly reduce the methane leaks then NG can be a useful bridging technology on our way to a greenhouse gas free grid. The NG capacity is going to be built. As we develop better storage and demand response systems we can dial back on the gas until, hopefully, we need it no longer.

It’s kind of like making a pact with Joe Stalin to defeat Ol’ Adolph. Team up with a lesser devil and then deal with that lesser devil further down the road….

If we look at the differences between wind technology today and a couple decades ago, or energy technology in general today compared to hundreds of years ago, we can easily see that things can be improved. Wind is a very promising energy source and has much potential.

And, of course, a tremendous amount more wind energy capacity and output is on the way already. Just one crossover of many, of course

Right now we use dispatchable hydro, gas peakers, storage, and demand response.

We’ve built 21.5GW of pump-up hydro to deal with the nuclear problem. Nuclear can’t be turned off when demand is low so we built a lot of pump-up to store ‘not wanted’ power and then feed it to the grid when demand rises. We will likely build more pump-up along with CAES (compressed air, we’ve got one facility up and running) and utility scale batteries (some are already on line). We’ll build thermal solar which can store energy for days and weeks.

We already pay large consumers to cut their electricity use when supply is strained. We’ll likely do more of that, along with timing things such as EV charging and appliance use. (You really care what time of day your refer defrosts? As long as it gets done often enough to keep the frost down is all that matters. Cycle it when supply is up, not when supply is low.)

And we’ll install more ‘always on’ sources such as geothermal, tidal, hydro and biomass.

I think its great how wind and solar are gaining ground….but…my question
is what are you going to do when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine…

Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India
Wind Energy Expert
E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com

Mr/Ms Guest needs to learn about the grid and how grid managers are constantly balancing rapidly changing demand and supply and how wind is just one more source that can fill the need for power.

Mr/Ms Guest also needs to understand that even nuclear, coal, and natural gas generation is not 24/365. Those plants go off line from time to time. On average coal plants are down about 15% of the time and nuclear, best case, is available about 90% of the time.

Grid managers use dispatchable sources such as natural gas and hydro to fill in the gaps caused by demand/supply mismatches.

I really doubt that Ms. Casey needs to learn about “CAPACITY and electric GENERATION”. She’s been at this for a while.

Perhaps Mr./Ms. Guest needs to learn how to read with comprehension. This article is about Texas not building a couple of planned nuclear plants and about Texas’s success with generating electricity from wind.

a. The difference between electric generating CAPACITY and electric GENERATION. This makes a huge difference when talking about wind.

b. That electricity from wind is very high in true cost and low in true value. It is totally misleading to compare electricity from intermittent sources like wind with reliable generating sources like nuclear, coal, natural gas, oil, (some) geothermal, and (some) biomass.