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The truth isn t so politically simple. In truth,
both wind turbines and gas plants froze because of the abnormal weather.
And when Warren Buffet s Berkshire Hathaway said it had plans for additional generation capacity in Texas, it wasn t talking about wind turbines. It was talking about more gas-fired power plants
ten more gigawatts of them.
While the Texas Freeze hogged headlines in the United States, across the Atlantic, the only European country producing any electricity from solar farms was teeny tiny Slovenia. And that s not because Europe doesn t have any solar capacity on the contrary, it has a substantial amount. But Europe had a brutal winter with lots of snow and clouds. Despite the often-referenced fact that solar panels operate better in cooler weather, sub-zero temperatures are far more drastic than
Yves here. This post indirectly raises a critical problem with renewable energy sources, that they are intermittent and not hugely reliable. And that’s before getting to another issue that this article does not address head on: the need for load-shifting even within a day, since peak energy production for solar (the favored clean source for residential energy) is mid-day, when peak consumption is late afternoon-early evening. So users in theory need a combination of storage or a different source to provide base load requirements.
This piece puts too much emphasis on cost, as opposed to what ought to be the first line of attack, radical conservation. But it does in the end acknowledge that the stakes are too high to consider only consumer desires.
Earnings season has begun in oil and gas, and while the sector is still feeling the effects of the devastating pandemic, expectations are much brighter this quarter