Originally Posted by
Tailhookah
Are you a green plant or a FOC (friend of China)? Coal is clean if burned correctly. The while plume coming out of stacks is steam…. You could stick your face in that plume and get a steam bath. Wind has not been good and only makes sense is very windy environments or very rural off grid areas. A wind generator doesn’t make enough electricity in its lifespan to overcome the cost of building it. And big solar farms are hit or miss. Where solar would be more reasonable is to mandate (in areas where there’s enough yearly sunlight and cloudless days, no trees etc) that every new home built/condo/apartment building to have mandatory solar panels on the roofs. Then solar makes sense. The combined solar output in those communities augments the KW needed to power those communities.
Fly into Vegas, Phoenix, Cali and scratch your head why there’s not solar on every roof. Big solar farms can be wiped out by 1 freak hail storm. As it’s already happened.
Nothing beats good old fashioned nuclear and fossil fuel use. Augment this power with solar and use wind only where it’s needed. But the rest is a joke.
Well China is leaning heavy into renewables. No one is claiming renewables are cheap, just renewable.
Nuclear is a great option (as I've been advocating for) but also very expensive to build. While microreactors are coming, they aren't here yet and really are only a good idea in remote areas. Besides that the traditional plant makes sense but those take name and money while not even discussing nimbyism. You're obviously a Navy guy so you've been around nuclear power. There's still drawbacks but the goods outweigh the negatives.
We had solar panels on my house in Florida in the 1980s. California is putting solar farms over aqueducts which provide a double win: no extra land required and the microclimate from the cool water helps keep the cells more efficient.
And no matter how you burn coal, it's not clean, has nasty by products. The entire world has moved on from coal. China has even realized they need to move on from coal.