That isn't a reversal. The two points fit together perfectly. If wind is used to replace gas (because neither would be likely to be used for baseline power, they both would be additional to the baseline), then you might have coal supplemented by wind power. But coal supplemented by wind has a problem. If coal is supplemented by gas, gas can with near 100% reliability go from off to full capacity in a short time. But wind power can't go on and off when you want it, the potential for it goes on and off, or up and down, with the wind, and we don't control the wind. If you want to maximize what you get from wind power, and you are replacing gas with wind then you either are running the coal all the time, and not reducing CO2, why having extra electricity all the time (which doesn't make a lot of sense, if your going to have not just enough coal capacity for your peak needs, but are actually going to burn enough coal to meet your peak needs, than the wind power isn't doing anything for you); or you are turning the coal on and off as the wind power picks up or drops off (in which case you are reducing the efficiency of the coal plants).
No you could build enough coal for all your base needs, enough gas power for all your peak needs, and then add wind power on top of that, and turn the gas on and off when the wind picks up or dies down. Operationally that's much better, and will result in a reduction of fossil fuels being used to generate electricity at least in direct terms. But if you do that your paying for 100% of the base power from fossil fuel plants + 100% of the needed peak power from fossil fuel plants, + the cost to build the wind farms. The extra building has economic and environmental costs. Also the fossil fuel use you save is mostly saved by burning less gas, which is the cleanest major fossil fuel, and not by burning less coal, the dirtiest.
Or you could keep wind power as a small fraction of your electricity needs. Then you don't have a lot of excess redundancy, and you might actually have a plan that makes sense, but then you leave wind power as just a niche.
Or you could store the power you get from the wind, but that adds a lot to the cost, and also pushes wind to be relatively small compared to other sources, since building enough hydro-power backup storage to make wind a major player is impractical (takes up too much space, and costs a lot), and the same is true for battery backup (less space, but more maintenance, and costs even more).
You could combine all the niches, a small (but perhaps larger than today) amount of unbacked wind power, a small amount of hydro-backed power, and a tiny amount backed by other storage methods. That makes the niche larger, but it isn't going to be cost effective scaled up to be as big as coal is now.
An alternative if you don't like fossil fuels, and if we figure out a way to make access to orbit MUCH cheaper, would be to build solar power satellites, and beam the power down to earth as microwaves. That's a long way away if it ever happens. Its much less practical in the near to mid term future (say the next decade or two), than wind power (or conventional solar) in terms of finding a solid niche, but for say a century from now, it may make a lot of sense as a major power source (assuming fossil fuels are massively more expensive than they are now, ocean thermal, geothermal, and ocean current turbines don't pan out as cost effective, and fusion either still doesn't work, or is costly like fission plants are today), while I don't think the same will be true about wind.
I do however see a role for wind as filling a much bigger niche than it does now (at least if fossil fuels go up a lot, or alternatively if we ignore cost effectiveness and subsidize the hell out of it). |
