Not at all. "X causes Y" doesn't even vaguely resemble "X is the same as Y". Your objection simply makes no sense.
Getting back to the actual issue -
Since wind power is unreliable it can't be used for peeking power. Peeking power has to be there when you need it. But it doesn't produce at a large fraction of its capacity often enough to be a large part of base power. Really its neither, its power you might want to use when it happens to be available. It doesn't fill the roll of either gas or coal very effectively.
The wind power can substitute for power from gas, but not for gas power capacity. Since gas fills a roll where it has to produce, and quickly, when called on, if you want wind power to produce some of that electricity you need to double up, none of the gas power capacity gets replaced, you keep it all, and keep building more of it, you just leave some of it idle when the wind blows. If that's your strategy than yes the power produced by wind will replace the power produced by gas. So cal can just produce the steady base, but you don't get to cut capacity for anything else, you just spend more on building capacity and add to costs all the way around. But even then it won't just replace gas, not if you want a large fraction of your electricity needs to be produced from wind, and if you want to actually use the wind power almost whenever you get a chance to do so. Your base load capacity (coal) should be able to produce the majority of the electricity you need. If your usage is such that you don't need peeking production, the gas plants are all idle, but the wind is blowing strong over your wind farms, what do you do? Either you let the wind power capacity go to waste (wind is already bad enough in terms of meeting it capacity if you use it whenever you can, if you don't use it when it would replace some coal power it will get even worse on this measure and be less likely to ever be cost effective in terms of dollars spent per kw/h produced), or you get less electricity from your base load production (which is often coal), either turning it on and off beneficently, or keeping it running and burning coal without getting any benefit from it.
If wind could really do the job of gas power you could bypass all those decisions, but wind simply can't be counted on to produce when you need it. |
