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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (29504)	9/5/2008 10:52:55 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71588

Wind and solar are sort of their own special category. You have base load (typically coal, nuclear or hydro), which produces power almost all the time. Can be expensive to build, but typically not expensive to run (at least for the amount of power they generate). You have peak (most often natural gas, but other sources can be used), cheap to build capacity (compared to the base power), but more expensive to run, useful for on demand power. Then you have things like wind and solar, less reliable, so you can't count on them as base or peak, but considered environmentally friendly, and with some designs you have a reasonably cost per level of capacity also cheap to run. You could produce less from the normal base or peak plants by using these sources. But the problem is you need to keep much of the base and peak plants because these sources can't really replace either. Well they could replace much of the base if your willing to rely on peak plants to a very large degree, but that probably isn't a good strategy.