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

To: TimF who wrote (36471)	8/21/2009 6:26:42 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Re: "since the limitations on fossil fuel plant placement are not nearly as great." What the heck are you going on about? You don't put windmills where there is little wind... and you don't site coal burners where the cost of delivered coal is too high.... (Nothing complicated about that....) Re: "Cost per kilowatt isn't an important issue. Cost per kilowatt hour is far more important. Wind plants have a higher ration of kilowatts of capacity to kilowatt/hours of actual production" I ALREADY (and very CLEARLY) wrote that wind generators are UNSUITABLE for baseload generation. But that does not mean that their lower cost-per-kilowatt is IMMATERIAL to the decision to build! A robust mix of generating assets is one with a multiplicity of different technologies and fuels... and the lower cost of electricity produced by wind generators, and the lower operating costs, (vs. 'conventional' production), makes properly sited wind farms economically attractive. And certainly wind generated power is much cheaper then, (for example), nuclear. But --- there again --- one must consider that nuclear (and geothermal) can be relied upon for baseload generation... whereas wind is more suitable for 'peaking' and non-baseload generation. Re: "Edit - I'd add that if I'm wrong and wind power really is generally competitive on an unsubsidized basis, great, then we don't need subsidizes to make it competitive so we should drop them (or perhaps it can get $0.00038 per kWh, if we can't also drop the smaller subsidies for traditional sources)" You wanna drop ALL SUBSIDIES for ALL ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES uniformly (nuclear, oil/gas, coal, solar, etc.) and you can count me up for that one.