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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (23092)	9/3/2010 5:35:33 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 86355

Since 2007, we have added hundreds of megawatts of wind generation, and our overall emissions have declined." See en.wikipedia.org While they where adding wind, I doubt they staid steady with everything else making no replacements, updates, improvements, or changes to have better/more maintenance of any other their other plants. Also its a sample of one. Personally I wouldn't argue that installing more wind power will increase emissions, I don't think the data is clear enough and settled enough to support that conclusion. But I would say its at least likely to disappoint in terms of how much it reduces emissions. And even if wind will reduce emissions a bit, that hardly undermines the critics. The potential that wind will not reduce CO2 emissions is far from the only point against it, its not the most important, or the most commonly raised argument. The main problem is the unsteadiness of wind as a power source. Another problem is the relatively high true (unsubsidized) cost of wind power per megawatt hour (esp. once you move past the very best locations and try to expand it to be a major portion of total electrical production), another strike against it is its low density, you need a much larger area to produce significant power than you do with a number of other types of generation.