Finally, an explanation for why it was in Simmons Flashback that Peak Oil made windmills not work

[james_davis_nicoll]

“Now, to add insult to injury, The University of Maine, Presque Isle – anybody here been up there to see that damn windmill in the back yard? Guess what, if it’s not blowing wind outside and they have somebody visiting the campus, they have a little electric motor that turns the blades. I’m serious. They have an electric motor so that they can show people wind power works. Unbelievable. And that’s the government that you have here in the state of Maine,” said LePage.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Our power bill is huge, but not THAT big.

Presumably you'd also need to include the energy embodied in all the materials produced upstream of your plant. But the people making these life-cycle claims always seem to imagine that they're novel arguments that proponents never considered before, rather than a basic part of the cost-benefit analysis for any alternative power source.

[redbird]

You never hear such discussions of the upstream power/energy costs for a coal plant--how much energy it takes to dig and transport the coal, and build and maintain the power plant, including getting the miners and plant workers to and from their jobs, let alone the energy side of medical "externalities" in the form of lung diseases: what is the energy cost of treating X number of asthmatic children, including fuel for ambulances, hospital electrical bills, and so on?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Similarly, the people complaining that renewables can't compete without subsidies generally ignore subsidies to fossil-fuel industry.

In the specific case of solar, they tend to have ideas left over from the 1970s about the cost of photovoltaic production. I just saw an article about solar reaching grid parity in India and Italy. The article defined grid parity as cost competitive with fossil fuels before subsidies. It sparked a discussion on G+, and one of the first things somebody said was "yeah, but that's just because of subsidies, right?"