Quote:
Originally Posted by California98Civic
Your electric car is only as clean as its power supply. If we are not supplying all of an EV's power from a home solar array, this ought to be of interest. Here is a clever and informative NYT article on trends in energy production since 2007:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ol-left-region
I got all three correct and I bet you all will, too. |
Well, the questions lead people to the correct answers. I was still off by orders of magnitude even though I was "correct".
While the NYT article still felt obligated to take a jab at conservatives and defend Obama, it was much more restrained than I had anticipated.
At any rate, adopting renewables into the grid is relatively easy and affordable when they amount to only 20% or less of total power. Once you start getting above that amount, it gets significantly more difficult and expensive to stabilize a grid that is increasingly relying on intermittent and variable renewable energy.
Show me a utility with reasonable energy prices that has 40% or more energy coming from wind and/or solar and I'll eat my hat.
As with most issues, both extremes of the political spectrum make errors in reasoning. The extreme right might say there is no AGW, or that renewables aren't feasible at all, and the extreme left might say we're all going to die due to AGW, and that we could easily implement 100% renewable energy sources if Big Oil weren't so powerful.
I'm sure the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. The fact that we're neither 100% renewable, or 100% non-renewable seems to support this middle of the road opinion.