I wrote a reply about renewable energy...

[catnhatnh]

...but it needs to be read here. The guy interjected himself into a discussuion about renewables in Maine.He asked if I lived in Maine, which I do not but I replied...

No I do not...But I live in Rochester, New Hampshire...

...which is an entire 200 yards across the Salmon Falls river from Maine. If actually curious you could have searched my profile in which the information is clearly listed, unlike some other posters.

As for wind farms in general though, we in New Hampshire eagerly await the completion of our first installation later this month which will power up to 10,000 homes at full power. With less than 2 million people, I'll assume we have less than one million homes and say this first step will power 1% of every home in the state when the wind exceeds a given speed without depleting any resources other than those given to the manufacture of the turbines.

The thing about renewable energy is this...the upfront is frightening, but the downside is small. As technologies and infrastructure developes storage and shipment of energy becomes more efficient. Picture electrical ties across continents to feed excess capacity across a world wide grid. Not only can it be done, it must be. Sunlight in the Sahara and the Gobi will be shipped across the world. Tidal plants in the Bay of Fundy could transship enegy to equatorial Africa. In New Hamshire, on Mount Washington winds blow at over 100 miles an hour 70 days per year.

Picture a wind turbine optimized for winds above 100 mph-It would work well only 15% of the time and most of those occur in winter...but think of this-winter is just when our northern tier need extra energy for heating-but also it would be summer in Australia when energy is needed for air conditioning.

Past all of this could be things like demand smelting...most of the cost in producing metals from ore or recycled metal are energy costs-Picture using smelting operations as a form of "energy storage", absorbing excess energy production. All it would take is a nimble labor force.

Think of a pool of on call labor paid a premium to take advantage of excess renewable power assembling for 3 days to a week when the winds blow or the tides are extreme or when the world reduces it's percentage of clouds.

All it will take are buss bars across a few oceans, though they would be huge or of massive voltage (think: US-Russia, a couple hundred miles...this links every normally inhabited continent except Australia. US-Europe tie is longer but as doable as the first trans-atlantic cable. This would start the tie of Europe and North America and end with land lines to Africa and Asia and South America.

The far side is a world wide "storage bank" of energy where an August class 1 hurricane in Florida would ship energy to smelters in North Dakota and a week long cloudless sky in Mongolia runs cheap energy to a cold Boston Massachusetts. A neap tide in the Bay of Fundy runs an "energy excess" manufacturing plant in Indonesia 3 days a month. The workers recieve five times a normal wage and need only earn half a normal wage for the other 27 days to come out ahead.

The entire idea is a world wide economy of scale. Each renewable in the world directly relates to an excess need of power elsewear. Dark here means light somewhere across the planet and too cold here means too warm there. Any power you have too much of is offset somewhere across the globe with a demand. The answer for any imbalance is predictable advantageous manufacturing.Those plants become a world "storage battery" When a 100 mph wind blows on Mount Washington, during a cloudless period in the Sahara, while a neap tide flows in the Bay of Fundy, then those plants that are energy intensive should fire up for as long as energy prices "reward the market".

The "failure" of renewables has never been about energy production. If there is a failure it lies in the inability to share.
Stark Raving Democrat
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