Pelican Parts Forums - Okay folks, how about this as part of our energy strategy

I work for a large electric power generation company so I'll take a stab at the issues from their point of view.

Like many have said, there is no single solution. A mixed bag of generation is probably our best plan for now.

Some of the problems with wind and solar are what to do when the wind or sun suddenly stop, which happened in Texas about a week ago, and with the power factor. Large power plants have to have a certain percentage of spinning reserve, which means running the plant below it's maximum capacity so it can load up and catch drops in load from other plants tripping offline or from drops in wind or sun.

The problem with running below max cap for spinning reserve is that efficiency drops off significantly at lower loads. For some units it can be as much as 3 times less efficent at low load versus full load. The regulators don't pay the plants for this spinning reserve, so the plants have no incentive to have more spinning reserve than they're required to have.

The other issue with solar and wind is the power factor. I'm a little fuzzy on this since I'm not an electrical engineer, but my take is: Industrial customers with large motors require a certain minimum power factor. This power factor requires the generation of more VAR's which are the imaginary side of voltage and powerplants don't get paid to generate VAR's. They do it anyway for their large customers and because the system operators require it.

Either way, there's not enough land to go full solar and wind, not even close. We will need large gas, coal, and nuclear plants for the forseeable future. Fortunately the new plants and many retrofitted old plants are much cleaner than they were 5 or 10 years ago. The new combined cycle plants have efficiencies near 60% versus around 30-35% for simple cycle gas turbines or fossil fuel fired steam turbine plants.