Eugene Coyle wrote:
An electrical load fluctuates diurnally as well as seasonally and utilites have dealt with that for a century. This is not to say that integrating wind into a system is without problems. But the industry is learning new tricks, and incorporating new technology to redce the problems.
. Yup, the power companies also hire long range weather forecasters yet (and I can only speak of PG&E) still can't seem to get the tree limbs et al trimmed away from the power lines before the winter storms. The work crews make HUGE amounts of overtime $$$ working in storms, fixing all the stuff that should have been... maybe not routine, but secondary, unmaintainable. That unneccesary cost is gladly passed on to the consumer. Those same weather forecasters could work on seasonal wind patterns for regions of the U.S., with the same type of economic dysfunction occurring in their organizations, while they intensely $$$ pressure some locales (Missouri, my roommates family spread and the surrounds), to develop wind farms that will no doubt be run so inefficiently they fail. ... and the aesthetics of wind farms is... well, there are none. Somewhat clean, if you don't count the maintainance/contractor truck traffic from now to eternity. Maybe what they can do is what the cellphone companies do for their towers, and as Sempra promised for that LNG regasification pox-on-the-landscape in Baja... Paint the facilities to look like... dunes and ocean.... or a Missouri sunrise. Yeah.. I trust those people... Aren't they the 'Cognactive Elite'? Doesn't anyone remember the story of GM (and others) buying all the public transport in Los Angeles, just to run it ALL into the ground to pave the way for... well... paving... and cars, which subversively caused the funneling of masses of Californians into the realm of human isolation in pretty little metal boxes with wheels? But I digress... The organizations are f-cked up... Marcuse said it... I said it... Now Stan Goff is also implying it. Anything the 'cog...whatever elite' do is temporal... a blip on humanity's radar, simply because their IQ s don't allow them to think beyond THEIR 'herd', their sheeple, themselves... Nothing lasting, nor contributing to the resurrection of the ecosphere will arise from these people in time to render aid. They have to 'help' themselves first. Leigh 'Digressive, not regressive'
