COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
Wow, for a whole month!
And the other eleven?
Actually, it's not the other eleven months about which to be
concerned because wind power is intermittent and cannot be depended upon.
So, for every wind project, you must build traditional
capacity somewhere in the region as back-up.
And that small, undependable bit of wind power is very
expensive to consumers, costing many times per unit of energy what other forms
of generation cost.
It is costly to install, costly to maintain, and costly in
terms of always needing back-up capacities of other kinds.
If it weren't for the other sources to absorb and spread out
the wind power costs, consumers would be paying a fortune for power -
intermittent, undependable power.
Great portions of the public couldn't even afford the cost
of such power. The poor would suffer most, and this is already a fact in some
jurisdictions.
There actually are lots of people who say, why don't we just
get on with it and build as much of this capacity as possible, asking this with
no appreciation of costs or the economics of energy and as though the whole
matter were just one of getting new technology installed fast enough.
Articles such as this only help promote fantasy ideas in the
minds of the general public about power.
