navajojoe,
"You can use your brain...as you say, but if you don't have the knowledge of the subject you can't see the problems. We are not talking about saving the world with "green energy."
We are talking about the basics of keeping the lights on everyday and night 24/7/365
We've had this discussion before. You weren't here that I recall.
There is a big problem with dispatchability with wind and solar. They are not dispatchable.
You then idle power plants that are dispatchable. The more wind and solar you build the more you idle these dispatchable plants.
Power plants are constantly called by the system dispatcher to raise or lower load to match demand. Wind and solar can't do that.
The fewer plants you have to do this the more unstable the system.
If you have a very large nuclear or coal plant trip off....with many other dispatchable plants running you can recover. There is a certain amount of inertia in all the mass of those turbines, along with a governor response to bring the load up. and save the system, possibly from a black out that could take weeks to recover from.
Wind and solar do nothing to help.
The wind doesn't always blow and the sun sets right during peak daily demand. Everyone should see the problem with that.
I often multiply a situation to see it more clearly.
if all electricity is made by power plants that run on coal, ngas, nuclear and hydro....well, we know that can work fine, dependability supplying our needs.
If all our electrify is supplied by wind, solar we would not have dependable electricity even daily.
We could add nuclear and battery storage and solve many problems....if we would.
We don't have enough water to add much if any hydro plants.
So, for now we need to stabilize the system and keep plenty of ngas plants being built and not shut down too many coal and nuclear plants. Because everybody wants reliable electricity. It would destroy our economy (see current China) if we don't."