Sally Vix wrote:
Fat hurts wrote:
I guess you are dumber.
Not only are people pushing wind energy, they are spending billions on its deployment. They don't spend that kind of money on a technology that doesn't work.
Last year alone, more than $25 billion was spent on offshore wind energy. And that's just the offshore portion.
Plus, the wind industry provides more than 100,000 US jobs. That's over 3 times the number of coal jobs.
Is wind energy really a technology that works? I mean in an efficient manner? I ask this as a genuine question. Can it really be cost-effective in its current state? Or will it have to be subsidized?
It depends on where it is deployed. Every wind farm has different characteristics. This not only includes the site itself and how much wind will be produced and the cost of building the site. It also includes how much the generated electricity will be worth in the area where it is sent to the grid.
Like solar, wind has a high up-front cost. Then it operates essentially free for many years. With fossil fuels, you have to keep buying more coal or gas to keep the plant running and it's hard to predict that cost 20 to 30 years out.
The cost of wind and solar continues to fall each year and this trend is expected to continue.
If you want to add up the cost of renewables versus fossil fuels, you also have to consider that fossil fuels have add-on costs that renewables don't have. This includes medical costs of air pollution, the costs of climate change, and the military costs associated with protecting oil interests.
If you want to talk about subsidies, consider that the fossil fuel industry is very heavily subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars per year. So we are throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at old, dirty, expensive fossil fuels that provide few benefits from those outlays.
It's much better to spend that money on research in the growing field of renewables to drive the costs down even faster. There are some amazing technologies on the horizon that can eventually bring us free energy for all.