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Thursday, August 18, 2011

Higher Electricity Bills

We talked about higher gas prices, now let's look at the cost of electricity. Your power bill is about to go up. Why? Because we are building windmills to generate electricity, and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But isn’t it worth it, you say, to help reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions? Well, let’s take a look and see if they do.
Generating electricity with wind is supposed to reduce emissions by allowing coal fired power plants to be shut down. The idea is to replace electricity generated in coal plants with electricity generated by windmills. The problem is, we can’t shut down our coal plants, so the theory doesn’t work.
We can’t shut down our coal-fired power plants because we still need electricity when the wind isn’t blowing hard enough to turn the windmills. Can you imagine your power going off every time the wind slows down!?
It would be a huge problem in the home, never mind the office! Inconvenience would be the least of our problems when the traffic lights and street lights go off: that would be a serious safety problem.

No, we can’t have frequent ongoing interruptions in our power supply; we need consistent and reliable power. Unfortunately, we can’t just turn coal-fired power plants on and off on a whim. It takes many hours, even days, to start up a big coal-fired power plant. As a result, we end up running both the coal-fired plant AND the windmills!

We don’t reduce emissions, but we have the privilege of paying higher power bills to satisfy the green coalition! But don’t worry, the hundreds of millions of dollars to build the windmills doesn’t all come from your power bill, government subsidies make up the difference. And where do they get their money again? Oh ya, our taxes!


If you want to know more, read Kids Before Trees https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/80505   and check back here for frequent updates.

1 comment:

  1. The problem with wind generated power is that when the wind stops, so does the generator and therefore the electric power production. Electric power cannot be produced and stored for consumption later.

    Therefore, wind power can only be counted on mostly when the wind is blowing at optimal speeds and only in locations where the prevailing winds are such that it makes economic sense to build these power plants and this may not be when and where the power is needed. Making it NOT suitable replacement in terms of continuous power generation and it only add Cost because you have to maintain it even if it's not producing power.

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