Yep, America has lost it's nimbus, and I think it won't be able to regain it again.

Perect safety comes with a steady state that's a fact.

Boss: Can't be, your bladder is only 85% filled, you must give 120% !!

Brave new Odity

Well, in germany anytime the industry announces to leave germany if they are remembered that they have social and environmental duties,
but the first that tried this, came back to germany crying about unstable justice systems and unquallified workers, and concluded that they had spent far more, than they would have staying in germany.

Germany was dizzed by the US, for selling so many goods. I know that's because the industry fears ..

And btw. there are many places like the examples are USA and Australia where the grid is worse than the german grid.

This is the CO2 return of invest of a windturbine. Solar panel is around 10 - 15 Months or so.

Lead Acid Batteries in fact are green, as long as you don't dump those in the nature, these types of batteries can be perfectly recylced!

I think he will say: Integrating dynamic resource like the renewables with base load - notstopable nuclear power plants - results in a facility near the nuclear power plants where 10000 people start 1000000 2000Watt water heaters simultainously to evaporate the excess power nobody really needs.

that we would power our trains with electricity, but according to you this must be a hoax, I will take a train hop on the top and just test those insignificant "lines".

Ok, jokes aside, the railway is electrified, the locomotives using converter technology today are far more efficient than their diesel powered brothers. But the feasability of an electrified railway system depends largely on the climate and topological situation. But if you can electrify a railway system
you can use long range trolley trucks, but investment would be needed yes, but if extracting hydrocarbons from crude oil or producing these from secondary processes(fuel synthesis) than those investments would be undertaken.

But you are right if you refer to long range or over the ocean transportation
- ships
- airplanes

Also but global transportation by ship, the average speed of the container freighters today decreased and is now the same as in the late 1800s of the sailing boats,
cause reduce fuel consumption.

Also why I think civilisation will not collapse
1.) 7 billion people and 5 billion living between the middleages and the early 19th century
2.) change happens but slowly
3.) price for energy rises, people react, example: in 2008 when the fuel prices reached 1970s - oil crisis levels the US-Americans(many) started to get away from their gasguzzling machines
4.) however: when the prices decrease because of the economic down turn, the gasguzzlers were back in business
5.) it's the price not laws

So rest assured civilisation will work.

But perhaps you will mention that I don't take thermal solar not into account
1.) concentrated ?
a.) direct to steam
- working models exist, yes
- working models have problems, yes - heat resistant materials
- efficiency is not so good because of secondary processes applied, also the size of the steam turbine is governed by the space up in the chamber tower

here the topics - b. c. d. e. f. g. - also apply see down below

b.) melting salt/natrium to steam
- efficiency loss due to secondary process
- but nighttime storage for energy
- working models exist (small scale plants)

2.) small scale ?
- efficiency loss per area due to small delta_T or apply secondary processes (heat pump but also a heat pump needs energy)
but great for warming your home pool or shower water
- proven technology

Conclusion on why thermal solar power is irrelevant in the picture:
At the moment (direct) thermal solar energy makes up only a 1/1000001 small fraction of electrical energy generation
thermal energy preservation & storage is however limited by storage capacitiy and the local holding points.

This is because the plants are either small scale working models or plant size working models, but they do come with high investment cost,
huge usage of space and "engineering problems" and problems equal to cost for operation and troubleshooting

you need to take the following things into account:

a.) storage of energy
- yes you can store pv energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- yes you can store wind energy as H2 / but any given process comes with a loss
- energy storage is very expensive

but you should not apply an efficiency factor before the energy is put out into the grid lines.
calculate cost for building a storage device

b.) position
- you have countries that are more nother and get less direct sunlight
- you have countries that are more south and get much direct sunlight

if you want to fill the distance gap goto d.) and evaluate further

c.) daytime & season & weather
- bad weather = bad pv, perfect wind
- good weather = med pv, good wind
- sunny perfect weather = perfect pv, bad wind

- night = 0.4% pv (on a full moon), good - perfect wind
- day = good pv, bad - good - perfect wind

season - depends on position

d.) distance
- distance is loss the more distance you need to cross the more you loose
- if you have distant source and drain your efficiency will decrease

e.) space usage
- pv is a space consumer because within a pv field you cannot use much space you will loose much light because it's shadowed away
- around wind farms in contrast cows can eat the grass that was fueled by sunlight, the space can be used more diverse

and so:
more space equals to less economic efficiency
less space equals to more economic efficiency

f.) cost
pv is Factor (4 - 8) times more expensive then wind

g.) return of invest / return of energy / resource usage / resource recylcing ..

"Just displaced solar energy"

That statement is wrong if used as an argument to support your theory that wind is a niche.
Because you leave out the view, that "wind energy" is "conserved" and "transportable" solar energy. If you look at direct solar energy alone
you absolutely dissmiss the fact that the earth and it's atmosphere is a storage and distribution network for energy.

The invariant in your view is the pure "scientific" view, yes theoreticly you could replace wind by solar, and vice versa, but on the other hand you would have to find solutions for the topics I mentioned, and finding solutions equals to cost at anytime, the more advanced your solutions are the higher your investment and the operational cost.

Solar power does not work at night - fix it=storage / networkstransfer - costs money
Wind power does not work when no wind blows - fix it=storage / networkstransfer - costs huge amounts of money

And I will not go into detail what implications HVDC transmission lines or AC long distance land lines come with but you can guess it's lost efficency and higher costs.

Conclusion on why wind and solar power are not feasible replaceable by each other:

Simply we don't need to, if we would do, all solutions that would need to be implemented would generate extreme additional costs and decrease the effficiency dramatically. And that's not feasible even if pvE could be generated at the same cost like wind-power,

What I want to say is if you don't mix and use natural energy buffers/storage the atmosphere, hydro energy, oceans are those - you will be horribly inefficient because you need to create these exact same buffers.

And you talk about thrist and also pray inefficiency. Start thinking and look at actual distribution curves about how much AND WHEN
wind power and solar power reach their respective peaks. Simply goto eex/transparency .

ok I will lay this out short. this is the pretext you need to understand and asses my view on the topic of renewable energy and on things that sound easy:

1.) I'm a mechanical engineer (with electrical knowledge)
2.) I do work in the wind industry, I do sometimes climb on wind turbines, also Offshore
3.) I know how wind turbine generators work from the inside out
4.) I have a deeper understanding about things like grid codes, grid compliance, reactive power demand & generation, the need for those
5.) I have experience in working safety / I have written safety assessments / done risk assessments / done last minute risk assessments / 5 - stops
6.) But I also know that I'm not perfect and sometimes will make an error, and that there is no perfect or ideal world

Do believe me when I state this from my experience with safety:

- In engineering and science if something reads easy and safe from your office chair view, onsite reallity will change easy to hard and safe to unsafe.
- If you ignore that fact, as an engineer having to layout or assign work others execute on complex systems (in dangerous areas) you are a safety problem if you are not aware of your responsility to assess the real situation and not the situation you perceive from your office chair
- Do not ignore the human factor

Please guys, be realistic one time, fantasy and dream back and forth.

1.) renuclearization - won't happen on a large scale
there won't be a big program to go nulcear, if a country would really do that, they would be ridden with execessive cost (see actual building site in Finland, and take look at England)

Projection:
In seven years from now, the project in england will probably cost so much that there will be a pay partly off and walk away solution.

Thinkaboutit:
The fixed energy price for that new nuclear power plant in england is higher than the actual subsidies for wind energy, and the reactor will start operating 2025 or so .. when renewables are far more advanced and cheaper. That project won't pay off for the people only for the investors. And in England there is no real threat for nuclear energy through anti nuclear groups, the island is PRO-NUCLEAR (55% are PRO nuclear)

2.) Thorium

Projection: won't happen, too high costs

Thorium will be our saviour. - except that idea is pretty old, it predates the anti nuclear movement, so please cherish the fact that there might be a real world problem with going from drawing board and simulation to reallity, I think thorium reactors are a scientific dream, that when turned into reallity would turn into an engineers nightmare.

Projection:
What will happen ? Actually nobody knows.

But we see today that in some countries which have a huge amount of installed wind/solar/biomass power, that on certain times it happens that the
renewables generate about 50-90% of the needed electricity. That's good in the first place.

The "bitter" taste is.

The "dormant" coal fired power plants are still running and are paying to sell their electricty, because during several times the stock market price for electricity turns negative. As do nuclear power plants. Because in terms of controlability and medium reaction times power output coal is worse(we talk about hours) and nuclear is impossible (we talk about weeks!)

But what can be seen is a clear shift towards renewables, with - till there is no really cheap, small, availible, high power density method to store electricity - accomodation of the fossils(coal, oil, gas).

Convetional nuclear power due to it's bad controlabilty (not dynamic = bad) and long term nature is doomed to fade out over the next 15 - 25 years.

If you doubt my prognosis about nuclear power, please take a look at the figures of power plant projects (that do not get stalled in the planning phase)
Finnland actually builds a new reactor, it was planned 15-20yrs. ago, and the costs have rissen dramaticly, see for yourself at wikipedia. Even building a new reactor takes a decade at best, so when nuclear energy would not to be faded out, than we now would have many building sites. And that's not the case.

Nuclear(fission/uranium/plutonium) energy is economicly doomed, because of the huge investment, and the fukushima shock, because this event has clearly shown that scientists and engineers can actually draw the safest IDEAL plans, but if you fail to execute these, safety is inexistent. Do you really think before fukushima that similar events wouldn't have led to the same outcomes in other countries, many people doubted safety and reassessed protocols, thanks to fukushima.

The japanese are perfecstionists ! And yeah, if the safety on such a site would have failed, it's easy what to do next:
Before doing the cleanup you sue the worker that has forgotten to do the check on valve No 22. To simply prove that your safety plan hasn't really failed, it just didn't work out you expected. This is how you please the insurance,

And yes, even fracked oil and gas will run out in 20yrs. and the cause is it's price, it's cheap if energy is cheap there is no need to use it carefull, because saving energy needs planing and if planning costs more than the saved energy it does not pay off. And growth demands more energy and ineffeciency demands a lot more energy.

Warning: Exponential curve on the loose, don't get bitten.

You make it sound like it's bad to rely on renewable energy, but all your arguments actually strongly support renewable energy:

- short return of invest / return of energy / low investment cost

- technology is state of the art and not something that only ran in a lab or in virtual reality

- you also bring up the best argument in favor of diverse renewables "1/3 transportation runs 99.9% on hydrocarbons", good when photovoltaic and wind are used for generating electricity, the methane can power your truck.

But there is really not enough biomass without getting into food conflicts, but you can also power transportation with electricity and that works. (there are electrical
powered busses, they are mostly connected to power lines and not on batteries (capacity problem solved) and the line grabbing and releasing is automatized.
Think of a highway with a lane soley for trucks getting there power from grid lines. Yes infracstructure would have to be built, but even in the case you go all nuclear, you would need to find a fix for that same problem.

Ohh now I get it. You think the hippies won and are a foul loser now.. ok, from this perspective: We are really stuck with renewables!

also these wind turbines do actually in most countries supply the biggest part of the renewable energy mix.

Install it by yourself go off grid and call yourself tea party anti-government!

Now better ?

You should actually read all what's written in the text you are commenting on.

Also the 0.5% is an ideal figure in reality the 0.5% would be distributed as your predecessor did also mention.

and btw. which infrastructure well the same infrastructure already present and supplying your computer with electrons, the concept he hinted is decentralized
energy generation. And for the computer nerds the redundancy would be Raid1 on steroids.

No not really, ask yourself one question, do you own anything that says "Made in Greece" or anything that says "Made in Japan".

Nobody wants to give greece money anymore. This has some causes, but all accumulate into one big cause, greece does not produce much and has an overblown
military complex. They wanted to "fragg" the turks in the past but then they stepped down and collected & displayed tanks as their sign of strength.
(try some digging, calculate the "tanks per people" ratio, and compare that to other countries)

And well my home country (germany) - in the past - was willing to lend them the money they needed to buy weapons and also supplied the weapons.

If you recognize the debt-collector-junkie-drugstarter relationship ?

Well, judging from the debt rate of UA and European States, we will get to build such a device.

Japan, actually engages in fueling their economy with debt-money, (we have seen similar matters in UA and EU States, subsidized new car programm "for the environment")

Keep in mind Japan has 200% debt rate, so the total amount of goods and money generate in the country is only half of the debt value, but it's Japan sourced debt.
All japanese people own japan two times ;)

This means in terms of house owners spoken, they owe their tenants money, and well their tenants are actually also the houseowners. Think of dogs chasing their own tails.

And now take a look at your tail and at the debt rates of UA and EU States ..