Quebec, with 8.2 million people, goes 365 days on hydro all the time.

Considering they doxed ISIS fighters, does anyone find it surprising they're returning the favour?

Lazy morons don't try to support their BS points.

> If carbon is as real a problem as claimed, this in the long run will not be enough.

It most certainly will. Do your math.

200? Try 60:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

~4000 dead.

> Fail. Completely. Yet again.

Yes, you did.

> There simply isn't enough wind in many areas to even consider it.

There is 10 times as much wind power in the US as needed to power everything in it.
http://www.windenergyfoundation.org/interesting-wind-energy-facts

> We don't have enough sunshine in may parts of the country either

There is 100 times as much sunshine in the US as needed to power everything in it.
http://ecowatch.com/2014/11/20/solar-energy-power-u-s/

And before you start typing your ill-informed response, it doesn't make a difference what you think, because solar and wind are outpacing all other forms of power generation both in the US and the world. So you're wrong. Period.

>Nice if you've got a bit of land and don't give a flying fuck about poor people's electricity bills.

As opposed to "nice if you're BP and don't mind spilling oil while hovering up government money".

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/27/wind-power-subsidy-fossil-fuels

Oil and gas received 3.6 billion in 2010, renewables got 1.4, wind got half of that.

> wind should be less efficient than energy from solar due to thermodynamics

Whoa... wind is the result of heating taking place over the entire planet. Or more accurately, millions of square meters.

> Why then is solar more expensive

Because a solar panel only collects what falls on 1.6 square meters, not millions.

> On the wind side there are substantial additional costs over dispatchable sources

No, there are not. I posted the numbers. Integrating wind is cheap, and the numbers keep going down because the equipment is getting better. The vast majority of "the equipment" is a PC running software you can buy from IBM.

When they invented coal fired power in the 1880s do you know what the interconnect cost was? Infinity. That's because they didn't have a grid, and the plants went up and down all the time. In spite of this, they built it out successfully anyway. They figured out how to interconnect two generators that would otherwise be running out of phase, how to keep voltages under control, how to handle generators going offline out of the blue.

Now after over 100 years, do you think we know more or less about how to hook up generation to the grid? More? Well if infinity was small enough to handle 100+ years ago, how can you possibly believe it's a) more difficult, or b) more expensive?

This isn't theoretical. We're actually adding this capacity as I type this. The grid is not failing. The companies are not going out of business. Everything is working just fine.

> will add almost 4.5 times as many MWs of utility-scale capacity as solar in 2015

But utility-scale is on;y about 1/3rd of the PV installed. So in terms of *totals* it should be closer to 1:1.

This is unlike wind, or practically any other source, where something like 99% of the installs are utility-scale.

Just click on the link I posted earlier, they have all the numbers there.

> Costs: Wind: 6 cents/kw [snip] , solar 60 c/kw, natgas 9 c/kw, coal 7 c/kw, nuclear 12 c/kw, hydro 3 c/kw.

Ummm, no. Using actual numbers from an industry source, this one specifically:

http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf

It's wind at ~5 cents/kWh, PV around 7 cents, natgas around 7, coal around 9, nuclear around 11.

And maybe get your units right?

>(but 30 c/kw with infrastructure)

OMG where did you get that figure? The American Tradition Institute maybe?

The cost of integrating wind is at worst about 20% more than the cost of integrating dispatchable sources. The EIA says it's only 3.8% more:

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf

Not ONE post from someone complaining that wind can't possibly work, and the only possible solution is to build [insert nuclear power unicorn faerie dust machine here].

Wow, the worm has indeed turned.

> We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate,

No we're not, not even close.

Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.

However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently. About half the planet's arable land is using stone-age methodologies and crop varietals, which offer about 1/4rd the payload per acre or less.

So if all we do is introduce modern methods to the rest of the existing used land, that will increase production to the point where something like 50 or 60 billion can be fed.

And of course, the techniques are improving all the time. I have a friend in the industry who visits the contests across North America. Over the last 10 years the record for corn production per acre has improved something like 15%. There is no sign of this slowing down.

And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. We take thousands and thousands of calories and turn them into tens or hundreds. And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.

The world is literally awash with food, so much that the vast majority of the calories we make are ultimately thrown away. We could *easily* double the population with zero changes to the existing production methods.

> Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers

Completely incorrect. "organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base"

Organic methods generally produce about 80% per acre of basic foodstuffs compared to non-organic methods. That would mean, say, 5,000 calories per person per day on existing land. Still way more than we need. And if we were to eat a little less meat, especially beef, that would free up a lot more.

The difference is not output, but cost. Organic methods generally use much smaller plots of single crops interspersed with similar sized different crops. This means harvesting is more expensive than, say, driving a reaper around a 5000 acre plot. Weeding and pest control are likewise more expensive and time consuming.

But that's it. And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% - in spite of far greater amounts of eating at restaurants and other expensive options - we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it, if we wanted. I personally don't care, nitrogen is nitrogen.

Seriously, read a little. Start on the Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming