Trump says he's pleased America isn't powered by wind: 'it only blows sometimes'
49 replies, posted
I assume he's making this argument with wind because (I think) most people would want solar panels, could they afford them. I don't think too many people are looking at tapping into a free source of energy and thinking, "Gee, it's only free sometimes!" even if you ignore the concept of batteries.
The Sun only shines on solar panels sometimes. Half the time it's on the other side of the planet.
I never did like the "turbines kill birds!" argument, because you know what else kills a shitload of birds?
Power plant emissions, highway traffic, and stationary windows.
Don't forget, coal and oil polution
Uh, Trump, the planet isn't a bsp. Wind isn't an env_wind on a random seed trigger...
If you can't see it, it doesn't exist
You're assuming he's capable of making arguments rather than spewing whatever half-thoughts his childlike brain comes up with while watching Fox News
Someone told him there's a thing called "clean coal" so now he has to oppose anything that isn't that.
And like any disaster we should have been responding swiftly and effectively to mitigate the damage, only that most ways to do that are illegal.
Haha trust me, I certainly am not assuming that. I just meant that even the stereotypical dumb redneck that lives in a confederate flag covered RV in the back woods understands that solar panels are cool, making it a bad move to try and politicize compared to something like wind (that most people have yet to interact with and see function.)
Trump's a walking talking Dunning-Kruger Effect. "I know a lot about..." is one of his catch phrases
With the amount of hot air that comes from his camp, he could power the northern hemisphere.
I suppose that might be true, assuming they're not a coal miner.
there's people arguing wind is more polluting than coal in my state which has some of the best conditions for wind in the country. They couldn't even build a coal plant in the same place since its a hundred miles from any major water sources but that's the reality in bumblefuck nowhere
You can't use batteries for baseload generation, at least with technology we have for the foreseeable future. They're incredibly useful for replacing natural gas peaker plants or providing remote or low population areas with stable, clean power, but the sheer amount of electricity we use vs. the capacity and storage capacity of batteries we have right now just doesn't work out.
California is currently, at 2:30 AM, has a demand of 18,704 MW, with a projected peak demand later on in the day being 25,834 MW. The all-time high peak demand was 50,270 MW, in the summer of 2006. You can take a look at what's currently going on in that realm here. The US generated 357,690 gigawatt hours in 2018, which comes out to an average of 40GW being generated at any particular hour (though due to how this works the chances of it being 40GW being pumped out at any particular time is low, it will probably be either higher or lower than this). Tesla's battery in South Australia has a capacity of 100MW and a storage capacity of 129MWh, and as far as I am aware it is still the largest constructed battery built. there are some 120MW batteries in planning with a few hundred MWh of storage, and one planned 300 MW battery in the US that's designed to last 4 hours. It is specifically a peaker-replacement battery.
All of these projects are very expensive for not a whole lot of power output, relatively speaking. They also have short lifespans, relatively speaking, likely lasting a decade or two at most before the cells are rendered unviable. This would be even shorter if they were acting as baseload since they would necessarily have to be recharged more often, which degrades the battery.
You can't just throw up solar and wind then charge a battery, that isn't how this works. Unless we dramatically reduce the amount of power we use across the board, we need something that can provide a lot of stable power over a long period of time. My preference is nuclear energy, with renewables paired with batteries acting as peakers. Until we have a breakthrough in battery technology, that's their best use.
Just put a wind turbine in front of Trump and we're good to go seeing as how he blows all the time
I don't disagree. I never expect wind or solar to feasibly be the sole source of power generation without our current technology. I was just pointing out the obvious counter to the whole, "it ownly blows sometimes" thing in that there are ways to store the generated energy. There are other means that are used to store generated energy, such as utilizing the potential energy of some water pumped up to a height to later be used to generate power as needed. There are solutions out there. I suspect there is more of a prospect to use battery arrays or other energy storage means as the technology progresses, though.
You'd think the world's biggest windbag would be in favor of windmills.
EVs can pollute more than gas cars in places where the primary source of power is coal. combustion engine cars are generally a lot cleaner than coal plants. Electric vehicles aren't necessarily emissions-free, the emissions are just dependant on where the power is coming from.
you like being a fucking weeb huh ?
???
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