Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.
It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad. It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.
Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk.…
Joe Romm at Climate Progress reports that:
Both [John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco] have been told not to make news [at their confirmation hearings], so it could be as boring as Energy Secretary Chu’s hearing.
My eight-part series on Dr. Holdren’s energy-related views documents a troubled history of exaggeration and intolerance that deserves some hard (and unavoidably) embarrassing questions. We will know in a matter of hours if this turns out to be the case.…
Roger Pielke Jr. of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado has started an interesting blog series concerning the growing realism on the political side of the climate-change debate. He begins:
…The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon. The collapse is not due to the cold winter in places that you may live or see on the news. It is not due to years without an increase in global temperature. It is not due to the overturning of the scientific consensus on the role of human activity in the global climate system.
It is due to the fact