Back in the day I used to work for a consulting engineering firm that did resource planning for public electric utilities.
What does “resource planning” mean? It means deciding what kind of electricity generating plants to build in order to meet expected electrical demand.
First thing to understand. The electric system, every second, adjusts its generation to match the eletrical demand — exactly. If it fails to do this, then you get a blackout, either deliberate by the system operator shedding load — that’s you — or accidental, like the notorious Northeast Blackout of 1965. The point is, you see, that it is vital to protect expensive generators and transformers and other electrical equipment. So there are all kinds of relays and thingies that turn off the power rather than let a surge destroy vital equipment. Frankly, the fact that electric systems work, all over the world, is a bloody miracle.
Now, there are basically two kinds of electric generating resources: base load and peak load.
A base load resource is designed and built and priced to stay on at a fixed output. It is not designed to adjust its output. Typical base-load resources are coal plants and nuclear plants where a steam turbine drives the electric generator. Because they are inflexible, their output is priced low.
A peak load resource is designed and built to follow the load. You can turn it on and off, and throttle it up and down as required. Typical peak load resources are natural gas turbine powered generating plants where a natural gas turbine drives the electric generator. Because they are flexible, they get a better price for their output. There are also so-called “combined-cycle natural gas plants,” which recycle the hot gases from the gas turbine and creates steam for a steam turbine. The output from these generating plants is not as flexible as a pure natural-gas plant.
Do you see that if you have a resource that cannot be reliably scheduled as base load, or “dispatched” on demand as a peak load, that it is not very useful? And its power cannot be competitively priced, except by gubmint edict?
So we come to the current enthusiasm of our ruling class: green energy from wind turbines and solar power. There is one little problem with both wind and solar. You cannot “dispatch” them, either as a base-load plant or as a peak-load plant. Because only God knows how much wind or sun is available at a particular moment to power the wind turbines and the solar cells. This means that wind and solar have to be backed up by other generation, typically natural gas plants. In other words, a competent resource planner will regard wind and solar as extra. He will know that to provide generation 24-7 he needs resources that do not depend on the weather.
There is one kind of user that can use wind and solar: the operator of a server farm with its banks of computer database servers. If you have a server farm you need to provide on-site backup power, such as a diesel generator, just in case. So, it makes sense for a Google to site its server farm just down the street from a wind turbine farm. If the wind is blowing, it can take power from the wind turbines. But if the wind fails, it can crank up its backup diesel generator. Yay!
Let us look at the case of California, that has just decided to ban the sale of fossil-fuel cars starting in 2035 and also just issued an alert asking EV owners not to charge their cars after 4:00 pm. This means that, right now, Californis does not have enough electric generation to charge its existing fleet of EVs.
What should California do? It could order coal plants (eeeuw, fossil fuels), which might be online in ten years. It could order nuclear plants (eeeuw, Three Mile Island), which almost certainly could not be online in ten years. It could order combined cycle and gas turbine plants (eeeuw, fossil fuels), that could be online pretty quickly. Forget wind and solar. Wind and solar are not reliable sources of electric generation.
I could also talk about hydroelectric plants, but I won’t because it would be too complicated.
If you understand this piece, then you can say, to your liberal friends, that “experts agree” that wind and solar don’t work, and never will, not unless they are backed up by fossil fuels or nuclear.