[ZeroGravitas]

There's very boring technologies to mitigate these problems and buy us enough time to figure out something better.

Bigger grids, lots more wind turbines geographically distributed, pumped hydro, demand management, smart grids.

These are all being rolled out right now in various places and we've not exploited these to anywhere near their full potential so we'd be best to do so before calling a halt to expanding wind (or solar, which has similar issues and solutions).

In the short term gas burning plants that we only turn on when we actually need to is a stop gap measure that isn't perfect, but is better than just running them (or worse coal) all the time.

[TheLoneWolfling]

Unfortunately, all of those mitigation techniques have problems of their own. (Not to mention that you glossed right over the politics.)

With AC power, bigger grids can create instabilities. Look at the 2005 Java–Bali blackout, for instance. Cascading failure. Or the Northeast blackout. Cascading failure. Etc.(With DC power, you have the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Among other things, you need less failsafes for DC than with AC, and it's easier to bootstrap the grid.) You can avoid this by... making grids less interdependent. Which you cannot do if you're tying them together for purposes of keeping them running. (And smart grids mean that things go wrong more badly when they do go bad.)

Lots of wind turbines geographically distributed would be great - except, of course, that wind power isn't available everywhere. Remember, the power carried by wind scales roughly as the cube of the windspeed. There's a relatively small window of "enough, but not too much" where wind power makes sense.

Ditto - pumped hydro I talked about, but again, you have to have a watershed with enough capacity. Which isn't the case everywhere.

Demand management... Good luck with that. That's politics, as much as anything. We have come to expect reliable power, and trying to convince people otherwise is an uphill battle, as it is very much a regression.

And as for small-scale gas-burning plants... Two things. First, by the time you've added up the wind turbines (again, wind turbines are hideous for the environment to make!), the additional infrastructure required to be able to inject power safely at distributed points, the additional infrastructure for a smart grid, and the gas-burning plants, things look much less obvious. And secondly, gas-burning plants are either inefficient or don't scale fast enough to be worth it.

Oh, and they are expensive. It may be better to sink the absurd amounts of money that is required for wind (especially when you realize that gas-burning plants are really expensive for their energy output) elsewhere.

[ZeroGravitas]

Everything has got problems.

The first person to suggest building the electrical grids we already have would have seemed a bit of a visionary, because they are truly epic bits of engineering but lots of problems have been solved along the way and continue to need solved as thing evolve.

Throwing your hands up at the first hint of potential problems is basically a variant on the FUD we know so well in computing, as is claiming wind turbines are "hideous" for the environment. People love that old switcheroo, "electric cars are worse for the environment than ICE cars", "Solar panels use more carbon than they will ever save" etc. except when you look at the serious studies done by actual experts you find these questions were dealt with thoroughly years before, and the people who keep repeating them aren't interested in facts.

Wind turbines aren't magic fairy dust, they're technology. They can be used well, they can be used badly, they can get better. One of the big changes is that larger turbines can be deployed successfully in lots more places and take advantage of slower average windspeeds. That's not revolutionary, but that and thousands of other improvements are making wind and solar cheaper every day. The problems that remain are far more solvable, and cost-efficient to deal with, than dealing with the consequences of continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere.

Many nations are already building/converting gas generators just to avoid using coal, an on balance this is a good thing from a pollution and carbon perspective. Making use of stuff that already exists to plug gaps as we go forward really isn't that radical a suggestion.

[TheLoneWolfling]

I agree with what you say.

But again you're missing what I was saying with my original comment - namely that wind turbines seem to be far too often built where it makes political sense, not necessarily where it actually makes sense.

As is far too often the case for renewable energy, it seems.

[ZeroGravitas]

Why have you singled out wind and renewable energy to be affected by politics? I think the current nuclear plans in the UK, the fracking support, and the anti-wind hysteria all have very strong political aspects. The IMF recently suggested fossil fuel is heavily subsidized since it's pollution is externalized.

I don't see anything about wind power that makes it particularly susceptible to politics, in fact the decentralized nature of wind and solar seems to make it a bit less likely for one entity to be given monopoloy rights and therefore be able to kickback large sums to politicians and lobbyists.

[TheLoneWolfling]

This comment chain was started by talking about wind. And people here seem to take it for granted that nuclear is affected by politics, but tend to be fuzzier about things like wind. Wind power is very political in nature. On the one hand, tax credits / etc. On the other hand, regulations as to where you can put wind turbines, etc. And general discontent about bat deaths / noise complaints / etc. (And in some cases, at least, for good reason.) And unmetered (and as such, unknown, which is "interesting") power used for things like rotating the wind turbines, feathering them, and keeping them turning when there isn't wind.