Power system should adapt to changing world
LETTERS
Response to Lynn Thacker’s letter in The Herald.
I agree with Mr. Thacker about the unreliability of solar electricity (PV) 100 per cent, but I can’t agree with his comment for wind energy because the wind energy is not that bad for reliability, particularly if we look at the wind power production over the whole Prairies or nation (perhaps North America) wide. Then it does level out. It is more that our grid needs to be adjusted to a new world and not stay in the monopoly’s world.
Several facts used to support the writer’s thesis are wrong, wrongly used or just not fitting.
a. Our power grid is like our road system, common infrastructure, with one difference: the roads are common property and anyone with the proper licence and equipment can use it, while the power grid is in monopolies’ hands like our railroad system and can only be used by the monopolists and their buddies.
b. Every kilowatt of electricity produced by renewable source, including hydro, reduces the production with CO2 emission and that is the main issue: CO2 emission and oxygen depletion (please do a search with these five words).
c. The writer states production capacities need to be the same as without renewable (excluding hydro) energy production and that statement is only partially true because of changed movement patterns.
I have 21 kW PV generation on my farm, producing 28,000 kWh annually with a possible lifetime production of 700,000 kWh. This will not need to be produced by coal or natural gas and I will not have to buy this amount.
The arithmetic would make even more sense if every south-facing roof of every building had enough PV capacity on it to supply the annual needs of such buildings. With this, only the required “non-sunshine” equivalent use would need to be transported.
Further to reliability: I am rather in a group with 5,000 producers where it is minor if one fails, than being in the hands of five where any one failing could mean chaos.
Let’s face it: the world and freedom our fathers, grandfathers and so forth have had are gone and we must try to clean the mess up that mankind has made in the past 150 years and it will probably take longer to clean it up than it took to make it.
Dark moments are coming and the quicker we change, the easier it will be.
Joerg Klempnauer
Vauxhall