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Rick Bishop's avatar

I worked in the power industry for over 15 years after graduating college. I’ve been directly and remotely involved with virtually every form of production and transmission. I was on a team coordinating a lot of these discussions with EPRI. And I can attest to the difficulty people seem to have understanding the difference between energy and “capacity”, or “power” as used above.

Another aspect is that of timely delivery. Wind and solar, for example, only produce when environmental conditions are right. People today need energy all the time. Without storage, such as very large batteries (or lots of small ones) these methods are insufficient. I don’t know if this reality was included in the power density numbers above, but if not, it only adds to the problem.

Thank you for the very enlightening article!

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Rationalista's avatar

I guess winning a Nobel Prize let’s one spout off on all sorts of nonsense that is unrelated to their chosen area of study. Krugman is just one example, but he is probably one of the worst...

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