We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans

System working as planned. Slowly driving society toward living in caves and eating grass.

And yet with all the facts and data on how useless the bird blenders are from all over Europe and GB, our scientifically brain-dead politicos keep throwing the bucks at the green scam. Ken(Kulak) is right.

Enviromentalists and politicians should be forced to use wind and solar power only. All their business and personal and medical power usage, and none of this buying off the grid and then paying a higher price. Direct usage only.

What Maxed Out Mama has discovered is that power quality really, really matters with respect to voltage and frequency. Because of their variable nature, wind and solar are extremely bad for regulating voltage.

Wind and solar are not responsive and erratically variable....grids need reliable steady inputs.

I realize I may sound like a cracked record but this very same element that promotes solar/wind is implacable that hydro is not a renewable.

In fact they lead initiatives to remove power dams.....so the rivers can "run free"...creating floods and such....

Suggested image: A hairy legged hippy piroueting in a tutu...

The truth is that hydro is perhaps the most reliable and definitely most flexable. Infact hydro has a response time of minutes..faster than even NG turbines. Thermal "fossil fueled" or nuclear has response times of hours....

Sasquatch, only one small caveat to your post, which otherwise I agree with entirely. Hydro is vulnerable to low water years. About every 10 years or so, for example, Hydro-Quebec will have very low water supplies for its northern dams. In at least one year in the past two decades, this required HQ to become a net importer of electricity.

But I agree with you about dispatch. My point only matters over the balance of a year or more.

I can't remember now how many power dams have been removed in the US, but I think it's nearly a dozen or so.

With respect to nuclear, you are again entirely correct. Nuclear plants could be configured for load following, and in fact the French have done so with some of theirs. But in practice, nuclear plants are set up for base load supply. Given the trivial cost of fuel, you want to turn them on and leave them on. And they run best when they are running at full power.

All power sources are susceptible to external conditions that affect their reliability. With hydro the watershed that is the source or fuel is a whole lot more reliable than say wind or even solar. Yes there are dry seasons and even rainy seasons that force the energy generators to "dump" the excess hydro down the river but generally I can count on next Tuesday's hydro power a lot more than hoping the wind will blow and the sun to shine on that day. The notion of storing excess solar/wind energy for when the load demands it is too cost prohibitive to incorporate on a massive scale. It is too easy to sell the "green" message to an unwitting public when all the grants/incentives/government handouts are not in the equation. Any wonder why Spanish solar sites were selling power at night when they could buy power from the grid to "run" their solar operation and make a profit. Here in Ontario Premier Dad and the lackeys are still selling this crap to the people and for the most part they are still buying into this crappola.

One of the good things about hydro power is that you can use it as a load leveler with pumped storage, if your siting is right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Pumped_Storage_Generating_Station

Wind and solar electric only make sense when used on individual buildings where the renewable energy can be used when available and grid power used when it's not. Capital costs should be borne by the owner not taxpayers.

While there is nothing wrong with cutting waste per se, the real purpose of most environmentalism is to get people used to the deprivation that will ensue after the socialists take over.