Ok someone is going to have to teach me why you can't store electricity from windmills? That just doesn't even see to come close to making sense.
You can store electricity. It just costs a lot of money.
The downsides with wind power are:
It costs more than conventional power generation sources
It's intermittent. You can't order a wind farm to produce more electricity to meet demand, it produces power according to the strength of the wind. That means you need backup generation ready to come on line immediately in case the wind drops.
That pushes the price up further, because you not only have to pay to build the wind farm, you have to pay for another power station to back up the wind farm as well.
As for the technology... sure; storing electricity from turbines and solar fields is problematic, but there is absolutely no denying that it generates power... a hell of a lot of it, and that none of it will be 'wasted'
Unless you pay a fortune for storage, much of it will be wasted. You have to have enough other generation capacity to cover 100% of demand for when the wind isn't blowing strongly enough to generate electricity. On the other hand, at times the wind will be just right and you will be generating as much electricity as you have installed capacity.
Wind farms typically average about 25% of their installed capacity. So a 1 megawatt turbine will generate an average of 250 kw/h an hour over a year. Obviously, some of the time it will be generating 1 mw, other times it will be generating 0 mw, and some times it will be generating something in between.
That means if you have wind power making up 25% of your power generation, the wind will contribute between 0 and 100% of electrical demand, on average. Because power stations take time to bring on line, and can't be shut down quickly, there are times when you will be generating far too much power. If you don't have any way of storing it, that excess power will be wasted.
and yes, it will not; by itself, replace oil or LNG.... but it WILL make a big assed dent in the use of oil and LNG for power on the grids this system will supply.
It would make a difference in natural gas consumption, at the cost of higher electricity bills. But useful oil isn't used for power generation in the US. The little oil that is used is residual oil and petroleum coke, two waste products from the refining process that aren't much use for anything other than power generation.
The only exception are generators, typically running on diesel. But they are used for backup and off grid, so increasing the electrical supply won't make any difference to them. In fact, increasing the price of electricity by using more expensive forms of power generation may result in increased use of generators, because it will narrow the cost gap between generators and mains electricity.
So, aside from the fact that he's making a buck, and the libs hate his politics, anybody got any valid reasons why he should be dismissed as 'irrelevant'?
Look at the experience of other countries that have spent fortunes subsidising "alternative" power generation. Germany, for example, where the government pays massive subsidies for solar power, but industry is warning unless there is an urgent expansion of coal power stations the country will start suffering blackouts, because solar might appear green but it doesn't generate enough electricity.
Same in Britain, where the government has spent a decade subsidising wind farms, which still make up less than 1% of our power generation. The government is now doing a U turn and promising a massive expansion of nuclear power, and new coal power stations, despite writing both off 10 years ago as "not green enough". Even then, there's a big doubt whether the new conventional power stations will be built in time to avert blackouts in the middle of the next decade.
The solution to expensive oil isn't to increase the cost of generating electricity.
