I want to thank Marilyn Strong for her very well-written and obviously heartfelt “Viewpoint” article in the May 9 Press. Her intelligence and unwavering support of wind and solar are a combination I encounter frequently—well-meaning and sincere, but just not possible. The issue is best expressed by asking a very simple question: What do you do to get the 30,000 megawatts New England needs on an early winter evening with no wind blowing and no sun, given the fact you cannot store electricity at all at the 30,000 MW level?
The answer is you still need every single watt of thermal or nuclear power plant energy, even if wind and solar sporadically made a significant amount of energy toward that 30,000 MW, which in fact they cannot do. Wind and solar cannot eliminate even one of those power plants on that winter evening.
The Cape Wind project involves about 300 huge windmills, which rate about 360 MW in total output; but the wind blows only 30 percent of the time, making the average 120 MW. Even that huge project, lining the beautiful coast with windmills of gigantic size, will make only 120 MW out of that 30,000. That is .004 of what we need for New England, less than half of 1 percent. Should we subsidize or support that? Solar, even worse, averages over the course of a 24-hour period only 16 percent of its maximum output, which occurs at noon.
The fact is that beyond the miniscule capacity and erratic availability of wind and solar compared to the need, the economics are so poor that there would not be a single watt of wind or solar connected to the grid without being subsidized by renewable energy certificates.
Yet by changing just one of many existing gas power plants from steam to combined-cycle (gas turbine plus steam) we could add 600 MW to the grid, five times Cape Wind, with no increase in carbon emissions or gas consumption, and with no windmills. If we really want to do something meaningful about energy now, that is what we need to do. But no one will get rich from that, as they do from renewable energy certificates. There are not even any green renewable energy certificates available for what is truly low-hanging fruit (combined cycle).
Maybe all the R&D cash wasted on things that will obviously be ineffectual due to scale ought to be used to solve some of the issues with nuclear power that Marilyn so carefully enumerated in her article. Those can be fixed, but the utterly miniscule total energy capacity and the storage issues with wind and solar cannot be fixed at the 30,000 MW level.
John Grady
Slough Road
