Excellent article concerning Texas’ efforts in renewable energy. Link By the way, is it Texas’ or Texas’s? Anyway, I’ve driven through Nolan County many times and didn’t realize that county alone produces more wind energy than the entire state of California.
I am no power guru, but I thought capacity was generally stated in megawatts or gigawatts, and actual output was stated in hours...such as kilowatt hours. Two identical turbines can produce different amounts of electricity depending on the load factors...
You're right txecon- perhaps the author of the article misspoke I love the Texas wind story- and it's even more funny that GWB got the whole thing going (supposedly without much thought given to it), and the momentum kept going after he left due to our very laxed permitting standards.
I was offered a contract to obtain my power through wind but its so much more expensive than natural gas or regular electric, it wasnt worth it.
Regular electric often means coal. And the negative externalities such as health issues are not priced into your coal electricity. In Texas- it is very well documented that wind is producing at similar and occasionally better rates than conventional gas electricity. So, your anecdote is the exception rather than the norm.
mcbrett, from everything I know about GWB, it isn't funny at all. He has always seemed to me to be a conservationist type. His house outside Waco is supposed to be very 'green' in design, and while the whole ethanol thing was a bad idea, it wasn't because he wasn't trying to get us to move towards renewable fuels.
general35, My wife and I just switched to Green Mountain Energy. We were with TXU for 14.9 cents a kwh, and we are now at 11.7 cents per kwh. Their energy is 100% water and wind. Not sure what % is wind, or how much a wind only plan is, but we feel much greener, and the rate is much better.
This is a major flaw in figuring economics-the figures do not include all the costs. Cheap coal energy is only cheap in certain ways-it doesn't figure the cost of the health problems that will be subsidized by governmental health plans or the cost, like it or not, that we will be paying to remedy global warming problems. Nuclear energy, as far as I know, does not figure the cost of mothballing the plant, which only has a useful life of so many years (25?) and is very expensive to shut down. Of course, there isn't even a guess about what disposing of the waste will cost in the future, since there isn't any good way to do it yet. Just a few of the reasons why we should move forward aggressively on green energy options, which as the article points out, are also economically beneficial to the Texans profiled.
general35, My wife and I just switched to Green Mountain Energy. We were with TXU for 14.9 cents a kwh, and we are now at 11.7 cents per kwh. Their energy is 100% water and wind. Not sure what % is wind, or how much a wind only plan is, but we feel much greener, and the rate is much better. __________________________________________________ yeah, they are running a special on it in north texas right now. i got the letter in the mail. i was going to try the wind thing last year but at the time it was about 5 cents more per kwh
