Green Canvassers

A couple of days ago I had a door-to-door canvasser come to my house. Among other things he had a petition to force Ohio electric companies to produce 20% of their electricity through renewable sources. I pointed out that this was going to be expensive. If it was economically feasible then they would already be doing it. His reply was that it will be expensive but not as expensive as having our oil run out.

This shows just how poorly informed these canvassers are. Around half of our nation's power comes from coal. Nuclear and gas are nearly tied for distant second and third places. Fuel Oil is fifth place. Here's how they stack up.

The following amount of electricity, in gigawatt-hours (GWh), was generated from the nation's fuel mix:

• Coal: 2,013,179 GWh
• Nuclear: 781,986 GWh
• Gas: 757,974 GWh
• Hydro: 263,029 GWh
• Fuel Oil: 122,522 GWh
• Biomass: 63,856 GWh
• Other (geothermal, non-wood waste, wind, and solar): 52,142 GWh

My source is here. It only took me a minute to find this with Google.

I did take the opportunity to quietly inform the gentleman that new coal-fired power plants are being blocked by activists and replaced with gas-turbine ones. This will raise the price of natural gas a lot. It is unclear how well these will work out. Currently gas-fired turbines have been used for short-term load balancing, not constant generation. They may not cope. I expect rolling brown-outs within a decade.

I didn't take the time to tell him about the problems with wind. There are several. It comes and goes at its own schedule. You can't turn it up during a heat wave when everyone has the air conditioning on. If it blows too hard then windmills have to be shut down or they break. Worst - the power grid cannot store power. If the wind is gusting then the power plants can only take the low-end of the production in order to produce constant power.

Coal is cheap and plentiful but activists hate it so new coal-fired power plants are being blocked and many power companies aren't even trying to push them through.

But the activists have no idea of any of this.