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Wind Energy Beats Nuclear & Carbon Capture For Global Warming Mitigation

Mike Barnard, July 29, 2014 (Clean Technica)

“There’s an enduring myth…that only nuclear can be scaled to sufficient capacity to reduce the impacts of global warming, and that wind energy is much less scalable…And there’s another myth related to carbon capture and sequestration being more significant than renewables…China is the true test bed for maximum scalability of nuclear vs wind. It has a tremendous gap between demand and generation…[It built 16-plus gigawatts of 40.35% capacity factor wind in 2013 and 4.7 gigawatts of 90.9% capacity factor nuclear from 2010 to 2013]…[T]hat’s about 6.5 GW of real capacity of wind energy in one year vs 4.3 GW of real capacity for nuclear over four years. That’s roughly six times more real wind energy capacity than nuclear per year…[N]uclear is a good choice where it can actually be built and where it makes economic sense…But reality limits nuclear growth mostly to China and India…[J]ust solar and wind so far have eliminated perhaps thirteen times the CO2e of all the CCS projects to date [and are being built much more quickly at a much lower cost]…Doing a little math, it’s apparent that CCS will add…16.8 to 19.6 cents per KWh which puts existing coal plants impossibly deep into unprofitable territory…[In the U.S. Midwest]…the total price of newly built wind generation including PPA, PTC, grid interconnections and additional ancillary services is 5.4 cents per KWh and dropping…[T]he heavy lifting will be done by displacing fossil fuel generation with renewables…That’s what the empirical data tells us…” click here for more

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