Solar and Wind are Retarding

the efforts to make the power grid more efficient and greener. I use the word retarding because it means exactly what I want to express, which is that the current focus on shifting power production to wind and solar with the current grid, which is the way we distribute electricity, is holding back progress to make the grid better. Why you might ask, well firstly because too much of the money is going to solar and wind production. As a result of the stimulus package the government has spent over 12 billion dollars on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, but the focus has been on renewable energy.
Now I’m not saying that renewable energy is a bad thing. I think it’s a very good thing, but I think the Efficiency portion of the equation is more important. The problem with current wind and solar power is the same problem we’ve always had with solar and wind power. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind does not always blow. That’s a hard fact of life, and what you might not realize is that if the solar panel isn’t soaking up the sun and the wind turbine isn’t getting it’s fair share of the wind then the turbine isn’t turning and electricity is not being made and you can’t turn on your lights or run your refrigerator. So in a system with only solar and wind you end up being reliant on the sun and the wind to tell you when you can turn your lights on or condition your air. If you ask me, that’s a step backwards isn’t it?
Now, let’s say we could somehow store the electricity from the solar and wind power production and use it later, that would solve the problem right?. And then you say “But we can!” and I say “Not really, at least not well.” Batteries suck as storage units for electricity, and they suck harder the larger you build them, so the more energy you are trying to store the less efficient the battery becomes. You might also have heard about storing water via pumped hydro power, which works pretty well, but requires a hydroelectric dam or other large reservoir of water and correct geological formation. And while we use it as much as we can, it’s a mere fraction of what is needed. So we basically can’t store electricity right now in the way we would need to to rely on wind and solar. Right now it literally is like I said before, the electricity has to be produced when you want to use it.
Therefore any move to make us more dependent on wind and solar power is a retarded move. Money should be going to the storage problem. If we can figure out how to store electricity easier and more efficiently then it suddenly makes solar and wind more viable. But hey if you don’t like answering the storage question then we could also put money into figured out how to make wind and solar better at producing electricity, cause right now they do a very poor job of this. This would make them much more useful on the grid, although calm nights would still result in major power outages. But no, that’s not what we spend our money on. We spend our money on putting in crappy solar power plants and crappy wind farms and we call it progress, even though it’s not.

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