Stephen Berberich News Today

In February 2021, Texas and wide swaths of North America were shut down by Winter Storm Uri, which caused massive blackouts and left millions of people without power for days. The winter storms exposed vulnerabilities in our country’s electrical grid, and underlined the pressing need for a more reliable energy system. Is a recent breakthrough in nuclear fusion a possible path forward?

The truth isnt so politically simple. In truth,  both wind turbines and gas plants froze because of the abnormal weather. And when Warren Buffets Berkshire Hathaway said it had plans for additional generation capacity in Texas, it wasnt talking about wind turbines. It was talking about more gas-fired power plants— ten more gigawatts of them. While the Texas Freeze hogged headlines in the United States, across the Atlantic, the only European country producing any electricity from solar f...

Yves here. This post indirectly raises a critical problem with renewable energy sources, that they are intermittent and not hugely reliable. And that’s before getting to another issue that this article does not address head on: the need for load-shifting even within a day, since peak energy production for solar (the favored clean source for residential energy) is mid-day, when peak consumption is late afternoon-early evening. So users in theory need a combination of storage or a different sou...

The truth isnt so politically simple. In truth, both wind turbines and gas plants froze because of the abnormal weather. And when Warren Buffets Berkshire Hathaway said it had plans for additional generation capacity in Texas, it wasnt talking about wind turbines. It was talking about more gas-fired power plants— ten more gigawatts of them. While the Texas Freeze hogged headlines in the United States, across the Atlantic, the only European country producing any electricity from solar farms w...