Re: theWatt Podcast 75

On the topic of wind power, a few thoughts: land use, intermitancy, cost, time frame.

1. The requirement for land is large. I`m not sure i would term this land use. In what sense is the land used? Crops can still be grown, cattle still reared, building built etc., In europe ofshoore is going to be vast, in the US it probably will be at a later date but you have a lot of land!

2. HV DC lines can be used to increase the consistancy of power supply. It is common for local wind power to be very low but extremely unusuall for the same to be he case 1000 miles away. Lots of work is being done on this for a North Sea power grid and enormus wind farm. UC Berkeley are doing some great work on demand damping, this combined with micro renewables offers great potential for renewable energy penetration in a smart grid.

3. If fossil fuel subsidies where ended i think wind would compete without the RPS. If you introduced a cap and trade scheme to internatise the cost of carbon i'm pretty sure it would out-compete all fossil fuels.

4. Wind power is an emerging technology. Evert new wind power factory represents not an increase in next years expected wind power output but an increase in the increase. Exponential growth in wind power is the reason that it is takens seriously as an investment opportunity. By the way, do you have a chess board? I would like one grain of rice on the first sqaure, two on the second four on the third etc.. Wind power can be deployed more quickly than practically any other generating unit.