I still think 800MW is a pipe dreams. Sure we can get the low hanging fruit like leaking ducts and incandescent bulbs. Maybe get a few hundred. When we get that knocked out then it will get exponentially more expensive per saved KW. It will be expensive stuff like insulation, windows, higher efficiency a/c units. Like I said some people will do it but a large portion of people won’t. What do we do then start buying people A/C units and windows. As an A/E customer I don’t want to pay for someone else’s home improvements. I am not saying it in impossible, I am just curious how they plan on conserving that amount of power. I haven’t seen anything saying how they plan on doing it. I can say I will earn a million dollars but just saying it won’t make it happen.

Also, the fossil fuel backup plants are always going up and down to balance the load due to wind’s intermittency and this leads to very inefficient combustion.

Wind farms also consume large amounts of electricity from the outside grid just to operate. Also because they are often built far away from cities in many parts of the U.S., they suffer from unduly high line loss of electricity across the great distances.

Whenever wind is installed to any great degree, massive transmission infrastructure is required. A huge cost to ratepayers that the wind pushers and politicians hide from Joe Ratepayer. But an inconvenient truth.

See the following link for a history of this sham.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html

This is a good, compromise plan –not perfect — but it will signal the wider market that Austin will be looking for the best deals out there on solar, biomass and wind while also growing our energy efficiency market. We have done 700 mWs of energy efficiency already in 20 years, and this plan calls for 800 MWs over the next 10 years. Ambitious but not impossible (and the TAsk force recommended setting a higher goal of 1000 MWs).

IN terms of wind development, fortunately in Texas we don’t have the same issues as you might in Maine — most of our wind power is in West Texas..where habitat and endangered species issues are not the same. But siting is important for certain bat and bird species and deaths do result. Unfortunately, no energy solution is perfect so the idea is to slowly transition from one set of energy resources –coal, gas and nuclear to another — wind, solar, some gas, energy efficiency and hopefully a way to store it all. IT will take time, but the AE plan is a good start toward a Just Transition.

Wind power is not the answer – alone. Even if we wanted to we probably couldn’t get all our energy needs from wind exclusively. That is why we also advocate for efficiency and other renewables like solar, geothermal, etc. Transmission is a bigger issue, in my mind, than the wind farms themselves. But the transmission issue can be overcome as well.

“Locals” who complain about wind turbines are mostly just NIMBY-ists. I have been to many wind farms. They are NOT noisy. The screech of an eagle is many times louder, the roar of a passing car or truck is many times louder. The WIND blowing past your ear lobes is louder! You can’t even hear the turbines until you are quite close. These NIMBY-ists are just thinking up complaints because they don’t want to have to deal with a development in their backyard (or the “eyesore” – which I really don’t get, I think they are pretty), meanwhile the poor and disenfranchised have to deal with more coal plants, more nuke plants, more oil refineries in their neighborhoods. There will always be a draw back to energy generation – there will always be a footprint. The objective is to minimize it as much as possible.

You’re worried about the small acreage of space needed for the base of a wind turbine? What about the people living in Appalachia who are having their mountains blown up and their waterways destroyed or poisoned by mountain top removal? Don’t cry because a few turbines will be put on your mountain ridge – be glad you still have a mountain! When you talk about energy generation and the costs you also have to consider what the costs are of the alternative.

Bird issues were a concern, but now with proper citing bird/bat deaths are minimized. Sky scrapers kill far more birds every year than wind turbines do. Where are the anti-wind advocates when a new sky scraper is proposed? Where are all the bird-activists calling for the demolition of all tall buildings? And I assure you, coal plants kill far more birds (and other wildlife) than wind turbines do.

Finally, it is not unreliable. Wind can be predicted with great certainty a day in advance. Solar will always generate at least some electricity between sun up and sun down. Any possible shortcomings can easily be accounted for, particularly when you start increasing the versatility of your renewable generation and even just the versatility of your wind farm locations and overall production. If you don’t like wind farms then advocate more strongly for distributed generation, efficiency, solar power, etc. But I cannot fathom someone believing that wind is even remotely close in terms of public health and ecological destruction to a coal plant, nuke plant, or even natural gas plant.

I think the worries about getting from A to B are a little misguided. This plan has been designed over a 2+ year period, its been looked at by Austin Energy staff, independent consultants, and a volunteer commission representing industry, energy experts, citizen groups, and environmentalists. At all levels these folks were looking at very specific projections and plans for implementation – all of them with an eye towards cost and reliability.

The idea that we can save 800MW is not a pipe dream. Just look at the results we’re getting back from point-of-sale home inspections. There are AC ducts pouring energy into attics throughout the city. And as electricity costs rise (which they will do no matter what plan ultimately gets implemented) the incentive to conserve or generate your own will only improve.

But at the end of the day, it really is good that people are chiming in. Austin set a new standard for transparency in developing this policy. People should stay engaged, get good answers to their questions, and offer good ideas.

Another problem I see is adding all the renewable and having nothing to back them up. Renewable are the least reliable of all forms of power generation. Sure we will be green but we will be in the dark a lot more.

Mitchell, I’m just going to have to disagree with you there. Our current dirty energy system is out of touch with what America needs (to put it lightly), and I just don’t see a way to fix it without moving forward with cleaner, greener solutions. How we do energy nowadays is the root of so many major societal problems. Worried about public health? The way we do energy is making us sick. Worried about the economy? We’re losing the clean tech boom to China. Worried about the environment? The way we do energy is poisoning our air and water ways. Worried, as you certainly appear to be, about mountains? We’re blowing them up to keep the lights on (mountain top removal). Worried about global warming? The way we do energy is radically changing the climate.

Every new megawatt of renewable energy is one less megawatt of energy we get from dirty fossil fuels. Every new megawatt of renewable energy means the air is cleaner for a child with asthma, or a woman worried that her baby will struggle with a learning disability. Every new megawatt of renewable energy means we’re closer to building up a new economy. Every new megawatt of renewable energy means we’re a little bit closer to derailing catastrophic global warming.

Plus, we DO try to educate the public; that’s why we’ve got this blog going! And I couldn’t agree with you more on energy efficiency, that’s one of our key issues as well (and one of the reasons I am so supportive of Austin Energy’s generation plan).