
Ten percent of the electricity generation in US now comes from wind and solar - shawnee_
http://www.salon.com/2017/06/15/the-u-s-hit-a-wind-and-solar-power-milestone-in-march_partner/
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D-Coder
It's seven percent annually, 10% for one month. (This is covered slightly
better in Ars Technica.) Spring and autumn have lower energy use because less
heating and cooling is needed, and wind works particularly well at those
times, so the ratio is better than the annual rate at those times.

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api
I think we are at the early stages of another major "disruptive" event. In
20-30 years fossil fuels could be obsolescent. I'm sure everyone realizes how
incredibly destabilizing this will be to the world economic order among other
things.

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BLKNSLVR
This is the only rational explanation for the illogical "maintain the status
quo" arguments against wind and solar that come from the halls of power - in
Australia anyway.

It's understandable in that short-sighted human perspective.

The combination of clean electricity, electric cars, and driverless cars is a
holy trinity of disruption and it's sitting right on our doorstep.

~~~
api
Yes. They frame it as 'stop hippies from wasting our money on namby-pamby
renewable fantasies' but the real concern is 'stop the tech industry from
destroying the entire fossil fuel economy with disruptive innovation.'

Here's a list of jobs that renewables and EVs will destroy:

Oil/gas drillers, oil refiners, loads of car service jobs (oil changes etc.),
oil/gas shippers and pipeline workers, oil/gas traders, coal miners, engine
mechanics, everyone who works for a filling station, an entire internal
combustion engine supply chain, ... I could keep going for a very long time.
We're talking huge double-digit fractions of developed nations' economies and
more than fifty percent of some countries' economies.

Imagine if someone made food or pharmaceuticals obsolete. It's like that.

Personally I suspect that if the Russia<>Trump allegations are true it's about
getting an anti-renewable president in there to stall or kill this disruptive
event. Russia's economy is >50% fossil fuel based and disruption of fossil
fuels would _destroy_ them. We're talking total economic collapse. They're in
a worse position than Saudi Arabia since they have less cash on hand to
diversify.

SA is buying loads of tech via SoftBank right now and IPOing Aramco to cash
out and hand it off to people who don't see what's coming.

In 50 years we will have nearly infinite energy from solar. It will be dirt
cheap, possibly almost 'too cheap to meter' at normal user scales. (Yes the
same claims were made for nuclear power, but that was back when they thought
fusion would be easy. If fusion had been easy those predictions would have
come true. Fission has inherent costs and can't scale like this.)

