Introduction
-
Coal → carbon emissions
-
Natural gas → methan emissions
-
Nuclear → poisoned waste
-
Oil → cost in wartime blood
What is the grid?
In America, there is three of them:
-
one for the West and a bit of Mexico and much of western Canada
-
one for all of the East
-
smaller one for Texas
For the most part Mexico has its own grid, but Canada does not (except for its errant province, Quebec, which, like Texas, has chosen to keep its options for secession open by managing its infrastructure for itself).
Blackouts
-
2003 East Coast blackout
-
caused by overgrown tree and a computer bug blacked out weight states and 50 million
-
6 billion dollars lost in GDP
-
Problems
-
Both how renewables make power but where they make it
-
Wind farms go up where it is windy
- Wyoming or Iowa or West Texas good options but they don’t have very good lon-distance power lines to carry it to more promising markets Natural gas
-
Methane emissions from natural gas development and leaky transport infrastructure
-
undercut some of the climate advantage gas has over coal.
-
One 2012 study estimated that if the industry were to let leak only 3.2 percent of the gas produced, it could be worse for the climate than coal.