Plenty of serious analyses have shown wind in fact can provide a very significant fraction of our electricity, and that projections for the contributions of renewables are frequently serious underestimates:
Although the IEA has always been outspoken about the need to deploy more low-carbon technologies and address climate change, the organization has been known for its conservative analysis about the future growth of renewables.
For example, in 2003, it projected that non-hydro renewables would only represent 4 percent of global generation by 2030 under an aggressive policy scenario. But the industry hit that threshold in 2011 -- nearly twenty years early.
Eric Martinot, research director at the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, wrote in his recent Renewables Global Futures report about how the IEA and other international organizations have consistently underplayed the growth trajectory for renewables.
"Given the dynamic nature of this growth over the past decade, many past projections of renewable energy have already fallen short. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2000 projected 34 gigawatts (GW) of wind power globally by 2010, while the actual level reached was 200 GW. The World Bank in 1996 projected 9 GW of wind power and 0.5 GW of solar PV in China by 2020, while the actual levels reached in 2011, nine years early, were 62 GW of wind power and 3 GW of solar PV. The history of energy scenarios is full of similar projections for renewable energy that proved too low by a factor of 10, or were achieved a decade earlier than expected," wrote Martinot.
The writer uses a very limited quantitative factoid to draw a demonstrably false conclusion about the usefulness of wind - not coincidentally, as part of an effort to prevent wind from being used widely enough to make a difference.
So I'm curious - if you're anti-wind, as you seem to be, what do you propose instead?
= new reply since forum marked as read
