Just Some Poor Schmuck

How too much wind power could actually hurt salmon

COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE - Wind turbines are the hottest rage in ‘going green’ but the technology has a dangerous side for endangered salmon in the Columbia River.
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At the end of June, there was an unexpected surge in wind power and too much energy was created for the regional grid to handle. To compensate, the dams cut their power by spilling more water.

Spilling more water is dangerous for fish because water plunging from the dams into the river becomes saturated with air. Air is mostly nitrogen and salmon do not like nitrogen saturation.
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we actually have enough electricity to meet demand in the Northwest but excess green power produced here can’t just be sent back east.

That’s because the electrical grid in the Western United States has little connection to the rest of the country.

In August, the Bonneville Power Administration asked gas and coal-fired facilities to look at ‘generation increases or generation decreases.’ In short, they asked if the facilities would be willing to produce less power when wind turbines are producing at high levels.

The rub with that is that anyone who owns a coal or gas-fired electricity plant made a huge investment and is essentially being asked to cut their income.

You see, the U.S. power grid is made up of local grids with little connectivity to each other.

So why not build a nation-wide grid? NIMBY and environmentalists.

Environmentalists don’t like transmission lines. They don’t like dams, coal or natural gas generating plants, LNG, natural gas pipelines or nuclear generating plants. They don’t like any practical means of generating or transmitting electricity. But they do like electric cars.

The NIMBY part of it is because California has a huge appetite for electricity but their environmentalist keep them from building power plants. They will pay top dollar for electricity, especially if it is “green” electricity. This leads people in the Northwest to be wary of connecting to a nation-wide grid because most of the electricity would be transmitted down to California resulting in higher prices locally.

The environmentalists want our electricity need to be filled by Magic Pixie Dust, which unfortunately doesn’t exist yet and many of the NIMBYs sold their property in California and moved up here to get away from what they built there. They got their and screw you.