With rapid advances in AI and with the continuing overall significant increase in demand for electricity, electricity generation sources, more than ever, need to be both clean and reliable.

 

Given the limitations of low capacity renewable energy sources like industrial wind plants and utility scale solar, leading tech companies are now pivoting away from intermittent renewable energy sources and relying on high capacity and dispatchable power from small scale nuclear plants.

​

Although, the federal government has been aggressively subsidizing wind and solar power for 35 years now, utility scale wind as well as utility scale solar drawbacks and limitations have never been more apparent. For example, there are four states where wind is the single biggest generating source. Surprisingly, none of these states have attractive per capita emission profiles due to the intermittence of wind energy production that requires fossil fuel backup.

​

Other increasingly important issues that continue to limit the growth of utility scale low capacity renewables include:

​

• Installation cost and supply chain issues impacting materials and sourcing.

• Transmission costs and logistics.

• Land use and siting issues.

• Environmental impacts and fragmenting local ecosystems.

• Audio and visual impacts on people and animals.

• Impacts on raptors and on marine life from land and sea turbines respectively.

• Inability to deliver reliable baseload energy that corresponds to grid demand.

• The need for lithium batteries that are apparently not environmentally friendly.

• The need for always on “spinning reserves” typically via fossil fuels.

• The need for more not less grid capacity to kick in when low capacity renewables can’t.

• Inability to replace baseload fossil fuel power in New England. (rather than displace)

​

A good portion of the low capacity renewable energy limitations above are further compounded by the seasonal weather patterns unique to New England and the ISO-NE grid generation sources.

​

NHWW believes in protecting and preserving the environment but not by blasting, bulldozing and deforesting our mountains and ridge lines with the mistaken belief that destroying nature will somehow protect it.

​

As ISO-NE has done, grid operators all across the country must eliminate coal and oil in order to have a stellar emissions profile like ISO-NE does. That emissions profile has very little to do with low capacity renewables as we read the EIA and ISO-NE data.

​

As several leading tech companies lead the way to high-capacity, zero emission nuclear generation technologies, and as natural gas replaces coal and oil, as carbon capture begins to scale, the 35 year and running expectation that wind and solar would prove to be a panacea is now being effectively challenged by more pragmatic and effective approaches.

​

These developments are cause for hope. Keep in mind, however, that the USA accounts for 12%, and dropping, of global emissions. So, these newer technologies and ideas will need to be, as we hope they will, embraced globally.