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Thank you, Terry Speicer, for not being rude, now if only you could avoid being inaccurate. To a degree you are correct, solar is not the most efficient form of producing energy, but efficiency is not the problem, capacity is a bigger problem. Solar can convert about 20 percent of the input to a useful output, about the same ratio as a car ICE. The biggest difference is that with fossil fuels you are paying for the fuel in the first place and paying for the waste at the end. Wind and solar have the weakness of not having a constant availability of input fuel but used in tandem can provide a nearly uniform supply of output, supplement that with a reserve supply of emergency energy from natural gas and we may reach the holy grail.
So, wind and solar don’t have to be efficient, they just have to run enough over the course of time to pay for their capital costs. Their marginal operating costs are dirt cheap, much cheaper than coal and gas plants. So why would you want to keep paying 300 pecent for fossil fuel when you can only recover about 20 percent to 50 percent of its potential. As for EVs, because they have storable power, they are vastly more efficient than ICEs, there are competitively priced EVs available, and the future IS EVs, over the life of a vehicle EVs are cheaper to operate and maintain: in the final analysis an EV is going to save you money, I am shopping for mine right now.
Jerry Hiniker,
Hovland
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