Chase the Wind
Stark County doesn't seem to have a Kentland-level wind farm, but there are a fair number of wind turbines scattered independently around.
It's been a couple of years since I did one of those posts where I dug through Department of Energy reports to see how wind turbines or solar farms are doing in their quest to displace fossil fuels, and I don't feel like doing one right now. I've seen a lot of people on social media touting the big gains in electricity production from renewable resources. Everything I see continues the error I've often brought up of measuring these gains in the amount of electricity produced instead of the percentage of total electricity that comes from renewables, and I'm always suspicious of that. Every time I've looked at actual numbers, electricity consumption has been increasing at rates far higher than the production increases from renewables, which means renewable growth isn't even keeping pace with the increase in consumption demand. I haven't really looked at this since the sale of electric cars started taking off and the data mining craze hit. And now I see people talking about the big jump in electricity consumption from Artificial Intelligence programs. AI brains are hungry, and my guess is they're still mostly being fed by natural gas.
I might get bored sometime soon and do some digging. But not today.
Chase the Wind
Stark County doesn't seem to have a Kentland-level wind farm, but there are a fair number of wind turbines scattered independently around.
It's been a couple of years since I did one of those posts where I dug through Department of Energy reports to see how wind turbines or solar farms are doing in their quest to displace fossil fuels, and I don't feel like doing one right now. I've seen a lot of people on social media touting the big gains in electricity production from renewable resources. Everything I see continues the error I've often brought up of measuring these gains in the amount of electricity produced instead of the percentage of total electricity that comes from renewables, and I'm always suspicious of that. Every time I've looked at actual numbers, electricity consumption has been increasing at rates far higher than the production increases from renewables, which means renewable growth isn't even keeping pace with the increase in consumption demand. I haven't really looked at this since the sale of electric cars started taking off and the data mining craze hit. And now I see people talking about the big jump in electricity consumption from Artificial Intelligence programs. AI brains are hungry, and my guess is they're still mostly being fed by natural gas.
I might get bored sometime soon and do some digging. But not today.