Rutgers U. Professor: ‘To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity’
David McDermott Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of Energy without Conscience: "For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism...What applies in the pandemic also applies—and also with desperate urgency—in the climate crisis. We can live with some intermittency and rationing—at least until batteries and other forms of energy storage are up and running everywhere."
"The United States has built a vast infrastructure for generating, transmitting, and consuming it—all almost entirely based on planet-destroying fossil fuels and nuclear power." - "Renewables can provide that plenitude—and already do through wind and solar farms in Texas and California—but not necessarily all the time. The sun shines at us constantly, with more energy that we can possibly use at any moment, but the Earth’s rotation puts us in shadow at nightfall. And wind, of course, can simply stop. As a result, the leading fossil- and nuclear-free sources of energy bounce from feast to famine, raising the possibility of more frequent and longer power cuts. Critics—often supporters of natural gas—say wind and solar power are “not ready.†Renewables, they warn us, pose an “intermittency problem.†... "For those seriously concerned about climate change, the inverse—the demand for electrical continuity—may be the real problem...We ought to consider enduring much more than six hours of electrical downtime every year for the sake of transitioning more rapidly away from fossil fuels."
https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/10/08/rutgers-u-professor-to-save-the-climate-give-up-the-demand-for-constant-electricity/
