Let's not downplay the simple fact that wind energy has the lowest levelized cost of electricty and has for over a decade now (in the US and AFAIK on average worldwide, not universally). As an intermittent source it's never going to be a silver bullet, but it's hardly surprising that a power source that's not just cheap but also has a long track record of being _consistently_ cheap gets a lot of usage. And the only other real competition is solar, which would likely have the same issues as wind in the specific case of the original article.

Much as nuclear energy is both green, reliable and safe - it's also hard to imagine it becoming cost-competitive at the scale that wind and solar are. Better regulation might help a bit, but even in places like South Korea where nuclear costs are unusually low and solar/wind costs unusually high they're basically competitive - and I wouldn't be surprised for solar+wind to fall in price there too, once they've slightly more mass in the market.

The focus on wind+solar over nuclear is less due to greenwashing that due to penny-pinching.

Unfortunately, the best time to build a nuclear plant was 20 years ago. Shame.

By "green" are you referring to the radioactive sludge it produces? ;) I'm not anti-nuclear energy, but it comes with a host of problems and costs that many nuclear energy supporters tend to gloss right over. Chief among them is that no one wants these facilities in their backyard or anywhere near their backyard. Part of this is just NIMBY-ism, but the other part is a well-warranted fear of an accident or negligence leading to contamination. It's all great until the private equity firms take over.

Wind has been producing 29% of our electricity over the last year in Blighty.

Source: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical

It's currently 16:31 GMT, and the 'live' feed says 17.8 % of the UK grid is currently running on wind as I'm typing this.

Source: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

You must be delusional if you think wind power is greenwashing.

How's the nuclear power production in Spain?

Logically, yes, but it doesn't always happen. Ballmer forgot MS was a software company, thought it was only a Windows company, and wasted a decade. Oil execs look at the cost of change, and decide they're not energy companies, only oil because that's what they know.

Except probably 99% of their profits come from oil. 99% of their infrastructure is setup for oil which has been honed and put into place over decades.

Can you imagine the cost of revamping all of that? And then they have to explain to their shareholders why their profits are a fraction of what they normally are, otherwise their stock price will sink which will affect the company in myriad ways.

There's so much to this space that I'm ignorant of, but I know enough to know that it's really not that simple.

Chevron is an oil and natural gas company, not an electricity production company. Directly producing green energy is a bit like Apple selling Windows PCs.

There is a reason why newer companies and younger people tend to make bigger changes…

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not because they can’t.

It’s because all that they have built up from hard work has resulted in responsibilities to a lot of people that also now hold them back.

If the profits or barriers to entry are less favorable they might be disinclined to do that.

companies are made of people, and generalally all of the execs in charge cut their teeth in the oil and gas sphere

I have a little experience on this aspect. There are tons of local governments who weigh in on the location of these lines and that can be a contentious process to get buy-in from them.

Sounds like the people who live there might beg to differ with you.

The usual reasons: maintenance costs on the old unused gear, environmental concerns of new construction, locals who don't want it, partnering with a transmission company, partnering with a distribution company, getting the capital to pay for it all & the feasibility of financial return, among many others.

There are hundreds of potential projects like this they could invest in. It's very likely that one of those other projects is way more likely to succeed, so they pick those projects, and take this one as a writeoff. They could possibly still come back to it, but probably not.

Infrastructure to physically carry the energy away from the power station, aggregate it with other stations’ energy, and transmit it safely to the customers who can use it.

To tie in a major new source of energy, you need to make sure the wires and stuff can handle it, which involves physical construction and planning at a level above an individual operator. The US regulator estimates that 2,500GW of clean energy projects, like this one, are already built and stuck in the backlog of interconnection requests.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/transmission-inter...

Thankyou. I will use more articles from that site from now on.

No, they have an interconnection agreement. They're already connected to the grid.

I would expect a company whose business is building and operating power plants, to be more adept at navigating the red tape surrounding the grid that they operate than you are.

> Chevron did everything wrong on this wind farm even before they built it. This is not a wind issue, this is not a government issue, and this is not a PacifiCorp issue.

What do you mean by all this? Anything specific? The parent comment seems to imply they just haven’t built interconnect yet

Fundamentally, Grid operators have to realtime-match demand + generation, and have a bunch of grid-scale devices along the way to sink excess generation temporarily, or have (expensive) peaker plants to ramp up generation temporarily. For example, natural gas can respond quicker to demands, but nuclear power plants typically cannot. Typically nuclear plants will feed into the average 'base load' and the more responsive plants will handle temporary peaks.

In order to financially make this work, there are a whole litany of agreements + commitments in place, as well as some "free market magic". (Remember a few years ago when spot prices for electricity spiked into obscene territory?)

Renewables provide unique challenges for these operations, as you cannot simply turn sun and wind off and on. Similarly, you can't just pump uncontrolled electricity into the grid w/o the operator's coordination.