Frogs

[AlbertaFarmer5]

If you repeat it often enough, if you say it loud enough... Chuck will believe it is true.

[chuckChuck]

So A5 your only lame, often repeated argument is that Sask Power is wrong and doesn't know their cost of electricity from their generation sources? LOL

And you keep coming up empty handed when asked to prove Sask Power wrong!

Get your tail between your legs and keep running A5!

[TSIPP]

Capacity rating? The renewables don’t come close to capacity rating.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

You can prove that Sask powers speculative projections are potentially true by finding a region where the addition of wind and solar didn't result in much more expensive electricity to the consumers.
You tried Texas, but as we now know, it made it 20% more expensive for their consumers compared to their next door neighbors who stuck with fossil fuels.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Chuck, have I got a deal for you. Since you claim to be a capitalist farmer, I'll sell you a fleet of the cheapest new harvesting capacity that you can add to your fleet.

Threshing machines. The payments on your new combines are costing you $100's per threshing hour. I can get you into a fleet of threshing machines for a fraction of that cost per threshing hour. And you can use wood burning steam engines to power them, and horses to haul the stooks and grain and save the environment from CO2 at the same time.

Except, you can't sell your current combines because you will still need them when it gets too dark for the threshing crews without lights, so your payments will stay the same, but their cost per acre will go up a lot. You will just add the payments for the threshing machines.

You'll never buy fuel for the threshing machines, you'll just have to hire a crew year round to cut and spilt and cure and haul firewood, you'll pay that crew year around, even when the threshing machines aren't even in use. You will need to seed a large amount of farmland back to trees to keep up with the demand.

Your current swathers won't work, so you'll have to buy a fleet of binders, and horses to pull them, and harnesses, and build a barn to house the horses, and hire the crews to drive them, then feed and look after the horses year around, even if they aren't producing anything all winter. You'll have to devote a large proportion of your farmland to growing horse feed, those are acres that will no longer be growing crops you can sell. But you'll still have the payments on your existing swathers to swath for the combines you'll have to keep.

Just like wind and solar, the supply needs to be brought to where the demand is, and since a threshing machine is stationary, you'll need to buy a fleet of stook wagons and horses and hire the crews to haul the stooks to the threshing machines.

The threshers won't reach into your current grain carts and trucks, so you'll need to buy an entire fleet of grain wagons and crews to run them, but you'll still have to keep your trucks and carts to service the combines. Did you forget that those wagons don't have hoists? Now the elevators you haul to will have to install hoists to dump the wagons, should that cost be forced on all the other farmers who don't use it?

You will have more downtime, they require a lot of maintenance. With a road speed of 2 miles per hour behind the steam engine while you move from field to field across your 6000 acre farm, you will need a lot of redundant capacity to make up for the travel time while the threshing machines don't do any productive work.

They are quite weather dependent. Everytime it rains, and every night, you'll have to remove all the belts from the thresher, and the canvases from the binders, better allow a lot of extra time for this.

The straw will all end up in a pile, if you burn it, you release CO2, since care about the environment, you will need to spend a lot of time and energy putting the straw back on the fields where it belongs.

But at least you can always claim that these new threshing machines have the cheapest cost of new threshing capacity. Unless of course you can actually do math.

[shtferbrains]

The basic argument goes back to the government regulating the economy to support their manta of controlling the weather.
Western governments have lost touch with their taxpayers.
Not hard to see why China wants to interfere in our politics.
They sell us all the things needed for the new green economy but aren't playing in the same game.
We are handing it to them.
They get stronger and we decline.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

The basic argument goes back to the government regulating the economy to support their manta of controlling the weather.
Western governments have lost touch with their taxpayers.
Not hard to see why China wants to interfere in our politics.
They sell us all the things needed for the new green economy but aren't playing in the same game.
We are handing it to them.
They get stronger and we decline.

It takes a lot of cheap coal to make expensive green energy.

[chuckChuck]

https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2023/Aug/Renewables-Competitiveness-Accelerates-Despite-Cost-Inflation"

"For the last 13 to 15 years, renewable power generation costs from solar and wind power have been falling. Between 2010 and 2022, solar and wind power became cost-competitive with fossil fuels even without financial support. The global weighted average cost of electricity from solar PV fell by 89 per cent to USD 0.049/kWh, almost one-third less than the cheapest fossil fuel globally. For onshore wind the fall was 69 per cent to USD 0.033/kWh in 2022, slightly less than half that of the cheapest fossil fuel-fired option in 2022."

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Do you think IRENA might be missing something from their equation?
If this cheapest form of energy always results in higher consumer costs, perhaps you might want to revisit some assumptions.

After all, we now have decades of real life data proving that it is never cheaper. There's no need to rely on projections such as this.

[shtferbrains]

We are shutting down dependable plants to replace them with a much less dependable source.
The ones we are shutting down are paid for.
How does it get cheaper than that.
We aren't reducing global CO2 production. We are exporting it to Asia Pacific countries and importing all the consumer goods and heavy manufacturing from them.

[fjlip]

Chuck, have I got a deal for you. Since you claim to be a capitalist farmer, I'll sell you a fleet of the cheapest new harvesting capacity that you can add to your fleet.

Threshing machines. The payments on your new combines are costing you $100's per threshing hour. I can get you into a fleet of threshing machines for a fraction of that cost per threshing hour. And you can use wood burning steam engines to power them, and horses to haul the stooks and grain and save the environment from CO2 at the same time.

Except, you can't sell your current combines because you will still need them when it gets too dark for the threshing crews without lights, so your payments will stay the same, but their cost per acre will go up a lot. You will just add the payments for the threshing machines.

You'll never buy fuel for the threshing machines, you'll just have to hire a crew year round to cut and spilt and cure and haul firewood, you'll pay that crew year around, even when the threshing machines aren't even in use. You will need to seed a large amount of farmland back to trees to keep up with the demand.

Your current swathers won't work, so you'll have to buy a fleet of binders, and horses to pull them, and harnesses, and build a barn to house the horses, and hire the crews to drive them, then feed and look after the horses year around, even if they aren't producing anything all winter. You'll have to devote a large proportion of your farmland to growing horse feed, those are acres that will no longer be growing crops you can sell. But you'll still have the payments on your existing swathers to swath for the combines you'll have to keep.

Just like wind and solar, the supply needs to be brought to where the demand is, and since a threshing machine is stationary, you'll need to buy a fleet of stook wagons and horses and hire the crews to haul the stooks to the threshing machines.

The threshers won't reach into your current grain carts and trucks, so you'll need to buy an entire fleet of grain wagons and crews to run them, but you'll still have to keep your trucks and carts to service the combines. Did you forget that those wagons don't have hoists? Now the elevators you haul to will have to install hoists to dump the wagons, should that cost be forced on all the other farmers who don't use it?

You will have more downtime, they require a lot of maintenance. With a road speed of 2 miles per hour behind the steam engine while you move from field to field across your 6000 acre farm, you will need a lot of redundant capacity to make up for the travel time while the threshing machines don't do any productive work.

They are quite weather dependent. Everytime it rains, and every night, you'll have to remove all the belts from the thresher, and the canvases from the binders, better allow a lot of extra time for this.

The straw will all end up in a pile, if you burn it, you release CO2, since care about the environment, you will need to spend a lot of time and energy putting the straw back on the fields where it belongs.

But at least you can always claim that these new threshing machines have the cheapest cost of new threshing capacity. Unless of course you can actually do math.

What a GREAT analogy! Thanks...THINK CC, exactly how wind/solar interact with gas/coal generation...CHEAP but plain STUPID!

[fjlip]

Speaking of FROGS...they spanked the TURD in by election really hard!