Yes. I do. I can see it. I cross it on a ferry. I swim in it. I drink it. I boat on it. I eat fish from it. It's called a "natural resource".
We are not foolish. We use it quickly. It's stored for a few months.
So, you'd rather we just let it run into the ocean?
It's not "locked up". It's stored briefly, then used. Managed, in other words.
I can't make sense of that statement, frankly. The reservoir fills during spring runoff and is released throughout the year until it re-fills the next spring. It's available for irrigation and other uses year round.
Not true. There are many locations that are under-utilizing hydro power. There are many others that are using it wisely. Bhutan, for example has but one major export. Hydro power. To India. Run-of-the-river power solutions don't even require a reservoir.
So, I'm making up that "fairy tale? That, in fact we don't sell power into the US? Tell that to the residents of BC, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland, all of whom earn substantial revenue from that "fairy tale".
As for "loosing" energy in transport, line losses for high voltage AC power distribution average about 1% Even less with HVDC.
How many of your Nucs would be required to generate 50,000 gigawatt hours of power? BC alone does this continuously, silently and with zero emissions of any kind. And that's just from one little area. The eastern Canada hydro projects dwarf ours.
I said nothing about wind. I referenced solar and hydro, since I'm familiar with those systems. For wind-based fairy tales, I suggest you instruct the people of Washington State, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma et al on their stupidity. They have invested hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in wind farms. There are hundreds of new wind turbines in Oregon alone, all of which appear to be working quite well, thank you.
And, again to short circuit the inevitable cheap shots: they no longer kill many birds. The birds learned.
Peter, your missing the whole point. Storing water even for a couple of months would still have an effect on crops and farm animals. Although it may rain a lot where you are, this is not the case in many other places of the world. What is Mexico City going to do?
Furthermore, your comment asking how many nuclear plants we would need to generate 50,000 GW while bring up a damn that you have ignores some pretty important items. First, we are nearly maxed out in the developed world with locations to build damns. Although there may be places in the 3rd world, we literally have no more places to build damns.
So, in order to keep up with our energy production, we will need to build more plants, regardless of the type. Now the international standard is to build plants that can produce 1 GW of electricity. So, for your example of 50,000 GW, we would need 50,000 plants, either nuclear or wind/solar farms. A typical 1 GW nuclear plants takes up 3 acres, so we would need 150,000 acres to fill the need. Best case, from real life data, shows a 1 GW wind/solar farm takes up 1500 acres.
So to fill the 50,000 GW need with wind/solar farms would require 75,000,000 acres. To put that in perspective, that is 117187.5 square miles or a square that has sides of 342 miles. That is more then double the size of NY state!
Regardless of the type of power, the land needs to be clear cut. Would you rather destroy 150K acres (about half of NYC) or 75M acres (two entire NY states)? Good luck getting the public to adopt the latter. It always amazes me when so called environmentalists want to pick an energy source (wind/solar) that would completely destroy extremely large areas of natural habitats.
Insofar as your comment on those states using wind/solar, all, with the exception of TX, have seen their energy prices rise along with emissions. The only reason TX saw a decrease is because TX is the epicenter for natural gas fracking and natural gas is cheaper there then anywhere else. So the extreme decrease in the price of gas offset the increases that would have been seen from wind/solar.
Finally, your comment on less birds dying because they smarter really gave me a good laugh. These wind mills kill large birds, many of which are threatened species. The reason we see less of them dying is not because they are getting smarter, but because there are less of them around due to being killed. LOL It would be like me saying that the Passenger Pigeon wasn't actually hunted to extinction, they just got better at hiding, and that is why we don't see them anymore.
