Comment & Debate
“Pickens’ Audacious Wind-for-Gas Plan Flawed?”. CNBC. 8 July 2008 – One key virtue of natural gas power plants is the critical ability to supply ‘peaking capacity’ —electricity needed to quickly meet surges in demand, such as air-conditioning use in the summer time, he explained. Wind — along with coal and nuclear power — has no such capability. It is also an intermittent energy source, although this shortcoming could be mitigated by future advances in battery storage technology.
“That’s going to be an issue if you are going to try to supplant natural gas with wind, which is a variable fuel, and which is not yet been the kind of thing you can count on as a base load generation option,” added James Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, another leading utility organization.