Click to see the enlarged page-size image. You can google the IEEE to get a flavor of who they are, with the PES being its Power Energy Society special interest group - the power grid engineering profession mainly, motor and generator design and production engineers, high voltage and/or high power device physicists and vendors, software engineers focusing on power physics and phenomena, utilitiy managers and other related business folks, energy futures traders, etc.If you are interested in technical aspects of connecting intermittent stochastic power generation sources to the grid and maintaining stability while increasing carrying loads and oprating reliability you should look at this issue. It is as good a starting place as I have seen to get quick, factual, helpful information. While politicians of the GOP ilk in particular are busy saying wind power's a pipedream and an impossibility, the engineers, who are educated unlike GOP Palin types, are making it happen, cogently and economically.
So you can spend time swapping myths with like-minded GOP chums, or you can learn things and become a better person, better educated. Your choice.
Read. Learn. Avoid being an opinionated dunce and instead have informed opinions.
I will end with a sampling of this publication's pages (two facing pages plus a third from a following article), to show a part of the analysis in place and the progress being made by power engineers, meteorologists, statisticians, surveyors, maintenance technicians, right-of-way lawyers, and economics planners to keep your lights from flickering and your TV amusements dependable (except as to content). I expect in the post Civil War era there were politicians belittling the pipedream of a railroad grid for the nation, for reaching west.
There will always be crabgrass on the lawn of life. Sand in the gearboxes of progress. Republicans and other Luddites.
