Does an old computer game developed by an oil company really provide the ‘big picture’ about energy? – vtdigger.org
The commentary author provides some welcome, if perhaps unintentional, comic relief in his recent piece titled “Looking at the big picture in energy options” in which he appears to be basing his opinions on the merits of renewable energy on a 20-year-old computer game. A 20-year-old game that was developed by an oil company. That’s right, his big contributions to the “big picture” are the startling facts that it’s not sunny or windy all the time and that Chevron would “ding their score” if his students tried to power their computer-game hospital with computer-game renewable power.
Fortunately, we do have a few more recent (not to mention less biased) places to look if we are interested in the cost and reliability of renewable power. The national laboratories have weighed in and said that it is cost-effective to get upward of 90% of our power for the entire country from renewables using existing technologies. Several of Vermont’s utilities — no pushovers when it comes to energy costs and reliability — have set goals of getting to 100% renewable power within the decade.
The author is right that energy investments involve trade-offs, the question: who do you trust to evaluate them? Some pretty smart engineers who did the math and figured out we can make 100% renewables work or a 20-year-old knock-off version of SimCity developed by an oil company with a vested interest in making renewables look bad so they could keep their dirty profits flowing as long as possible?
Jonathan Dowds, deputy director of Renewable Energy Vermont
Burlington
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