California is doing this right now with rolling blackouts because wind and solar can't meet the demand.
Personal wind has been tried for years and been partially successful for homeowners. The original towers for home owners relied on government subsidies and tax credits to be successful. When the subsidies went away, home owners abandoned those dinosaurs and had them removed. I made a ton of money contracting to climb those towers and remove the generators, then remove the towers. They were very small units about 100' tall. Took a few hours to do the job with a crane for assistance.
The new home wind generators are much more efficient and can reduce the overall electrical bill by a lot, but the concept of selling back to the utility company's is a sales trick. They don't buy it back at consumer prices, only at generating prices which is a whole lot lower.
Since getting into the RV world, we have been looking at the solar that can be installed on an RV so you can go off grid and power most everything with solar power. The price and the addition of three to four batteries that have to be replaced on occasion has pretty much driven us away from that option.
Alternative power is OK but it will never meet the carbon footprint the dims always tout. The cost to build, transport and erect will never make carbon footprint minimums, and with its current design, never will in the lifetime of the industry as we know it today.
Maybe in the future.
We are always progressing in the science of power production.
Base load coal plants are also progressing in the ability to maintain clean emissions.
In my 16 years at a coal fired power plant, one of my jobs was emissions monitoring. If we cheated on the reporting to the Feds, two people would go to jail. The Plant Manager and the Tech that lied on the emissions daily reports.
We were instructed to NEVER lie or produce misinformation. The company would pay the fine if required.
OG&E has always been in front of reducing emissions. They recently added scrubbers to the Sooner Power Plant at a cost of multi-multi millions of dollars to meet the requirements that are not even in effect, because they are always looking forward.
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If Obama and Biden had put the billions wasted on "green energy" that went bankrupt into better scrubbers for coal plants he could have lowered our carbon emissions AND had cheap energy. Instead they wasted billions, shut down several coal plants and did nothing long term to cut emissions.
I'd love to have no need to depend on a local power grid . . . but to get things installed and completed the right way isn't cheap. If I went with solar I'd probably try to include a propane powered generator or something.
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