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The article cites a 2016 report from Callan LLC, which is here: https://www.callan.com/ndt-stu...

In this report, Callan points out that decommissioning costs were $91B in 2016. They also state that the fund is stable at around 70% (which I assume is 70% of expected decommissioning costs).

So, even if the wind article were true, and there would be some massive apocalypse if some wind turbines stopped working, the $27B gap (gotten by subtracting $64B from $91B - I'm not sure where the other article got the $41.8B number) in nuclear decommissioning costs for 2016 would be enough to decommission 135,000 wind turbines. That's ~40% of the turbines operating worldwide (341,320 - from this page http://gwec.net/global-figures...).

Additional source.

So, if we are looking at the 52,343 turbines in the US at the end of 2016, and assume the 214,000 birds per year is accurate, that means each turbine has a kill rate of roughly one bird every 3 months. If we go with 368,000 birds per year, that's about 7 per year, or one dead bird every 7 and a half weeks.

Cat numbers and more.

85 million pet cats in 2016. At least 1,400 million bird deaths by cats in 2016. 16 birds per cat year, or one and a quarter birds per month. 43 per cat per year at the high end of the estimate, or just under 6 per week (and on Caturday, the cat rested).

I could find no useful statistics on radio towers in 2016, but that there were at least 106,257 cell towers that year.

sjbe, answer the question people ask or you will look like you're hiding something. The big problem here is that while you are right, you're also being an asshole in how you respond to people asking for information by not giving them anything close to consistent numbers for comparison.

First off, hanwha's work has been just in the last year. They had very little prior.

Except that Q.Cells, the German innovator that Hanwha bought, was established in 1999. And that's hardly the only non-American company involved in the staggering progress of the last two decades. Just the one geographically closest to me that I'm aware of.

in a field that WE CREATED

Really?

and have spent the most money EACH YEAR?

That claim likewise appears very dubious. Germany having twice the US capacity in 2006 means that at some time, US must have spent less. That's simple calculus. (Either that, or you spent indeed the most but with weak results, which wouldn't be exactly a step up from the former.)

BUT, R&D in it still remains dominantly in America.

That sounds more like wishful thinking than reality. If that were true, I'd still expect US-based manufacturers to be more competitive on the global market. After all, the very purpose of R&D is to improve your products' chances on the market, by improving performance and lowering costs. Yet in practice, American creations such as SunPower are DOA on foreign markets. Around here, you'd have to be bribed to buy them. Even the 100% German stuff is way cheaper.

I recently noticed an interesting convergence. The long term growth of both solar and wind capacity is exponential. The growth rate for solar is higher than for wind power but wind power is currently ahead in capacity. If we take a capacity factor of 20% for solar and 30% for wind, how long does it take to cover the roughly 20 TW of world energy demand?

For solar, taking 200 MW of capacity in 1995 and 100,000 MW in 2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... we get to 100,000,000 MW in 39 years from 1995 since (log(100 TW)-log(200 MW))/(log(100,000 MW)-log(200 MW))/17 years)=39 years. So 2034 is when we may expect solar PV to cover all energy demand.

For wind, taking 7,600 MW of capacity in 1995 and 369,553 MW in 2014 http://www.gwec.net/wp-content... we get to 60,000,000 MW in 39 years from 1997 since (log(60 TW)-log(7,600 MW))/(log(369,533 MW)-log(7.500 MW))/17 years = 39 years. So, 2036 is where we may expect wind power to cover all energy demand.

So, within just a couple years of each other, either technology can be projected to grow to cover all current demand.

A driver for ongoing exponential growth for PV is the still falling cost of manufacture. It is expected that panels will cost $0.36/W to produce in 2017. http://www.greentechmedia.com/...

This seems to be a faster rate than pledges coming in for Paris are anticipating so we might have some confidence that those pledges are going to be met.

Any third option for the foreseeable future is a hippie pipe dream

I don't get it, all the free market preachers are promising that my energy problems will shortly be solved by the free market but your view is such a fatalistic-don't-even-try-jaded response that you seem to doubt the free market can provide.

And if anyone thinks that solar panels and wind turbines are going to supply Tokyo with even a fraction of its power needs, you've obviously never been there.

I haven't been there. But no one's asking those solutions to go from zero to powering Tokyo over night. Look how gradually it's taken wind power to start in the United States (current numbers here). Japan is comparable at our state level and is looking at connecting with Korea, China, Russia and Mongolia power grids to buy more renewable energy. So why call these hippie pipe dreams? If these are hippie pipe dreams, when will our innovation kick in and 'save us' from nuclear and coal?

(unless you count regular, sustained blackouts as an option)

Did you hear that Japan did actually make small adjustments following Fukushima and called the movement setsuden?

I don't think the situation is as dire as you describe it and, frankly, dismissing all the alternative efforts really undermines what we should be working toward which are transitional phases until some breakthrough comes in fusion or an unforeseen source.

The original article can be found here. It has more figures, including some on China, and an interesting remark that Europe in total generates 66GW, which is another way to the per capita computation to moderate this first rank of US...

I went to a seminar on building new data centers. There we a part about location of new data center. The favorite places in Europe were France and Germany, because of cheap power generated by non-polluting nuclear power plant.

Ah but nuclear power is polluting. Nuclear power pollutes from the ground to the ground, cradle to cradle.

I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this.

It's not just the end-of-life, mining the uranium itself pollutes as does refining. Then there's the construction of the power plant. Nuclear power plants require prodigious amounts of steel and concrete, both of which are energy intensive and require a of mining as well.

not-so-sunny Europe

Europe has some pretty good wind sites though, as it does geothermal.