Empower Wisconsin | June 14, 2022
Dave Hoffman, Wall Street Journal
Letter to the Editor
Your editorial “America’s Summer of Rolling Blackouts” (May 28) identifies absurdities arising from attempts to bend the laws of physics to the demands of progressive ideology. How fatuous those demands are is illustrated by U.S. Energy Information Administration data pegging the “capacity factor” of utility-scale wind generation for 2021 at 34.6%.
In English, that means a U.S. wind farm can be relied on to generate its designed electricity output a bit less than two-and-a-half days in any given week—with the caveat that you don’t know which days. The EIA gives utility-scale solar panels a weaker capacity factor of 24.6%. Without continuously available fossil or nuclear capacity, the systems we’re told we must use for our electricity generation will guarantee nothing except the collapse of the grid.
Our leaders are intent on abandoning the world’s most reliable and affordable energy system in favor of something far more costly that doesn’t work very well.
