Wind power, an alternative, clean, green energy source is having a very good week.
On Monday, the #3 Reactor at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan NY shutdown after IP personnel reported seeing arcing on a transmission line tower. A mandatory event report was sent to the NRC as required (see report – click on event #51606). The incident was dutifully covered by the local press, although they all seemed to be reprinting the same AP report, with the same lack of any real information or any probing questions. However, this headline in Bloomberg Business caught our attention: “Wind Rescues New York Power After Nuclear Plant Shutdown” (see article). You would have been hard pressed to find it by googling., which might have been due to a lack of keywords or tags. None-the-less, there it was.
The article started off with these two paragraphs:
“A nuclear reactor that supplies Manhattan unexpectedly went offline Monday night, though you wouldn’t know it to look at power prices.
The Indian Point 3 plant, 27 miles (43 kilometers) north of New York City, automatically shut down at 7 p.m. because of an electrical disturbance, owner Entergy Corp. said in an e-mailed statement late Monday. The last time that happened, spot power more than doubled. Tuesday, wind turbines in the state came to the rescue, running close to capacity and compensating for the loss of the reactor.”
No wonder the mainstream press didn’t mention this in any of their articles. They see Entergy as a reliable news source and reprint their press releases and PR verbatim.
It’s a short article with the focus being on the economics of the event but here was an unapologetic Capitalist publication reporting on how an alternative energy source not only provided more than enough power to compensate for the shutdown of a nuke but lowered energy costs for that period at the same time. Capitalists may lie and misdirect us but they are quite candid with each other.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, wind power was victorious over hot air as five Supreme Court judges rejected Presidential contender Donald Trump’s appeal to prevent wind turbines from an adjacent wind farm from obscuring the view from one of his golf courses (Donald Trump Has Lost His Legal Bid To Block A Wind Farm Near His Scottish Golf Course). With his usual hubris, Trump made this statement after the decision:
“History will judge those involved unfavorably and the outcome demonstrates the foolish, small minded and parochial mentality which dominates the current Scottish government’s dangerous experiment with wind energy.”
Perhaps Trump needs to be schooled by some of his fellow Capitalists.
It wasn’t just a good week for wind but for us as well. How often do we get to have our position reinforced by unsolicited truth from the other side?
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