It will be funny when the switch from natural gas to solar in twenty years has a headline of “LA is finally ditching natural gas - and replacing it with another polluting fuel.”
1. Has a political base willing to tolerate more cost than a mere gas plant.
2. Is comparatively wealthy and thus has the budget for a more expensive option.
3. Is in a renewables dream zone: mildest climate of any large city (i.e. smallest daily and seasonal usage swings), clear skies almost year round and steady ocean winds blowing over coastal ridge lines.
The thinking to an activist is that LA needs to be doing more, because let's be honest: there are other local governments in the US who will be doing less simply because of political affiliation. And I think that's exactly right.
The headline is misleading and a much better article, to me, would be about what went into this decision and the timeline.
This is not the only plant feeding LA and should be a mixture of renewables and this plant.
So they're still getting 49% from fossil fuels.
People who want 100% pollutant free energy are being unreasonable. At our level of species intelligence and technological know how, we're basically in the position of having to pick a poison and go with it. (Or pick several poisons as the case may be.)
And that's the name of the game: Try to minimize pollutants.
Pollutants can never go to zero. There will always be some. Question is, which strategy gets you closest to zero.
Wind+Water is the lowest pollutant profile we know of currently, and such a system in a state or city would still produce a lot of pollutants during its build out.
No. The name of the game is to remove CO2 emissions. Because, as I've been told, CO2 emissions are an existential threat to humanity. Or is that not the case anymore?
>Wind+Water is the lowest pollutant profile we know of currently
No. Nuclear is. Hydro works but is geographically dependent. Both Wind and Water have huge environmental footprints with enormous impact on local ecosystems.
Also, pumped hydro is not geographically dependent. Where are people parroting that idea from? You dig a cylinder into the bedrock, water proof it and fill it with water. There's a piston at the top that lowers slowly over time, thus providing the flow back into the top of the cylinder for power.
Finally, every energy plant has enormous impacts on local ecosystems. Do you want to save the squirrels, or the humans? If you want to save both, Wind+Water is unquestionably the best system to build. But it's enormously expensive. (Ask the average civil engineer how much drilling the pylons for an average skyscraper costs. Yeah, this would cost even more and you'd be drilling pylon equivalents for 20 skyscrapers at the same time.) So people instead use the cheapest system to build, which is Wind+LNG.
If that's the way you see CO2 emissions, then I have no quarrel with you - though you may be at odds with the entire environmental movement and possibly climatologists. Carbon emissions are not sold today as just another pollutant (out of many) that needs to be managed. They are sold as THE existential threat to humanity.
If you don't see that, then nuclear is not necessary, you can get good, clean power generation from natural gas and wind/solar mix.