so when CO ditches coal fired plants.....

[DenverGP]

Didn't that chart hollohaus posted show that wind was already on par with traditional fossil fuel usage? I was either surprised to see that, or read the graph wrong.

You talking about this one:




I suspect you were reading it incorrectly, thinking that green being at the top meant it was more... the total peak for a day is the total of all power sources shown. You can get a better idea of how it's working by looking at solar.... it's the barely visible yellow spots thrown in there... the fact that they are on top of the gas definitely doesn't indicate it was doing more....

Basically for any given day/time, the amount of green vs tan vs brown shows you their relative production.

On the best spots on that graph for wind, it looks like it was doing about 20k megawatt hours. But for most of the graph, it's way under that.

Natural gas has spots during the peak demand period where it was making 35k megawatt hours... Add in coal doing a very consistent 10-12k megawatt hours, gives you fossil fuels producing 45k at times.

Nuclear looks like a very steady 5k megawatt hours.