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It is quite a sight to come up over a slight incline on the otherwise flat I-65  (North of Lafayette) to see the dozens and dozens of wind turbines on the horizon (particularly at night with the red lights pulsating).

It is quite a sight to come up over a slight incline on the otherwise flat I-65  (North of Lafayette) to see the dozens and dozens of wind turbines on the horizon (particularly at night with the red lights pulsating).

I did all of the survey work and some of the engineering work on all of those.

Some folks think more smaller earthquakes is better than one really bad quake.

There could be a benefit to this, possibly.  I recall some work decades back about injecting "lubricant" into fault lines so they would slip more gradually instead of building up and then breaking bad.

I figure an agent that reduces friction might be called a lubricant.

At any rate, as you know, this notion about relieving pressure gradually is not well tested.

It is quite a sight to come up over a slight incline on the otherwise flat I-65  (North of Lafayette) to see the dozens and dozens of wind turbines on the horizon (particularly at night with the red lights pulsating).

this occurs in Iowa obviously, but there are 100s
flying over in a small plane (10,000') at night with the red lights pulsating in unison is interesting

The wind farm that you all are referencing near Purdue (which I passed to/from when Michigan played there a few weeks ago) is one of the largest in the country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler_Ridge_Wind_Farm

Wind turbines kill a very insignificant number of birds compared to skyscrapers, cats, rats, and other natural (and artifical) predators.

The best hope for nuclear is through smaller-scale plants. France's plants, unlike America's somehow have the ability to fluctuate their generation to an extent (I'm admittedly not sure how), so they're not just so-called baseload power (the DOE study on so-called baseload power to prop up coal and nuclear and the subsequent request to FERC for grid resilience is all BS....), where as gas plants have a great ability to fluctuate their generation to counteract the intermittent nature of wind and solar (and in the future, grid-balancing services will increasingly be done through energy storage and demand-side technologies, as well). I'm skeptical that small-scale nuclear will ever take off because other forms of dispatchable and distributed generation (namely CHP / cogeneration) are already more cost-effective, especially for universities, hospitals, and other campuses of sorts. 

NG provides about a third of our grid electricity today, as does coal.  Nuclear is around 20%.  Hydro is what 8% or so?

The rest is kind of in the weeds, though wind is growing, 5-6%.

Hawaii historically, like most islands, used fuel oil to burn to make steam and electricity.  I would think they would benefit most by a wind/solar focus, but to date it has been rather limited.  I read they are trying to move in that direction but capital is scarce.

The place we visit in Hawaii when we go gets 3" of rain a year, usually in one day (I've been there on that day).  It is both consistently sunny and much of it is lava fields (from an 1860 flow).  There is very little solar around, a handful of wind turbines up in the mountains.  There is a Federal geothermal/magma research center there that has a few PVs outside.  I suspect that place is a boondoggle as geothermal has not seemed to make any progress that I can discern (I don't mean the heat pumps.).