(See Giedd, Blumenthal, et al. "Brain development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal MRI study." Nature Neuroscience, October 1999, Vol. 2. Sorry, but there's no hyperlink to the full article.)

And like puberty, the developmental pace of our frontal lobe can vary, depending upon our own personal genetics as well as certain external environmental factors. Further, once we've obtained cognitive maturity, and provided that we remain healthy, our frontal lobes will commence to slowly atrophy at a rate of 0.5% annually.

(I've qualified the previous statement because according to the latest research, that rate of decline for the frontal lobe is often noticeably accelerated in persons who are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease or have suffered a serious brain trauma.)

I'm obviously talking about the generating capacity already in place:  Systems that are generating electricity and already on-line.

My point is and was that the existing capacity must be kept up and operating. It is not like a jar of jam on s shelf. You just can't flip a switch and a generation plant comes immediately on line. That's not politics that is just facts.

I think the ones in Germany are real life utility systems.

Germany is a bust. Read about it here.

First, let's take a statistical tour of the German electricity sector in 2012, one that reveals the poor performance and intrinsic shortcomings of the most popular renewable technologies. (Most of these figures come from Germany's BdeW utility consortium, an industry source that gathers data from all of Germany's electric utilities, here and here.)

Renewable power is growing, but too slowly to take up the slack from nuclear shutdowns and also reduce fossil-fueled generation. The portion of German electricity generated by renewables rose from 20.3 percent in 2011 to 21.9 percent in 2012. Unfortunately, that was largely offset by a drop in nuclear's share of generation due to the post-Fukushima shutdowns of reactors, from 17.7 percent in 2011 to 16.1 percent in 2012. Fossil-fueled generation edged up from 352 to 356 terawatt-hours (trillion watt-hours, TWh) and its share of total electricity production barely budged: 57. 8 percent in 2011 compared to 57.6 percent in 2012.
Worse, that fossil-fueled electricity got dirtier because of the "merit-order effect": renewable power preferentially displaces expensive natural gas from the grid rather than cheaper coal.

Natural gas-fired generation decreased, but coal-fired plants, which generate more pollution and greenhouse gases, increased their output by 14.5 TWh--more than the increase in renewable generation--and coal's share of electricity production rose from 43.1 percent to 44.7 percent. Germany's greenhouse emissions therefore rose 1.6 percent in 2012, the increase mostly coming from CO2 emissions by coal-burning power plants--up 3.4 percent for anthracite and 5.1 percent for lignite.

Look, I have no pre conceived anything. My background is engineering. My business experience was in the utilities. If solar/wind actually offered the future you seem to think it does I would be thrilled. But it doesn't. So far it is not competitive unless subsidized with tax payer dollars.

Our concentration should be on nuclear for the next generation and our research should be focused on fusion.

Here's a response to the article.

Throughout the article, Boisvert characterizes the performance of wind and solar power as variously "terrible," "unreliable," and, in case you weren't adequately alarmed, "of catastrophic unreliability."

In fact, the amount of solar irradiance and wind energy for a given date and location are fairly predictable. Boisvert bases his claim that solar power "varies wildly" largely on the uncontested fact that the sun sets at night. But this is why engineers use the adjective "intermittent" to describe solar (and wind) power, not "unreliable." What Boisvert ignores is that peak power use occurs in the middle of the day, precisely when solar power is at its greatest.

From this doom-and-gloom perspective, Boisvert asks, "how will a Germany run largely on wind and solar generators survive the long periods when they shut down completely in the dead of winter?" Part of the answer is that wind power actually peaks in "the dead of winter"--not in the summer as Boisvert apparently believes.

Unaware of the complementary properties of wind and solar (wind energy is also highest at night when solar energy is at its nadir), Boisvert states that Germany is being forced to build what he calls a "second grid." "To escape long blackouts many times a year," Boisvert writes, "Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal."

I asked Claudia Kemfert, one of Germany's top energy economists, what she makes of this claim. "That is not true," Kemfert responded in an e-mail. Kemfert, the head of the department of energy, transportation, and the environment at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, and an external expert to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explained, "It is one of the myths conventional power companies argue to overestimate costs and to undermine the acceptance of the Energiewende."

And this, from the NYT article:

In Germany, where solar panels supply 7 percent of power and wind turbines about 10 percent, wholesale power prices have crashed during what were once the most profitable times of day. "We were late entering into the renewables market -- possibly too late," Peter Terium, chief executive of the giant utility RWE, admitted this spring as he announced a $3.8 billion annual loss.

Technological Innovation

As renewable energy sources start to cause gyrations in power supplies and prices, experts contend that clever new market rules could keep the costs reasonable.

Some of the innovations they recommend are already in use to some extent -- pioneered in the United States, with Germany avidly studying them. They include regular payments to persuade utilities to keep some fossil-fuel power plants on standby for times when renewable sources lag.

"It's like a retainer you pay your lawyer to keep her around in case you need her," said Jay Apt, an electricity expert at Carnegie Mellon University.

SO I AM NOT SAYING THAT THE CURRENT GENERATING CAPACITY WOULD HAVE TO BE SCRAPPED. I AM SAYING, IF YOU WANT TO HAVE IT AVAILABLE AS BACK UP, IT MUST BE KEPT IN OPERATION. THAT'S OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU CLAIM I SAY.

And thanks for the insult. I knew you would get there when you realized you didn't understand the subject enough to discuss it.

Funny thing though. I'm more "green" than you are.