Poe wrote, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” I’ve done that too, in my case trying to figure out my electric bill. The cheapest electricity is from hydroelectric power, a couple of cents per kilowatt hour. Electricity from coal is perhaps four cents, from gas or nuclear around five to seven cents. But here in California, a small allotment of electricity is billed at around eleven cents, then rates rise rapidly to over forty cents. How are the astronomical rates achieved? It’s hard to figure, but when all the costs of green energy are included, a picture starts to emerge.

The two leading candidates for becoming major alternative energy sources are wind and solar. Both are subject to outages. The sun goes down at night and the wind sometimes fails to blow. So what do we do during the interruptions?