Can't we just make diesel so expensive that Antarctic researchers are forced to make do with wind and solar?

Catching the Wind in Antarctica - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com

In the Antarctic winters, the sun stays down for six months, generating no wind.

At other times of year, “We can get storms when the winds at McMurdo are 100 miles per hour,’’ said Brian W. Stone, acting division director for Antarctic infrastructure and logistics at the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
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Generally speaking, when turbines do manage to run in Antarctica, they are especially valuable because they take the load off diesel generators.

McMurdo bought its fuel last year for $2.86 a gallon — not a bad price — but it comes all the way from Greece, where a refinery creates a special formulation meant to resist extremely cold temperatures, which can turn the fuel into a useless gel.

The tanker makes the last few hundred miles of the trip trailing a Swedish icebreaker.

And if the fuel is taken from McMurdo on the 1,100-mile trip to the base at the South Pole, it is often flown in a C-130 cargo plane that burns 700 gallons an hour for the three-hour flight — each way. The result is that the trip burns two gallons for every one gallon delivered.
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But engineers in Antarctica face the same problem with wind as American utilities do: its production does not meet peak demand. In the United States, that’s generally on hot, windless summer days, when the air conditioners are running at full tilt. In Antarctica, peak demand comes on cold, windless winter nights, when the astronomers’ telescopes are operating.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Navy, which then ran McMurdo, tried to solve the energy problem there by operating a small nuclear reactor at the base, but Mr. Stone said it was unreliable and was shut down. A New Zealand government Web site, which contains information on how the reactor was shipped through that country, says it was known as “Nukey Poo.’’

With few alternatives in the harsh conditions, “diesel is still very much the lifeblood of the Antarctic,’’ said Mr. Stone.

But renewable energy is trimming the size of the problem.