Reposted from the NoTricksZone
By P Gosselin on 19. January 2021
Is the German model America’s future?
Putting matches in charge of fighting gasoline fires? Even more interference appears to be the German government’s approach to solving the power grid mess that its earlier meddling created in the first place.
Germany struggles to keep the lights on, looks for a law to prevent its power grid from crashing.
Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts – people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide.
Green energies destabilized the German power grid
Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany and eventually passed the outlandish EEG green energy feed-in act and rules. They insisted that wildly fluctuating, intermittent power supplies could be managed easily, and done so at a low cost.
Blackouts threaten
Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets.
Germany’s rickety and moody power grid now threatens the entire European power grid stability, as we recently witnessed.
The need for “smoothing out” demand peaks
So what solution does Berlin propose today? You guessed it: more meddling and interference, more outlandish bureaucrat solutions. Included among them are shutting down the remaining baseload coal-fired and nuclear power plants, and relying even more on the power sources that got the country into its current mess in the first place.
And new are restrictions as to when power can be consumed by consumers and industry! Energy rationing and targeted blackouts.
Hat-tip. Tichys Einblick
Cutting off e-vehicle battery chargers and industry
To deal with the power grid problems, Germany’s Economics Minister Peter Altmaier presented a draft law that would allow electric utilities “to temporarily cut off charging power for e-cars when there is once again too little electricity available”, an idea known as “peak smoothing”.
“Shutdowns due to power shortages have been practiced for some time. Aluminum smelters, for example, have to put up with having their power cut off for limited periods of time,” reports Tichys Einblick. “These, like refrigerated storage facilities, consume great amounts. It’s a dangerous game because after three hours the molten metal has solidified and the factory is ruined.”
Situation now “too critical”
The situation in the German power grid has deteriorated so much that Tichys Einblick also comments: “The situation in the power grids has become too critical. The only thing that helps are abstruse ideas like: ‘You are not allowed to refuel your car from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day!’”
A law that would allow for “peak smoothing” has been demanded by power utilities for some time now as they struggle to keep the increasingly wind and solar powered grid from careening out of control and into blackness. In other words: targeted blackouts.
And as Tichy Einblick mentions, the increasing number of cars on the market will only serve to cause more extreme power demand peaks. Currently Germany is set to make a major push into electric mobility this year.
No electricity for up to 2 hours a day
In the proposed draft law, which has since been recalled because it was deemed so embarrassing, it was written that “controllable consumption facilities” would be able to receive no electricity for up to two hours per day if there was a threat of overloading the grid.
“This includes charging stations for e-cars as well as heat pumps, which can already be temporarily disconnected from the power supply,” reports Tichy.
More burden on power grid
Currently there are only 33,000 electric car charging points in Germany, a country with over 50 million cars, and the government plans a vast expansion in the future, yet isn’t sure what that infrastructure should look like. It’s a policy of going full speed in total blackness and hoping there won’t be a brick wall in the way.
Government admits it’s not going to function
Tichy comments further: “The German government has recognized that in the future electricity system, it will no longer be possible to satisfy every demand at all times. Therefore, the control of the consumer side should be put on legal feet.” […] “Controllable consumers such as heat pumps, electric heaters and wall-boxes, i.e. charging stations for e-mobiles, would then be switched off variably at times.”
This is the sorry state of Germany’s once highly regarded power grid.
Governments should not be allowed to pick winners and losers!
Losers always pick losers
Mediocrity attracts mediocrity.
Mediocrity explained with numbers might for example give this:
Best regards from Germoney, Pauleta!
J.-P. D.
Yep, the POINTLESSNESS of wind and solar is there for EVERYONE to see.
Wind + Solar , just 6.4% of energy used.
fred250
My comment was about ‘Green energies destabilized the German power grid’, what is absolutely wrong.
I propose that before posting such a rather incompetent reply, you first start to read the head post of this thread.
There you will understand that this thread’s focus was on the secondary energy source named electricity, and not on primary energy sources you unnecessary presented a picture of.
Not very surprisingly, you don’t even mention the fact that nuclear energy accounts as primary for no more than 5.8 %, compared with the 12.5 % in the chart I posted.
This is the definite proof that you didn’t read the guest post. You seem to belong to those persons who post replies to comments without having read and digested the head post these comments were in fact related to.
*
But as a fairly seasoned commentator on the energy field, I can confirm that you are not really wrong. Because even if we in Germany achieved 50% renewable electricity generation in 2020 (1991: 4%), the question arises for me (though I don’t own a car): How should we produce electricity for future electric cars?
In 2004, Germany was planned to have a minimum of 20 GW offshore installed by 2020: this goal will not be reached before 2030, a time point where 50 GW were planned (170 TWh at a load factor of 0.4, surpassed since 9 years by the Alpha Ventus test plant).
This is due to the ultra-conservative energy producers and their extreme lobbying on conservative lawmakers.
But I am confident that we can do it, and will do it.
Please note that the CO2 story does not interest me at all: I feel much more concerned with immediate problems like SO2, and nuclear waste disposal in a country occupying laughable 350,000 km², and not 8 or 9 Mio of them…
J.-P. D.
Natural Gas and Oil are the BIG energies in Germany.
That’s just the way it is, only a VERY incompetent person would not realise that
Wind and solar are bit players.. destabilising the electricity grid.
Oops! I scrambled the text, a paragraph is missing.
But I am confident that we can do it, and will do it.
Nonetheless, the above-mentioned 170 TWh secondary energy is a drop in the ocean compared to the primary energy consumption of overall traffic. Solving the problem will certainly require concession from road users over the next 30 years.
The time of ‘my cheap fuel gallon’ is now drawing to a close.
J.-P. D.
How do you pronounce ‘Malthus’ auf Deutsch?
Oha. Das war ja eine äußerst intelligente Frage.
Bindidon,
“Solving the problem will certainly require concession from road users over the next 30 years.”
What problem are you specifically concerned with?
I would like to know what concessions are being talked about. Germany has a population density of about 250 people/ sqkm. Most of the states in the US west of the Mississippi and east of CA have a population density of 15 people/sqkm. To reach a population center for shopping or acute health care many people here have to drive a 100 miles or more. Exactly what are these people going to have to give up in terms of concessions?
Just for comparison, I used to have cousins that lived and worked on a cattle ranch is SW Kansas. It was 11 miles from the bunkhouse to the border of the ranch! It was another 30 miles to the nearest small town. What kind of concessions are these folks expected to make?
It can’t be madness, there are not that many insane people in Germany to populate all the levels of government. But what else could it be? 1) Capable people so terrified by the left that the will not speak up? True in many cases, but is that enough to populate government at all levels? 2) Could it be social scientists paired with egomaniac and power hungry socialists? or 3) Socialists and Communists plotting to ruin the country and then take in over during the resulting chaos, riots, etc.? If you are not satisfied by 1,2,or 3, then could it be 4) Some mix of 1, 2, and 3?
Groupthink..
It’s not the first time the extreme left took over Germany.
Yeah. I can imagine that for Alt-right people living in CONUS, a conservative person like the German Chancellor Angela Merkel certainly shall belong to the ‘extreme left’.
Of course!
J.-P. D.
Needs more Reichstag fires. Oh wait, we learned that from you.
Merkel.. conservative ???
ROFLMAO
Next stop Karl Marx or Genghis Khan.
THis kind of self-delusion and out-right lying is what caused Chernobyl. Of course, the Russians had made lying into a fine art of self preservation – most forgot what the truth was.
But to see this come from a society of engineers, sheesh.
In America, the largest number of politicians were once lawyers. In the Soviet Union, I once read that the largest share of party officials had been engineers.
Lying is actually increasingly admired for its directness in social manipulations among postmodern activists to whom the truth has no real standing compared to their desires and so increasingly they feel entitled (within their broadening ‘safe space’) to be unchallenged in their evasion of it. People with theologically rooted ethics hesitate to take such advantage of those rather too easy means of seemingly authoritative expression and are inclined to under-estimate how many are impatient with the rewards of truthfulness. The eventual unwelcome hitch emerges when the true outcome is so much at odds with what was greatly anticipated and the piper submits his bill.
“It can’t be madness, there are not that many insane people in Germany to populate all the levels of government. But what else could it be?”
Groupthink. Social pressure. Social pressure will make someone say they believe in something they don’t really believe in.
The radical Left controls and focuses the social pressure through the propaganda organ of the Leftwing Media.
Misinformed, propagandized populace who are blocked from hearing truth.
The more you expand government, the more midwits you have to hire because there aren’t enough smart people. And midwits wreck everything.
…
It’s protocols. Execution of protocols.
Its a feature of socialism.
Take out the stupid wind and solar for a moment, but, from a demand standpoint, is it getting more difficult for grid operators to predict demand?
Just curious
Grid demand is predictable but now they need to decide who to switch off
Predicting who will take it without freaking out is a skill
For sure, any virtue signaling EV owner should be the first to be shut down
Safe bet that the government will always ration power to those out of political favor, first.
I can see it now – a mass number of EVs stuck on the Autobahn because the charging stations are all shut down.
Merkel is turning her country into a third-world nation, with Joe Biden and the USA blundering swiftly behind.
Hang on USA, get back in line & wait your turn;
we Brits are determined to win the race to the bottom
& we have the 10 point plan to do it
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-ten-point-plan-for-a-green-industrial-revolution
With our ‘Glorious Leader’ Boris in command we can become destitute in less than 15 yrs.
The U.K. is ruled by morons.
Wait there…CA is doing it’s Gavin Neusomlini impression…
He promises the trains in CA will be on time…
Are any of Gov. Brown’s trains running? Much less on time.
As an American, I would like to refute your assertion that the USA is blundering swiftly behind!
Unfortunately, there is no data to support my attempt at refutation. Indeed, quite the opposite. Damn!
Pat
Another Pat here.
Recently (in the past two weeks) I have had two letters from my German/French? owned supplier EDF telling me that my (female) Smart Meter installer was rarin’ to go with my new meter.
She promises to observe all the draconian Wuhan Flu diktars imposed by Frau Sturgeon, whilst painlessly doing the job.
I told them to eff off by not replying to book my appointment.
So any one who is stupid enough to sign up for a ‘Smart’ meter is not being very smart if they do not want to get blacked out.
Pat,
The DF stands for de France. 🇫🇷
Small clue there.
They installed a smart meter for me about 10 years ago (PG&E Northern California), and it broke a year or two later. I did not realize this until I got a bill for no usage. I called to report the broken meter, they didn’t believe me, and demanded I prove it.
Prove it? I asked, How? Aren’t you supposed to be able to query smart meters from the power lines? Don’t your systems report unusual occurrences like zero usage?
I reported it again every few months. Went on for 18 months, two years. Finally I snagged a utility crew who was around for other purposes, and that finally got the ball rolling.
Still wonder how long that would have kept going, but I figured if I reported it every few months, and documented all such calls, it was a better defense if they ever took me to court.
I had something similar.
I had signed up for automatic withdrawals, based on their billings. So I figured they were the ones responsible for keeping track of things.
Your honesty (although you say it was for defense) is commendable.
Yes, it was for defense. I don’t trust PG&E burrocrata as far as I can throw them, especially with the PUC pulling the strings. Suppose I had let it go on for ten or twnety years. I might only be liable for the last two years or such, but I figure criminal charges might not be far behind, and I couldn’t very well plead ignorance.
Demand is still relatively predictable, it’s the supply that has become unpredictable. When supply drops, demand has to be shed.
Is this where California is headed into? Thank you governor newsome.
And once the doofus-in-chief gets installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, it’ll be what the rest of the country gets to look forward to. Just remember to tell any Democrat voter who complains to “shut up and enjoy your green Utopia”…
YES! His solution is huge utility scale expensive Lion battery banks to store excess wind power off peak to stabilize grid Hz & voltage when demand exceeds supply. The situation in Germany is huge opportunity for suppliers of diesel standby gensets for businesses that have severe losses from more than a few minutes of utility power loss.
P.S. This didn’t start with Newsom. It started in the 1990’s & was cast in stone in the 2000’s.
I recall someone doing a back-of-the-envelope analysis for a lead acid battery facility to operate as a backup for – uhm – a few days? Assumed it was for the US. Wasn’t enough known lead in the ground to do it, IIRC. How much known lithium is there?
Gruesome Newsomlini…you mean.
Perhaps you didn’t notice that Calfornia is already there.
CA is already there.
The rest of the country, too
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-17/make-america-california-again-how-biden-will-try
Oh, ERCOT, how do I love thee…
When I was travelling in India 35 years ago, one question I was asked that I cannot forget, was “is the electricity on 24 hours a day in your country?”
When I replied that it was, I was met with disbelief.
35 years on, that answer would probably not be true any longer. That’s what CO2 terrorism has wrought. Back to the 70s when the socialists gave us repeated blackouts, not because of any lack of resources or labour, but because of their unrelenting greed.
Berlin could become the new Nairobi at this rate. Merkel has been disaster as her country’s leader. Here in the UK, households are being urged to fit smart meters, with lots of TV ads cooing that this is how we save the planet. In fact, smart meters will be used to switch of EV car charging at periods of peak grid use. And all because our policians have bought into the ‘CO2 is evil’ insanity.
The UK produces 1% of the world’s industrial CO2 emissions. These people are stark, raving mad.
They know that the UK produce only 1% of emissions. This is not about emissions, it’s about government invading and controlling all aspects of your life. Thats why China is not interested in reducing CO2 emissions, its unecessary, their people are already under total control. Western countries want that same control, and we’re giving it to them through climate and Cov-2 hysteria.
They’re not stark raving mad, we are.
The ultimate aim is to replace money with energy credits, so they can totally control everything in your life. Remotely.
If the government has the right to control all CO2 emissions, then it has the right to control when (and whether) you can breathe….
It has nothing to do with greed. It’s rooted in a combination of autocratic impulses (wanting to force others to play by their rules), a perverse savior complex (believing they can “save” people if only they would follow their enlightened prescriptions), and hubris (thinking they have the only true and correct solution to a “problem”). The latter two are particularly resistant to reformation because they are convinced their cause is noble and sacred. The most destructive people in history are those who are deluded into thinking they are doing it “for your own good”. Or as Rush eloquently desribed it in Freewill: “kindness that can kill”.
Obligatory CS Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Beautiful, but given the current culture, demoralizing quote.
I just skimmed through your comment and at first read ‘Rush’ as Limbaugh and just plodded on to the next comment. Then the little seldom used synapses fired up and I realized it was Getty Lee.
You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will.
Indulging in phantom fear is a choice, cultured by the Dems.
The US lives under a Bureaucratic Hegemony today. It is an unelected entity which is not accountable to the people and which, like any entity, knows it has to grow to survive. It grows and ensures its survival by taking more and more control over the people and their lives. The groundskeeper for the Bureaucratic Hegemony is the Democrat party. The Dems keep the Bureaucratic Hegemony fed well by legislation which demands more and more regulations be propagated by the Bureaucratic Hegemony. It a large reason why Trump is so hated in DC, he was so anti-regulation that it became a threat to the Bureaucratic Hegemony and the Democrats.
If 300 million people voted for Trump, he still would have lost. The swamp will never allow another outsider to break into their cabal ever again. Trump may run for president in 2024, but he will not be allowed to win. The swamp saw that they can use fraud to win. The United States is done. It is over. The far left will just keep using fraud to solidify their power.
What this means is that even if electricity prices are 10 times as high as they are now, the far-left democrats will not lose their power. No matter how bad things are, the democrats will still win the election. And since the most of the media worships the democrats (literally worships them), they will declare the elections as pure as fresh snow. Twitter and Facebook will punish anybody who says otherwise, even if you have verifiable proof.
The pain is coming soon. And nothing you do will be able to stop it.
Moron.
You really shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. I’m sure that in your next life you will be able to reach an acceptable level of competency.
Such perceptive introspection from Bruce.!
You know what they say about projection!
Thing is, while the DNC won the presidency, they lost ‘bigly’ everywhere else. The statehouse elections nearly all went GOP. And those state houses decide how electors are allocated. The ‘swing states’ where allegation of corruprtion were made, saw unconstitutional changes made to state election law, by the executives and the judiciary, violating standing law. THe legislatures objected and were ignored, as the Sec States certified and pass along the votes.
The legislature is solely vested by the Federal Constitution to select electors. They passed laws making that a state wide popular vote, with certain requirements. These were ignored and circumvented. The next year will be interesting there. Other state legislatures will notice. It’s not over, not by a long shot.
Read this morning: Senate already introducing a bill that will require states to institute internet registration and block voter ID.
Constitution? What’s that?
I expect the several states to challenge that, as it supersedes the plain language of the Constitution.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1/text#toc-H74BE0560DD34428E8C903E46DB1C7DDB
Trump’s legacy is the three judges he appointed to SCOTUS
Biden’s legacy will be the 7 judges he appoints in his first year.
Those judges already proved themselves worthless in the election case.
I understand what you’re saying, but (a) I don’t have a lot of faith in “the system” to protect the Constitution anymore. I’ve seen that degrading for decades, and (b) They won’t need to – they’ll get around the Constitutional limitation by tying it to funding, and the states will cave because they’ve become dependent on the Federal teat.
“If 300 million people voted for Trump, he still would have lost. The swamp will never allow another outsider to break into their cabal ever again. Trump may run for president in 2024, but he will not be allowed to win. The swamp saw that they can use fraud to win. The United States is done. It is over. The far left will just keep using fraud to solidify their power.”
There is one thing that can possibly turn this around: Trump needs to prove that the election was rigged.
If he can prove the election was rigged, then he can set himself up as the one who is going to fix the corrupted future elections. He can hold rallies in the various States that have violated their election rules, and the people in those States can rally and demand their legislators fix the election laws.
Proving the election was rigged also makes Trump the aggrieved person. The victim. This will give his supporters impetus to vote for him again in 2024, to right this wrong that was done to Trump and Trump’s supporters and to the nation.
If Trump does not attempt to prove the election was rigged, then I think this will probably end his political career.
Trump has the entire Left and now some prominent Republicans saying Trump lied about the election being stolen, and this is one reason to blame Trump for the riot at the Capital Building, becaue he got his people all riled up over a bunch of lies claiming the election had been stolen.
Trump has to answer these charges, or he will be branded a liar in this situation for the rest of his life.
I still have faith in Trump. He has never told a consequential lie, and I don’t think he has ever deliberately lied but rather he didn’t have the facts straight. I don’t think he is a liar even though the Democrats claim they have documented 30,000 Trump lies. I think what they have documented are 30,000 distortions of what Trump said and/or meant.
We will find out soon enough if we can still place our trust in Trump. I’m a staunch Trump supporter, but he can’t make allegations about the election, if he can’t back up those allegations. If he does not, then even I will have to re-evaluate how I think about him.
We need the evidence, Donald Trump. The evidence is key to the future now. I’ve heard a lot of credible people say there *is* evidence, so let’s have a look at all of it and let the people decide. Do a documentary laying it all out.
This can’t be ignored.
The Right and the Independents need to feel some righteous indignation over the election. Give them the reason to do so, by providing the evidence.
It’s just like Climate Science: The Evidence please! Just the evidence. We can’t go forward without the evidence.
You cannot prove anything when the government won’t investigate itself. You cannot prove anything when the court systems won’t listen to the evidence.
I simply find it impossible to believe that so many downstream elections went GOP while the presidential election did not. I’ve seen it estimated that 90% of the people vote straight ticket. If that is really true then it is apparent that something is amiss somewhere.
How do you prove it? It’s impossible with the system we have today. A simple change that would fix that would be for every voter to have to provide a fingerprint on the ballot. That would work for absentee ballots, early ballots, and day-of voting. It would eliminate the whines that poor people can’t get to the DMV for a voter id, that it would suppress the vote, or that it is racist. Scan in every fingerprint on the ballots and see how many dupes come up. It might not stop the dead from voting but it would provide a lot more integrity in the vote than is provided today.
Election fraud won’t matter anyway, because the Republican party committed suicide on January 6th. Most Americans I know have said they’re never voting for them again.
Besides, Biden wants to legalize tens of millions of illegals. That alone would guarantee permanent Democrat government.
Democracy is over in the US. And any thinking person knows what happens next.
When I first worked in Mexico City I stayed in a hotel in the downtown area. Across the street was a small, brick two story building. Every morning three guys would show up with a wheel barrow, sledge hammers, and a pickup truck. They would bang away loading the wheel barrow and emptying into the pickup. The project I worked on employed thousands of people. When I showed them how many they could save with automation they cringed. Discussing this with them I figured out that mechanization was a forbidden word. The government literally had to provide make work projects to keep all the people happy.
What a loss. What a joke. Everyone remained poor with no chance to gain productivity and increase what they could make. It still makes me sad.
“You cannot prove anything when the government won’t investigate itself. You cannot prove anything when the court systems won’t listen to the evidence.”
This is in the Court of Public Opinion now. Trump has to make his case to the People. He is not beholden to politicians or judges, all he has to do is get all the evidence together in one place and present it to the People.
The Democrats haven’t yet gotten to the point where they can censor every broadcast network or the internet. Not yet.
Trump has to do something about this or people like me cannot defend him on this issue, and I *so* much want to defend him. He needs to give me the means. Claims of voter fraud are not good enough, we need to see the dots connected.
Otherwise, they can call Trump a liar and I can’t say he is not.
It’s been proven. The courts will not listen.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210118215025/https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michigan_forensics_report_%5B121320%5D_v2_%5Bredacted%5D.pdf
I know there are various tidbits of evidence here and there on the internet, but your average Joe is not going to spend time searching on this subject.
All the voter fraud claims and evidence needs to be put in an easily understandable and easily accessible format.
Rudy Guiliani needs to sit down on video and lay out his whole case, with lots of graphics. That’s what I want to see. That’s the only thing that will swing the pendulum back the other way. Trump’s credibility is on the line.
Is it time to adopt a different approach?
Those that had their constitutional right to a free and Fair vote must use the justice system to exercise retribution.Join together, don’t act individually. Then lawyer the fraudsters and their allies into purgatory.
New slogan “Individual responsibility and Patriot strength”.
You must join together to save your country and yourselves.
If you do not you and your offspring will be paying taxes to support failed blue states forever.
I think it is time for those who value their personal freedoms to realize the radical Democrats are playing hardball in their efforts to take those freedoms away. They are serious.
The Radical Democrats want no dissent. It’s their way, or the highway. That’s their attitude. And they have convinced themselves that anyone who doesn’t agree with the leftwing political philosophy is an enemy of the State. This is typical authoritarian thinking.
Seems we may have lived in the sweet spot.
My grandfather, in a small community, in a small State, had the odd job of flipping the switch and turning off the power every night at 10:00 pm every night.
And thus a first world nation descends into darkness.
And soon to come to this side of the pond, now that the fools have voted in the idiots and economic illiterates here.
Hmmm…. The Germans seem to have a propensity to follow zealots, no?
The situation seems perfectly predicable. Not sure why they fall for this insanity.
Oh, and remember she grew up in East (Communist) Germany.
Yes. They knew she was a communist when they elected her. They can hardly complain now.
They’re even setting up camps for those that don’t follow quarantine restrictions. Germans and camps again. Who’d a thought?
Multiple high ranking Democrats as well as a number of other socialists have already started musing about forcing all of Trump’s supporters to go through “deprogramming”.
Re-education camps to follow
You have to realize what power outages do to industry. I worked for Intel when the Gray Davis blackouts were occurring in 2000. We lost power at 11:00 AM sharp every day for eight days in a row. The server farm craps out, the test floor craps out. Those things don’t recover for a minimum of 6 hours.
Imagine when even a modern server farm loses power for an hour. Do you think that comes back online right away? NO, and 5PM isn’t looking good either. Just like the example of the smelter, when the rock crusher at your gravel yard loses power, it has to be disassembled and shoveled out. What is the cost of 50,000 office workers furloughed for even just two hours per day? Typically you send most of the workforce home, as nothing is going to be solid for the rest of the day.
Do you think modern banking recovers instantly from a power outage?
Power outages in an industrial setting typically take several hours to recover.
My office has a building out back that’s about 10ft x 10ft X 20ft. It contains a diesel generator that automatically kicks in whenever the power is off for about 5 minutes. All of our computers are laptops and the network hardware is all battery backed up.
This what all companies are going to have to do once the climate warriors have achieved their goals
Running generators today may be expensive but they are a viable option, and can pass the costs versus benefits test (benefits being keeping the factory running and people working).
But….Running generators in 10-15 years when the fuel to put in them has either disappeared or gotten so expensive because of the multiple hits of government carbon taxes and government regulations leading to shutdowns of oil and gas extraction means the companies will just have to live with the loss of power and shutdown.
So build a massive diesel fuel storage tank, instead of buying a 10-minute TESLA battery. And keep it full!
That will be designated as contraband that must be disposed of as hazardous waste at a cost certain to bankrupt you. Any deplorable who would try to overthrow legitimate government controls like that only deserves the consequences.
Pretty much all the chip fab facilities in Silicon Valley have diesel generator backup power & battery UPS’s. The company I worked for for 34 years before retiring & currently do consulting supplied many of the diesel generators & serviced those of mfg’s other than the mfg. by the Co we are dealer. Intel was a frequent customer until Intel moved many ops out of the area. We provided more than 10 mW of diesel backup at a Intel data center in Santa Clara that Intel sold shortly after commissioning to a data center services Co.
I suspect you meant 10 MW of diesel backup!
It’s mW — low-power CPUs for next-generation laptops!
As I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear. Once the pain kicks in, the people will realize the CAGW folly. If it costs nothing to believe the BS, why not? People think it’s like Pascal’s wager. Once they realize it’s the opposite though …
You should not be grinning. “Sticking it to the other” is infantile especially because we will all suffer.
Rather, our friends that sit between the far left and the center– typically called “liberals” in American political parlance– represent the biggest problem. They will simply go along with it because they don’t have the spine to stand up against their friends further to left. I suspect the far left will crack before liberals do because in their extreme sense self-preservation they will find they are without phone, email, and (God forbid) Twitter access which are the essences of their pitiful lives.
Oh no, it’s not in any way like that, nor is it schadenfreude. I treat people as rational actors. They will go along to get along until they have a pressing need to do otherwise.
Careful with that ‘rational actors’ bit. Herbert Simon did a pretty good job of questioning it.
Humans are anything but rational in nearly every aspect of their lives. Instead they are emotional actors who are driven primarily by intuition/gut feeling for nearly all day to day decisions. The rational mind is predominantly there to justify the actions/feelings/intentions of the intuition. The rational mind is the spokesperson for the intuition.
Yes, commieBob, but the Germans have been having these same troubles for some time now. At least as far back as 2014, when I visited there. How much suffering does it take for Dumb and Dumber before the lesson is learned (just a rhetorical question, no need for you to answer, lol)?
The Germans as a nation appear to have a history of not learning lessons.
Obviously WW1 was not a lesson learned. Even when the general German populace had no option but to realize that they were on the road to ruin – they seem compelled to continue on their selected path like a herd of sheep. Then came WW2!
The US & UK population has the benefit of sitting on the sidelines watching this modern German electrical fiasco but apparently they also seem destined to follow them, lemming-like, over the cliff to economic ruin.
I blame the modern dysfunctional US/UK education system together with the indoctrinated main stream media!
I imagine the reparations after WW1, forced on they by The Treaty of Versailles had something to do with that.
Folks felt a lot of pain. There were stories about going to the store with a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread.
It also wasn’t obvious to lots of Germans that they had been beaten. It was easy to persuade them that they’d been sold down the road.
The allies learned something from the aftermath of WW1.
1 – Make darn sure every German has no doubts they had been beaten.
2 – Make them grateful to be invaded by Brits and Americans, not Soviets.
3 – No reparations.
4 – Hold the Nuremberg Trials and punish a few of the most guilty.
I don’t know if we can say that reparations caused WW2, but they sure didn’t help things.
It’s a sobering thought that, when we were suffering in the Great Depression, the German economy was going gangbusters. I have even heard stories of German immigrants to America returning to Germany because things were so much better there.
Even with the USA’s industrial might aiding the allies Germany was set to win the WW1 until the USA committed troops after the sinking of the Lusitania. Russia had capitulated aided by the Bolshevik revolution and the West was bled white by that terrible war of attrition. Fresh USA manpower tipped the balance.
Germany won WW2, but for some stupid reason Hitler decided to invade Russia. Evil exists and doesn’t always lose, the world was just lucky that evil happened to be stupid too.
The goal isn’t the shutting down of reliable power, that is just a side-effect. The goal is accumulation and concentration of political power across the Western democracies into the hands of authoritarians.
The Greens are the ones being duped by the Global Marxists into thinking the love affair will continue after the Marxists have achieved their political power monopoly. Once the political power monopoly is in place the socialist-Marxist governments will revert to large-scale coal powered generation if they have to to maintain their grip on political power. We see this in China and Russia today. The one thing that is lost universally is a vibrant, affluent middle class that has the financial means to give Big Government the middle finger. So the destruction of an affluent middle class reverting it into serfdom is a necessary condition for Marxist control.
The Germans voted for this Green nonsense, and, to paraphrase H L Mencken, they deserve to get the consequences good and hard.
Actually Menchen probably got that from Joseph de Maistre who, back in 1811, said: “Every nation has the government it deserves.”
AKA ‘politics is downstream from culture.’
When your culture believes in powering the world with magic Green unicorn farts, you end up with a government that does, too.
People have coping mechanisms for dealing with cognitive dissonance which allows them to disconnect one thing from the other. Thus, CAGW ideology is never questioned. It is sacrosanct. There are any number of convenient scapegoats who can be blamed for the economic pain and inconvenience, including “Big Oil”, “Deniers”, “the One Percent”, and “Capitalism”.
The politicians aren’t telling the whole story. Most lefties I deal with believe they are only going to pay the government a teeny tiny amount of tax and that THE GOVERNMENT WILL TAKE CARE OF THE PROBLEM. No one is telling about the hassles of EV’s, the tripling of electricity rates, power shutoff, etc. Live and learn I guess.
Most of those on the left believe that they would only pay a small amount to solve ANY problem and that the bulk of the money would come from the ‘rich’. Ask any lefty how much more they would be willing to pay in taxes and the answer is always “a little more”. “I would be willing to pay a little more to help the poor.”. The exact amount is never identified and the squawking starts when they realize that they are on the hook for much more than ‘a little bit’.
“The German government has recognized that in the future electricity system, it will no longer be possible to satisfy every demand at all times. Therefore, the control of the consumer side should be put on legal feet.”. Well, they got that wrong, didn’t they. The correct statement is: “The German government has recognized that in the future electricity system, it will no longer be possible to satisfy every demand at all times, unless control of the system is given to engineers.”.
This comes now to Germany, then the USA and then the rest of the Global Warming-Climate Change-Alarmist World. How will you like reading in the dark by candlelight and peddling power for your emails? How long can the Alarmists keep this insanity running?
Pedaling the bike to make it go
Peddling the bike to sell it
We’ve been over this before I think.
Well, in a way, they ARE “peddling power”, just not to the masses…
Need to move to China. They are exempt from this for the next couple of decades. Developing nation, ya know?
If I fly to China and claim asylum, do I get citizenship and lots of free stuff?
I would like to hear from an experienced electric power system engineer on the likelihood that administrative measures such as described above will allow the German system to function at all. A frequency fault, for example, can occur instantly but a curtailment command cannot be issued and implemented instantly. The comments from Lil-Mike below identify a few industries that cannot accommodate power curtailment at all.
When wind speed starts dropping, you have a second or so before power from the turbine starts dropping. When a cloud move across a soar field, it takes several seconds for it to go from one side of the field to the other. This gives the operators, assuming they have written the software properly, time to start issuing commands to start shutting down demand. For even more time, you could ring the solar field with sensors to give even more time to react.
As much as I think that renewables are not suitable, this is just wrong. I often work with power plant operators in germany and it’s not that grim (thankfully). It’s true that, funny enough, the weather report grew to be very important for their job and they have to adjust their big machine according to wind speeds several 100km away, but large enough scale changes with solar and wind production happen within a timescale of hours to days, not seconds.
I don’t want to have their job, they have to work and juggle within the constraints of demand and weather related production and they can control stability only so much within their technical limits. And in the end they are maybe even rewarded by beeing a scapegoat if all things fail, we’ll see. It all worked out as long as renewables were only a small margin of the whole grid, but it gets obviously increasingly impossible with more and more of them obviously.
But that’s only a small price to pay for saving humanity (…) with this increasingly permeating jesus complex that my fellow countrymen develop. Speaking of which, our public TV even created a movie about legal resposibility for climate damages as if reality wasn’t flaggelating enough.
MarkW,
But, say, ten minutes later when the wind picks up again and/or the cloud(s) move away from covering the solar farm, does the software/facility operator then issue “ooops, never mind” orders to allow the demand to go back to where it was previously . . . and how often might such up-down-up cycles occur on any given day at any given location?
This is just one of the basic issues of “intermittency” of wind and solar electrical energy generation facilities.
Two years ago I witnessed the effects of solar PV on a college campus microgrid. It was partly cloudy breezy day. I watched the screen of the management system show about 80% rapid swings in output from the solar PV as the clouds passed over.
In the background, I could hear the natural gas fired engine (one of two on campus) rapidly rev up and down trying to balance the load. Think of taking say a Dodge Challenger flooring the gas peddle, then slam on the brake, then hit the gas again.. repeat this for hours.
The operators were telling me they were going to have to rebuild the engines again because the constant extreme modulation in output was causing premature wear & tear.
Now imagine what happens to a coal, nuclear, or combined cycle gas plant in this situation? Large power plants generally alter output by about 1% an hour (per a study from MIT I read).
When it comes to economics, socialists don’t let reality get in the way of a good fantasy.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/california-democrat-23-minimum-wage
That would be $46,000 per year at a full time rate, for kids just out of high school.
Progressivism is completely defined by the Never-enough condition. If every one of Progressives demands for today were met, tomorrow there would be more. What was done they would declare is not enough.
Mark they are such cheapskates. Clearly they should be proposing a minimum wage of $250k a year 🤓
Nah. What it really means is businesses will hire illegals and pay them cash under the table.
How long till griff once again proclaims that Germany is proof that renewable energy does not destabilize the grid?
About 5 hours 8 minutes in this case
Haven’t these [snip] morons learned anything about future power technologies? SMR molten salt reactors would solve all of their problems, including their grid’s high prices. Biden senility is catching, apparently.
Shouldn’t we wait until the engineers finally figure out how to build one of these miracle plants?
Then there is the problem that no financiers are willing to risk investing in nuclear unless governments provide legal immunity for any problems that develop.
IF !
WHEN ?..
maybe !!
How long do they have to wait ?
Colonel, while Molten Salt Reactors show promise, there are still corrosion problems that must be solved, a commercial design to be developed and licensed, reactor component factories to build, reactor sites to approve, and the reactors to build. All this will require public acceptance but that doesn’t yet exist and won’t until the power starts to go out. The only thing that’s certain is, with growing reliance on unreliable renewables, there will be blackouts. If the transition to MSRs ever happens, it will take many decades at the soonest. I wish you were right that MSRs can magically solve the world’s energy problems, as I’m a nuclear engineer, but you’re not.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
It will not be long before aluminum smelters and other high-users of electricity do their part to help ease Germany’s power shortage – by moving to Russia. No power, no jobs, no money, and Germany can join with other third-world countries in demanding aid from industrialized countries.
It is interesting that this post on Germany rationing electricity because of a shaky unreliable grid is juxtaposed with a post “Sensible, sustainable nuclear power for Africa”
So we have what was the bastion of European industry and engineering being shown up by African states albeit with the support of China and Russia.
And the Electric BMW’s that Germany will be proud of will be made in China too.
The intent of energiewende is to destroy German industry and move that industry to China. The UK “Net Zero” and the US “Green New Deal” both have the same aim – move all industry to China.
This is either the plan or crazy unintended consequences.
The Marxists have always wanted RE so they can have ultimate control over the people. Being able to turn off your power at any time, under the guise of saving the planet, provides that control.
The reliability of cold storage for food must be guaranteed Once legislation allows for heat pumps to be turned off at random, all bets are off.
Who thought of it first…
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-8706033/Smart-meters-used-switch-electricity-without-warning-compensation.html
The trouble, another trouble, is that the existing Smart Meters installed at a cost in excess of £1,300 each, would need to be changed.
Those meters were, when first proposed/legislated, promised to cost less the consumers £341 each.
Ain’t cronyism great?
Yet recent ‘news’ told us that they might save the consumers who have one, £11 per year – if they spend all day every day fretting over the thing.
Without completely realising it and what I initially thought was the work of Josh, someone has nailed Contemporary Government perfectly in this cartoon
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-55562107
What’s wrong in the cartoon and what I found truly mind-blowing and perfectly symptomatic of the criminal & suicidal madness that now engulfs us was this:
https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/life/health-fitness/dry-january-724559
The little body in the cartoon is now medically encouraged to drink wine and not tea.
it was wine-drinking that allowed Covid to damn nearly kill Boris Johnson, while a T-Total Donald Trump, 20 years older, went through Covid without missing a beat
How’s your WUWT Dry January panning out?
386 days in, not long to go now
Did you write that book about alcohol – the one size of War & Peace while not containing A Single Good Word about booze?
Did you get Covid. Did you die from it?
Mmm, maybe not, but did you get ‘Long Covid‘, now = All The Rage here in the UK.
Amongst people who so clearly and desperately want to Return to the Womb.
i.e Socialists
The Human Animal Cannot Lie – remember that so that if/when you get the chance, rub their noses in their own mendacity.
Do be careful tho, after they have skunked off to the pub or back home via the offy or supermarket booze aisle, they’ll feel empowered enough to come back and punch your lights out.
As Contrarians are fully aware
PS Eating refined sugar and cooked starch have exactly the same effect on us (all)
But you knew that
And the recently legalised cannabis just throws, as in the story, more petrol onto the fire while magical Thinking tells its owners mind, that petrol will help put out the fire.
Just like California burning trees, in order to stop the trees from burning.
How do you argue against that sort of logic
See the kind of fun we get, romantic candlelight evenings a gogo! Tight cuddling in the cold nights. Aromatherapy or salutary cold showers, you choose.
On the job, landing a full-house fifi at a dark airport with crippled ATC and ground services is even more fun that we signed for.
Break away from the comfort and safety of your prosperous monotony. Join us. Go green !
(*implicit palmface*)
This last year, a lot of commentators have been reminding me of how George Orwell’s fictionalised world in <i>1984</i> seems to be starting to form around us in real life. They mostly focus on how the state controlled the flow of news and created external enemies (e.g. coronavirus) to induce fear as a means of controlling the populace.
Another defining characteristic of the world of <i>1984</i> was scarcity. Everything was in short supply, everything was rationed, and everything was unreliable and of poor quality. It makes you wonder if this situation could be deliberate, rather than the result of bungling.
The scarcity (for the masses) helps to cement the power of the Party, so, not much of a stretch.
Brought to you by the one and only, Big Green, welcome to The New Dark Ages
This is what happens when engineering decisions are taken over by activists and politicians. All cheered on by a complicit media that shuts down opposing voices by labelling them as conspiracy theorists or Big Oil shills.
Where are those mini nuke plants you can dig into ground for some 100 years? Didn’t Bill Gates Work on them for a while?
Any bigger company or cluster should install one!
Make yourself independent of the shitty grid!
In the Netflix doc on Gates, there was segment on his Nuclear Power Plant ideas, stated they’d gotten to the point of appointing a Chinese firm to develop a proto-type, then Trump nixed it. They never went on to explain why no other company in the whole world was then approached to do the job.
Covid did wonders for fuel prices.
Hopefully Australia will avoid any of the direct carbon tax nonsense – been there and it is not a political winner. The country already pays a sort of tax due to the high cost of integrating intermittent generators. But if you are part of the problem then you can avoid those costs by adding to the intermittency. At least to the point where the lunchtime voltage prevents production.
So we can only praise the German citizens prepared to give up their gasoline and diesel cars and take up walking or cycling instead. Those autobahns will be left to the few government employees and representatives provided with government cars. Fortunately Covid also provided a valuable lesson in the ability of modern communications to successfully eliminate the need to work in a remote office. Germans can stay at home; conduct their zoom meetings when the wind permits and life will be wonderful.
So, Germany doesn’t have the engineers to keep their grid up anymore! We may be rapidly approaching the time when the old joke comes true; the Germans are the lovers, the British are the cooks, the French are the engineers and the Italians are the politicians!
Nope, the new Europe definitely doesn’t sound like heaven to me, but the US with a new president that many consider illegitimate and intellectually challenged is no bed of roses either! Welcome to the Dark Ages 2.0; brought to you by the ChiComs and the global political/corporate elite! Be sure to get your Mandarin-as-a-second-language course before they sell out; translator, security guard and concubine may be the last vestiges of the middle class for most of the non-Chinese world!
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help” has been described decades ago as ” the nine most terrifying words in the English language.” Probably translated into German it will ring just as true today.
a complete nonsense article.
Germany hasn’t had any blackouts, despite the longing of some here for them… once again in 2020 it increased renewables and reduced fossil fuel power with no blackouts.
these are emergency, least probable case scenarios. All states have them.
There is an internationally accepted measure called System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and is the average outage duration for each customer served. Germany’s is SAIDI is 12, i.e. there have been blackouts.
I will note that by that metric. Germany has the second best SAIDI in Europe far exceeding France’s 52. They have a way to go before but its going to hit like a brick when it does
Having lived in rural France I can vouch for the fact that power cuts are a feature of La France profonde but the cause is normally weather related. The usual triggers are thunderstorms causing momentary dropouts to breaks of a few hours. Strong winds with similar effects to lightening, then major storms and snowfalls causing outages which could last days in some cases.
When travelling in rural France it’s easy to see why these things happen and why traditional telecoms over copper are also not the most reliable in the world.
So while the nuclear power stations are keeping the lights on in the UK and Germany the French infrastructure is letting its own citizens down
Again self-titling your dumb comments, hey griff.
Obviously didn’t even bother reading the report.
Why are you SO DUMB !!
.
And cowardly worms like you will grovel and say “thank you”
Are you really willing to say to your government.. “please take away my right to electricity” !
“Germany hasn’t had any blackouts, despite the longing of some here for them…”
You just can’t keep making these accusations that people here are some kind of “fringe anti whatever mob”. The truth is is much more rational than that, and quite simply people have done the maths…… and it don’t add up.
Here from a Bloomberg article May 10th 2019:
Europe’s Biggest Economy Is Worrying About Blackouts
“I am really insecure on the security of supply,” Tobias Federico, managing director of consultant Energy Brainpool, which has advised the German government and RWE AG, said at a Montel conference in Dusseldorf. “Specially for 2022 it is an issue. I am concerned about the winter of that year. It takes five years to build a power plant and we don’t have that time anymore.”
While some of the capacity gap can be filled by new renewable energy and natural gas plants, it will leave Germany reliant on imports from neighbours. But some of these other markets are going through their own energy revolutions and are also cutting coal capacity. And Germany has not being able to attract investments for new gas-fired power plants because of the very low or even negative margins.
“There is no rational reason for a company to build a gas plant right now, because it won’t get returns,” said Federico.
Investments in clean energy in Germany dropped by 31% to $10.6 billion in 2018 from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg NEF.
“We see security of supply in 2023 endangered in Germany with the recommendations of coal commission,” said Konstantin Lenz, a business developer at Wattsight, a Norwegian energy consultant. “And politicians are not really aware of that challenge. There is no time to install batteries or new gas power plants.”
Germany’s Bundesnetzagentur, the grid regulator, and the Economy and Energy Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
…….surprise, surprise.
Other articles: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05/renewables-threaten-german-economy-energy-supply-mckinsey-warns-in-new-report/?sh=1cec3cac8e48
(needs translator) : https://www.mckinsey.de/branchen/chemie-energie-rohstoffe/energiewende-index#
How little clue someone can have ? 😀
Our grid is edge sewn, as we saw Jan. 8th:
Just missed the blackout
Notice how the troll tries to change the subject.
The article said nothing about black outs. It talked about actual actions, that actual employees of the German government are doing in order to prevent future blackouts from occurring.
Simples. You go out and buy yourself a diesel generator……….as most large businesses and hospitals on interruptible contracts have done in the UK
That will work until they are outlawed – as they or their fuel will be.
Diesel powered emergency generators will not be outlawed. Too much money is to be made in manufacturing and servicing them, and even in supplying the diesel for them as a priority fuel allocation for large businesses and hospitals when the supply of diesel fuel begins to tighten.
Diesel generator lobbyists will buy off the green politicians, big profits will be made on the sale and maintenance of these generators — and on the fuel which powers them — the green politicians will get their cut of the action, and everyone will be happy.
Even larger profits will be made on the carbon credits required by said diesel generators. It is the end user who will pay for the increased cost, not those who are brokering the deals and making money from the arbitrage.
Initially, most of the affected will be low income, but as their numbers and dissatisfaction with energy costs increase, then more income shifting (ie taxes) will have to occur. The lid must be be kept on the pot.
Inflation will be the double edge sword which does us all in.
Germany doesn’t need a new law. They need a new Chancellor who makes sensible decisions…
I suppose anything is better than having to admit you were wrong, and need to correct it by building more of those dreaded fossil-fuel-powered generating stations!
Just how many times have I commented on this all across the net and media? Now perhaps they will believe me! Never was a phrophet without honour except in his own country (or the EU!)
If renewable energy sources, wind and solar, were seen only as a way of providing extra energy to the grid, perhaps this would be of some use. The government could subsidize this type of energy just enough to attract investment, not to make it the most profitable means of producing energy at the expense of taxes paid by the people. But it seems that this is a very complicated equation, which brings together technical, economic and socio-environmental variables. I don’t know if any country is capable of solving this equation today.
The electric car , government states buy electric cars better for envoirment, no fossil fuel to be used and yet the restrictive charging rules have put a dent in the now owners of said cars.So much for global warming preventive measure when people cannot charge their cars to go to work etc as for the home and business: for those that did not think it takes fossil fuel to make all things work including charging those electric cars.
Ah, but it’s the Energiewende….
Isn’t this the kind of insanity that ushered in our last great German leader in the 1930s?
Sadly, IMO, the only way this insanity ends is for a complete collapse of the grid that affects not only Germany, but the entire EU in such a way that it is undeniable what caused it. That is, the claims by the green mob that it is not due to unreliables, but due to the failure of fossil fuels (as some tried to do re: CA blackouts).
Stuck on stupid.
It’s alright – they’ve got rock-solid Putin fossil fuel contracts – this will all work out in the end
I guess they can’t use cheat software and deception on this one. They did it to themselves.
Germany didn’t just use high cost, early adopter solar panels, they used most of them in even higher cost rooftop applications. Such moves like that served to waste their wealth and other advantages from an earlier time before China moved to eclipse them.
Where I live in the US, a number of coal plants are being shut down as they reach the end of their useful lives with no realistic plan to replace the lost capacity.
So I’m expecting to see an increasing number of power interruptions beginning to occur in our area starting in about 2025 and then getting worse throughout the remainder of the decade.
I will be buying a 15,000 watt emergency generator for my house. So the question I’m now asking is whether it should be powered by diesel or by liquid propane.
I haven’t decided yet on whether it should be diesel or propane, but I do want to get one ordered and installed before the big rush for these generators begins.
Simple answer to your question: buy one of each, or alternatively a dual-fuel unit.
Thanks. Those are options I hadn’t thought of. The other question I’m thinking about is where near the house the generator should be sited since it must be protected from theft. Another question is whether 15,000 watts is enough given that I may have to be sheltering some of my neighbors for a time if I have power and they don’t.
Just a quick calculation. 15000w/120v = 125 amps. See those wires coming into your house, plan on something like those. Will that replace your regular feed? Probably not. No air, dryer, stove @ 220v. Even if the gen is 220v, you still won’t much more capacity but you could run a 220v device one at a time.
220v @ 25 amps = 5500 watts with 9500 watts left over for 120v, so 9500/120 = 80 amps.
Remember, that would be at full blast running. Probably not a good idea for long periods of time.
I took a look at Generac’s online size calculator this afternoon. I will need 22,000 watts if I want to stay warm in winter using my heat pump. Assuming a limited supply of propane is available, every watt we consume during an outage would have to be evaluated for its worth relative to the severity of the situation.
flip the breaker n the circuits you don’t need. Or don’t hook them up to the transfer switch at all.
The last multi-day winter outage we had we just ran the furnace. Used a white gas camping stove to cook on. Get up when it is daylight and go to bed when it is dark. Worked for us.
Of course no thought is given to doing something rational and sensible like more fossil fuel power plants.
Controllable customers, that is a new one. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around where the supplier meets the demand of the customer. Socialism.
I remember when I first read Atlas Shrugged, decades ago, I enjoyed the book very much but thought some of the storylines, such as the government’s involvement in the power grid, were a little too far-fetched to be plausible. Sadly, some of the storylines I thought were unrealistic have actually come to pass. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a John Galt or even a Dagny Taggart.
Read “1984” and “Animal Farm” by Orwell and “Farenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. Frightening what may happen to keep politicians and crony capitalists in power.
The “Titans of Industry” who were iconized by Galt, Taggart, and Rearden, don’t exist. Today’s “leaders” are all wrapped up in government graft.
Even some of the bills being put forward are strikingly similar in name and intent.
They can call it “The Fair Use of Electricity Act”.
Marxists are only happy when everybody but their elites are groveling at the same level.
This is the final solution. Force everyone into EV’s, then make electricity prices so high and scarce you can’t charge it. Then you are forced to move into a cramped apartment and take public transport. All part of the plan
You only have two choices:
1) Learn to live with blackouts by installing your own power generation or storage infrastructure.
2) Throw the government quacks out of office and re-establish sensible polices.
Pick one. The U.S. just chose option 1.
I guess those who live in Germany will simply have to turn to the government bureaucrats to help solve the issues. God have mercy upon them.
germany heading down a fascist road – whoda thunkit?
Fascists believed in industry and reliable power. This is something far worse.
I came across an interesting German word the other day, Scheissdrecken. It doesn’t even need translating.