You don’t have to be any kind of a genius to figure out that wind and solar generation are never going to supplant fossil fuels in powering the world economy. The main reason is that the wind and sun only work part time, indeed well less than half of the time at best. With wind, you never know when it might work, and over a year a given facility might on average produce about 30-35% of rated capacity, with long and random periods of nothing. With the sun, you know from the get-go that you will get nothing fully half the time (i.e., night); and cloudy days wipe out half and more of the remaining half, again at random times. Averaged over the year, you’ll be lucky to get 20% of rated capacity from a solar facility.
With the world economy finally bouncing back (hopefully) from the year-and-a-half of pandemic, this is the moment for wind and solar to step up and show what they can do. All the advanced economies (Europe, UK, U.S., Canada, Australia) have been pushing wind and solar for a couple of decades, with tens of billions of dollars of various subsidies and tax breaks. There are now wind turbines and solar panels all over the place. Simultaneously the same countries have shuttered coal plants, reduced nuclear, banned fracking in many places (Europe, the UK, and much of the U.S.), and discouraged fossil fuels of every sort in a hundred different ways. Now there is a surge in demand for manufactured goods of every sort. That will take some energy. Let’s see what the wind and the sun can do!
The answer is that when they are needed they are useless.
Which brings me to two front page articles in the Wall Street Journal the past two days. Yesterday it was “Coal Shortages Weigh on global Economies.” Excerpt:
Coal supply shortages are pushing prices for the fuel to record highs and laying bare the challenges to weaning the global economy off one of its most important—and polluting—energy sources. The crunch has many causes—from the post-pandemic boom to supply-chain strains and ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. And it is expected to last at least through the winter, raising fears in many countries of fuel shortfalls in the months ahead.
How much have prices increased?
Australia’s Newcastle thermal coal, a global benchmark, is trading at $202 a metric ton, three times higher than at the end of 2019.
And then from today we have “Natural Gas Shortage Sets Off a Scramble.” It’s basically the same story as for coal:
Buyers in Europe, Asia and Latin America are competing for limited supplies of gas, racing to fill tanks and caverns with the fuel before winter hits the Northern Hemisphere. Natural gas stocks are alarmingly low around the world, and prices in most places have never been higher after surging to new records in Europe and Asia this week. Demand has jumped as economies have bounced back from pandemic shutdowns, and the squeeze has caught traders, shipowners and energy executives off guard.
How about a few details on the price? They helpfully give us this chart:
Thankfully the U.S., home of fracking, has mostly been spared the huge natural gas price spikes that have befallen Europe and Asia. If the dopes occupying the White House and leading the Congress had their way, we would be suffering the fate of those places and worse.
And oil? It’s suddenly trading at $80 and more per barrel, the highest prices since 2014. Expect that fact to show up in gas prices at the pump over the course of the next few weeks or days.
But what are we missing? Shouldn’t wind and solar just step up to fill in the gaps? After all, they are clean, and they are green, we have lots of brand new facilities, and the fuel is abundant and free. The question is of course facetious. Wind and solar are completely useless to step in when supplies of fossil fuels are tight. You can cover the landscape with them, but on a calm night you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing. Essentially you need the same fossil fuel capacity as if you had never built any wind or solar facilities at all.
While we’re at this, we might as well look over to the big energy story on the front page of today’s New York Times. That would be “World Wants Action as China Gushes Emissions.” It’s a big three-column extravaganza, continued to all of page A-12 in the interior. The bottom line: China is producing a huge percentage of the world’s manufactured goods, and it currently has a shortage of electricity to do the job, and it’s going to build more fossil fuel power plants whether the pooh-bahs of the rest of the world like it or not. Some excerpts:
On the northern edge of a vast Chinese factory city, welding torches gleam as workers finish construction on a gas-fired power plant to replace one that burned coal and blanketed the surrounding neighborhood in a sooty pall. It’s one of several huge gas-fired plants being built to pump more electricity throughout this sprawling industrial city of about 10 million, where rising demand for power has led to rationing and blackouts that are now rippling across eastern China and threaten international supply chains. This archipelago of power plants underlines an unsettling reality in the global fight to slow climate change. China burns more fossil fuels than any other nation, making it the planet’s top source of the greenhouse gases that are warming the Earth. And its voracious appetite for electricity is only growing.
But hasn’t China built all kinds of wind and solar facilities, and for that matter hydropower? The Times calls them the “world leader” in all three categories:
China is the world leader in hydroelectric power, in solar power and in wind power. While China has mostly run out of rivers to dam for hydroelectric power, it has been building solar power and wind power faster than any other country in recent years.
So why don’t they just use these sources to provide the power they need and forget about the coal and the natural gas? The Times will never say it, but the fact is that all the wind and solar are completely for show. They produce some small amounts of power at random times, and then when you really need them they can’t be counted on. So China continues to build natural gas and coal plants, while mouthing empty promises about maybe someday slowing that process down. As to the reality on the ground:
China still plans to build 247 gigawatts of new coal power. That is nearly six times Germany’s entire coal power capacity. China’s plan “would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world” to restrain global warming to a relatively safe level, [John Kerry] said.
But Kerry and his ilk have no real idea of where actual useful energy can come from to make all this manufactured stuff. For example:
The biggest driver of China’s emissions, however, is its insatiable appetite for steel and cement, key ingredients for apartment towers, bullet train lines, subways and other large construction projects. Producing these two materials accounts for about a quarter of China’s carbon emissions.
Make vast amounts of steel and cement with solar power? Good luck with that.
Anyway, we’re little by little seeing the inevitable consequences of trying to replace real energy that works (fossil fuels) with fairy dust. This will continue until the low and middle income people of the world figure this out and throw the climate cultists out of power.
As we in Texas noted in February, as far as wind and solar reliability goes, that s@@t don’t work!
The problem in Texas was a failure of natural gas. It would still have failed with 100% fossil fuel.
Ultimately it’s all your fault for not being pious enough. Repent and self-flagellate.
Planned Powerhood (PP) for intermittent/renewables. Let us bray for energy progress.
griffter,
Please, don’t start off a thread with such an obvious lie! The statistics from February show natural gas plants carrying the bulk of the load, while wind and solar were pretty much nonexistent! And the gas supply would have been adequate, if the pipes had been properly weatherized, and the pumps hadn’t been subject to unreliable ‘renewable’ power!
I’ll bet many of the bureaucrats believed the CAGW myth, so they didn’t think cold was a factor any more! Maybe you can give them some lectures about how increased CO2 leads to more and deeper cold snaps! That should be right up your alley!
I’m defending Griff.
There have been many periods in the ten years before February 2011 when wind power was low (every winter) and in many weeks there were hours of near zero wind output. ERCOT managed to provide electric power is spite of months, and hours, of low wind power output. What was different in February 2021? Only that the weather was unusually cold and the cold weather lasted an unusually long time. Fossil fuels provided electricity for about 24 million of 29 million Texans.
The problem was that all non-wind sources of electricity were unable to produce enough electricity for all 29 million Texans.
You could criticize those windmills whose blades were iced but Teaxans made the decision not to pay for optional deicers. Even if they had deicers, there still would have been a blackout.
The Texas energy infrastructure can not handle extremely cold weather. That was true in the late 1980, February 2011, February 2021 and probably will happen again.
Don;t blame windmills for doing what they were designed to do — blame Texas utilities for not having sufficient fossil fuel backup that could operate in very cold weather … just like utilities have in northern cold states and high latitude cold nations.
When you add unreliable windmills to an electric grid, you get an unreliable electric grid. I’m sure Texans knew that as they wasted their money on windmills in the past 15 years. But they got to virtue signal that they had more windmills than any other state.
Green, that sound more like you’re disagreeing with Griffter. The reason Texas had insufficient reliable fossil and nuclear was because they spent far too much building unreliable renewables. Their policies favored unreliables by not adding the same amount of necessary reliable backup power every time they build a windmill, they don’t have a capacity market, and they don’t consider reliable power as being much more valuable than unreliable power.
Also, the “renewable policies” make very much fuel storage (which requires facilities and operational expenditures) too expensive for companies that hope to stay in business.
Plus, right at the beginning of the situation, some gas power plants were forced to shut down because of executive order that diverted their gas supplies to home heating — which sometimes could not function due to lack of electricity.
Plus other regulation and policy conditions that have been explored in detail put additional difficulties upon thermal plants.
Richard,
I think we’re all talking past each other a bit.
I would agree that the wind turbines did just what they were designed to do; they were unreliable at a critical time! But I would disagree that most Texans know that they wasted their money on them!
The hard selling of RE has been nonstop for decades now! John and Jill Q. Public have little or no idea how expensive, inefficient and unreliable wind and solar are when compared to thermal generating systems like fossil fuel and nuclear! There is a dearth of engineers to explain the problems for the electrical grid created by excess wind and solar; problems that start once RE takes over 10-20% of your capacity! Most of the virtue signaling was done by Austin bureaucrats; the Texas Valentines Day Massacre was a bucket of cold water on the sleeping public!
I’ll throw some hot water on the fire. Thank many of you again for paying for the solar power we put in in 2008. I’d figured at least a 20 year payback. Thanks to anyone living in the states around Philadephia- states aligned with green power(we get ‘green’ from it).
With all the overlapping installation subsidies and the overlapping green energy subsidies the facility will be paid off in 2-3 years. But all along it has paid some $100/month on a $30-60 power bill.Thank
Thanks Again!!!
Every year, there are more wind and solar and less gas and coal.
Just because they survived periods of low wind and sun in the past is not proof that low wind and sun played no part in this years problems.
Natural gas is also used for home heating.
“Don;t blame windmills for doing what they were designed to do — blame Texas utilities for not having sufficient fossil fuel backup that could operate in very cold weather … just like utilities have in northern cold states and high latitude cold nations.”
In the case of the February 2021 arctic cold snap, windmills in northern cold States didn’t work either. The problem was the wind became becalmed over the whole central U.S.. That’s what happens under a large dome of high pressure.
The Southwest Power Pool also had rolling blackouts and the SPP includes all those States that supposedly have their windmills hardened to withstand ice. And to the best of my knowledge, fossil fuel powerplants located in the SPP did not go down like the ones in Texas. So what does that leave as a source of failure in the SPP? It looks like windmills to me.
you missed the point
no wind equalled no electric power to supply the electrically mandated Gas Compression
Therefore no gas to provide the electricity to power the gas supply
chicken and egg no energy = no energy and the lights go out
Um, no. The old gas powered gas pumps were replaced by ‘green’ electrical ones. No power, no gas.
So apparently Texas’s problem was in listening to the Ecoloons and investing in unreliables without listening to the climate realists and providing 100% fossil back-up capacity be maintained at all times and ready to spin up at a moment’s notice.
No windpower is at the heart of the problem. The structure of the Texas grid, depending heavily on natural gas peaker plants, is due to the fact that the government has supported so much wind and not coal. If wind was properly treated, i.e. not favored in the distribution scheme and forced to pay for its own backup, the Texas grid would have a very different set of power sources.
Now, that’s the real problem. Secondarily, wind failed to perform during the cold weather. Texas has about 32,000 MW of wind power capacity – supposedly. For most of the crisis we were lucky to get 6,000 MW and for much of the time it was less than 4,000 MW. So we were getting 12% of the power we paid for. Nobody in their right minds would be paying full price for any equipment that only delivered 12% of the performance required. https://sa.ercot.com/misapp/GetReports.do?reportTypeId=13105&reportTitle=Wind%20Integration%20Reports%20&showHTMLView=&mimicKey
So yes, wind caused the crisis – first, because it distorted the power sources installed on the grid and second because it failed to produce more than 12% of the power it is rated to produce.
We all know that a 100% fossil fuelled power grid would have coped with the Texas situation without any problems. Goes without saying that you have to have proper stockpiling and proper insulation of services. Simple . .
Natural gas was able to increase production 450% before it failed. How much was your vaunted wind and solar able to increase during that storm? Imagine the magnitude of that disaster had Texas relied 100% on wind and solar power.
There would probably be a blackout very week !
Absolutely, without reliable back-up
Still aspiring for peak insanity?
No, insanity is just it’s vehicle, stupidity is the peak it is trying to reach. I would say it is sliding down the other side, at this point. 😉
It doesn’t matter how egregious the lie. griff will repeat it for as long as the funding lasts.
The cause of last winters black outs were the fact that wind and solar cut out completely. This destabilized the grid and caused the compressors that fed natural gas to the power plants to fail
The reason the compressors failed was because the EPA demanded that they no longer be powered by gas generators that tapped into the gas pipes, but from the grid instead, because this would result in less CO2 being emitted.
BTW griff, didn’t you declare that the arctic would be ice free and all the polar bears dead by now?
Griff loves winding all we WUWT commentators and we fall for it every time.
Probably the best response to Griff , if you need to, is with a suitable Memoji.
I have a theory that Griff is the imaginary creation of Moderator Charles Rotter, who gets into a silly mood when he is drinking and then posts as “Griff”, increasing page views dramatically, as the arguments begin. But I can’t prove it. I also have a theory that it’s impossible to prove anything. But I can’t prove it.
Australia learned all these lessons about 5-6 years ago. They apparently aren’t making appropriate changes to their electric grid policy.
Hi Jack!
The difference is the gas was there but the supply infrastructure was not cold proofed. The wind and solar weren’t there. You can fix the supply infrastructure so the next time the gas continues to flow. You cannot turn on wind and solar by any means including prayer and sacrificing virgins.
Brayer and babies in a modern frame. In Stork We Trust for JIT delivery.
True enough! It’s ALL been tried before, and it didn’t work for the Aztecs, and it won’t work in Texas, or even in the UK, either! Sorry , Griff!
Someone suggested throwing politicians into volcanos instead.
Virgin politicians are rare.
And yet the same lie from the lie spewing liar. How typical.
It was a failure of wind turbines freezing up and some gas plants having frozen water lines.
All that could have been avoided with freeze protection systems for wind turbines and insulation for water lines.
Unfortunately, many houses and other buildings are heated with ELECTRICITY, which greatly increased demands during the freezing conditions.
That demand increase was far beyond the capability of the cold-affected wind and gas plants.
The result was rolling black-outs, and electricity shut-offs for several days.
NOTE: Wind turbines NEED electricity, whether running or not, whether frozen or not.
While there was freezing and icing that wasn’t the real issue with wind turbines. We have a bunch of them here in canada and they can run in -40
The issue is no wind, Texas was hit with the same arctic high that moved through central canada a couple days before
Here in AB we had 8-9 straight days below -30 from that system and it’s a calm cold, our wind assets never got above 5% that whole time.
Luckily we are used to it and gas and coal plants operated right through it
Or we’d all be dead
And that’s the big problem with wind. Summer’s hottest days and winter’s coldest days are during high-pressure systems, which bring no wind and have clear skies. The clear skies let the summer sun heat everything, and the winter nights radiate what little heat there was during the day out into space. And no wind to generate wind power. Like everything else Leftism believes and promotes, it’s backward.
“The issue is no wind, Texas was hit with the same arctic high that moved through central canada a couple days before”
Yes, this same arctic high covered an area from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and all points in between. That’s why the windmills were not working and that’s why the northern States were having rolling blackouts of their own.
Willem,
The problem is the Left are trying their best to shutdown and harass all pipelines and to harass that hydrocarbon industry.
The Left hate the hydrocarbon industry and hence are like angry stupid children who are clueless about the engineering reality and the importance of 24/7 power.
A reliability analysis and failure analysis (determine how a systems fail) to mitigate and manage failures, should have been done (and checked/monitored by the regulatory agency) to ensure the system does not fail.
In cold countries like Canada… Heat is required in the cold months of the winter (24/7) or all of the water pipes in the buildings will burst, causing a great deal of damage. And, if heat is lost, the people living in the house/buildings will freeze to death.
In Canada, natural gas distribution networks are required to have backup generators that are powered by natural gas… To ensure heat and natural gas is not lost if the electrical grid fails.
The gas plants have heat tracing to ensure that water lines do not freeze. The problem is the heat tracing is powered by electricity. So when the electric grid shutdown, the gas plant, water lines froze. In Canada where it is cold for months… Heat tracing is powered from a backup power supply batteries and a generator…. To ensure the system can be restarted if the electrical grid is shutdown.
The failure is due to a lack of design requirements/specifications to ensure there is back sources of power.
The point is …. The Natural gas pipelines and gasoline/diesel pipelines provide (if they are powered independently from the electrical grid), separate sources of power and heat which is an advantage, if the electrical grid is damaged or out of service.
One of the risk of EV vehicles is if the electrical grid stops working… EV vehicles become useless bricks.
A second problem which was noted above is some gas pipelines, in Texas, have pumping stations that are powered from the electrical grid, rather than burning the natural gas in the pipeline to power the pipeline’s compressors.
The normal practice for natural gas power lines is power the pumping station compressors by burning the pipeline natural gas, using a single pass turbine.
No Griff
As I said the other day, you chortle endlessly that most of the grid investments go to renewables, Texas is the poster child for that with its lack of a capacity market.
There is a correlation and causation between how much you point to renewable penetration and blackouts.
The only issue with gas was some freezing, because you climate scientologists convinced many that it’s only getting hotter.
So every bit of that disaster and all the deaths are on you and people like you
Griffoon .
You can not cripple conventional energy supply for years in favor of unreliables and the blame the the conventional energy for being overwhelmed by demand because the unreliables failed to do what they were built to do.
That’s like me breaking your legs and then mocking the crap out of you for a failed marathon run.
The reason for this failure is simple :
Any system can only take a certain amount of parasitism before it breaks down
and the higher the number of parasites the more failures will happen.
I know hypocrisy is your religion but please don’t blame the host for what the parasite did.
Climate scam policy of pushing useless wind power is at the root of the Texas February ERCOT grid near-collapse. Just as it will be for Germany and the UK in a few more months failure to invest in fossil fuel supplies and overreliance on wind will bring blackouts.
I wonder why the Canada Pension Planners made such massive investments in European renewables? I wrote and asked but no one responded.
https://www.cppinvestments.com/public-media/headlines/2020/cpp-investments-establishes-renewable-power-capital-to-focus-on-european-renewables
“CPP Investments has made approximately C$9 billion of equity commitments to renewable energy globally as of September 30th, 2020…. “
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/america-doomed-replicate-europes-energy-crisis
“What is happening in Europe—including the UK, by the way, one of the most active energy transitioners—right now is a cautionary tale of magnificent proportions. Even Bloomberg, which a few weeks ago came out with an article stating that Europe’s Energy Crisis Shows the Downside of Fossil Fuels, recently published another, cautioning that Global Energy Crisis Is the First of Many in the Clean-Power Era.”
EIA data from that event and WSJ summaries of the data are not that hard to read. Give it a try.
Griff is sort of right here, which we should celebrate !
Wind energy in Texas was expected to produce very little power in February 2021 and the Texas windmills did not have optional deicers, so icing reduced potential wind output.
The actual wind output during the blackout was about two-thirds of the expected low output.
A little more serious was a few hours of very low wind power output just before the blackouts.
But windmill do that once in a while — maybe every week?
The power not provided by the wind, because of the icing problem, should have EASILY been covered by spare fossil fuel power capacity.
It was not, because the entire Texas energy infrastructure was not winterized to handle unusually cold weather.
This was also true in February 2011 when wind power capacity was about 1/8 of what it was in February 2021. An august 2011 FERC report explained the problem in February 2011 — the report date could have been changed for a new 2021 report — the 2011 winterization recommendations were not followed.
Windmills did exactly what they were designed to do — produce highly variable and unpredictable electric power output. And their blades can get iced if there are no optional blade deicers.
The real issue:
Why would anyone with common sense attach windmills to an electric grid, especially without having 100%+ fossil fuel (natural gas) backup? I can’t answer that. Maybe Griff can?
You hit the REAL PROBLEM on the head…
Windmills did exactly what they were designed to do — produce highly variable and unpredictable electric power output
And that is the exact problem with weather dependent generation sources
Now complete the thought…
Would have failed, because there was not enough natgas to supplant the complete shut-down of wind.
The problem was a dependency on wind to always produce a certain amount of power. And when it didn’t – the other sources failed.
It was wind – not gas – that caused the problem. The failure was not enough reliable gas to back up all that unreliable wind.
Ever actually been to Texas Griff ? How about to a gas pipeline site. In order to move large volumes of gas high pressure gas pipelines need this thing called “compression”. To operate compressors you need electricity. When wind energy collapsed ERCOT panicked and cut power flows around the state indiscriminately in order to avoid a total collapse of the grid. That left many compressors without electricity to operate. Without compression gas deliveries stopped. The parade of horribles Texas suffered in February was caused by a sudden and almost complete collapse of wind energy.
Not if you are clever enough to use the actual gas that you are trying to compress to run the compressors. Actual gas that’s actually there, as opposed to electricity that relies on unreliables.
Of course, this is what they did. Then some greentard decided that this was too reliable and forced them to use unreliable electricity instead, because CAGW. If I didn’t know better, I’d imagine that it was a beautifully executed cunning plan, but I know that they are way too stupid to execute that.
It’s amazing that our resident Black Knight keeps harping on this same lie, post after post on the matter.
Unfortunately even if you power the engines with gas the instrumentation on the compressors still requires electricity
Yep. The elegant solution was scrapped by greentards.
Don’t be such a moron Griff. The sudden loss of all the wind and solar put the grid out of commission.
Mostly true. However, that does not negate the fact that a grid cannot be run on intermittent power sources. There will always be a need for fossil fuel backup about the same size as the rated capacity of unreliable sources. This is why renewables are completely uneconomic: double the rate base equals double the cost. Eventuall
y viable storage technology will mitigate the problem to a degree.
Griff, it would help if you paid attention once in a while. Texas shut down the fuel-fired power plants prematurely. I posted a comment on that a while back. The state does that routinely. It was a mistake – a serious mistake, assuming the weather would be the “same as always” which was incorrect – and no one in my family down there in Texas was amused.
Griff, stop repeating that nonsense. Look at production of electricity in TX on and after Feb 8th. Wind and solar became non-factors. Natural gas saved the day.
You Greens are worse than Bolsheviks.
Watermelons.
“The problem in Texas was a failure of natural gas.”
One thing about using natural gas is the problems can be fixed, given a little thought.
Nothing can make a windmill work when the wind doesn’t blow.
Wow. Next time try commenting on something you actually know a little about.
The solar farms were pretty much useless due to clouds and nighttime. One can predict this outcome given a winter storm.
Wind Turbines – half had frozen blades and the other half lost most of their production as the winds quieted during the coldest days and nights of the weather. You could spend a ton of money on “winterizing” the blades – which you would use maybe once every 3 to 10 years while reducing electrical production 100% of the time due to added weight.
The problems with Gas Operated Plants had many root causes – lack of on-site storage, failure of delivery trucks due to icy roads, frozen pipes, and gas pumps that had no electricity. Investing in fossil fuel plants is discouraged by the rate structures and laws favoring “green energy” – so no incentive to expand storage. The building of new pipelines is discouraged and often blocked by the Greens – so an over reliance on trucks for delivery. Frozen pipes were caused mostly by the EPA requiring the old gas heaters be replaced by electric heaters. Electric pumps (and heaters) were turned off (denied power) by ERCOT in their effort to divert electricity from “non critical” industry uses to residential homes – they didn’t even understand what they were asking to be turned off. Almost none of these gas plants failed due to their direct ability to handle cold weather.
A nuclear power plant shutdown one of it’s reactors due to cooling pipes freezing – an easy to solve engineering problem. No one had anticipated such cold temperatures so far south.
Had their been NO green energy mandates or infrastructure, companies would continue to invest in their existing fossil fuel power plants and built new ones. Onsite storage would “likely” have been greater. Had EPA regulations not enforced a needless change, gas pipeline heaters and some pumps would still have operated. Had ERCOT not turned off electricity to companies operating electric pipeline heaters and pumps, they would have continued to deliver gas to power plants. Yes, the nuclear reactors need upgrades to winterize their input pipes. The grand result is the storm would have had little effect on residences needing electricity.
Green Energy is expensive, undependable, and carries great risks due to weather. The only way to lower the risks is to build more fossil fuel or nuclear capacity as backup. If you have more fossil fuel and/or nuclear energy capacity, you simple do not need green energy in the first place.
Griff,
one unintended effect on giving renewable generation full access to the market is that the conventional generators get less of that market than otherwise would be the case. What that does is reduce income to the conventional generators which means that to remain profitable, expenditure must be cut. If that expenditure is winterisation and the requirement for that is quite low it may not be done.
This effect is true wherever theer are renewables who whave full market accesss, the essential generators have less income and investors for new plant that is needed are less likely to invest so what should be bilt may not be.
That for all the technically incompatible aim of adding renewables to the grid.
Hey griff aren’t you busy getting ready to jet in for the knees-up in Glasgow and the multisensory experience-
Capsule of 1765 air reveals ancient histories hidden under Antarctic ice (msn.com)
The creative juices are really beginning to flow mate after the usual dooming warmup by the watermelon media.
The problem in Texas was the Fracking Cold.
Wind turbines couldn’t spin especially with iced blades.
More Turbines simply would have meant even MORE unspinning generation.
Gas was needed to maintain heating and thereby prevent people from freezing to death.
Electric heaters were useless due to No Spinning Wind Turbines generating electrons to power them.
Gas being needed for heating equates to less gas available to pick up the slack created by the frozen wind generation void.
Gas was still far more reliable during the Wind Freeze-out all things considered
Do you suppose Kerry ever read the IPCC’s SR1.5 document prepared before the failed Katowice COP? Half a degree above now? I read some of it. Not surprised no-one else has. And the well informed criticisms? No of course he hasn’t. Too busy flying around the world making Statements.
Hey! They need a reason to fly into Aspen and park their private jets.
You don’t have to be any kind of a genius to figure out that wind and solar generation are never going to supplant fossil fuels in powering the world economy.
One would think so, but I know a very smart talented guy and if you ask him straight out, “Do you really think the world’s economy can be run on wind turbines and solar panels, he answers with a simple “Yes”.
OK, so not as smart and talented as you think he is.
That’s hard to deal with. He has his own company and several patents, software and hardware, that are providing a substantial income, and he’s a semi professional musician (weddings).
So, creative, not intelligent. Those are two very different things. I know several successful software developers and outside of their chosen field they are not smart enough to pour piss out of a boot which is why they pay me and other people to do all manner of things FOR them. And if they had not had the luck to marry business savvy spouses they would be broke.
Like John Kerry, perhaps?
All Lurch can create is lies. He did have the minimal intelligence to marry a vastly wealthy widow. And she has the minimal intelligence to not let him have any control over the money, that still resides with the law firm John Heinz’ grandfather put in place to run the money. That infinite gravy train with biscuit wheels will keep chu-chu-chugging along long after Lurch and Theresa are gone.
Magical thinking and utopian ideologies recognize no intellectual boundaries.
If anything, they are overrepresented on the brainier end of the scale.
Being talented in one area is not proof that one is knowledgeable in another.
Or, not nearly as smart as Steve Case THINKS he is, right?
A square peg can fit in a round hole if the hole’s diameter is greater than √2 times the length of the square’s side.
Unfortunately, your smart talented guy doesn’t want to be so constrained and in essence tries over and over to violate fundamental realities by making the square peg bigger and bigger. This by definition is insanity.
See my reply above, I just don’t understand how the whole world can be duped by the bullshit.
Well, we know that advertising works on most, propaganda works on many and hypnosis on quite a few. One shouldn’t blame the victim in most cases, even though some deserve it.
FBI was able to convince millions of Russia colluuuusion 🙂
The FBI-bois also run the dirty tricks department.
98% of folks dont have any idea of the complexity of being able to walk to the wall and flick the switch and get power. Many of course have no power to begin with. But because the FUNDAMENTALS arent understood it is easy for an Al Gore type and renewable advocates to lead the masses into their propaganda and false ‘truths’.
It isn’t really that difficult, if you followed the audits for the Nov3 election!
Big enough hammer will put that peg in! Destroy the hole and everything around it, that is the leftists’ idea of progress. They just think they will not be hurt by the process.
Then clearly his talents are not based in intelligence.
You need to ask him his definition of the world’s economy. He is likely thinking of the economy circa 1800.
A lot of folks here at WUWT have seen this coming for several years.
Proof positive of the slow car crash…
And it’s obvious that the climate cult will blame energy shortages on fossil fuels.
The Davos WEF globalist elite doesn’t like the present human population size on Earth, so how best to weed out the deplorables? Create terrorism, Leak a virus to force faulty injections, force fake energy supply on all, make a bio security surveillance state, start a WW III.
They think they can escape bad fall out of all this – wrong.
Create terrorism, Leak a virus to force faulty injections, force fake energy supply on all, make a bio security surveillance state, start a WW III.
Nice strawman, but a direct quote can’t be refuted so easy:
The Wizard of Baca Grande
Daniel Wood; West magazine
Daniel Wood interviewed Maurice Strong for several days in 1990.
Here’s a Synopsis of the last page from that interview:
Strong said he has a novel he’d like to write. It would be a cautionary tale about the future.
“Each year”, he says, “The World Economic Forum convenes in Davos to set the economic agenda. What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries, and if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is no, they won’t. So in order to save the planet, that small group decides:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
“This group forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. They’re all at Davos. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. Using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies, they engineer a panic and prevent the stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries to hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos hostage. The markets can’t close. The rich countries…” he trails off and finally says “I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this.”
Yes, he shouldn’t be saying things like that. Most left wing liberals are a bit more circumspect than that, but every now and then they let on as to what they are all about in front of an open mic or an objective reporter.
The election of President Trump was a mild rebuke to the left. They learned nothing. I fear the election of someone who is actually as bad as they accused Trump of being.
When the masses start freezing and starving, they will instantly turn on those who think they should be the masters because they know better than the rest of us.
None of this that we are experiencing now, none, would have come about were it not for “Public Education” The answer, the solution, lies there.
I couldn’t agree more. The real problem is that the democrats are pushing the voters to do this with their irrational fearmongering and irrational policies to combat these made up fears.
“I fear the election of someone who is actually as bad as they accused Trump of being.”
Your fears have been realized with the “election” of Joe Biden. Biden is as bad as they accused Trump of being. They accused Trump of being another Hitler. Biden is looking very Hitlerian since he took office.
And it wouldn’t matter who the Republican leader was, the Left is going to demonize them. Character assassination is the way the Left deals with those who don’t agree with them. If it wasn’t Trump, it would be someone else. Anyone who opposes the Left is Hitler, as far as they are concerned.
And Hitler was a socialist.
“Absolutely nothing. Essentially you need the same fossil fuel capacity as if you had never built any wind or solar facilities at all.”
I’ve watched my countryside fill up with turbines continuously visible from a distance at night along a 120 mile corridor. And we still need full capacity back-up. Environmentalists and school children (more alike than they would like to admit) still complain that we should do something. Is that a tacit admission that wind turbines as far as the eye can see are nothing? And their answer is to build twice nothing.
Also, it’ just tragically comic how those Aussies talk about controlling their own weather and brush fires with their own emissions while they admit that it’s a global problem and while their continental neighbors to the North obliterate what they do. Irrelevance in search of denial.
“… they admit that it’s a global problem…”
There isn’t a problem, quit buying into the bullshit.
While laughing all the way to the free lunch that the wealth from commodity abundance brings as demand and prices soar. The joke is on the woke living in the northern hemisphere who will die when the lights go out.
Australia has never done better:
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/current-account
No miner in Australia wants the circus to stop. The Minerals Council has employed professional greens to lobby the government to go all-in on net-zero so Australia can be seen to support the circus.
Wind and Solar are the only industries that are allowed to chop up or burn our flying friends, including protected raptors. This pass on laws makes one wonder what the woke left will come after next? OK, for the record I am in favor of Socialism.
‘Mummy, when I grow up I want to be a socialist.’
’Make up your mind, dear, you can’t do both.’
The usual nonsense, illustrated by something which is vanishingly rare in the real world.
Renewables supply 40% or better of electricity in multiple top economies these days…
Renewables while intermittent are predictable.
Renewable installations are still increasing.
Outside China coal power decreased worldwide last year, as did the future coal plant pipeline.
Usual nonsense indeed: by you.
At least it infers that Reliables (fossil) generate 60% of demand and reliably too
First major electricity supplier “Rheinische Elektrizitäts- und Gasversorgungsgesellschaft” (immergrün! & Meisterstrom) terminates supply contracts in certain areas
Link to German page
On Friday it became known that the Rheinische Elektrizitäts- und Gasversorgungsgesellschaft, to which the brands “immergrün!” and “Meisterstrom” belong, has terminated supply contracts in certain areas. A reason for the sudden terminations the enterprise did not announce so far yet. It is however assumed that the supply is stopped due to the drastically risen procurement prices area-wise. As already well-known from the media the procurement prices for natural gas and river in the last months at the stock exchange approximately tripled, the prices for short term procurement are even approximately quintupled. With such drastic price increases above all the ?cheap offerers? come under pressure, since these usually at short notice your need at the stock exchange buy and therefore up-to-date record prices must pay. Thus on Friday the first customers surprisingly received notice letters to the center of the month. Thus the customers are supplied by the respective local basic supplier, if the customer does not worry himself about a new supplier.
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
So far to your factfree comment
“Renewables supply 40% or better of electricity”
Better make that 4% Which is why the [mad] rush for renewables has led the world into an energy crisis.
The problem with the devout, such as yourself griff is, you never think anything through.
Just the other day you made the amazing statement that we should make Drax natural gas.
I’m guessing that was off script.
Hi Hi 😀
First gas supplier “Deutsche Energiepool” terminates supply contracts
Link to German page
Deutsche Energiepool has announced that it will cease its activity as an energy supplier, due to the drastic increase in procurement prices. “In recent months, the procurement prices for natural gas and for electricity on the futures market have increased about threefold, and the prices for short-term procurement have increased about fivefold,” the company said. Hardly anyone had expected such a development. Deutsche Energiepool had therefore seen itself forced “due to economic unreasonableness” to the terminations. Customers here already receive notices of termination from the supplier and will be supplied by the respective local basic supplier, unless the customer takes care of a new supplier himself.
Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
“I’m guessing that was off script.” Just another lie. That is all griffie has, lies.
You did not give the full quote. What griff actually said was:
Renewables supply 40% or better of electricity in multiple top economies these days…
For example, according to the UK department of Business, Energy and Indisrtrial Strategy, “Power production from renewable sources again provided record levels of generation in the U.K. last year, with 43% of the nation’s electricity met by sources including wind, solar, and biogas”.
How many other ‘top economies’ had 40 percent, griff will have to tell us. In the USA, renewables provided only 18 per cent of the electricity supply.
And with the 18% how much redundant fossil fuel energy did we waste in case that renewable failed?
I won’t reply to Griff, but for the UK over the last year:
https://grid.iamkate.com/
Wind – 17.9%
Solar -3.9%
Hydro – 1.3%
…
And our aging, clapped out nukes, half of which are down at the moment?
Nuclear – 16.8%
Nearly as much as from windmills.
…
Gas – 40.2%
Maybe G picked the wrong thing?
The UK supply from renewables last year was 23.0% not 40%!
There are many Griffs 🙁
Once again, griff repeats the lies he/she/it are paid to repeat.
There is no economy that gets 40% of it’s power from renewables, even if you include hydro as a renewable.
What griff does is take the graphs or power generation, select the peak for wind/solar and then pretend that this peak was actually the entire year.
Renewables are not predictable, you have no idea when a cloud will pass over a solar field, and while you can predict that tomorrow will be more or less windy than today, predicting minute to minute exactly how strong the wind will be, within a few mph, 24 hours in advance is impossible, and will remain impossible for many more decads.
Renewable installations are increasing, because governments mandate that they do, not because the people want them or because they make any sense.
Coal is decreasing once again because of government mandates.
Coal is decreasing once again because of government mandates.
Even that isn’t sure, as it’s realised in some brains, Green Energy isn’t the clay to secured production of energy.
Bullshit. Even if you add the capacity factors of wind and solar, it is so far short of 100 that you would have to massively overbuild more generating facilities and scale up storage by orders of magnitude.
“ scale up storage by orders of magnitude”
Except that there is no technology, neither current, nor even imagined for the next several decades, that can accomplish that at any price at all. It doesn’t exist, and there are no promising possibilities even on the horizon. Even if Trillions of $ in supplements were passed, there would be no genuine takers. Scam artists perhaps, but genuine producers, no!
Notice griff never talks about how much his little wish lists are going to cost.
That’s because he actually imagines that government is going to force someone else to pay for it all.
Yes, you spew the usual lies. Why? You are a lie spewing liar, and you keep proving it every time you post a lie riddled comment.
All of which shall be recycled at the end of its 30 year lifespan using 100%…fossil fuels. Bravo
As real life experience has been showing. It’s closer to a 20 year lifespan. Less for offshore ones.
This was the situation in 2018. Who predicted that?
Britain is experiencing a “wind drought” that has slowed or halted the blades on turbines around the country.
July’s wind energy output so far is down 40 per cent when compared to the same period last year – despite more wind turbines having been installed in the interim, according to new figures.
Climate change might mean that less wind is available for energy production in general during the coming decades. One projection, published in Nature Geoscience in December, suggested that wind power would decrease in the northern hemisphere but increase in the southern hemisphere.
This might mean a loss of as much as 18 per cent of wind over the central US by the year 2100, according to the study.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2174262-weird-wind-drought-means-britains-turbines-are-at-a-standstill/#ixzz78uHIHlRK
40%?
Please link your data for that.
The percentage might hit 40% on a windy summer day at Noon, but all the calm nights will drag the annual total much lower than 40%.
Griff, Do you have PV panels on your dwelling?
We have certainly spent trillions on renewables.
Facts and graphs show they only provide a fraction of that nameplate in energy, and therefore only provide a tiny fraction of the needed energy.
Sort of like the intelligence in your comments, just a small fraction
Yes, Griff is spouting BS, again, but you know what? Renewables could be producing 90% of the power, and it would still be a failure. That remaining 10% wouldn’t be a little reduction spread out over time; it would be a 90% curtailment for days at a time as the wind stops blowing and overcast skies linger.
You cannot maintain our civilization with recurring multi-day power outages. People would freeze, people would die, commerce would immediately stop. Traffic would be a nightmare (no traffic control), and in many places, stores would be looted and cities would burn. Factories for glass, porcelain, aluminum smelters, food processing plants, and other industry would be forced to buy their own generating equipment, and FOSSIL FUELS to run them, or close for good.
The UK is in a world of hurt, right now. If they have a bad winter, they will forget about saving the future, and instead try save the present, by building more coal and ng plants. It won’t be a safe country for Greta to go to.
Well, I have to admire your honesty. You definitely deliver what you promise!
I suppose this can be explained by the ‘fact’ that China does not HAVE any wind, huh, and therefore they are FORCED to use only coal? Show us some ‘fa ts’, Griff, exactly WHICH ‘top economies’ are achieving 40% or better of electricity? It certainly isn’t the UK!
“Renewables while intermittent are predictable.”
Boy, I am still trying to get my head around that one.
Solar power in CA or the MIddle East might be predictable, (except for sand storms and all), but wind power is extremely unpredictable. Hydro power cannot be predicted a year in advance. Now wood burning, yeah, that is a great renewable energy source!
“Renewables while intermittent are predictable”.
Rather like that gem from an Aussie believer from same cult that Quiffy worships.” Australian renewables can already provide 100% of the nations power needs for ONE day”.
If you penalize fossil fuels and subsidize “renewables” you of course will get more of the latter and less of the former.
100% of the UK economy could probably be run on peat if the subsidies were high enough.
The question of course is what are the costs vs the benefits. In this case the costs are immense and the benefits non existent. A true no-brainer in the full ironic sense of the term.
Wind And Solar sequester energy in the lower troposphere and prevent it from convecting upwards where it would radiate into space. Wind And Solar cause global warming.
Here’s a question:
Why does the CCP not invest in nuclear electricity generation?
They are but it takes years to build them, even for the Chinese.
The Chinese have taken the Westinghouse AP1000 design and have completed 4 of them. They are now going to uprate the design and build those as well.
According to https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/home.aspx
There are 51 reactors under construction currently worldwide. 14 of those are in China. They already have 51 reactors, including one or two of each of the designs ever thought up pretty much anywhere on the planet. That makes them the number 3 country worldwide behind France (56 reactors) who are building just one.
The Chinese even have two working EPRs, something the French designers haven’t yet managed in France!
From the Tooting Contrarian.. And there is even a crater on Mars named after Tooting. To be precise, Tooting is an impact crater (of the type rampart crater) with volcanic features at 23.1°N, 207.1°E, in Amazonis Planitia (Amazonis quadrangle), due west of the volcano Olympus Mons, on Mars; so there…
“You don’t have to be any kind of a genius”
To be a successful politician/technocrat requires some skills or talents and a high degree of psycopathy. Loyalty and fidelity etc are definitely lacking.
Mirror, mirror on the wall…
“Having Fun Watching Wind And Solar Failing”
It’s alright for some. My bank account’s laughing its head off.
“Drill, baby drill !” I’m down with that.
Another couple of years of this and renewables will have price parity with fossil fuels…; )
You left out the part about how pigs will fly. 🙂
“….the fact is that all the wind and solar are completely for show….” And for make work like ghost cities using other peoples’ money. The “Green Economy” is a lie and everyone knows it. When the “Green Economy” can build and nurture itself without fossil fuels I’ll believe in it. Right now it’s like Socialism that without Capitalism it couldn’t get started much less exist.
They are not for show, they are for the subsidies, also known as government guaranteed profits for the politically collected.
This article barely mentions, there was little wind in Ireland, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark from April, 2021 to the present.
As a result more gas was, and is being used from already-depleted gas storage levels, to generate electricity.
Blaming Russia was not an option, because Russia had been supplying gas to Europe, per signed contracts, as even EU bureaucrats had to admit.
The EU countries failed to sigh additional long-term contracts with Russia, mainly because bureaucrats are forcing the EU to “decarbonize”, to set a good example.
BTW, Fossil Fuels Supply 84 Percent of World Primary Energy, and Other Eye Openers from BP’s Annual Energy Review
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/wind-and-solar-provide…
Coal, 27%; Natural Gas, 24%; Oil, 33%, a total of 84%, plus Nuclear, 4%; Hydro, 6%; Renewables, 5%, after more than 20 years of subsidies.
Some of the primary energy, about 10%, is used for exploration, extraction, processing and transport to produce primary energy to users. That 10% of primary energy is often called “upstream energy”.
For example, to produce ethanol from corn requires a very significant quantity of primary energy to produce a gallon of ethanol for blending with gasoline; the combustion CO2 of ethanol is not counted, as is the CO2 of burning biomass, because they are “renewable”, per international agreement.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2020/06/20/bp-review-new-highs…
These idiot EU bureaucrats think more wind, solar, and batteries are the answer to NIRVANA, i.e., “saving the world from ruinous climate change”
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/high-costs-of-wind-sol…
At present, EU gas storage levels are at about 30% from where they should be at this time of year, with no extra gas available to increase storage; A RECIPE FOR A LONG-LASTING DISASTER AND ECONOMIC STAGNATION, IN CASE OF A STRONG WINTER.
If additional gas contracts were signed right now with Russia, it takes a while, several weeks at least, for Russia to ramp up production, and then transmit the gas to users, to alleviate shortages in Europe, and simultaneously increase storage in Europe. Yikes!
This predicament is the result of Socialist-style, government-mandated “planning” by EU bureaucrats, who do not know their ass from a hole in the ground regarding energy systems; New England is similarly affected by such bureaucrats.
Instead, European countries relied on the SPOT MARKET, which always is only a small fraction of the CONTRACT MARKET.
As a result natural gas prices increased, from about $300 to $2,000 per 1000 cubic meter, and coal prices increased in Europe; at present gas is about $1,200/1000 cubic meter.
This did not happen in the US, because the in-the-basement, recently opened-borders, dysfunctional-Biden-RE-wind/solar idiocies, and the $3.5 TRILLION SOCIALIST, REMAKE BOONDOGGLE, fortunately have not yet been implemented, and may never be implemented.
The US does not need such EU idiocies.
The US has no trouble being energy independent, plus that energy is low-cost, as proven by Trump before the 2020 Election.
Unfortunately Trump was ousted by the infamous 2020 Dem/Prog coup d’etat.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/state-senate-hearings-of-forensic-audit-results-of-arizona-2020
BTW, Bloomberg, a financial services/media conglomerate, earns a lot of fees from cajoling wealthy investors into buying various tax shelters, including wind and solar systems.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/cost-shifting-is-the-na…
Bloomberg would never mention any lack of wind, because that would rain on its own wind/solar parade.
LESSON: Now we all know, how we are being brainwashed by the self-serving Media purveying incomplete, distorted, and untruthful “news articles”, to sell TV programs, newspapers and ads to survive.
The same self-serving Media shenanigans were, and still are, used regarding the 2020 Election
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/state-senate-hearings-…
“The EU countries failed to sigh additional long-term contracts with Russia, mainly because bureaucrats are forcing the EU to “decarbonize”, to set a good example.”
Why sign a long term contract with a party that has track record like Russia?
That seems like about smartest thing EU countries have ever done.
Serbia and Hungary and Turkey signed long-term gas contracts with Russia at $250 to $300 per 1000 cubic meter, which is a good deal considering EU spot prices are about $1200/1000.
They are real-world proof Russia is a RELIABLE supplier of gas.
Russia also supplies record volumes of gas under 30-y contracts to China.
None of these countries are complaining.
The only renewable energy sources are coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear. A shortage of coal is easily fixed, mine and ship MORE. Shortage of gas is easily fixed, drill/pump/ship MORE. Same for oil. The only way you have a shortage of hydro is leftards tearing out dams, easily fixed, build MORE dams/hydro stations. As for nuclear, simply remove leftards and their nuisance lawsuits and the problem vanishes.
Solar and wind are failed stupidity and all the people who pushed them should be rotting in prisons and all their ill gotten gains used to mine and drill and lay pipelines and build more nuclear plants.
I’m pro coal, can you clarify how coal is renewable as that might be an excellent point to make to renewables fetishists.
You use it, when you need more you dig out more. Renewable. Solar and wind are not renewable and they do not produce enough electricity to even sustain their own operation, much less enough to produce new solar panels and wind turbines. THAT is the ultimate proof that solar and wind are not renewable, coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear are REQUIRED to keep wind and solar operating and to produce their components.
I can save you a lot of time and aggravation, you are not going to sway any greentards away from their religion. Go to the kids. More and more kids are rejecting the greentards’ religious dogma. Just keep presenting them reality, point out that they will have to give up all the things they have today, smartphones and computers and big screens and cheap travel and all their freedom. Point them to Venezuela, plenty of video of how leftists have destroyed a prosperous and relatively free country in less than a decade. Good luck.
Coal is renewable given a sufficient period of time !
What the Griffters [sic] of the world will learn from the tragedy of high fossil fuel prices, blackouts, and economic collapse, is that renewable subsidies need to be increased to better compete with the now higher priced fossil fuels. That’s how stupid they are. SIGH! I refuse to get sucked in to having hope that the average citizen will stop being deluded when a woke mob riots at a wind farm and begins chopping down turbines, demanding their money back from the influence peddlers that sold this crap.
Hi Griff.
Mickey,
Why not let the National Guard or military get some use out of them? They’d be great for artillery practice or air-to-surface missile training! Hell, I bet they could make extra money by selling tickets to spectators! I know I’d like to watch a few of them blasted to tiny pieces!
Unless, Western Europe has an unseasonably warm winter, I am worried that there will be a significant increase in deaths from hypothermia. Have any of the pompous EU bureaucrats determined how they will bury/cremate the remains?
No, we won’t have a warm winter.
Stockpiling here.
Steel and Cement are also wasted in China frequently. This article show demolition of 15 apartment towers that were neve completed due to bankruptcy of the builder. A waste of energy and resources, and a sign that there are Big Troubles in Little China.
China Blows Up 15 High-Rises Because Constructors Ran Out of Money to Finish Them (vice.com)
BBC: Global warming made the UK’s apples redder and tastier than ever ! !
I say, let’s have some more global warming to save us from catastrophic energy failures this winter as predicted by the BoJo’s government, currently run from Marbella in the sunny Spain. Globally warmed British Isles not warm enough for our beloved leader.
“If the dopes occupying the White House and leading the Congress had their way, we would be suffering the fate of those places and worse.”
Let’s Go Brandon!!
I don’t know what all the fuss is about. There should be no price run up and no storage crisis in the midst of global warming predictions that “children just won’t know what snow is” and “an ice-free Arctic is almost here.” /sarc
Social contagion is a first-order forcing of pandemics.
Watching a failure in progress is not fun.
Telling the climate alarmists “I told you so” is fun.
Richard,
Like house training a puppy, sometimes you have to rub their nose in it!
The puppy will actually learn from it.. The warmistas and make excuses for the negative consequences and continue the behavior.
Thanks for this link and reminds me that we should remember to cite proper data etc whenever we can.
BTW has anyone got a reliable link to the EIA, IEA or BP that provides a CONVENIENT update to an accurate PIE graph or chart showing every individual countries’ TOTAL energy percentage from all the sources?
I understand that Solar + WIND generate less than 3% of TOTAL world energy, but why is this so difficult to find plus easily sourced graphs for all countries?
That Natural Gas Price Hockey Stick is a pretty good indication of where people want to put their money to get energy and it is not wind-power or solar-panels.
From the quote “Coal supply shortages are pushing prices for the fuel to record highs and laying bare the challenges to weaning the global economy off one of its most important—and polluting—energy sources. The crunch has many causes—from the post-pandemic boom to supply-chain strains and ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. And it is expected to last at least through the winter, raising fears in many countries of fuel shortfalls in the months ahead.”
How can the short supply of coal be a function of ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions? Burning less coal should lead to oversupply, not less. I guess CO2 can violate the law of supply and demand.
It is almost impossible to get finance and environmental approval to commence any fossil fuel project. Australian mines near rail lines and port infrastructure could be started in 3 years last century. Now it takes at least a decade with all sorts of legal challenges.
Even expanding existing mines faces legal challenges for generational pillaging – depriving Greta and cohort of a survivable future. The nub is that they will die of cold without fossil fuels.
Just make sure you have your own trees and a place to burn them when it gets really cold. Also keep a few tonne of dry wood handy for emergency use – preferably well hidden from would-be thieves. And don’t advertise your heating appliance.
Coal mines cannot really ramp up supply quickly to meet a sudden increase in demand.
New mines take decades to go through external and internal approvals processes. Equipment lead times can be three years. Infrastructure takes many years to be approved, let alone installed.
A lot of coal projects now face severe pressures to be approved, and the timeline to gain approval has ballooned.
Even operating mines are constrained by the existing machines, most are operated at as close to 100% of nominal capacity as they can so the ability to bump up production is very limited. Most mines will have the ability to stockpile only a few weeks of production – and are loath to do that because it costs a lot of money to have a stockpile just sitting there.
If demand is reduced, operating mines will simply move onto a lower operating cost method of operating, eg go to 5 days a week from a 7 day operation. The days of producing more when prices go down to lower fixed costs on a unit basis are long over. Producers have a bit more discipline.
“The main reason is that the wind and sun only work part time”.
There are 2 main reasons, each fatal. The other is the exceedingly low energy density of wind and solar, causing an ongoing need for huge expenditure of resources.
Imagine thinking a 1500 year old technology could replace fossil fuel to generate electricity.
If you recall, windmills were originally built to grind grain. The millers had no control over the wind or weather, but knew both of those well enough to know what their limits were, and how big the sails on the windmill arms had to be to do the miller’s job. There are still old windmills on farms next to water tanks, and they still pump water for livestock and household use, in this country.
But just because it worked for millers and farmers and what they did, producing flour, pumping water, etc., it does not mean it would work for producing a constant stream of electric power or anything else. Even a farmer who used a windmill to pump water for livestock in the Midwest knew that.
And if these geniuses who think they know everything about everything when they don’t even know what day it is without checking a phone to find out, knew even half of what millers and farmers know, they’d realize how abundantly dumb their brilliant ideas are and go back to watching TV, where they belong.
Is that a large bird’s nest in that photo? See??? Those obnoxious eyesores do have some post-wind-cranking usefulness, after all. 🙂
It’s just unfortunate that the people who don’t understand the real limits on solar and wind almost seem to follow that path intentionally. I think they need a dose of their own medicine. I certainly will not share my bean soup and cornbread with butter and cut-up veggies if they drop by. It’s about earning the privilege of being in my kitchen, and they haven’t.
Wind and Solar can be part of the solution. But they are not the only solution. Oil and natural gas are the main part of the solution and will always be that way. Nuclear too.
Here are some quotes from my paper at
https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
” Abstract
This paper begins by reviewing the relationship between CO2 and Millennial temperature cycles. CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between the phases of cyclic processes of varying wavelengths and amplitudes. At all scales, including the scale of the solar planetary system, sub-sets of oscillating systems develop synchronous behaviors which then produce changing patterns of periodicities in time and space in the emergent data. Solar activity as represented by the Oulu cosmic ray count is here correlated with the Hadsst3 temperatures and is the main driver of global temperatures at Millennial scales. The Millennial pattern is projected forwards to 2037. Earth has just passed the peak of a Millennial cycle and will generally cool until 2680 – 2700. At the same time, and not merely coincidentally, the earth has now reached a new population peak which brought with it an associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases which threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/. The establishment science “consensus” that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels and not this actual fourfold population increase is the main threat to human civilization is clearly untenable. The cost of the proposed rapid transition to non- fossil fuels would create an unnecessary, enormously expensive. obstacle in the way of the effort to attain a modern ecologically viable sustainable global economy. We must adapt to the most likely future changes and build back smarter when losses occur. ”
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Most importantly the models make the fundamental error of ignoring the very probable long- term decline in solar activity and temperature following the Millennial Solar Activity Turning Point and activity peak which was reached in 1990/91 as shown in Figure 5. The correlative UAH 6.0 satellite TLT anomaly at the MTTP at 2003/12 was + 0.26C. The temperature anomaly at 2021/9 was + 0.25 C. (34) This satellite data set shows that there has been no net global warming for the last 17 years. As shown above, these Renewable Energy Targets in turn are based on model forecast outcomes which now appear highly improbable. Science, Vol 373,issue 6554 July2021 in “Climate panel confronts implausibly hot models” (35) says “Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models…… into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”
The global temperature cooling trends from 2003/4 – 2704 are likely to be broadly similar to those seen from 996 – 1700+/- in Figure 2. From time to time the jet stream will swing more sharply North – South. Local weather in the Northern Hemisphere in particular will be generally more variable with, in summers occasional more northerly extreme heat waves droughts and floods and in winter more southerly unusually cold snaps and late spring frosts”
The whole Net Zero campaign is founded on the self delusions and confirmation bias of the academic establishment consensus model forecasts . The main stream Media notably the BBC ,Guardian, NBC ,ABC, CBS,PBS have been the greatest sources of false news. They have produced a generation of scared and psychologically disturbed teenagers and green fanatics who believe that the world has no future if fossil fuels continue to be used. The effect of C02 on temperature is immeasurably small. There is no CO2 caused climate crisis. It is left to sites like WUWT and the Blogosphere in general to question and discuss the basic science on which the disastrous Net Zero policies are based.”
“with tens of billions of dollars of various subsidies and tax breaks.”
Fie! They simply need several trillion $ (each) increases and things will really fly. Haven’t you heard what Joe said?
My take away from the editorials bashing China. The CCPP isn’t bribing enough people and that the these newspapers have no hope of selling their services in China.
The very fact that wind turbines are seriously considered as providers of scalable electric power is all the evidence you need that green energy is a pipe dream. Everything needed for functioning wind turbines had been invented by 1832, when Michael Faraday developed a practical means for generating alternating current. Airscrews (as in windmlls) had been invented in the Eighth Century. Wind turbines are roughly as modern a technology as steam engines.
Here in Canada, it would probably cost 100 million dollars to electrify a town of 2500 souls with wind turbines, which would still need fossil fuel back-up. It is only grotesque levels of popular ignorance that keeps the green energy chimera alive in the public imagination.
Articles like this are anti-Australian.
Australia’s resource based economy is benefitting hugely from this madness – please don’t try to bring sanity back into the discussion.