Reposted from the Manhattan Contrarian
In the field of litigation settlements, people sometimes talk about a “win, win” scenario — a settlement structure where both sides can get some advantage and simultaneously claim victory. By that criterion, what is “green” energy (aka intermittent wind and solar power)? The public pays hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies to get the things built, and in return it gets: sudden shortages and soaring prices for coal, oil, gas and electricity; and dramatically reduced reliability of the electrical grid, leading to periodic blackouts and risks of many more of same; and despite it all fossil fuel use doesn’t go down. It’s a “lose, lose, lose.”
As the world comes out of the pandemic and the international economy returns to attempting to fulfill normal consumer demand, you can see green energy hitting the wall pretty much everywhere you look. It’s just a question of which data points you want to collect for a day’s entertainment.
The current energy crisis in Europe and Asia is of course getting next to no coverage in the U.S. media. But over at Bloomberg News they have a big story on October 4. That’s Bloomberg News as in Mike Bloomberg — the man with four private jets and at least ten houses who devotes his public life to hectoring you to cut your “carbon footprint.” But now suddenly the Bloomberg News people seem to have figured out that periodic energy crises are an inevitable consequence of increasing reliance on the undependable wind and sun. The headline of the article is “Global Energy Crisis Is the First of Many in the Green Power Era.” The Bloomberg piece itself is behind paywall, but extensive excerpts can be found at Climate Depot here, where they call it a “moment of clarity”:
The next several decades could see more periods of energy-driven inflation, fuel shortages and lost economic growth as electricity supplies are left vulnerable to shocks.. . . . The world is living through the first major energy crisis of the clean-power transition. It won’t be the last. . . . Wind and solar power production have soared in the last decade. But both renewable sources are notoriously fickle — available at some times and not at others. And electricity, unlike gas or coal, is difficult to store in meaningful quantities. That’s a problem, because on the electrical grid, supply and demand must be constantly, perfectly balanced. Throw that balance out of whack, and blackouts result.
No kidding.
Meanwhile, the latest place to get hit with blackouts due to an unreliable grid is China. (Previous rounds of blackouts traceable to over-reliance on unreliable wind and/or solar power have hit South Australia in 2016, California in 2020, and Texas in February this year.). From the New York Times, September 27:
Power cuts and even blackouts have slowed or closed factories across China in recent days, adding a new threat to the country’s slowing economy and potentially further snarling global supply chains ahead of the busy Christmas shopping season in the West. The outages have rippled across most of eastern China, where the bulk of the population lives and works.
But didn’t the same New York Times just tell us on October 8 that China is “the world leader” in both solar power and wind power? Somehow, neither of those seems to help when electricity demand suddenly ramps up. Just yesterday the Guardian reported that the recent power chaos is causing China to re-emphasize what they call “energy security,” which the Guardian takes to mean fossil fuels, particularly coal:
China plans to build more coal-fired power plants and has hinted that it will rethink its timetable to slash emissions. . . . In a statement after a meeting of Beijing’s National Energy Commission, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, stressed the importance of regular energy supply, after swathes of the country were plunged into darkness by rolling blackouts that hit factories and homes. While China has published plans to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, the statement hinted that the energy crisis had led the Communist party to rethink the timing of this ambition, with a new “phased timetable and roadmap for peaking carbon emissions”. . . . “Energy security should be the premise on which a modern energy system is built and and the capacity for energy self-supply should be enhanced,” the statement said.
Over in the UK, somebody has now finally taken the time to do a calculation of how much it would cost to provide sufficient battery storage to get the country through an extended (ten day) period of dark and calm in the winter, assuming a grid relying 100% on wind and solar generation. The calculation has been made by Professors Peter Edwards and Peter Dobson of Oxford University, and Gari Owen of Annwvyn Solutions, on behalf of Net Zero Watch, which is a project of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of the American affiliate of this organization.). The answer that Edwards, Dobson and Owen come up with is approximately 3 trillion British pounds. For comparison, UK GDP in 2020 was just under 2 trillion British pounds. And if you look at the Edwards/Dobson/Owen calculation, you will realize that they assume zero loss of energy on the round trip into and out of the batteries. That’s rather a favorable assumption, given that in practice an all-wind-and-solar system would need to store power all the way from the summer to the winter. What percentage of your cell phone’s battery charge is left if you leave the device unplugged on the shelf for six months? But then, it’s all fantasy anyway, so what does it matter?
And finally, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency has just (October 6) come out with its annual International Energy Outlook. This is the sage projection of our wisest gurus of how the production and consumption of energy will change over the three decades from now until 2050. Surely then these guys will show us how the world will achieve the true path to Net Zero carbon emissions within that time frame, if not much sooner.
OK, then, here is the key chart:
Wait a minute! Could they really be saying that, rather than being on a path to oblivion, all major fossil fuel categories (petroleum, natural gas and coal) will continue to see increased usage right on through 2050, and with no indication that any decline will have begun even then? Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. Indeed the projected increases in consumption of two of those fuels are quite dramatic — up in the range of 50% for natural gas and 40% for petroleum. Yes, so-called “renewables” are projected to increase dramatically; but after thirty years of this, they will still, according to EIA, provide only about 25% of “primary energy consumption,” which is less than petroleum alone, and barely a third of the combined contribution of petroleum, natural gas and coal.
I come here everyday for stuff like this, thank you. Very entertaining, indeed.
I had some econut conversion success a few months ago when I turned a friend on to the tv coverage of the British Open golf tournament. Played on the coast, there were frequent background images of 100s of wind turbines out in the North Sea, maybe thousands. It looked like something out of an HG Wells story. He started reading WUWT after that, and now gets it.
One at a time. One at a time.
I occasionally drive through a windmill farm of hundreds, not your thousands, of windmills. I have to slow to the speed limit as I count the number of not operating windmills in the rows and rows of operating mills. Usually about 1% are stopped.
I used to drive I-10 between San Bernardino and Palm Springs pretty regularly. A lot more than 1% of those were not operating – most times it was closer to 50%.
I also used to drive between OC and Palm Springs, servicing computers. I noticed then, back in the 90’s, that MOST of the windmills were either idle or barely turning at all. I would have thought by now that they were ALL operating, but I guess not. Here in the Midwest I see the same thing. MOST of the windmills I see here are completely idled! It’s rather a shock when I see one that IS turning!
There is a line of wind turbines across a canyon between two mountains near Spanish Fork, Utah, where wind blowing off the wide valley near Utah Lake is funneled into the canyon, especially when it is blowing out of the northwest. One day when a cold front (with a NW wind) was blowing through, two of the seven wind turbines were stopped, and one was turning very slowly, on what should have been an ideal day for them, due to the Venturi effect between the mountains.
If these wind turbines perform this poorly on a NW wind, what would they do for winds out of the SW or NE, when they are in the wind shadow of mountains?
They are “farms” only in the sense they harvest subsidies; they do not grow windmills!
Facility is a better term.
Farce-ility would be even better.
As I have said to many friends who say they love seeing those wind turbines doin such good work, & I point out that just because the blades are turning it doesn’t mean any electricity is being produced, merely it is quite windy & the forces on the blades & turbine shaft are extremely high & it’s safer to let the blades spin in neutral from the gearbox, than try to let them resist the wind forced applied to them, which of course could cause severe damage them!!!
I’ve been travelling across Germany and noticing the windmills. I figure 1 out of 25 weren’t spinning.
What I don’t understand is with the same size windmills in the same location why random mills are spinning very slowly while their neighbors spin faster. Is this deliberate or a malfunction?
I have tried counting idle versus apparently working wind turbines in Texas along I20 numerous times. Usually between 30% to 50% are not turning – I assume they do not need the energy on the Grid and that most of the turbines would work if needed.
What an eyesore on the landscape.
I am actually quite scared of the scale of things out in the north sea. We’ve rushed headlong into this, and I am waiting for the inevitable resulting ecological damage that will happen out there. I think the seabirds must be doomed at the very least.
What about the whales? Don’t they communicate by infrasound?
Environmentalists have already responded to this concern –
“we doan need no stinkin’ seabirds”
Not all Fairy Stories have a happy ending.
The world needs a Don Quixote.
We already have one. He’s called Reality.
Actually the world has far too many Don Quixotes. What we lack is more Donald Trumps (as well as Anthony Watts, Jo Novas, Lord Monckton’s, Judith Currys… and a dozen others like them) . The good Don’s ideals and fantasies gained him nothing in the end.
Don Quixote granted Sancho Panza la ínsula Barataria – could he run it?
+ n. n.
Or a Don Corleone?
Few faerie stories end well. That’s the whole point. They’re told to teach children a lesson … a morality tale. We’ve gotten too used to the cleaned up Disney version.
Disney has bastardized and RUINED many, good fairy tales! Just sayin…
True story … when Disney decided to do a biography of Beethoven, he had a writer do the ‘book’. When he read it Walt declared … “He got deaf … a Disney production can’t have anyone getting sick. You’ll have to rewrite it.”
What I love is the usual suspects all claiming that the price increases and blackouts are because of fossil fuels. We had no significant price increases or blackouts before unreliables, and now we have unreliables we get price increases and blackouts. But, obviously, fossil fuels are to blame!
The Red Queen would be impressed.
But, beware, correlation isn’t causation!
But, beware, correlation isn’t “always” causation!, Just a slight modification! It can be on many occasions, but all other options must be assessed for a practical conclusion to be drawn!!! 😉
The rapidly rising energy prices have been a desired outcome by the eco-zealots from the beginning.
Not really – when prices are high, that means demand is high and production eventually catches up and goes high too, that is until the next crash in demand due to a recession or interruption in supply due to a war or political interference.
The zeolots would love oil prices to be low.
I swear, there seems to be almost zero understanding of the most basic economics concepts of supply vs. demand in this thread. For a bunch of commenters and editors who fancy themselves as conservatives, the lack of knowledge of basic economics is rather astounding.
Not to mention ignorance by commenters and editors of the actual history of the extreme cyclical nature of the oil and gas business, and prices, over at least the last 50 years.
The laws of supply and demand can be completely upset when the oligarchs main intention is to eliminate fossil fuels. At the present the US has one who’s sole aim in life seems to be to completely upset and destroy everything his predecessor did. If the nation, itself, gets destroyed as well, oh well!
Indeed. Windpower is free and obviously the solution for high energy prices.
Jan. It’s NOT free, except in fantasy world. Think—if it was “free”, would any subsidies be needed? Have you costed out the steel and concrete and maintenance?
Moreover, reliable energy is required to be ready to take over when the wind stops blowing;so what’s the point of an intermittent energy that requires backup? Just use the reliable energy in the first place.
Using this logic, so is oil and coal. You just go dig it up and there it is.
Jan provides confirmation about what professional marketers have known for ages –
consumers see or hear the term “FREE”, and seek no further info or consideration about the product proposition.
And green scammers have latched on to this marketing truism to rope in the Jans of the world en masse.
You are living in a fantasy world. Fossil fuels market has been characterized by extreme price and supply swings since at least the mid-1970s, vastly predating any renewable energy supplies. Both cuts in supply, and increases in supply, and cuts in demand, and increases in demand have resulted in wild swings in not only prices but also supplies. Whether it is a hurricane that shuts down oil refineries in the Gulf states for months .. or humongous increases in demand during fast economic growth periods, or interruptions that resulted from OPEC cutoffs or slowdowns, or huge increases in supply of natural gas and oil due to fracking.
The fossil fuel business, like most other mineral extraction businesses, is extremely cyclical.
I lived in the oil patch of the Permian Basin from 2008 to 2012, and in that period oil and gas prices went from strong to falling out of the bottom, then climbing back up again. Employment levels in the Permian swung right along with it. In 2008 you could hardly squeeze in the door in the local Walmart .. then a year and a half later, with the Great Recession in full tilt, you could roll a hundred bowling balls down the cashiers aisle at the same Walmart and not hit a single soul.
Apparently you’re too young to remember the massive gas lines during the OPEC oil embargo.
I also lived in the Texas-New Mexico area in the mid to late 1980s. In the early 1980s the massive amount of oil wealth pouring into Houston resulted in a humongous building boom there, and in other western energy producing states. But by 1988 people literally could not give away near new houses in Houston. The same drastic market crash also hit a lot of other mineral extraction businesses in those days. The company I worked for happened to need a lot of geologists – in the early 80s they could no be had as they were all raking in the dough working for the oil and gas companies .. but by the late 1980s they could be had for nearly a dime a dozen.
A former Labor Premier in the Australian State of New South Wales recently went off topic before a scheduled interview on Sky News and attempted to talk up the benefits of the renewables future, according to him a person who has never learnt to drive a car and managed to get a majority in Parliament to grant him a government car and driver for life when he retired from Parliament.
It’s all about wind turbines and batteries he said, and solar installations. No more coal or gas needed, not even modular nuclear generators.
There are none so blind.
…as those who make their grift by not seeing.
“ person who has never learnt to drive a car and managed to get a majority in Parliament” The real reason the guy never learn to drive a car is he either to stupid to pass the test or to bull headed to study for said test. I know such people all to well that was my ex-wife. Like your Labor Premier she been on the government tit most of her adult life, he just did it differently.
Bob Carr
Do you mean to tell me that the people of Australia elect someone that stupid? Shame.
A quick look tells me that they have not factored in the increase in demand from EVs, nor from mandatory electric heating & hot water. They also only calculate 50% unreliables.
If you want to go 100% unreliables, multiply by 5 (+100% EVs, +50% heating = 250%, then double it all for 100% unreliables). That’s £15 trillion.
If GDP is £2 trillion, that means that it would cost 7.5 years of GDP. So if ALL of the UK productivity went to building batteries, it would be possible in 7.5 years. Given the life of batteries, you would need to start replacing them at that point. So basically ALL of the productivity of the UK would be required to build batteries forever for 100 unreliables. Note that this doesn’t include the cost of the unreliables themselves, just the batteries.
People really need to do the very simple maths…
Also never discussed is the problem of recharging the batteries after a period of discharge.
Presumably more windmills or solar are needed, as the first in line will be the electricity users.
Once the batteries are recharged, what happens to the surplus electricity being generated.
No doubt someone will suggest producing hydrogen, which has its own problems in storage, transmission and usage, as well as the variable nature of its availability, much as with other unreliables.
The printing presses will be going flat out to produce the cash needed for all this, although it seems now the money can be produced by the press of a computer key.
The only thing that would make sense to do with the surplus electricity would be to make … methane or higher hydrocarbons with it, in which case these fuels would be “carbon neutral” and not “fossil”. Hydrogen? Forget it !
It is deceitful and misleading advertising to refer to something that is so obviously unsustainable as “renewable”. Allowing the purveyors of this fairy tale to change the meaning of the language is when the rot started.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/renewable-energy
Who can show me any “renewable energy” source used by humans that is not derived from fossil fuels?
We should all agree to call them the “unreliables” on every future occasion.
unRE
Tom,
I see you, and raise you an -liable; unREliable!
“noun
any naturally occurring, theoretically inexhaustible source of energy, as biomass, solar, wind, tidal, wave, and hydroelectric power, that is not derived from fossil or nuclear fuel.” To me the exhaust pretty quick when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. Somehow having a mode of transportation that won’t work when there is no sunshine or wind takes us back to when shipping on the sea was done by wind. Somehow the useful idiots seem to have skipped the history lesson what happens when said ship gets into the doldrums. Having a home in said roving doldrums means cold and dark. As Ron White puts it “you can’t fix stupid.”
It is what the ‘Woke’ do all the time. Changing the meaning of a word temporarily changes the general perception. That is, a pejorative word is replaced by a positive word, and a neutral, objective word is replaced by a pejorative word. I say temporarily because words are a ‘short-hand’ for reality. Eventually, the public comes to understand that the originally positive word stands for something undesirable, and the originally pejorative phrase, such as “ocean acidification” comes to be a ‘nothing burger.’
They probably haven’t factored in soaring materials costs as all insane nations try to do the same thing.
That is exactly what I thought when I read the article on Net Zero Watch (the site formerly known as the GWPF).
They have only calculated the battery requirement for the current demand. Whereas, in reality, they need to factor in the increased future demand from EV charging and heat pumps.
When people can no longer heat their homes with gas or fuel their vehicles with fossil fuels, electricity demand is likely to be about 3 times the current demand IMHO.
EIAs coal use predictions look like green bedwetter’s wishful thinking. Why would coal level off in a handful of years? Non-woke, mostly Asian countries make up the vast majority of coal consumers, and they have a huge amount of GWatts and tonnes of steel and concrete planned. Coal use will easily be 200 Quads by 2050.
Yep. Australia has enough coal for centuries. Only a complete moron believes it will remain in the ground while demand goes up – which it will continue to do.
There seems to be a real disconnect from reality over at green headquarters.
Australia has been receiving threats from China and even hints about the possibility of an invasion.
Considering that Australia is minerals and energy rich, enormous black and brown coal deposits, shale oil and gas, other natural gas and oil, uranium, thorium and salts and much more, including large high yield farming lands, if access was denied to export markets causing a shortage in supply what could that trigger?
Pearl Harbor.
Green: gullible, ignorant, ill informed etc.etc.
Chaswarnertoo,
GREEN: Gullible, Reactionary, Emotional Enviro-Nuts!
There, fixed it for you!
You forgot “stupid”. Really very stupid.
The United States has even more coal reserves than Australia, yet the eco-loons have managed to mostly kill our coal industry (domestic coal production is down more than 50% over the last decade and still spiraling downward). It’s no longer safe to assume that sanity will prevail over the religious fervor of the greens.
Coal is under assault in the US not only by Green Meanies but by competition from natural gas.
Natural gas is a beneficial fuel. In household heating, it can be made 90% efficient without excessive additional cost and is ash free, which is a problem for house heating with coal. Governments that are trying to discourage its use such as NY and CAL, are truly deficient. Canada has added Carbon tax to natural gas….obviously all Canadians have to heat their houses, so it is simply a tax scam there.
It’s simply a tax scam everywhere, end of story!!!
Not all, some manage to become climate refugees and spend their winters in Florida.
LNG is certainly competition for domestic use of coal, but American coal could easily open an export market to across the Pacific and compete with Australian coal in Asia. So why isn’t it? Because west coast watermelon governments have made it nigh impossible to build ports along the west coast for shipping coal.
“Only a complete moron believes it will remain in the ground while demand goes up – which it will continue to do.”
Yes, there are hundreds of coal-fired powerplants in the planning stages, so demand is definitely going up in the future.
Only a moron believes it will stay in the ground as long as it’s needed to manufacture Steel and Silicon. Both necessary for the creation of wind turbines and Solar cells
And computers and smartphones!
Too bad. We’re not short of morons.
It explains why they are ‘green.’
And gradually since signing the UN Lima Protocol Agreement during 1975 manufacturing industry in Australia has been in decline, and that includes steel, aluminium and cement.
The food bowl to Asia Pacific should be a whole lot more as a source of supplies.
Dennis,
Sadly, due to the rapid spread of the Fascist Health State, our Aussie friends are unlikely to restore much productivity! While infantile Western nations cry out for their RE candy for breakfast, the minerals and energy needed to produce Unreliables are being disrupted by or falling under the sway of the bully of Asia!
One has to wonder why the ChiComs would risk an invasion of Taiwan, when it looks like in a few more years they might have a large, mineral rich country begging them to intervene against a government they payed to terrorize it’s citizens!
But I should be careful; I’m sure there’s no more evidence of CCP influence in Australia than there is of Diane Feinstein, Eric Swalwell or Zhao Bai Den suffering from undue influence!
If only we had a federal bureau that investigated such problems, or a press that reported them within say a decade or two!
A man can dream!
Did they at least include in the calculation, that batteries only work for a limited number of charge cycles before they have to be replaced and disposed of ? So maybe it’s 3 Trillion pounds … every 5-10 years. If they’re planned for power outages up to ten days, I suppose that means sometimes discharging the battery quite substantially, which also shortens its life-span.
Nuclear reactors would be a lot cheaper. And they are feasible, unlike grid-scale batteries.
And they would demand a lot less space than batteries to deliver power 24/7/365
One of the worst things you can to to modern (LiPo) batteries is to leave them sit when fully charged (4.2 V/cell). Their life is prolonged when they sit at about 3.8 volts/cell, so multiply the total needed by 2 to get the needed capacity, since you can only discharge to 3.3 V/cell without permanently destroying the cell. (I’m ignoring the nonlinearities.)
I’m guessing the royals and Boris Symonds and all the American political leaders have extremely reliable gas-powered generators serving their homes and workplaces. At taxpayer expense.
When the inevitable happens, they can smile and say it’s just a minor inconvenience on the way to saving the planet. That’s their religion, after all. It cements their power and ensures their relevance.
And when the world doesn’t end, and when it’s no longer possible to extract any more money and suffering from this scam, they’ll claim they saved it. The only question is whether they’ll still have billions of followers refusing to subject to those claims to any kind of scrutiny.
The Houses of Parliament and the Whitehall have gas fired electricity generation and a heat recovery system to keep them warm and well lit.
I do wonder what their gas bill now is, although it is us the plebs that are picking up the tab.
I wonder if when it needs replacing they will replace it with like for like, or set an example by fitting air source heat pumps. The heat pumps would rather spoil the look of the HoP, and the noise will upset the neighbours.
They could of course fit a water source heat pump in the Thames, but would have to cope with the tides and ban anyone else from installing a similar system in the neighbourhood.
Emboldened California governor Gavin Newsom signed a law prohibition sales of gasoline-powered outdoor equipment, like lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and generators. The ban starts in 2024 but Honda generators already can’t be shipped to California.
Are you sure about that? I just went to the Honda of Glendale’s web site, and they are offering a wide selection for purchase.
Honda® Generators | Honda of Glendale
Get ’em while they last
I live in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. It hasn’t gotten that bad. Yet.
They may be rich enough to be able to afford backup generators powered by natural gas, but not smart enough to realize that the gas system is powered by electric compressors.
This all ends when blackouts become a regular occurrence across the world.
I wish I could agree with you Richard however, I think the cult followers and climate jackals will sit willingly and obediently in the dark and say they are saving the planet.
I think the support from the general population is weak. You get some who pay lip service but these people also like their creature comforts.
‘Saving’ a pre-industrial planet that won’t be able to support the present population or provide even the survivors with the lifestyle we have all become used to.
No, Richard. Blackouts and inflation in the West will end the madness long before it infects the rest of the world. Watch the “agreements” coming from COP26.
There are hoooooooles in the bucket,
Dear Greta, dear Greta,
There are hoooooles in the bucket,
Dear Greta, there are holes.
The Bandar-log won’t pay any attention to this calculation because they know they are right.
Like “green” energy is fake energy — “altered” USHCN data is fake data. I’m so glad our tax monies are being put to good use.
Electrical power shortages can certainly be blamed in part, but not wholly, on renewables. Renewable certainly CANNOT be blamed for the runup on oil and gas prices, which is strictly a function of supply vs. demand. Demand for oil and gas ramped up enormously this year, and just as renewables cannot simply be flipped on with a switch, neither can oil and gas supplies. There is typically a 1-2 year rampup required for any large increase in fossil fuel production.
Fossil fuels have ALWAYS been subject to supply disruptions and imbalances between supply and demand – ALWAYS.
Besides the usual cyclical supply and demand issue for fossil fuels, add to it the overall worldwide disruption in supply chains caused firstly by COVID shutdowns and slowdowns, then by the drastic recovery in demand for everything, and exacerbated by labor shortages because over 4 million Americans are retiring from the work force every month now. The latter was inspired if not caused by COVID, as older workers discovered they like life away from the daily grind, and even if they have to take a smaller retirement income, they were never going back to work.
This affects everything everywhere on the planet.
“Renewable certainly CANNOT be blamed for the runup on oil and gas prices, which is strictly a function of supply vs. demand.”
This is true.
Nope, the major blame is on the Eco-loons, who oppose every possible use of FF, banning pipelines, forbidding fracking, causing new gas and nuclear power plants to go thru years of permitting, forcing power providers to purchase unreliable power at inflated prices, etc. If the trillions of $ spent on unreliables had been spent on developing FF sources, prices would be much lower than they are now.
Wrong. Blame Newsome, Biden and their ilk for shuttering gas generation plants and raising the cost to get more gas and oil (leasing, permitting, regulations, pipelines, etc.) It’s the green morons that caused this shortfall in meeting demand.
In the very short term, the blame is definitely on Unreliables™ as there is a solar and wind shortage in Europe at the moment. In the near and long term, responsibility may be a more fungible element.
Of course renewables are to blame, what are you talking about. Fossil fuels are in short supply because there has been no investment in them, Griff and the usual trolls like to crow about how most or all of the investment goes to renewables, and shutting in of coal and nuclear.
So when renewables fail, there is not enough fossil fuel infrastructure to fill the gap specifically because they were starved of investment.
By design, renewable investment proscribes reliable energy supply. That was the entire point of all this.
And now its biting them.
If the demand can’t be fullfilled by renewables, excluded by Greens, whose fault is it ?
It’s not a question of COV-19 when the orderd quanities don’t fix the real demand while the orders were based on running renewables.
Even the eieio’s energy forecast is based on the fantasy that laughable grid-destroying unaffordable unreliables will continue to grow, and coal use will diminish. Even now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The reverse is true: Coal use will expand again, while energy based on fantasies and lies will decline, as it should.
I suspect that the Green contingent believes that subsidies, grants and carbon taxes etc. are RENEWABLE on the basis that the slaving masses at the bottom of the pile have little option but to RENEW that which has been expended.
I also suspect that the slaving masses will have a different view on that.
It will lead to interesting times🤯
Apologies to the movie “The Graduate:” The future is FFs, my boy. FFs.
But! But! They don’t make allowance for the fairies at the back of the garden, elves at midnight or even unicorn farts. How can anyone expect unreliables to become reliable without them?
This is not a bug, it is a feature. Collapse of energy production IS WHAT THEY WANT!!!!!!
“Under my plan, electric prices will necessarily skyrocket.” People didn’t hear that, though. It was said soothingly to an admiring audience and not reported by a complicit press.
From the article: “Previous rounds of blackouts traceable to over-reliance on unreliable wind and/or solar power have hit South Australia in 2016, California in 2020, and Texas in February this year.”
Don’t forget to include the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) which is made up of 19 U.S. States in the west-central United States, and also had rolling blackouts during the February 2021, arctic cold snap. The SPP was not having trouble with their fossil fuel powerplants. It was the windmills in those States that were not producing.
This is what happens when people who believe that cost free energy exists but the fossil industry have suppressed knowledge of its existence run the economy.
From the article: “But then, it’s all fantasy anyway, so what does it matter?”
It matters because some people don’t think it is a fantasy, and then they get put in charge of planning our future.
Yes, and blame the idiots who voted for them. At lease we’re not getting mean tweets anymore.
We got mean tweets and very good policy last administration, and now we have no tweets and the most terrible policy imaginable.
I’ll take the mean tweets.
In fact, I like them. I never have thought they were a drawback. If somebody hits you, you hit them back harder. Sounds like a good idea to me. Especially when we are talking about lying, dangerous Democrats. Their lies can’t be left to stand as the truth, they have to be attacked. If you don’t like politics, cover your eyes and ears.
Tom,
Most people still haven’t figured out that Trump was a comedian in addition to being a successful businessman! The mean tweets were his version of a Don Rickles-like roasting of the inept and corrupt creatures inhabiting the DC open air sewer that grift off the taxpayer 24/7!
He got the economy roaring for everyone by cutting taxes, regulation and red tape! His biggest mistake was believing that Fauxi and the public health officials actually wanted to save American lives, instead of covering their own butts and making bank!
I miss being able to laugh at the fools in Washington; the Praetorian IC has put them in charge and they make the mad emperors of Rome seem sensible by comparison!
“Most people still haven’t figured out that Trump was a comedian in addition to being a successful businessman! The mean tweets were his version of a Don Rickles-like roasting of the inept and corrupt creatures inhabiting the DC open air sewer that grift off the taxpayer 24/7!”
I agree. Trump was trolling these fools, and was enjoying every minute of it.
I still think one of Trump’s better ones was to offer to put solar panels on the southern border wall as a way of selling it to the Democrats. The Democrats’ heads exploded!
From the article: “Yes, so-called “renewables” are projected to increase dramatically;”
I don’t know about that. As we go forward in time, the unRE (unReliable Energy) Wall is going to be hit and going to be more obvious to everyone, and the investment opportunities might not look so good in the future. Of course, taxpayers subsidies may continue to breath life into these failed technologies. But that may change, too.
China is having a renewables problem… and admitting it? What’s going on here? Is this a spoof?
Every now and then, I really do wish I could get into the Tardis and move back to the 1950s, when things actually made some kind of sense.
I guess what is going on now is sort of like birthing pains: something’s coming down the road. Not sure what’s going to come out of it, but it does seem like a sea change of some kind. Those people in China have my sympathy.
Thanks for the article. Nothing like this ever appears on local news.
Whatever is predicted for increasing demand for fossil fuels, there is likely to be a large and permanent price surge in the years ahead. When almost all governments, in their wisdom, state that they will try to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, who in their right mind is going to invest in new wells, pipelines, fracking, etc. to produce more supply ?
Uh-huh, when Obama says “you can build new (ff) power plants, but our regulations will bankrupt you”, that clearly discourages new investments in FF power sources.
Who? Everybody but the West. Later, the West will try to recover but too little, too late. Maybe, just maybe, they will rediscover freemarket capitalism.
To reconcile the key chart you have to consider each part of this synthetic world. The upslope of the renewables line is practically a straightedge line extension assuming Congress extends the ITC tax credits way beyond current legal authority. It also assumes the wind energy industry keeps finding good wind resources at competitive costs even though the best sites were taken some time ago. Future wind energy shortfalls can be blamed on wind stilling effects from climate change rather than the last marginal additions of wind power in questionable settings and at higher costs. Fossil fuel use will need to increase by necessity to pay for higher rates of deficit spending from New England Progressives and extra costs from forced transition speed and forced grid destabilization. Somewhere on that straightedge projection there will come another economic and energy policy crisis that includes auto industry crisis–and possibly financial crisis at SS and Medicare. This will all translate as another political crisis opportunity for stimulus spending of $10 trillion more of borrowed dollars and debasement of the currency. Wanna buy a used aircraft carrier? Or a warehouse full of greenbacks–it’s recyclable you know?
The global energy crisis is just getting started….
Global power cost surge wrecks Singapore’s electricity market (yahoo.com)
China’s power woes may worsen as demand surges amid coal supply lag (yahoo.com)
WRAPUP 1-Coal price surge, power squeeze hits China’s economy, global supply (yahoo.com)
WRAPUP 3-Higher inflation squeezing U.S. consumers as food prices, rents accelerate (yahoo.com)
What does Joe have in common with Jimmy–beside an energy crisis? Answer: Edward Markey, the energy policy disaster architect and excuse maker.
I did like this one-
Returning to coal amid energy crunch would be climate ‘tragedy’ -EU (msn.com)
Indonesia will need to invest $150 billion to $200 billion per year in low carbon programmes over the next nine years to meet its goal to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2060 or sooner, a government study showed
“We want to cooperate with Indonesia, to make sure we can invest and have technology transfers, bring some ideas to the market for offshore wind, or solar, or geothermal,” Timmermans said.
Thank you for your input Mr Timmermans.
Indonesia GDP | 2021 Data | 2022 Forecast | 1967-2020 Historical | Chart | News (tradingeconomics.com)
Timmermans relies on OPM, lots of OPM. COP26 should disabuse him of such fanciful thinking.
An EU bureaucrat, amidst an energy crisis, telling the Third World to eat cake. No matter; he will never be held to account.
Renewables includes hydro, geothermal and biomass (wood) as well as wind and solar.
Do keep up or you’ll be dammed. Hydro equals solar nowadays-
Undamming Rivers: A Chance For New Clean Energy Source – Yale E360
Geothermal bad for Gaia-
Environmental Impacts of Geothermal Energy – Clean Energy Ideas (clean-energy-ideas.com)
Focus man focus! Only solar panels and windmills good for Gaia and the global coolers investments. Fans blow cool and solar panels suck up the sun’s heat or something like that.
Lots of walls out there….
OPEC+ Once Again Fails to Pump Enough to Meet Its Output Target (yahoo.com)
Maybe old Joe will bang his head against one, Jimmy Carter style.
“Over in the UK, somebody has now finally taken the time to do a calculation of how much it would cost to provide sufficient battery storage to get the country through an extended (ten day) period of dark and calm in the winter, assuming a grid relying 100% on wind and solar generation. The calculation has been made by Professors Peter Edwards and Peter Dobson of Oxford University, and Gari Owen of Annwvyn Solutions, on behalf of Net Zero Watch, which is a project of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of the American affiliate of this organization.). The answer that Edwards, Dobson and Owen come up with is approximately 3 trillion British pounds.”
**************
And how long do those storage batteries last? How often would they have to be replaced?
Can’t find any info on the lifespan of commercial utility-scale batteries, but PV Magazine says residential batteries last 5 to 15 years….
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/09/23/how-long-do-residential-storage-batteries-last/
“Solar installer Sunrun said batteries can last anywhere between five to 15 years. That means a replacement likely will be needed during the 20 to 30 year life of a solar system.”
Three trillion British pounds, and they have to be replaced every 5 to 15 years. Are they recyclable? Do they leave toxic waste behind like solar panels do? How much raw materials have to mined to produce 3 trillion British pounds worth of storage batteries?
So many questions, and the Green Energy Movement doesn’t seem interested in providing the answers. I wonder why.
Commercial, utility-scale batteries haven’t been around long enough to acquire any reliable actuarial data! The designers undoubtedly have made assumptions about the longevity, but then there is Murphy’s Law, which only demonstrates its power in the real world of experience.
One of many variations: “Something will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment.”
Murphy was an optimist. [And for the true Murphy fan, “Murphy didn’t write Murphy’s Law.”]
Batteries used with residential PV systems are almost invariably lead-acid.
So ‘energy security’ is the new catch phrase when it’s something most of the developed world has had for over a century? Will we enter a period when people say “remember when we had reliable electricity 24X7? If there’s a tipping point it will be over intermittent energy. What will people today do without their cell phones?
Not to mention their heat in Minnesota Winters, and Arizona Summers, not to mention cable TV and internet, and house lights after sunset, and recharges for their EVs, and….
As noted before, we can correlate increasing numbers of crowing comments from Griff regarding renewable investment and market penetration with increasing articles on energy security, rolling blackouts, and rising energy costs.
Correlation is not always causation, but we never used to worry about rolling blackouts here in the first world.
Griff is responsible. My science is just as valid as climate scientology.
There are people who see all this as new information. But this has been known for many years if not decades by those who address the honest science. The warnings have been provided to policy makers for just as long, and those same policy makers have either ignored, misunderstood, or denied the truth of the warnings in favour of their own agendas. It is great to see coverage of the truth about energy systems and the failure of “renewables” which really aren’t renewable given the inputs and leftovers, but there is no excuse for being surprised in 2021 with the outcome. In a similar vein, anyone who feels most of the media are doing their job and honestly informing the public is delusional.
EIA by 2050:
“…up in the range of 50% for natural gas and 40% for petroleum. Yes, so-called “renewables” are projected to increase dramatically; but after thirty years of this, they will still, according to EIA, provide only about 25% of “primary energy”
Let’s add a dynamic factor to the forecast to neutralize the ‘petri-dish’ view of human interaction. I call it the pitchforks in the street factor. No computer was used in this modification of the EIA forecast:,
Gas up at least 50%, oil up 40%, coal up 25%+ (3rd world dev.) , nuclear up 20% and growing after 2050. Solar for individual site use but not part of the grid.
Germany is decommissioning end of life windmill farms at present. Do they have the will (or cash) to replace them. Subsidies will be gone. RE companies are going broke.
More favorable words about nuclear are appearing regularly. We haven’t become fully attuned to what is happening re coal power in 3rd world Asia and Africa and when their poverty declines, they will want cars, highways, A/C, mod homes, vacations/travel… so I think even the first three energy sources could easily double by 2050. 600ppm CO2 will give us a Garden of Eden Earth and no troubling changes to weather.
I have had at least a dozen conversations at lunchtime over the table with the electrical Dispatchers at the utility where I worked. As far back as 1995 they described to me how the unreliable renewables were a pain in the a$$ to dispatch. Larger Wind Turbines just make it worse as a larger source is lost instantaneously. The only savior is the rotating surplus. But that rotating surplus has to be close to the lost generation or a major portion of the grid can also be lost. More Wind Turbines mean more outages. Accept it. it is a fact of wind turbines. If/when the rotating surplus is further away then that source is going through more substations and more protective circuit breakers greatly increasing the probability of a circuit breaker tripping and a large section of the town losing power.
Only cure is for every wind farm to have a rotating NG Turbine spinning away with minimal to no load. Having a NG Generator operating at 80-90% power will work but is dumb. It means that you are getting about 50% of the efficiency that you would get at 100% power. Thus, with every wind farm will require a fossil fuel generator. You have just doubled the cost of having a reliable source of power, and the price of electricity. Worse, your “Green” Wind Farm means that you installed five times the number of Wind Turbines to meet desired service capacity which are still only available 20% of the time.
Ultimately, reality will demand rationality, and the only known possible solution for non-emitting power generation will emerge as an urgent necessity – nuclear.
What you lot have not figured out in your echo chamber is that EV batteries will take on the role of energy buffer. This is happening already, it is not some fantasy plan that will never happen.
People plug in their cars when they are not being used, dial in the minimum charge level they want, then leave it to the software to add or take from their car battery.
As well as that, retired EV batteries will have a second life as grid batteries.
Got a technical study to offer us about this, kzb?
What I’ve been reading is that EV owners are challenged just keeping enough juice to use their own vehicles as & when they need to, let alone saving the rest of their zip code from power shortages.
What I hear is the opposite. The average mileage here in Britain is about 20 miles a day. That’s about 8kWh per day, being generous.
If you have a 80kWh battery and you have 50% charge, that’s five times what you need for the following day. So you would be quite happy for your additional 40kWh being used for load balancing. You get paid for it. People are getting free charging for joining in with this.
I live in a regional area where people need proper vehicles to go about their business, often clocking up > 100 miles in a day’s errands.
Also, an active earthquake / tsunami threat zone.
We keep our reserves of gas, propane, diesel and charged batteries for the inevitable time they will be called into service.
(That’s more certain than a “climate crisis”)
“… and the chicks are free.”
The fantasy is thinking the plan would ever work. Virtually no one would want to have less than a full charge available whenever they could. You are pretty much asking them to buy a bigger battery than they need, and let the powerco use it.
It is also a fantasy to think batteries from EVs, in use or retired, even with 100% participation, would be more than a drop in the bucket for supplying the electrical needs of a community.
I don’t agree. People are doing this already. If they only drive a few miles a day why would they want a full charge at all times?
There aren’t enough retired batteries yet, granted, but obviously that pile is only going to grow, and grow massively, in the future.
If they only drive a few miles a day why would they want a full charge at all times?
Then they’d buy a cheaper EV with a smaller battery unless you think owners buy long range Teslas out of altruism for the future? Or they’d buy a PHEV right now and have the best of both worlds.
Why on earth do net zero fans think it makes economic sense for everyone to drive around larger than required lithium batteries in order to back their unreliables with the grid? Any port in the current storm of their fantasy ship founding on the rocks and we await their jet in knees-up in the tens of thousands in Glasgow with heads shaking.
No-one wants a car with a 20-mile range. There will be occasions when you wish to go further, and on those days you can opt for an 80% charge or whatever. Anyhow, another reason is you get paid for it. People right now are driving round with zero fuel cost because they are signed up to load balancing. Is that not a good incentive?
Luckily, most people are not as technological and economically illiterate as you, kzb.
You lot on here are in an echo chamber. You need to get out more.
kzb, describe your experience in planning, financing, designing, constructing and operating electrical generation, transmission and distribution systems to serve real residential, commercial and industrial customers. Since I’ve done all that (plus everything from shoveling rabbit shit to making nuclear weapons), how should I “get out more?”
You seem unable to differentiate between marketing hype and serious engineering and economic studies.
Looks like a significant strat warming even is to occur over the Arctic towards the beginning of next month. The Brits renewable energy chickens may be coming home to roost a little earlier than expected.
“…a new ‘phased timetable and roadmap for peaking carbon emissions.”
Well, obviously the strategy is to increase emissions as fast as practicable to get the peak in 2030 as high as possible, after which it can come down a bit, when suitable, and affordable, and politically expedient. Makes sense, if you are intending to keep the lights on.
Huffington post used to have a Canadian branch, until the venture capital funds ran out. I was a regular commenter on blogs that celebrated the death of oil. When pipelines ran into trouble there were people who declaimed that it was a great saving because there was no way an oil pipeline could ever make back its cost.
I was laughed at for suggesting we would see $100 dollar a barrel oil this decade.
Darn I wish Huff.ca still existed so I could go and gloat.
The projected increased demand for all types of energy results from the increase in world population (still over 1% a year, or 80 million extra energy requirers). That’s the real problem.
Just finished watching Jordan Peterson’s interview of Michael Shellenberger, and it left me thinking that the eco-whack jobs don’t really want to find a solution; they’d rather find fault!
If GangGreen was actually concerned about the environment they would be pushing nuclear and natural gas, as widespread use of those two technologies would substantially reduce CO2! If they wanted to reduce global population, they would support efforts to improve economic opportunities and education in the Third World as a lower birth rate always follows a shift from subsistence farming to urban economic freedom!
One of the biggest reasons for the rapid rise in prosperity around the world should be linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the USSR! That put an end to many of the ideological wars in the Third World, and allowed people to pursue their own goals instead of battling for survival! But the environmental Left doesn’t want to give up it’s dreams of Marxist domination, so they will try and shove collectivism and state control down humanity’s throat regardless of what people do and say! You can see the same desire for domination in the politicization of the ChiCom-19 virus, and the policies used to combat it!
I certainly hope that the line on the graph for unREliables is wishful thinking! Hopefully that recent downtick is just the beginning of the end for this scam, and a return to sane, reliable and energy dense power sources that can power us to a bright, energy rich future! It would be quite tragic if the dark and dismal dreams of the delusional eco-loons were allowed to come to fruition!
The green scams do not work… If ‘work’ means the ability to run a country without producing CO2 emissions. Our Countries currently have and need 24/7, 365 days a year electricity.
Spending more money on a plan that cannot work and that has and will make electricity more and more expensive is going to cause economic collapse in German.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/01/business/germany-inflation-eurozone/index.html
German inflation hits 29-year high as energy costs spike across Europe
Germany has spent $500 billion dollars, saturating their electrical grid with intermittent wind and sun gathering, which has tripled the cost of electricity in Germany.
Half of the German intermittent green energy is exported (at a loss) to other EU countries and then Germany buys back at a higher prices, reliable power from nuclear or natural gas.
That poor utilization rate means one has to build up huge overcapacities in order to achieve a certain amount of power production. Worse, the power source fluctuates wildly according to weather condition
http://notrickszone.com/2017/02/28/german-electricity-price-projected-to-quadruple-by-2020-to-over-40-cents-per-kilowatt-hour/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
“A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
Can anyone find out if block island wind is operating
media black out
last news in August was four of five units down for inspection
thanks
China is lurking behind all facets of the current ENERGY REGRESSION to antiquated wind and solar failed technology. “China sees the threat of climate change as readily manageable regardless of what one believes about the underlying physics (remember that China’s leaders, as opposed to ours, tend to have technical backgrounds).[They are fully cognizant of the debunking of any climate crisis by Dr. Richard Lindzen for example] But they also recognize that climate hysteria in the West leads to policies that clearly benefit China. Indeed, China is actually promoting activities like the Sino-American Youth Dialogue on climate change to promote climate alarm among young American activists.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/china-warming-richard-lindzen
China is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, while building massive increase in new coal powered plants. Just saying.