By David Wojick
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has gone over the top on climate change. Their solution to the intermittency of renewables is for heavy industry to learn to live with it. I am not making this up.
They have a whole study on this nonsensical idea, reported at: “With Planning, Heavy Industry Can Use Wind and Solar Power”
https://www.aceee.org/blog-post/2023/08/planning-heavy-industry-can-use-wind-and-solar-power
Here is their central concept: “The growth of renewable power is key to helping industrial companies decarbonize quickly and economically, but it will also require them to adapt. While many facilities operate 24/7, they will need to accommodate the effects of weather conditions, the season of the year, and the time of day on wind and solar power generation.“
So stop operating continuously and just do it intermittently, when the wind blows or the sun shines? Seriously?
We are talking about the most energy-intensive industries, such as iron and steel, cement, bulk chemicals, refining, and food and beverage manufacturing. I doubt any of these can switch on and off, or even quickly ramp up and down, the way renewables do. What are they smoking at ACEEE?
Even worse, they are not just talking about today’s use of electricity. They specifically point out that: “Currently less than 15% of industrial energy consumed is electricity.“ What they propose is that all of that energy be electrified. Then it is used intermittently.
Okay this is just nuts, because electrifying heavy industry is impossible, even without intermittency. But the rest of the story is interesting. ACEEE used to be the energy efficiency (EE) people. In America EE has long been a big dollar, regulation driven industry unto itself. Most States and Utilities have big EE programs, as do the Feds.
Now the EE folks are trying desperately to find a place in the so-called energy transition. They are watching billions, going on trillions, being spent on renewables and such, with little or nothing new on EE. A recent ACEEE article title puts it succinctly: “Utility Scorecard: Energy Efficiency Efforts Stagnating Amid Climate Crisis”.
Their solution is to forget EE and jump on the climate alarmism bandwagon. Here is their new persona: “The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a nonprofit research organization, develops policies to reduce energy waste and combat climate change. Its independent analysis advances investments, programs, and behaviors that use energy more effectively and help build an equitable clean energy future.”
So now the mission is expanded to “combat climate change” and “help build an equitable clean energy future”.
The colossal irony is that renewables are the epitome of inefficiency. Their capacity factors are very low, especially compared to industrial heating with fossil fuels. Even worse, renewables make the mandatory fossil fueled backup generation highly inefficient. See my https://www.cfact.org/2023/06/26/offshore-wind-is-a-terrible-way-to-reduce-co2-emissions/ as an example.
In fact the renewables stampede threatens to make EE obsolete. EE programs are supposed to reduce the need for new generating capacity. That is their sole justification. But we are building new wind and solar capacity as fast as possible with no end in sight. No one is not building wind or solar because of an EE program.
ACEEE is grasping at the straws of climate alarmism. They would be better off trying to keep the EE industry alive during the impossible energy transition. Hyping the electrification of heavy industry, with 85% of its energy presently coming from fossil fuels, has nothing to do with energy efficiency.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consulting.
The public are just going to love intermittent shopping too and and intermittent logistic chain that goes with it.
perhaps it will be like the Soviet Union was . Your allocated shopping day and time is Wed 2pm. or that new car you like can arrive in 7 months time …on a Wed afternoon.
You won’t have a car
You will own nothing and be happy, per WEF idiots
Those crap-heads do not understand many process industries are continuous 24/7/365, such as the decades-old process of continuous casting of steel.
Such plants need several days to shut down
If wind/solar were minimal, those plants would have to shut down, unless they had a dedicated power plant, whose output is not weather-dependent, that would counteract the ups and downs of wind/solar output, and supplement it, as needed, 24/7/365.
Intermittent elevators in buildings?
Intermittent operating rooms in hospitals?
Intermittent traffic lights?
I hope people will finally mass in the street, like the farmers did in the Netherlands, when the idiot Prime Minister Rutte tried to take away their fertilizer and diesel fuel.
He was ousted by the BBB (farmers/citizens) party, which now is the largest in the Netherlands
It is symptomatic of the wider problem.
Many people wielding power and influence have been captured by the environmentalist dogma that industrial and technological problems, and thus solutions, is just a matter of passing some laws. Maybe re-shaping the economy a bit to encompass their grand plan.
A few moments reflection ought to remind these people that the adoption of steam power, the internal combustion engine, electricity, telegraphy, microelectronics, etcetera, did not occur by political mandate. It occurred because skilled people were able to make it work for physical reasons that were not political.
Sure, politics can certainly stop useful things being taken up, but it is a cardinal error to think that politics can somehow make genuinely unsustainable technologies work in the long term.
These people are unable to take those moments of reflection because they are frighteningly ignorant of, and and intellectually removed from, the physical limits that industrial civilisation has to work within.
There is a reason “heavy” industry is called heavy. It is because the mass of items produced are extremely heavy and require lots of power to do the work.
There are no electric bulldozers and excavators for good reason. Learning to live without iron or steel is a fools errand.
Electric bulldozers (2019)
Electric Excavator
Poor, poorlittle nick, he’s getting to be like griff. He never bothers to actually read the articles he cites as proof.
Either that or he’s to clueless to realize that diesel electric is not electric.
Built using fossil fuels
Charged using fossil fuels
Lubrication from fossil fuels.
I wonder how long those batteries last in the cold and the snow.
And how long they take to charge.
At least weight is a good thing for excavators, unlike for cars.
Correct, that 300kwh battery won’t last an hour in cold weather heavy duty work sites – just another piece of VS BS
Li-ion batteries are not allowed to be charged if their temperature is 32F or less. They will be permanently damaged, per battery university
HERE IS AN EXCELLENT EXPLANATION REGARDING EV CHARGING AT 32F OR LESS
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/here-is-an-excellent-explanation-regarding-ev-charging-at-32f-or
EXCERPT:
Here is an excellent explanation regarding EV charging at 32F or less.
Explanation by Expert
‘Cold temperatures’ is awfully vague. First, let me actually specify some real, hard numbers.
Do not charge lithium-ion batteries below 32°F/0°C. In other words, never charge a lithium-ion battery that is below freezing.
Doing so even once will result in a sudden, severe, and permanent capacity loss on the order of several dozen percent or more, as well a similar and also permanent increase in internal resistance. This damage occurs after just one isolated ‘cold charging’ event, and is proportional to the speed at which the cell is charged.
But, even more importantly, a lithium-ion cell that has been cold charged is NOT safe and must be safely recycled or otherwise discarded. By not safe, I mean it will work fine until it randomly explodes due to mechanical vibration, mechanical shock, or just reaching a high enough state of charge. See URL
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/263036/why-charging-li-ion-batteries-in-cold-temperatures-would-harm-them
Now, to actually answer your question: why is this?
A Cat D11 bulldozer is around 650 kW and a Komatsu PC3000-6 excavator is 900 kW.
A lot of draglines are already electric, but just about require their own substation e.g. https://mining.komatsu/en-au/product-details/p-h-9020xpc#!specifications
Some of the battery-electric and hydrogen work is quite impressive, but it needs to be kept in perspective.
The article even says that its run time can be as low as 5 hours per day. You would need 2 just to run one shift. And how do you charge it at a remote work site? A diesel generator?
The 300-kWh battery, even if it went from full charge to zero would only provide 60 kW for each of those hours. at the bragged 7 hours, that would only be about 43 hp while going to zero charge. My little 50-year-old Case backhoe has more power than that. Your 122-kW motor would have to be off most of the time.
It’s like using a colander as a dam
They exist no one here is disputing it, but it can’t compete with the Gas/Deisel equipment.
Without its fossil fuel derived oils & greases etc, it won’t work at all
“They exist no one here is disputing it”
The original poster said
“There are no electric bulldozers and excavators for good reason.”
and got 31 upvotes. I disputed it, and got 43 downvotes. I think someone is disputing it.
And then there is all the “you’re a dimwit” stuff, because, well, it may be that major manufacturers are producing these items, but, they’re made in China, or not top of the line in size, or CO2 is good, or whatever.
Ok while you never went beyond a hit and run links Electric only machines exercise while many here explains in some detail why they are not practical in most instances of which you NEVER responded to.
You didn’t make a single meaningful contribution in the thread beyond moaning about a small number of people mainly just 2 people in the thread out of a couple dozen who never said it that way at all but that is all you talked about while ignoring the many posts who tear your two links apart.
Pathetic for a PHD holder who post like a teenager.
The energy density of batteries isn’t sufficient to power any large piece of earth moving equipment that is in continuous use for a full shift. I have seen electrically operated shovels and draglines that use electric power delivered by a cable. One such dragline was built in 1923 for the NP railroad.
😉
https://bigbrutus.org/
space shuttle may have used the same tracks ?
Correct, but it’s good for a photo op
A big Tonka Toy. No earthmover wants to wait days to refuel its machines.
You really are a dimwit Nick .
This bulldozer made in China where coal consumption has now exceeded what the whole world consumed annually up to 2009 .
The world is going crazy trying to cut emissions but the facts are that coal consumption has increases from 4,7 billion tonnes up to 2009 and has now exceeded 8 billion tonnes twice since then .
Many countries are damaging their economies in a vain attempt to show the world that hey are climate friendly BUT all they are achieving is a futile exercise in reducing their standard of living.
The world cannot go back to the horse and cart and sailing ship era so with 8 billion of us on this planet energy is absolutely essential that the UN accept this fact .
Fossil fuel is absolutely essential at this time in history ,nuclear energy could provide a much needed base load for electricity but the greens are against nuclear as the ‘ban the bomb’ mob has morphed into greenpeace who would be happy to move back a hundred years .
Do you really still believe “the UN” has not accepted that fact?
Even worse, the electricity supply in the region of use may be derived from coal. Nick is making the ridiculous assumption that all industrial machines can be scaled to be powered by electric or batteries. That bulldozer is tiny compared to large mining machines.
More and more, Nick Stokes is looking like the fake ID I labeled him as a few weeks ago. It’s impossible for anyone to be this radically stupid.
Agree cgh, I have already outed Nick as Klaus Schwab – the similarities are biologically, identical
What does any of that have to do with
“There are no electric bulldozers and excavators for good reason“?
Annnddd you still didn’t make a point anyway since whether they exist or not is immaterial it is whether using them along with intermittent power production is productive when it is clearly not as a few examples later in the thread makes clear.
Giant Electric only equipment is impractical which you clearly don’t understand why.
Have you ever run a backhoe or a big dump truck it requires a lot of power and all day as construction normally run 10-hour days which is IMPOSSIBLE when running an all-electric big machine.
Some really big gear such as drag lines is powered by electricity. A lot of electricity, but electricity nonetheless.
Drag lines are effectively stationary, although they can move. Dozers are mobile, but excavators are somewhere in between.
Perhaps the word ‘useful’ should be inserted between no and electric.
You do realize that the bulldozer is only electric drive, right? It still uses a diesel engine to generate the electric power. It has basically given the option to use a “mechanical” transmission or an electric one.
The excavator is useless at most sites. They are used where there is no electric supply. What do you do when the battery is drained, load it up and truck it the home site for charging? Do you purchase a humongous diesel generator to provide the electric power? Lots of CO2 emissions reduction doing that? Or do you haul two similar batteries to the work site so you can use them to recharge so you can keep working for two shifts. But, then you have to truck them back and bring in two more while the first two are recharging. Real efficient!
You continually display your lack of experience in anything resembling physical work. In college I worked at a building site where machinery was used for two 8 hour shifts EVERY day. One driver would get off and another immediately get on. Servicing was done on the third shift.
I couldn’t find any charging information for the excavator. I’ll guarantee that quick charging in 8 hours or less will require a massive power station.
How about you put up links to a company actually using this machinery …. despite my long association with construction in Australia I’m yet to see any battery driven heavy plant. The closest is diesel electric on the open cast mines … A very different beast.
Correct, I can understand why China produces these engineeringly incompetent machines, using coal fired power generation, to sell to the West – they are winning the war, no shots fired
Massive? It’s a D6 at best, and can get about 4 hours on a charge.
The price is alright, though, so it might be alright for light jobs.
Goodness only knows why the article compares it to a D9. They’re chalk and cheese, and the 9 is nowhere top of the range anyway.
As always, the goal posts move. The claim I was responding to was
“There are no electric bulldozers and excavators for good reason”
Nick-pick..
Off you trot, little child…. Go play with your Tonka toys. !
Nick knows that he can’t win on the main points, that’s why he’s always trying to change the subject.
and as I said, the cost looks good and it might be good for light jobs.
It was the “massive” in the headline which was a joke.
If it said mid-sized, I would quite agree. The technology is coming along, but is limited until much better battery technology arrives.
Which you showed they do exist, but you fail to understand their reactions because they are not practical for many reasons while you completely ignored his take down reply of your Chinese bulldozer photo,
LINK
Stupid, childish words games as always. Meaningless points trying to distract from the overall conversation.
The bulldozer is not electric. It uses a self-contained diesel generator and an electric motor for a transmission. You have no experience with mechanical things do you?
Not the model in the link that you provided.
From the article that Nick only posted a picture of “Well, not really “all day.” More like four to five hours of heavy-duty dozing and six to eight hours of “medium to light working,””
These are not serious examples of heavy machinery, something Nick apparently has no experience with.
Full post since edit bug is still around
From the article that Nick only posted a picture of “Well, not really “all day.” More like four to five hours of heavy-duty dozing and six to eight hours of “medium to light working,””
These are not serious examples of heavy machinery, something Nick apparently has no experience with.
hm, also “It carries a 145 kW (194 hp) electric motor, which frankly seems a bit underpowered for a bulldozer, but I’m going to let it slide”
“It’s not particularly fast, with a top speed of just 10 km/h (6 mph)”
NS serves a useful purpose. What ever he states on anything, the opposite is likely to be the case. He writes as badly and unimaginatively as Bing AI.
I have to give him credit for being able to write complete and coherent sentences.
And on-site charging is provided by..?
First link is to Electric-drive bulldozer.. Nick-pick FAIL !!
Le Tourneau was building diesel-electric earthmoving equipment in the 1950s. They had some good gear.
No quarrel with diesel electric.
Most “non” electric overhead or track pick-up modern trains are FF-power with electric drive.
Have been since inception with trains like the M-10000, Pioneer Zephyr etc
Yes, like electric cars, useless
From Nicks link: “The D6 XE features a next-generation Electric Drive system” (i.e. the drive train, not the power source)
also “A new Cat C9.3B diesel engine has a redesigned fuel system…”
I’ll believe they’re viable when I see them in regular use on job sites.
Nick
Next you will link an article to a Tonka Mighty Mo and say it doesn’t even need electricity.
Great, great, great, … great grandpa did it.
Yeah, but world steel production has risen from 189m tonnes in 1950 to 1951m tonnes in 2021. So the world obviously sees steel as essential and is now using ten times as much. Grandpa didn’t see that coming! (Figures from https://worldsteel.org/)
When I worked for TXU in Texas back in the 1980s, we had a couple of hundred coal “trucks”. Each truck could carry 100 tons of coal and had an electric motor in each of the four 12 foot tall wheels. Top speed was 20 mph. The electric motors were powered by a 450 hp Cat diesel in the front and a 350 hp Cat diesel in the back. Even at that, they were underpowered and had to join together to scrape the coal into their hopper. I cannot imagine the batteries required to replace those diesels.
I forgot to mention that the coal trucks ran day and night, seven days a week. The batteries would had have to have been 3 or 4 MWH each.
Yeah those electric Moters are great for moving large, wheeled circling irrigation lines that is precisely calibrated to maintain its proper circle radius travel while the line is connected to the stationary water supply.
I would posit that the issue isn’t even the tools. It is the capital cost.
Consider what happens if you have say, a $500 million factory that now runs 8 hours a day vs. 16 or 24. This is a halving or 1/3ing of return on invested capital.
The reason nobody uses curtailed electricity despite it having literal negative price is because it is on only about 2 hours a week on average. That means ROIC is 8400% lower than the same facility running 24/7/365 – and in that context, the energy cost savings just doesn’t matter.
This is people who don’t understand the game, let alone play the game, insisting they get to write the rules.
If you make things, particularly raw materials or energy intensive production, the most efficient way to do that is to operate at a steady state and avoid continually ramping up and down. Not only that, if you don’t operate within tight processing tolerances, you won’t be able to make a consistent product that meets specs.
Just ask any poor third world country without reliable power and energy why they can’t compete with industry in the west, even though they have very cheap labor.
They obviously have never run a business. What about the man-power aspect of intermittency, do they just tell the workers to go home on a windless day? With power available say 20% of the time, do the workers get paid 20%? Or do they get paid 100% and the consumer pays for the inactivity?
It is a very common story: how professional, scientific, medical, industry and other organizations and associations get taken over by otherwise useless do-gooders and busybodies.
Yes, it is well to recall that the urge to do good is a false front for the urge to rule. — H.L Mencken
Being socialists, they probably feel that the workers should be paid, regardless of whether they are able to do any work because the wind isn’t blowing.
It is like a spell has been cast. I grow tired of even pointing out the specifics of the inefficiencies of the “ green energy efficiencies. “ Until the spell is broken I guess I will just try to relax and watch the show ( and have a good escape plan)
You’ve found a portal to a sane world?
Don’t despair. The IEA has recently called for a tripling of global unreliable energy by 2030 🙂
“the single most important lever to bring about the reduction in CO2 emissions needed by 2030 is to triple global installed capacity of renewable power by the end of the current decade” (July 2023)
They want Governments around the world to commit to this ahead of COP 28
Live with it, or move elsewhere where it’s not intermittent. Like perhaps China or India.
They don’t know much about economics, or where our wealth comes/came from, do they? Or perhaps they do, and this is just how they plan to roll back the 20th century.
The way most industries will “learn” to do deal with intermittent energy, will be to move to China, were the energy is not intermittent.
I wonder what their degrees are in, as it is fairly clear they have no real world experience in any industry. Feminist glaciology?
Very good recall. Funny.
The comments section on that post was a total snarkfestival.
I had to go to Snarkaholics Anonymous afterwards.
ACEEE is nuts. You cannot physically run most heavy industry intermittently.
Take an electric arc steel furnace. Shut it down for renewable electricity intermittency, it goes cold and freezes up. They can only be shut down when empty, and that is when the steel is finished and poured, not when the wind doesn’t blow. Take a refinery. Needs constant high temperature and pressure to crack crude into useful products. Shut it down intermittently because of renewables and it takes days to restart to operating temperature and pressure.
True, some heavy industry processes can be stopped and restarted without too much hassle. But the resulting cost goes up a lot from capital and labor underutilization. I don’t think the UAW would accept wage cuts when they cannot work shut assembly, lines because of renewable intermittency.
There is no way to avoid renewable intermittency. In the best locations in the US, the solar capacity factor is at best about 25% and the onshore wind capacity factor is about 31%. There is no solution for unavoidable renewable intermittency other than FF generation backup. There is NO scaleable grid storage scheme. Green hydrogen is a joke for several reasons.
OTOH, this ACEEE obvious abject stupidity is good for climate skeptics. More to ridicule per Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #5.
Or aluminum. It needs a huge amount of electricity to smelt, and can’t be shut down. How about a world with intermittent aluminum.
Aluminium needs constant electricity, too.
Freeze a po, that is the end of production. period.!
As with all bureaucracies, survival and growth of self is the only serious goal.
Rud – add paper mills to your list. The continuous chemical pulping and paper machine process takes about a week from a cold start to get back to continuous production.
And, when you’re ready to roll, guess what?
All part of the plan and we’re getting sucked into it in the name of saving the world from Capitalism.
As Tonto replied to the Lone Ranger when they were surrounded by Apache warriors and the Lone Ranger said, ‘Well Tonto, it looks like we are in trouble’:
”What do you mean ‘we’, Paleface.”
Joey Biden has a secret plan….world’s largest solar farm in Angola…and ….and….a railroad from the Pacific across the Indian Ocean – got it? Joey is gonna fix the world up with Bidenomics.
High tech industries like semiconductor factories (fabs) are absolutely dependent on reliable power, and an interruption of a few seconds is bad, and hours is a disaster, as massive furnaces cool and become contaminated, and require re-qualification. As noted, fabs will move to where power is reliable.
All these energy kludges and workarounds make no economic sense, and the justification of a climate emergency is NOT there. Only propaganda, political pressure, and skimmers trying to get a bit of the billions.
Yep. Semiconductor factories in countries with intermittent electricity have huge expensive backup generators. Used to be in that business.
Huge backup isn’t possible when FF use is outlawed.
It is just easier to shut down heavy industry and buy the heavy stuff from China. That transition is accelerating. China produces virtuous CO2 because they are a developing nation. Virtuous molecules are not heating the planet (nor are demonised CO2 molecules but that is another story).
The ability of these net zero / energy transition advocates to come up with plans that are impractical, illogical or plainly impossible never ceases to amaze. You think you’ve seen it all, then they come up with a real winner like this.
Our western societies are sleepwalking towards economic and societal collapse because of policies dreamed up by folk who couldn’t run a lemonade stand. Governments lap it up because they think they’re doing something useful. Heaven help us.
That they think they are doing something useful beggers the definition of useful.
Never forget how governments are made and perhaps you will glimpse a dim light in the distance.
Carbon based energy is a transitional stage before renewables. India and China are allowed to use carbon until they are advanced enough to switch. Ultimately, what the loonies are banking on is crushing demand thru population reduction, from 8 to 1 billion.
Once upon a time there came new blog software. At first the edit function, and often the HTML functions like italics, quote, and such, worked intermittently, and often poorly. Then that stuff was straightened out and everything worked well. Now editing of posted comments has been screwed up for some mysterious reason. Someone needs their fingers smacked, hard!
There are a host of industrial products which require continuous production with no plant shutdowns or process interruptions. Many forms of food processing is one of them. Another with which I am familiar is fiberglass processing. In the case of the later, a halt to the production process can require hours or days of downtime and cleanup with tonnes of wasted material destroyed.
In the case of food processing, things like diary production cannot be interrupted for more than a few hours on a regular, scheduled daily basis. The raw material will spoil rapidly if it is not processed right away.
Anyone imagining that all industrial processess can be accommodated to a variable, interrupted power supply is a blithering idiot. The losses from food spoliage alone is enormous with an interruption of refrigeration.
The voters seem to want this future as they keep voting in the people who are trying to tear it down to a subsidence living of the future.
None of these bat sh-t crazy ideas would even get very far off the drawing board obviously. But what we are going to get is a top heavy technocratic government full of new parasites sucking off useless subsidies.
And the one thing the government has gotten really good and efficient at is taking away your civil liberties. The truth still managed to leak out about Covid/vacs unscientific lock down mask policy .Ukr ( oh sorry)Hunter and Joe’s crime family, twitter files and on and on.
And the government/MSM/BiG Tech/WHO and others are working very hard to make sure that never ever happens again.
So who bankrolls these people? They clearly are not performing the task they were created for, time to shut them down.
In order for industries and factories to adjust to temporary power shortages and disruptions, without incurring significant costs, they would need to be robotized and have sufficient back-up power to safely shut down whenever the renewable energy was not available.
Of course, some people might be very alarmed by the prospect of robots taking their jobs, but societies benefit when they use their energy supplies more efficiently. Robots don’t require wages. They are the equivalent of highly trained, but ethical, slave labour.
There are a lot of processes which need to be run continuously, with many examples above.
It seems that a lot of manufacturing is already highly mechanised with lots of industrial robots and human supervisors/troubleshooters. That can work for a lot of areas, but not for many others.
Of course! It’s sensible to use only what works well in the particular circumstances. BEVs are not ideal for long-distance travel. Windmills are not ideal for locations that are unusually calm, and solar panels are not ideal for locations that have little sunshine.
Vincent – “solar panels are not ideal for locations that have little sunshine.” Yes.
In that context, it is worth recalling that ALL of Great Britain [the big island in the British Isles] is north of Winnipeg.
And the Northernmost parts of Great Britain are a similar latitude to Churchill, on Hudson Bay, where Susan Crockford’s polar bears apparently have such fun.
And, of course, we get cloud and rain, sometimes. But that doesn’t stop presumably serious reports that some Scottish local authorities are investing in solar parks – in their own areas, too, not in Algeria.
I assume it is only a matter of time before any last dribbles of serious industry migrate from the UK, in search of effective [continuous] power – to China or India, as suggested above somewhere.
Auto
The whole picture is getting messier and messier, with bad decisions leading to worse ones, and each layer being built up with increasing stupidity.
Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth was conspiracy fodder to the masses for the past 50 years, when it was actually the plan of the elites published for consumption.
Their attitude appears to be something like:
“You aren’t allowed to use a speedboat to cross the lake anymore. Instead, here’s a rowboat, and now you just need to find the most efficient way to row that boat accross the lake. Oh, and by the way, it has a leak in it, so you will need to find time to bail every so often.
What? You can do it, I have faith in you. Stop being such a negative nellie”.
I’m not convinced by this. My Hip replacement took 4 days because there wasn’t enough wind and there was heavy cloud!
Here is another goofy quote: “Wind and solar power are sometimes referred to as “variable renewable energy” because their availability fluctuates. Solar panels can produce power only when the sun is shining, for example. While this variability was initially seen as a barrier to broader deployment of these energy resources, especially for the high, constant demands of some industrial manufacturers, strategies such as energy storage, smart manufacturing, and demand response or flexibility programs can help even large energy consumers adapt. These tools and strategies contribute to an industrial facility’s ability to reduce or shift its demand from one time to another to match the availability of power.”
So “shift its demand from one time to another to match the availability of power” is the ridiculous plan.
I presume they want intermittent heavy industry to align with the intermittent power from wind & solar?