It has been obvious now for many years to the numerate that the fantasy future powered by wind and sun is not going to happen. Sooner or later, reality will inevitably intrude. And yet, the fantasy has gone on for far longer than I ever would have thought possible. Hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse have been a big part of the reason, going not just to green energy developers but also to academic charlatans and environmental NGOs to fan the flames of climate alarm.
It was three years ago, in December 2021, that I asked the question, “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Green Energy Wall?” The “green energy wall” would occur when addition of wind and solar generators to the grid could no longer continue, either due to regular blackouts or soaring costs or both. Candidates for first to hit the wall considered in that post included California, New York, Germany and the UK. I wrote then:
All these places, despite their wealth and seeming sophistication, are embarking on their ambitious plans without ever having conducted any kind of detailed engineering study of how their new proposed energy systems will work or how much they will cost. . . . As these jurisdictions ramp up their wind and solar generation, and gradually eliminate the coal and natural gas, sooner or later one or another of them is highly likely to hit a “wall” — that is, a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof, or both, forcing a drastic alteration or even abandonment of the whole scheme.
Three years on, it looks like Germany is winning the race to the wall. After a couple of decades of “Energiewende,” Germany has closed all of its nuclear plants and much of its fossil fuel capacity, with a huge build-out of wind and solar generation. How’s that going? The German site NoTricksZone posts today an English translation of a piece yesterday by Fritz Vahrenholt at the site Klimanachrichten (Climate News). The translated headline is “Two brief periods of wind doldrums and Germany’s power supply reaches its limits.” Excerpt:
From November 2 to November 8 and from December 10 to December 13, Germany’s electricity supply from renewable energies collapsed as a typical winter weather situation with a lull in the wind and minimal solar irradiation led to supply shortages, high electricity imports and skyrocketing electricity prices. At times, over 20,000 MW, more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity requirements, had to be imported. Electricity prices rose tenfold (93.6 €ct/kWh).
They avoided blackouts this time (barely) by importing more than a quarter of their electricity during the times of wind/sun drought. But the sudden demands for huge imports caused the spot price of electricity in the markets to soar, affecting not only Germany but also the neighbors who supplied the power. Vahrenholt provides this map indicating the prices reached during the December wind/sun drought:
€ 936.28/MWh is almost $1 per kWh. And that’s a wholesale price; retail would be at least double. By contrast, average U.S. electricity prices are well under $0.20/kWh.
Vahrenholt reasonably attributes the huge price spikes to elimination of reliable nuclear and fossil fuel plants, leaving Germany subject to the vagaries of the wind and sun:
The reason [for the price spikes]: The socialist/green led coalition government and the prior Merkel governments had decommissioned 19 nuclear power plants (30% of Germany’s electricity demand) and 15 coal-fired power plants were taken off the grid on April 1, 2023 alone.
From Wolfgang Große Entrup, Managing Director of the German Chemical Industry Association:
“It’s desperate. Our companies and our country cannot afford fair-weather production. We urgently need power plants that can step in safely.”
It is also clear from Vahrenholtz’s map how Germany’s sudden surge of demand affected the countries that supplied the imports on short notice — particularly Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Austria. Here is the reaction in Norway:
Norway’s energy minister in the center-left government, Terja Aasland, wants to cut the power cable to Denmark and renegotiate the electricity contracts with Germany. He is thus responding to the demands of the right-wing Progress Party, which has been calling for this for a long time and will probably win the next elections. According to the Progress Party, the price infection from the south must be stopped.
And the same from Sweden:
Swedish Energy Minister Ebba Busch was even clearer: “It is difficult for an industrial economy to rely on the benevolence of the weather gods for its prosperity.” And directly to Habeck’s green policy: “No political will is strong enough to override the laws of physics – not even Mr. Habeck’s.”
When the neighbors decline to continue to supply Germany with imports during its wind/sun droughts, then it will be blackouts instead of price spikes. We continue to move slowly toward that inevitability.
In other news from Germany, its auto industry is struggling (also from soaring energy prices, not to mention EV mandates), and its government has just fallen. Economic growth has ground to a halt. This is what the green energy wall looks like. Elections will be held some time in the new year.
I’m feeling cautiously optimistic that the world will wake up from the green energy bad dream before the damage turns to disaster. Our incoming U.S. administration seems to have caught on. Germany, sorry you had to be the guinea pig for this failed experiment.
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Texas is trying, in a very expensive and half-@ssed way, to get out from under the rent seeking wind lobby. People still remember February 2021, but many of the subsidy programs are Federal.
Perhaps the new coalition in Germany will reject the Energiewende, which had multi party support.
Let’s hope so because, so far, none of the parties to make up the likely coalition has said anything to suggest that they are waking up to reality. Given the current opinion polls, the new coalition is likely to include the CDU/CSU and the SPD but they are unlikely to form a majority government so they will need another partner. If the FPD don’t win any seats (a distinct possibility, given their position in current opinion polls), the likely other partner is the Green Party. Incidentaly, the Greens are on 14 percent, which is almost exactly where they were at the last federal election in 2021.
Indeed, the next government isn’t likely to be much different from the current one, with just CDU replacing FDP. The result is that the CDU is unlikely to shift policies very far. Yet if they were actually prepared instead to team up with AfD they would have a strong majority with perhaps about 60% of the seats after allowing for small party elimination. Then policies might really change for the better.
Once the Canadian election is over (probably in February) and the
Liberals and their carbon taxes are sent packing, that country will quit aiming for the unlikely or impossible. Instead it will try to focus on what it does best regarding energy generation. It already produces nearly 60% of its electricity from hydro, and now new projects in Newfoundland/Labrador have been given the green light to provide power both domestically and for export to the US. Somehow the current (and soon- to- be- former) federal government gave the impression that new hydro development was to be avoided because of the associated environmental degradation. A convenient excuse but one that citizens never bought in the first place.
Well solar sure isn’t going to work too well !! 😉
Maybe Canada can send a group of energetic, young alarmists to Greenland to look for ways to harness ice for power! A breakthrough in “cryo-power” could come in really handy if this winter is a sign of increasing albedo leading into the next period of glacial onset!
Some say that commercial applications are only 20 years out!
There is no surprise here, get government out of the energy production and transmission business and all of this madness will go away.
I suppose it is just a tiresome nit picking but still true. An average electricity price across all states of the US is about a meaningful as an average global temperature. In some states the retail electricity price is well above $0.20/kWh.
Like in California and New York.
Engineering 101 saw this coming yet the politicians continued. Anyone that doesn’t believe this was planned is naive.
Agreed & of course, there are virtually no engineers in politics … this doesn’t help the situation. As one with an “engineering mind” , it is very hard to comprehend the non-engineering mind.
Sr. Henry Higgins may have come close, when asked to describe a woman.
Maybe the engineering associations should be promoting their members into politics.
Avoiding an energy blunder down-under – the unofficial title to a presentation by aussie Robert Parker to the (Australian) Institute of Public Affairs.
The factoid coming out of this presentation that most caught my attention was his comparison of “burning” one atom of carbon to one atom of U235:
Carbon yields about 8 eV’s (electron volts)
U235 yields 200,000,000 eV’s
I’m not a nuclear scientist, but it sounds impressive.
Well worth a look for those who think renewables are cheap.
Presumably this is the comparison between the energy released by the conversion of a carbon atom to CO2 and the fission of a uranium atom.
Germany, might avoid the cliff edge. But it will be the UK, that goes over completely. Simply because we have the most stupid and inept government.
So many other governments around the world:
“Hold my (taxpayer-funded) beer!”
Every government in the West has the same stupid view of the world: Seeing CO2 as an existential threat to be solved, otherwise CO2 brings death and destruction.
This included the United States until November 5, 2024.
Of course, in reality, there is NO evidence that CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth. CO2 has given us no reason to fear it. Delusional and Power/Money-Hungry human beings are the ones raising alarms about CO2.
I don’t know: It’s pretty stupid to shut down all your working nuclear reactors like Merkel did in Germany.
Civilization is not a stop-start affair. Energy demands vary but are always large.
Germany, Australia, Britain (formerly Great), and others have not only dismissed coal and nuclear electricity generating plants, i.e. their RELIABLE, dispatchable energy supplies, but have destroyed these power plants in a show of childish pique.
Their bridges are burned, so to speak. Now, their citizens, ordinary people, will suffer.
These countries (USA included) have, at the same time, destroyed their industrial capacity. It is far easier to destroy than to build.
These countries with plans and charts galore do not understand the exponential function. Worse, they cannot even add.
The growth required to replace the energy system has always been beyond their financial capability, and the materials and space to build continuously exceed Nature’s bounty. The energy returned on the investment falls far short of the requirements to sustain civilization.
AND, of course, NO energy is produced at all by intermittent renewable energy (IRE) fleets when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine – dunkelflaute – a newly popular word.
The advocates for IRE speak often about stranded assets! These are not fossil fuel and nuclear plants, but IRE systems – stinking beached whales.
Nick Stokes will be along in a minute to inform us that this is all misinformation.
Fixed it for ya!
Poor guy is self-inflicted with a Dunning-Kruger mentality.
Australia is not on the Contrarian’s list but it should be with both major parties committed to a majority of power coming from renewables by 2050, the governing Labor Party with 94% renewables and 6% storage + gas and the opposition Liberal (conservative) Party promising 54% renewables 38% nuclear and 8% storage + gas.
Mineral fuels oils and distillation products that now make up 35% of exports by value at $129B USD presumably will continue to be exported mainly to China to pay for the solar panels and wind turbines that will continue be imported from China every ten to fifteen years as replacements.
I guess that’s called synergy.
An independent member of parliament from Sydney’s wealthy North Shore and one of the MPs who could hold the balance of power after a coming federal election Ms Zali Stegall’s thoughts bear contemplating: ‘the old-fashioned concept of baseload power is antiquated and proving to be more and more a thing of the past’.
Well, if baseload power is a thing of the past, then your economy will be a thing of the past in a short time.
The more windmills and solar that are added to the grid, the worse the problem becomes until it becomes untenable.
This is obvious to a lot of people now, although, unfortunately, not including the current crop of Western politicians. It won’t be long before it is obvious to everyone.
I also think the advent of commercially viable AI is going to factor into the demise of global warming alarmism as the tech titan platforms pull back from censoring rational skepticism and start in fact promoting factual scientific findings as the superior choice to drive policy vs. unproven (and unprovable) “models”. The reason is because they see massive commercial opportunity (i.e. MANY $) in selling AI platforms and services which they know will need new, reliable, and cost effective energy to power. So they will abandon the Green movement which was really more virtue signaling than fear of environmental disaster and embrace real science to justify the shift, because it will benefit then financially.
And they will fund and support academic and media initiatives toward this new enlightenment too because it is now quite simply good business.
MHO anyway.
Yes, I think Artificial Intelligence development will be the straw that breaks the “renewable” energy narrative.
The billionaires at the Tech companies needs lots of energy and they know windmills and solar are not up to the job and are taking a different route buying up the available conventional power and promoting the building of nuclear power plants.
Windmills and Industrial Solar are not only dead ends, they are a cancer to our current grid systems.
The UKs potential to hit the impossible Green energy wall first, was given a massive boost recently when Labour were elected for a chance at government.
Under the new government a Net Zero minister was appointed. Not just any old political clown you understand, oh no. This minister is none other than Ed (pass me another bacon sandwich) Miliband the man who put the 2008 Climate Change Act onto the statute book.
It takes a special kind of hubris and ignorance to imagine passing an Act of parliament is sufficient to Change the Climate, but that is what our Ed thinks is doable.
Anyway he has been given £22 billion to throw down his own black hole called Carbon Capture technology.
Once he has thrown away that money on trying to capture CO2 from our own diminishing gas powered electricity generation by 2030, he will be able to claim we have reached Net Zero because henceforth all CO2 will be put into Norway’s depleted Oil and Gas basin, They can then extract more oil and gas thanks to our backfilling the low pressure voids in their fields with CO2.
The clever bit is, Norway then sells us the gas they extract thanks to our gifting then the CO2 and we are saved from extracting our own gas and oil. Aren’t we lucky?
The end game is, the UK pays ever higher prices for importing the very gas we have an abundance of here in the UK. Meanwhile, Norway continues to provide its own residents with hydro electricity and sells its fossil fuels at great profit to the crazy UK.
Germany may have come close to hitting the wall, but the UK is not only full speed ahead at it, we are also paying for the wall to be built that we intend to career into!
I sense some hesitation about Net Zero coming from German politicians.
I don’t sense any hesitation about Net Zero from the current UK government.
I guess that means that Germany is closer to hitting the Net Zero wall than the UK, or maybe it just means UK politicians are a little more clueless than German politicians.
It looks like the combination of Germany’s “Energiewende,” and the US proxy war for regime change in Moscow will end up sinking the EU! The sanctions against Russia and the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline have brought Germany’s economy to the brink, and without it’s economic engine, the rest of the EU is likely toast!
One can envisage a future Europe economy relying on tourists from China and the US, while native-born battle immigrants over control of the blacked out ghettos!
Make Orwell fiction again!
Germany’s economy has been brought to the brink by its own green policies.
“US proxy war” – here we go again. Sheesh.
What was the excuse for closing cheap, clean, reliable nuclear power plants?
They were afraid of a tsunami apparently. They had seen the effect it had on Fukushima/Japan a country at one of the most geologically active places on Earth. They concluded, Germany which sits on one of the least active geologically spots on the Planet should not risk a big wave coming in.
I am being serious, that is what Angela Merkel decided was sound thinking?
That’s what Merkel gave as an excuse for closing the nuclear reactors.
Since Germany has about a close to zero chance of being hit by a tsunami, I have to question whether that was the real reason. My bet is it was just an excuse.
The real tsunami was the closing of all Germany’s nuclear reactors. A really stupid move on a level all its own.
They could have built dikes if they were so concerned.
Less land used, lower costs (substantially), and the economy would have just kept on ticking like a fine Swiss watch.
It will be interesting to see if any of the other parties, apart from the AfD, puts forward a platform of reversing the Energiewende in the forthcoming election.
If they don’t, the AfD will continue to grow. Ordinary people do not like suffering cold in the dark——especially while nations like China and India continue to produce CO2 at rates that make European energy-austerity irrelevant.
AfD will need to double in size. Then it can govern alone as a majority government. That will take time to achieve. All the other parties have vowed to exclude it from any coalition otherwise.
I have liked to believe my very distant German, English, French, and Dutch relatives (I’m a typical American mongrel) are very clever and part of prosperous modern societies.
It is getting harder to hang on to those beliefs.
Let’s keep an eye on Microsoft’s plan to bring Three Mile Island back online.
And Microsoft will be buying all the electricity from the reactor.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mile-island-microsoft/
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternatives/
Those Tech billionaires need electricity for their AI development. They ought to talk to the German government about restarting all those closed German nuclear power plants.
From the article: “Swedish Energy Minister Ebba Busch was even clearer: “It is difficult for an industrial economy to rely on the benevolence of the weather gods for its prosperity.” And directly to Habeck’s green policy: “No political will is strong enough to override the laws of physics – not even Mr. Habeck’s.””
It sounds like the Swedish Energy Minister understands the situation clearly.
Trying to achieve Net Zero using windmills and solar is a dead end.
Trying to achieve Net Zero is also unnecessary as there is no evidence showing that CO2 needs to be controlled or reduced in the first place.