Summer arrives in the Northern Hemisphere on Wednesday [June 21] and it’s likely to be a cruel one in the countries where policymakers are forcing a green energy transition.
Enlightened, these people are not.
There’s a lot of truth to the old joke that goes: “What did socialists use before candles? Electricity.” [emphasis, links added]
The green energy “revolution” is taking us backwards, to an era in which there won’t be enough electricity to meet the demand.
Members of the House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security were told last week to expect “potentially catastrophic consequences” due to dispatchable generating sources being retired “far too quickly” in the race to replace those sources – natural gas, coal and nuclear, which are available on demand – with renewables, primarily wind and solar.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark C. Christie told the congressmen that lawmakers’ and activists’ obsession (our characterization) with green energy threatens “our ability to keep the lights on.”
Though obvious to us all, it’s important to continually point out that wind can’t produce electricity when it doesn’t blow and solar can’t generate power when it’s dark (or the sun is screened out by smoke from forest fires that are caused by man’s refusal to properly manage forests, not his emissions of carbon dioxide).
Christie also told subcommittee members that PJM Interconnection, a regional power transmission organization that serves 13 states and the District of Columbia, is expected to lose 40 gigawatts of generation capacity by 2030 due to early retirements of generating units.
Roughly 90% of the lost capacity is energy spun out by dispatchable sources, mainly coal and gas, which produce at the flick of a switch.
Meanwhile, as PJM unplugs dependable sources, it will need an additional 13 gigawatts by 2030, and California, where the petty tyranny is outlawing automobiles with internal combustion engines, which are to be replaced by electric vehicles, won’t have enough energy to chase away the dark in the coming decades.
The best way to sum up Christie’s testimony is with his own words:
I think we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences, potentially catastrophic consequences in the United States in terms of the reliability of our grid, and I think that the basic reason is that we’re facing a shortfall of power supply. … The grid has to have power being fed into it every second of every minute of every hour of every day to keep the lights on. You store it up and bring it out the next day.
James P. Danly, also a Federal Energy Regulatory commissioner, made an important contribution to the hearing when he connected state and federal public policies that are intended to promote fickle wind and solar energy to the political campaign to “drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”
Right in front of us is an energy deficit by design.
Outside the U.S., the Germans, who are in the process of shutting down their nuclear power plants in their mad rush to go green, were stocking up on candles in December as they were staring into the black abyss of an energy crisis.
Today they are fast approaching a grim future that looks like the past, and “can expect to see industries leave the country due to [a] green energy policy ‘disaster’ that saw nuclear power plants ditched for renewables,” reports the Daily Mail.
This winter, the country expects it will be dependent on French nuclear power.
The British are also dealing with their own green energy disaster.
Over the winter, “consumers were asked to make a choice: keep consuming power as normal or just turn the lights off,” says Bloomberg, in “a preview of the choices and behavior that will have to become commonplace as the world transitions its energy supply to depend overwhelmingly on intermittent renewable sources.”
We wish were in the candle business (and owned a match factory). Or made emergency generators. Because those items will be in high demand as the West goes black thanks to green.
Read more at Issues & Insights
There’s another old quip about socialists…They’ll turn us into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please. I’d like to add a new one.
“The fewer, the better”
Soon we’ll all have to return to Whale Oil over this whole lie of Global Warming/Climate Change
“We wish were in the candle business (and owned a match factory).”
Buggy whips, that’s where the real profits will be made.
(Buggy whip. noun. a horsewhip once used by a driver of a buggy. “since buggies have been replaced by cars the buggy whip has become a symbol for anything that is hopelessly outmoded”)