On Saturday March 2nd Northern California was hit by a major blizzard in its Sierra Nevada Mountain Range with 12 feet of snow and winds of 190 miles per hour. But during the following week America was hit with a blizzard of a different kind: a flurry of pro-renewable energy news reports which totally distorted the facts. The distortion of the truth has been going on for at least 15 years. In 2009 Scientific American published an article (citing a Stanford study) which predicted that renewables could become 100% of the world’s energy needs by 2030.
In March of 2021 Carbon Tracker posted a report errantly asserting that renewable energy was capable of meeting energy demand 100 times over. Two years later the World Economic Forum jumped on the bandwagon with a study that mistakenly claimed that we have “reached peak fossil fuels” and that we are now entering a “new era for power”. Yet the WEF’s own charts show that worldwide electricity production (WEF apparently forgot about the energy needs of the global transportation sector) in 2022 was less than 13%. The WEF also aberrantly suggested that global CO2 emissions might start to decline in the near future.
Making matters even worse, U.S. President Joe Biden touted renewable energy in his March 7th 2024 State of the Union speech, and two days later the Washington Post printed a story about the efforts by Dartmouth University to try and find some way to bring solar power to northern Greenland where the sun does not shine for six months every year: solar power for six months and fossil fuel power when darkness shrouds the landscape.
Because of this never ending deluge of renewables propaganda, most American progressives dutifully believe that humanity can obtain all of its energy needs from renewables almost for free. But energy has never been unchained from cost. And although the cost of renewables have been declining, existing fossil fuel (including coal and nuclear) sources remain the cheapest sources of energy. That is true both for electrical generation and transportation – not least because the Sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow, making these intermittent sources of energy unreliable, as Germany discovered last winter.
Political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. has stated: “It is quite intuitive for people to understand that there is a lot of power in solar energy. We feel the wind. The idea that you can get something for nothing, people find enormously appealing.” But the Sun does not shine at night and the wind blows strongest at night in the winter when the electricity that it produces is not needed. Simply put, renewables are intermittent and they are far less concentrated than fossil fuels are.
In America, different states are following varied energy paths, providing us with an invaluable 50-part experiment. California is the most committed jurisdiction to the adoption of renewable energy and its citizens are being hit hard in their wallets. Take the U.S. West Coast as a comparison. Consumers in Washington state on average pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for the electricity they use. In Oregon, the average household pays 13 cents per kilowatt-hour used. Now look at California where people must endure an average cost of electricity of 30 cents per kilowatt-hour and they suffer from rolling blackouts and brownouts. The cost of their electricity has risen three times faster than the rest of the nation. Even California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has admitted that “we failed to predict and plan”. California’s recent spate of wildfires has been attributed by some to the state’s overloaded power grid.
The ‘lifting cost‘ of a land-based barrel of oil in the U.S. is under $40 for existing wells and about $60 for new wells. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review asserted that wind energy is now competitive with the cheapest fossil fuels even without Government subsidies – but this analysis did not consider the cost for each electric utility to keep a ‘spinning reserve‘ that burns natural gas as back-up in order to maintain grid integrity.
An article in One Finite Planet put its finger on the nub of the problem. “Solar and wind have proven to be successful partial cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are stored energy, and solar and wind are not.”
Richard Burcik is the author of two short books, The DNA Lottery and Anatomy of a Lie.
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Bingo! Spot on.
Sure, solar and wind can be converted to stored energy but there are very high efficiency losses in the process and commercially available solutions have not reached the energy density of a tankful of diesel.
Just another grift. Yawn. Seen it all before.
According to The White Hats Telegram channel Haiti has disintegrated and the President has fled the country.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/3/12/haiti-live-news-pm-henry-resigns-as-country-spirals-into-chaos
All the MSM are covering this even el-Beeb.
Oh I’m pretty sure they’ll be rocking up to the U.S border any day now.🙈
Yup.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-vaccine-uptake-uk-healthcare-workers/5851868
Thirty percent of NHS staff have taken five jibby shots. No wonder it is falling apart. They’re off poorly or knackered with calamari crawlers.
Amazing statistic and yet the junior doctors Union have not even noticed this alarming issue whilst striking for better conditions etc!
https://www.globalresearch.ca/engineered-destruction-america-europe/5851789
An excellent although disturbing essay hi-lighting the stupidity of the two Microns – Joe and Macron who appear to be acting for the Club of Rome.
Macron threatening to send French troops to Ukraine – no chance. The French Tommy isn’t that firkin stupid and Brandon who has apparently imported 320,000 single men to the US of A. The parallels with uk are remarkable.
Absolutely! Just like all the ‘lockstepped’ similarities through different countries during covid, we, like the US, seem to have adopted an open border. The paymasters are certainly pulling those strings, aren’t they?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/turbo-cancer-treatment-race-johnson-johnson-completed-2-billion-cancer-drug-buy-ambrx/5852007
Oh look, this time it’s a turbo cancer jibby. Looks like Fishy has probably done a deal already given the pharma scramble.
Wind/solar, Use them when you can not when you need!
https://off-guardian.org/2024/03/12/net-zero-the-digital-panopticon-and-the-future-of-food/
The best summary of where the world is at that has been written for a long time. A ten minute read but worth every second.
Colin Todhunter at his best.
So here we have yet another case reminiscent of Sam Melia and those policemen who were sent down for so-called ‘hate crimes’. I have zero time for these neo-Nazi idiots because I find them just as distasteful as the Islamist extremists, but ultimately this guy’s ”crime” was to make these distasteful comments in an online chat room. So tell me this; is this any worse than what we’re seeing every fricking weekend ( and every other day in between, seemingly ) with the pro-terrorist yobs all across the West? Is it any worse than the Islamists on the streets shouting for Sharia to be implemented? Then there’s the Muslims going all out at trying to convert people on the streets of London, as I shared this morning, then there’s the Imams preaching hate in the mosques, which would definitely qualify as ”racist” and ”hateful” to any reasonable person….This here is so obviously unfair and disproportionate it’s a joke.
”A court in Belgium sentenced prominent far-right activist Dries Van Langenhove to a year in prison on Tuesday for running an organization that a judge said spread “racist, hateful, Nazi and negationist speech,” in a major ruling on how the nation deals with extremism.
Five members of the extremist group that Van Langenhove led received suspended sentences, including two who work for the far-right Flemish Interest party, which is slated to make big gains in June elections.
Tom Van Grieken, the leader of the Flemish Interest party, said the ruling was proof that “Belgian justice is rotten to the core” and called the proceedings “a political trial from day one.”
They were accused of using a chat group to exchange racist, antisemitic and other extremist comments. Van Langenhove, a former Belgian parliamentarian, also had some of his civil rights suspended for a decade, making him ineligible for office.
Van Langenhove, 30, said he did not commit any crimes.
“A years-long investigation, on which the Justice Department wasted millions of euros of taxpayers’ money, shows that the … activists cannot be charged with anything other than some memes. Humor. Memes that I didn’t even post myself,” he said in a reaction.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ap-belgian-nazi-brussels-friends-b2511442.html
Western judiciaries have been bought as I have been stating these last couple of years.
Once again a great comment, but did you mean to post it under a different article?
Once the storage problem is solved, then of course we can switch completely. That said, it will be a slow boat to China.
Storage is not close to being solved, and if and when it does it will be hugely expensive. By that time though we may have come to our senses anyway and turbine dismantlement will be a massive Industry creating hundreds of thousands of those “Green Jobs” the silly politicians and bureaucrats have been ranting on about.
Who was it who said “Giving people cheap energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun”? ——This is what the mentality of the eco socialists now running most of the western world (except Trump) ——To many people, this idea that governments don’t want energy to be cheap seems daft. People would say “Surely that is just a conspiracy theory” “Why would governments not want us having cheap energy”? ——The answer is a simple one and it is that cheap abundant energy is the driver of Capitalism. Green Energy policies are anti Capitalist and anti human. The “save the planet” green energy policies all emanate from the United Nations and its Sustainable Development Politics. ——This is the politics that thinks the standard of living of the wealthy west is “too high”. They have this Malthusian world view that there are too many people using up depleting resources, and so the prosperous west must reduce its energy use and consumption. ——Sadly our own political class are fully onboard with this agenda, and ofcourse they will never tell you that they want to lower your standard of living as that would be political suicide. So instead you hear a whole barrage of hand wringing eco babble like “We must save the planet” “We must fight climate change” “We must be world leaders in decarbonising our economy” “We want to be the Saudi Arabia of wind” etc etc. ———–PS By the way whenever you hear a squirming UN lackey tell you that wind is now cheaper than fossil fuels, realise that this is an illusion. It is economic sleight of hand. Huge costs have been added to coal and gas in the form of environmental regulations and carbon taxes etc and wind get s 100% subsidy all paid for by the consumer. ——Fraud.
“They want to lower your standard of living ….”
Correct. But they are absolutely determined that it won’t apply to them; their billionaire donors or the Globalist “Elite” who are pushing the policy.
We are heading towards a Medieval society: Overlords living in luxury; and serfs.
And the serfs will be dragged off to the climate gulags where they will face re-education of their denial
This is the most important issue regarding prosperity, health and life spans. —-Price and availability of energy is directly correlated to well being and standard of living. ——I cannot emphasise how important this issue is and at the moment we are on a path with Net Zero to greatly reduce prosperity, and we are doing it under false pretences of a climate crisis. We can only hope that politicians are bitten hard in the behinds by the real world and they greatly reduce this absurdity or hopefully scrap it for good. ——-There is no point in worrying about 2 pence of this tax and 3 pence of some other tax or the pint of lager staying the same as long as Net Zero is already hammering us into poverty, and that is exactly what it is doing, and infact that is what it is designed to do. ——-Surely this is some “conspiracy theory”? ——Nope. It is the UN Politics of Sustainable Development and 95% of the political class are signed up to it.