Wind Power is a Scam; Hydrocarbons Must Bridge the Gap to Advanced Nuclear

Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe . . . . the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether. _Christopher Booker -- Telegraph

More at link above (via thegwpf)

Modern industrial nations cannot count on the intermittent unreliable energy sources -- big wind and big solar. And they have been slow to support the development of new generations of safer, cleaner, cheaper, factory-produced, scalable nuclear power reactors. This means that they will be forced to use coal, natural gas, oil, bitumens, kerogens, gas hydrates, GTL, CTL, and every other energy resource they can find, to bridge the gap between the hydrocarbon economy and the nuclear economy.

Europe is mired particularly deeply in the green dysfunction, and is slow to recognise its self-made energy peril. It remains badly divided over shale gas, for example. This sluggishness to adopt necessary energy resources is particularly stupid, on the part of European governments.

Europe is making itself increasingly vulnerable to a predatory Russia, just at a time when Russia's energy infrastructure is so desperately in need of Eureopean, North American, and East Asian expertise.

But Russia never did learn to work and play well with others. It has always been the schoolyard bully, and has covered up its vulnerability with bluster and threats. This is a make or break time for Europe as a whole, and for western Europe in particular.

It is obvious that the "green dysfunction" -- the lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgiast mentality of carbon hysteria, anti-nuclear hysteria, and resource scarcity hysteria, holds European governments in its grip, and threatens to paralyse governments in the UK, North America, and Oceania. Anyone concerned about the human future, will do whatever is necessary to prevent that political activist movement from grabbing enough control to widely enact its quasi-genocidal agenda.

Besides learning to build resilient communities, we also need to learn to build formidable networks of influence. These are treacherous times, but remember: It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood.