WORLD’S Most Expensive Joke: $2 Trillion Squandered on Wind & Solar (So Far)…

“The data is further evidence that dilute and unreliable sources of energy like solar and wind cannot replace coal and other fossil fuels and will not lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions.”

AND, as a result of the reckless and ruinous “Save The Planet” pursuit of weather-dependent, intermittent, costly, symbolic, novelty sources of non-energy – wind and solar…

“Coal grew one percent in 2017 — its first growth since 2013…”

STOP THESE THINGS

The point, if there was one, of throwing hundreds of $billions in subsidies at wind and solar was to slash emissions of carbon dioxide gas. Taxpayers and power consumers who are on the receiving end of the bill for all this environmental piety would, after almost 20 years, be entitled to ask just how much bang they’re getting for their buck?

The short answer is: not much.

STT leaves the battle over carbon dioxide gas to others.

Our view is pretty simple: if a naturally occurring beneficial trace gas, essential for all life on earth, really is killing the planet, then there is only one available solution. And that’s nuclear power.

In 2018, if a climate alarmist is still waging war on CO2 (although he’ll call it ‘carbon’) and not talking about nuclear power, you know you’re dealing with a deluded crank.

One character who’s still pretty fired up…

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RENT SEEKER’S NIRVANA : Ultra-Rich Pocket $Billions in Wind & Solar Subsidies at Our Expense

“AT present, the combined subsidies to wind and solar exceed $4 billion a year, and the number of permanent jobs generated is completely trivial; the instant the subsidies go, so do the jobs briefly ‘created’: Cut the Subsidies and ‘Green’ Jobs Instantly Vanish: 80,000 German Solar Workers Sacked.

“The reason that we’re still talking about this nonsense is all political.
And the reason that it’s political is because there’s money in it. Serious money.
Being able to sell a product with no inherent value, takes audacity; but it can be done.
Here’s how: …”

STOP THESE THINGS

The hundreds of $billions paid in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar constitute the largest wealth transfer in economic history.

In Australia, the Federal Government’s Large-Scale RET gouges $60 billion from power consumers over the life of the scam, and redirects it to such worthy outfits as AGL and our favourite whipping boys, Infigen. In the history of the Commonwealth, no other single industry subsidy scheme comes anywhere near it in value.

When motor manufacturers, General Motors Holden and Toyota put their hands out for a measly $500 million to maintain their Australian operations, then PM, Tony Abbott told them would “not chase them down the road waving a blank cheque at them“.

A mere half $billion would have saved something like 20 or 30,000 jobs across the sector.

At present, the combined subsidies to wind and solar exceed $4 billion a year, and the number of…

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Regrets: Fritz Vahrenholt – German RE Pioneer Demands End to Chaotic Wind Power Push

“And when there is little wind, the expansion does not help, as electricity production then remains close to zero. It is like the foolish acts by the people of Schilda (Schildbürger) who tried to carry sacks of light into the windowless town hall.“

CIVILISED humans abandoned unreliables – windmills – centuries ago, for obvious reasons. They only work when the wind is not too heavy, not too light, but, just right. Even then, not at the exact time when you want your lights on.

TO repeat a technological failure in mankind’s history is either insanity or simply an opportunistic and greedy Climate Crisis Industry taking full advantage of “save the planet” virtue-signalling in a panic-driven ‘climate’ where literally trillions of dollars of taxpayers money is up for grabs in the form of massive government subsidies. Or both.

WHY wouldn’t one yell “GLOBAL WARMING” when such lucrative cash incentives, that avoid all scrutiny in the name of “saving the planet”, are literally blowing in the wind for the deceitful to corrupt?

END green central planning and the massive government subsidies for unreliables and see just how quickly the renewables sector comes crashing down to earth…

STOP THESE THINGS

Fritz Vahrenholt: finally sits down to a banquet of consequences.

If the tech savvy Germans can’t make wind and solar power work, no one can.

The Germans love cobbling together endless, guttural syllables to create nouns longer than the Autobahn.

‘Energiewende’ roughly translates as ‘energy transition’, which Germans have taken to mean a new path with energy. Germans were told that instead of coal and nukes, they’d run on sunshine and breezes, as if by magic.

Except that it didn’t quite pan out that way.

Germany has policies in place that will squander close to €1 trillion in subsidies ladled out to wind and solar.

Years ago, its brains trust determined to shutter its safe and reliable fleet of nuclear power plants by 2022; hypocritically, Germany still imports plenty of nuclear generated electricity from France and will do for decades to come.

Coupled with its push kill off its nuclear…

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Fool’s Paradise: Germany’s Renewable Policy an Economic & Environmental Disaster

“Energiewende – CO2 emissions are rising, not falling as promised and predicted.

If “saving” the planet is – as we are repeatedly told – all about reducing man-made emissions of an odourless, colourless, naturally occurring trace gas, essential for all life on earth – then German energy/environmental policy has manifestly failed. And what an expensive failure it is.”

NUFF said.

STOP THESE THINGS

Merkel plays Head Jester: but Germans aren’t laughing.

Germany has long been held up as the poster child for wind and solar power, but the picture is now more tragedy, than triumph.

In Germany, around €130 billion has already been burnt on renewable subsidies; currently the green energy levy costs power consumers €56 million every day. And, the level of subsidy for wind and solar sees Germans paying €20 billion a year for power that gets sold on the power exchange for around €2 billion.

Squandering €18 billion a year on power – which Germans have in abundance from meaningful sources – has them asking the fair and reasonable question: just how much power are they getting for the €billions that they’ve thrown – and continue to throw at wind and solar? The answer – at a piddling 3.3% – is: NOT MUCH.

For Germans, that would all be miserable…

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RISIBLE Renewables: 30 Years and $Trillions in Subsidies – Wind & Solar’s Total Output Less than 1% of World Energy Demand

“The truth is that after decades of beefy government subsidies [$Trillions] wind power still meets just 0.46 percent of earth’s total energy demands, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“One must also remember that such massive investments in solar panels would inevitably contribute to resource scarcity: modern electronics require many of the same minerals as do solar panels. Increased competition for a finite supply of minerals would raise the prices of our electronic goods, as well as the price of electricity.

“Given these facts, we can reasonably conclude that the green energy industry is little more than a corporate welfare scheme marketed under the guise of noble intentions.”

UNRELIABLES = The climate-theory-obsessed Western world’s economic suicide note.

STOP THESE THINGS

A decade from now, as grids collapse and businesses and households are driven into penury, because they can no longer afford their rocketing power bills, the current generation will have plenty of time to lament (albeit, sitting freezing or boiling in the dark).

South Australians, with a deluded and dangerous Labor Premier, utterly obsessed with wind power, are acutely aware of the price that has to be paid for attempting to run on sunshine and breezes.

Those still clinging to the hope that all will be well again, one day, could be forgiven for believing that throwing all to the wind and the sun is paying dividends, right now.

For more than 30 years the wind industry has been telling us that the wind is ‘free’ and getting cheaper all the time. However, as retail power prices rocketed in places like Denmark, Germany and South Australia; as routine load shedding…

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STABLE and Reliable Coal-Fired Power Still the Cheapest By a Country Mile

“When the wind stops blowing, or blows too hard, your friendly wind power outfit will cry ‘Act of God’ and leave you and yours freezing or boiling in the dark.“

Unreliables – wind and solar – Symbolic energy appeasing the hubris and superstitions of “save the planet” climate catastrophists and globalist elites, whilst destroying economies and working families livelihoods.

STOP THESE THINGS

You’ve got to hand it to the wind cult. Australia’s dwindling band of wind industry spruikers keep telling us that the answer to cheaper power prices is out there blowin’ in the wind.

The more deranged among their number have been telling us that wind power is actually cheaper than coal-fired power, for years.

There’s just one problem with that argument. And that would be the evidence.

The world’s top three wind ‘Superpowers’: South Australia, Denmark and Germany all suffer from the highest retail power prices in the world:

What the wind worshipper conveniently overlooks is that wind power delivers nothing but chaos.

Try asking a wind power outfit to guarantee delivery of a fixed volume of power on 30 June 2018, between 6:30am and 9pm. Or, indeed, at any given point, on any given day, between now and the 12th of never (see above the entire output…

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TRULY GREEN? How Germany’s #Energiewende Is Destroying Nature

Germany_s Energiewende is destroying nature

“The destruction of nature by the land-hungry wind and biogas industries is the opposite of what the environmental movement used to fight for: just as the communists made workers unfree and poor, the Greens have destroyed our landscapes and killed millions of birds and bats.” Michael Miersch, German Wildlife Foundation

 

WIKIPEDIA describes Germany’s “Energiewende” (German for energy transition) as the following:

The Energiewende is the transition by Germany to a low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply. The new system will rely heavily on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy demand management. 
Energiewende in Germany – Wikipedia
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BASIC research into each of the virtues ascribed by Energiewende shows that not one of the fundamental ‘energy transition’ goals have been realised. In fact, the opposite in all cases has been stunningly achieved:
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“LOW CARBON”
Online Swiss daily, Basler Zeitung cites an “expert team” by McKinsey consulting group, which not long ago found that the German energy policy has fallen far short of its aims: Emissions of climate-harmful carbon dioxide are not going down, but rather are increasing, as is power consumption even though it was supposed to go down because of efficiency measures.”
IF the justification for taxpayer subsidies that will top €1 TRILLION was cutting CO2 emissions, the report card for 2016 on Germany’s Energiewende is a massive FAIL!

EXCLUSIVE: German Emissions Increase in 2016 Due to Nuclear Plant Closure — Environmental Progress…

German emissions increased in 2016 for a second year in a row as a result of the country closing one of its nuclear plants and replacing it with coal and natural gas, a new Environmental Progress analysis finds.

German emissions would have declined had it not closed a nuclear plant and replaced it with coal and natural gas. 

Not only did new solar and wind not make up for the lost nuclear, the percentage of time during 2016 that solar and wind produced electricity declined dramatically

Germany added a whopping 10 percent more wind turbine capacity and 2.5 percent more solar panel capacity between 2015 and 2016, but generated less than one percent more electricity from wind and generated one percent less electricity from solar.

The reason is because Germany had significantly less sunshine and wind in 2016 than 2015.

EXCLUSIVE: German Emissions Increase in 2016 Due to Nuclear Plant Closure — Environmental Progress

(See also: Numbers don’t lie: Germany’s Energiewende has had zero impact on emissions – at best | Watts Up With That?)
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“RELIABLE”
THE mad obsession with unreliable-energy by global warming theory-obsessed politicians has led to an unprecedented power crisis in Australia too. Problems began in the 60% unreliable-energy, utopian state of South Australia, with three major blackouts last summer (one of them statewide), regular load-shedding and now officially the highest power prices in the world. And, so it goes in Germany: the attempt to run on sunshine and breezes has led to skyrocketing power prices, energy poverty and a grid on the brink of collapse. NoTricksZone on the German debacle:

Today the task has become a challenging balancing act. According to Manager Magazin, facility manager Volker Weinreich says “we have to intervene more often than ever to keep the power grid stable. We are getting closer and closer to the limit.”

The reason for the grid instability: the growing amount of erratic renewable energy being fed in, foremost wind and sun. Manager Magazin writes that there are always four workers monitoring the frequency at the Tennet control center, just outside Hannover, making sure that it stays near 50 Hz. Too much instability would mean a the “worst imaginable disaster: grid collapse and blackout“.

Weinreich describes how on stormy days wind parks are forced to shut down to keep the grid from frying. And the more wind turbines that come online, the more often wind parks need to be shut down. This makes them even more inefficient.

Not only do wind and solar feed in their power on a part-time basis, but now so do the conventional power plants as well — all according to the whims of the weather. An d too often they run at levels well below peak efficiency. The costs of all the inefficiencies get passed on to the consumers. Tens of thousands have been forced into “energy poverty”.

1400 interventions
Weinreich reports that the grid is so unstable that in 2015 it was necessary for Tennet to intervene some 1400 times. In the old conventional power days, it used to be only “a few times a year“.

Germany’s Energiewende Nightmare: Grid Collapse Looms Due to Erratic Wind & Solar – STOP THESE THINGS

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“AFFORDABLE ENERGY SUPPLY”
Germany’s Energiewende has only succeeded in massively elevating Germany’s consumer power prices, making its power almost twice as expensive as power in neighboring France, which relies heavily on nuclear. While France’s power is half the cost, the country also emits far less CO2 from electricity production.
europe-power-prices-2
THE correlation between skyrocketing power prices and high roll-outs of unreliable-energy by country is stark:

electricitypriceseuropeRE per capita EUrstudioscreensnapz027

Data Source | Watts Up With That?

Fuel-Poverty Related : 

  • POLITICIANS Mad With Global Warming Theory Are Destroying The Economy And Hurting The Poor | Climatism
  • German Pols Now Demanding Energy Welfare For Its Citizens – 800,000 Have Had Their Electricity Cut Off!

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“ENVIRONMENTALLY SOUND”

Via GWPF:

GERMANY’S green energy transition is destroying vast swathes of nature, agricultural lands and forests. In the name of climate policy, rare birds and endangered species are being killed while much of the countryside is transformed into industrial parks.

Michael Miersch from the Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung recently gave a talk in the House of Lords about renewable energy’s devastating impact on wildlife and the environment in Germany and other parts of the world. 

About the author Michael Miersch is director of Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung (German Wildlife Foundation), a non-profit organisation devoted the protection of wildlife in Gemany. He is a professional journalist who worked for more than three decades for national newpapers, magazines and TV-stations, amongst others Die Welt, Die Zeit and WDR (public TV). He has written several books about nature, science and politics, some of which have become bestsellers. This paper is based on a speech given on 24 October 2017 in the House of Lords.

(Climatism bolds and selected highlights from report)

Are Wind Power and Biofuels Really Green? How Germany’s ‘Energy Transition’ is destroying wildlife and forests Michael Miersch

It is one hundred years since the Russian Revolution, known officially in communist countries as ‘The Great Socialist October Revolution’. The one time I visited East Germany, a friend there said, ‘the name contains four lies’.

First, it wasn’t great. It was a coup, led by Leon Trotsky, that took place at night, so that most inhabitants of St Petersburg didn’t even notice.

Second, it wasn’t socialist, at least not in the sense that it brought freedom and prosperity to the working class.

Third, it wasn’t a revolution, but instead – as I said – a night-time coup by an armed militia, which occupied strategically important buildings in St Petersburg. And fourth, it didn’t happen in October but, according to the Gregorian calendar, in November.

Today, whenever I hear the phrase ‘green energy’, I think of this old joke. In Germany, electricity from wind power and biogas is called ‘eco-power’, ‘bio-power’ or even ‘natural electricity’. These names contain many lies too, and I would like to tell you about them.

First though, there is another parallel between green energy and the Russian Revolution. The communists promised the workers everything and gave them nothing. Anyone who was not ideologically blind could see that the workers in western capitalist countries were much better off than their counterparts in communist eastern Europe. The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greens promised to save nature. They wanted to be the protectors of forests, birds and rivers. But their policies have led to the most widespread destruction of nature in Germany since the Second World War. No industry consumes as much land as the generation of ‘natural electricity’.

Without the pressure from the Greens and their friends in the environmental NGOs, the German governments of chancellors Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel would not have pushed the expansion of wind power, bioenergy and solar energy as much as they did. As our former Minister of Agriculture from the Green Party, Renate Künast, once said: ‘Farmers will be the oil barons of the future!’ She and her party pushed for massive subsidies for growing energy crops. The destruction of nature by the land-hungry wind and biogas industries is the opposite of what the environmental movement used to fight for: just as the communists made workers unfree and poor, the Greens have destroyed our landscapes and killed millions of birds and bats.

Wind power lobbyists say the numbers are small compared to the millions of birds that collide with windows, cars, power lines and other obstacles. But this is a fallacy, because the argument ignores which species are affected. If ten city pigeons fly into windows or cars, it has no effect on the population of pigeons. But when a breeding red kite is chopped up by a rotor blade, it represents a significant loss for the species in the region.

If one red kite is caught in a rotor every eight years, then the 28,000 turbines in existence at present will kill 3500 birds. In a total population of only 15,000 breeding pairs in Germany, that’s a dramatic loss. According to a 2013 study commissioned by the Brandenburg State Environment Office, rotor blades killed about 300 red kites each year in this one state alone.

If the German climate protection plan is implemented as planned and the number of turbines is doubled, the red kite could soon be extinct in Germany. The plan would mean one turbine every 2.7 km on average all over Germany, each one 200 m tall, without regard for landscapes, lakes, mountains, forests or cities.

The PROGRESS study showed that even a widespread raptor like the common buzzard would be threatened if wind power is expanded as planned. Birds that aren’t killed by the rotor blades are often driven away. One of these wind power refugees is the black stork, a very shy forest bird. When 170 turbines were installed in the Vogelsberg region in the state of Hesse, nine of the 14 pairs of black storks in the region simply disappeared.

If the argument that windows and other obstacles kill even more birds is very misleading, when it comes to bats the argument is completely wrong. Since bats use ultrasound to navigate, they almost never collide with any barriers. They can even fly through spinning rotor blades without getting hit. But even so, they fall dead from the sky. The cause is barotrauma: Their lungs burst because of the pressure drop behind the rotors. This happens to about 240,000 bats each year.

The actual number is probably much higher, because they often fly a little longer before they die and their little cadavers are eaten. Whenever there was a construction project in Germany such as a motorway, bridge, airport, office park or residential building, the presence of a bat colony could hold up the project in the courts for years, or prevent it altogether.

Yet when the wind industry kills masses of these animals, there is no such outrage. The supporters of the German energy transition brush aside all collateral damage to the environment, such as dead bats, with the argument that global climate disaster must be prevented.

Truly Green? How Germany’s ‘Energy Transition’ Is Destroying Nature | The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Read all of Michael Miersch’s brilliant and defining speech given on 24 October 2017 in the House of Lords, here…

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Michael Miersch Related :

  • GREEN Energy – Killing The Earth To Save It | Climatism

Energiewende Related :

  • GREEN Party Co-Founder : Germany’s Energiewende “An Economic, Social and Ecological Disaster” | Climatism
  • Germany’s Energiewende Nightmare: Grid Collapse Looms Due to Erratic Wind & Solar | Climatism
  • Numbers don’t lie: Germany’s Energiewende has had zero impact on emissions – at best | Watts Up With That?
  • Is The Energiewende Running Out Of Steam? | Climatism
  • German Energiewende To Cost €520 Billion By 2025 – New Study | Climatism
  • Germany’s ‘Energiewende’ Close to Kaput: Wind Power Fails to Deliver | Climatism
  • Germany’s ‘Transition’ Back to Coal: Renewable Energy Push Smacks Into Reality | Climatism
  • Germany’s €Trillion Euro Disaster: Wind Power ‘Transition’ Destroys its Industrial Heartland | Climatism
  • German Wind Energy Market “Threatening to implode” | Climatism

Unreliable-Energy & Climate Fraud Related :

  • UNRELIABLE Energy – Wind and Solar – A Climate Of Communism | Climatism
  • CLIMATE CHANGE – The Most Massive Scientific Fraud In Human History | Climatism
  • WIND TURBINES Are Neither Clean Nor Green And They Provide Zero Global Energy | Climatism
  • Al Gore Praises “Climate Leader” South Australia | Climatism
  • Adding More Solar And Wind Power ‘Doubles’ CO2 Emissions | Climatism
  • THE $Trillion Windmill Industry Is The Greatest Scam Of Our Age | Climatism
  • @AlGore Your ‘Save The Planet’ Legacy – Palm Oil – Is Making Indonesia Warmer! | Climatism

BREAKING: German Wind Farms To Be Terminated As Subsidies Run Out 

ANOTHER win for climate sceptics! We predicted the unreliable-energy disaster years ago. Literally $TRILLIONS, worldwide, of other-peoples’-hard-earned-money wasted on fake fixes to a fake catastrophe. Yet more public money incinerated at the whim of virtue-signalling, global warming theory obsessed politicians and progressives.

EVEN notable warmists saw the flagrant flaws of symbolic, novelty, weather-dependent energy…

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

Tallbloke's Talkshop


The short working life of wind turbines compared to power stations, plus their lack of commercial viability, will likely put the brakes on German renewables expansion according to this GWPF report. Where do used wind farms go to die?

Wind power is the most important component of Germany’s green energy transition.

The end of subsidies for older turbines, however, threatens countless wind farms. By 2023, more than a quarter of Germany’s onshore wind farms may be gone.

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Why Wind Power is the Greatest Economic & Environmental Fraud in History

“The collusion between wind energy and government disgusts me. If the Federal Production Tax Credit for wind energy didn’t exist, you would not see another industrial wind energy turbine built. As Warren Buffet said.

“Whether they keep making electricity or not, these gigantic steel and concrete structures will be there for generations, monuments to the greed of a few in a short-sighted land rush to hurry up and get them built and collect their profits off the backs of taxpayers before Uncle Sam wises up and shuts off this gravy train.”

OTHER comments from warmist notables on unreliables:

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

STOP THESE THINGS

When called upon the think of certainties, gravity springs to mind (at least on earth). Although, for the wind industry it does tend to deliver harsh results – see above, yet another fatal collapse, this time in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Another certainty, is that once people tackle the facts, they turn against wind power with a vengeance. Tom Brewer is a Senator from Nebraska who has not just turned on the wind industry, he is determined to destroy it. Here he is doing just that, a couple of months ago.

Brewer at the Legislature: Wind energy is testament to greed  
North Platte Bulletin
Sen. Tom Brewer
22 August 2017

I went to a meeting about Wind Energy in Mitchell, S.D. this week. There, I met representatives from more than a dozen South Dakota counties, a member of the South Dakota legislature, county commissioners and nearly that many people from Nebraska.

While…

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Green Power is Part Time Power 

“Using taxes, subsidies, dictates and mandates to replace a full-time power producer like coal with up to five part-time power producers only makes sense in the part-time minds that inhabit Greentopia.”

AND, Like the old sailors say, “The wind is free, but everything else costs money”.

Viv Forbes on the problems with symbolic, novelty, “part time” energy sources…

Watts Up With That?

Guest opinion by Viv Forbes

Solar power only works while the sun shines – it is part-time power.

Wind power only works when suitable winds blows – also part-time power.

Batteries only work when charged – part-time power again.

Hydro fails in droughts – more part-time power.

And using full-time power like natural gas to fill the inevitable supply gaps from part-time power forces backup gas to operate like part-time power.

Moreover, on sunny windy days, wind and solar generators spew out electricity at little extra cost. These erratic surges of part-time power drive electricity prices so low that even low-cost full-time producers like coal cannot operate profitably at those times. They are throttled back and forced to operate as yet another part-time power plant.

24/7 electricity users such as hospitals, trains, factories, refineries, fuel and water pumps, cash registers, infrastructure and mines cannot operate on part-time electricity.

Moreover, every…

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