I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector. //
In 2025, Louisiana had the third-lowest electricity rates in the United States. The reasons are simple—73% of Louisiana’s electricity is generated by natural gas and unlike California or New York, Louisiana has not attempted to implement carbon dioxide or renewable energy goals through its electricity generation system. //
em
2 days ago · 0 Likes
Can you please boil this analysis down to a soundbite? Voters already believe renewables are cheaper, so that soundbite should include something that slays that belief.
Richard Greene
7 hours ago · 0 Likes
Free electricity with windmills and solar panels.
At night, when there is no wind, you will not pay for electricity.
The hidden costs of powering civilization //
I want to ask you a question we don’t usually think about when we flip a light switch or fill up a tank…and that is, where does the energy actually come from?
Sure, sunlight, wind, and even coal and gas are technically free, they are energy sources just sitting there in nature to be used… some facing more limitations than others. But turning them into power we can actually use to run Santa Claus’ chocolate factory or light our christmas trees? That’s a whole different story.
This is where the idea of primary energy comes in. It’s actually not about the electricity we see listed on our bills, but is really about all the raw energy we have to pull from nature, to process, convert, and deliver before we get anything useful, such as 24/7/365 electricity, every single second we need it. And once you start looking at energy this way, things get a lot clearer.
We often hear that solar and wind energy is “clean” and basically “free” and it does not have thermal losses like a nuclear or gas-fired power plant. But to make this wind and solar energy usable and reliable in the real world, we have to build enormous support systems, mine rare minerals, manufacture components, build storage, upgrade the grid, maintain everything, and then, eventually, dispose of it. It’s not just about a solar panel and a little breeze blowing over a turbine blade.
Now compare that to conventional fuels like coal or gas or oil… they might lose more energy during combustion in power plants or engines, but the upfront infrastructure is simpler, and the systems last much longer, with the average coal or gas plant running for a good 30-60 years, nuclear usually far longer. That is not nothing and this should be considered when speaking of “free” energy.
Understanding primary energy helps cut through the feel-good stats and get down to the physics. It assists in showing us the full cost of electricity (FCOE), time, money and materials used in making any source truly usable…and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
That is why looking at the real problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy” often used by supporters of grid-scale wind and solar, is worth it! //
The “Primary Energy Fallacy” a term coined eloquently by many, is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced by an equivalent amount of “renewable” energy. However, those people say, this would not be necessary because more than two-thirds of primary energy is lost as wasted heat during the conversion processes.
The misunderstanding occurs in the belief that wind and solar generate electricity without any losses (a secondary or tertiary form of energy) while coal, gas, uranium may have a high energy content but have “thermal losses” ~60-70% during processing. This PE fallacy argument is used for power generation and also for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) in a slightly adjusted form.
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 1: “The conversion of gas and coal to power results in a loss of around 60%. This means that one unit of primary energy from wind or solar, replaces two units of that of gas/coal”
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 2: “The conversion losses during end use in internal combustions engines ICE are also high. Electric motors are much more efficient. Most car engines ‘lose’ 70% of fuel energy, which means that one final energy unit of electricity replaces three units of gasoline/diesel”
The Issue: Bill Gates’ revision of his former stance on the urgency of fighting climate change.
Well, well, well — Microsoft founder and climate-change zealot Bill Gates has had a change of heart (“Gates: OK, sky not falling,” Oct. 29).
He knows he’s milked the climate-change cow for all its worth, and now he’s on to the next big money-maker: artificial intelligence.
He’s acutely aware of the tremendous need for electricity to power Microsoft’s development and deployment of AI.
He’s also aware that this energy won’t come from windmills and solar panels, but from gas, coal and nuclear power plants.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then greed is the father.
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And let's talk about wind turbines that they love. A slight problem, one of a few but this is the worst, yet one that the Democrats are too stupid and too arrogant to admit: The machines are lasting for one-third of their advertised life. It's an engineering issue that no one has solved and that I will explain presently. The issue has required bailouts of Siemens (#2 wind turbine producer, #1 market share in the U.S.) by the German gov't. Similar info for the others isn't publicly available but read on and you will see that ALL of them face it.
It's actually simple. Wind fields are mathematically chaotic. The flows are NOT uniform. Think of wind not as the unified force that we think we feel outside because we don't stop to analyze it, but as what it really is: an infinite number of constantly varying smaller forces. This means that the wind pressure that makes the blades turn varies GREATLY on the blades. Different not only the top vs. the bottom of the blades, but along their entire length, and constantly varying on each foot of each blade as the three of them turn.
As a result, the turbines wobble at the hub. The bearings and gearboxes are warranted for 20 years but are failing at 7 years. The issue has been known since the very beginning. Anyone here drive past wind turbines and notice how many of them aren't turning? That's why. Think it's one of those easy, boring things that the engineers in the basement can fix? Think again. They can't fix it, and as a result, today's wind turbines are tomorrow's white elephants. In utility lingo, "stranded costs." We will be paying those bills for decades.
Even when they are "working," wind and solar are the least reliable power sources. Democrats hate facts and ignore critical problems. Why not, when your solution is to just raise taxes? Mr. Teixeira, I love ya to death, but I'm afraid that, alas, your underlying thesis is tragically incorrect. The "progressives" who run the Democratic Party are every bit as hooked on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as they have ever been. They continue to lie their asses off at every turn, and to stick us with the bills for their crusade.
When it comes to assessing power sources, the three most significant metrics are affordability, reliability, and environmental friendliness.
For several years, we’ve been told that so-called green energy sources like wind and solar check all three of these boxes, thus making them the best choice for America.
However, this is not true. Actually, a strong case can be made that wind and solar are some of the least affordable, reliable, and clean energy sources.
On the other hand, natural gas, which has been inaccurately portrayed as being terrible for the planet and more expensive than wind and solar, is, by far, more affordable, reliable, and environmentally friendly.
This is not mere opinion. It is based on taking the whole picture into account. //
“Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are considered baseload power because they can dependably provide reliable, on-demand power whenever they are needed.” Conversely, “Wind turbines generate, on average, only about 35 percent of the power that would be possible under consistently ideal conditions.” Even worse, “Solar equipment generates, on average, only about 25 percent of the power that would be possible under sunny skies at high noon.” //
Another “hidden” cost that is often overlooked when it comes to wind and solar is that their intermittent nature “require baseload power facilities like natural gas plants to be cycling and available – racking up costs but selling no power – in the background in case they are needed at a moment’s notice when wind or solar power ramp down.”
Because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, wind and solar necessitate “cycling in the background, which adds to the cost of operating natural gas power plants, even though wind and solar power are gaining the sales and imposing those additional operating costs on natural gas power.” //
Wind and solar power pose unique threats to open spaces and species protection. It requires approximately 60 square miles of solar panels to generate the same amount of power as a conventional power plant. It requires approximately 320 square miles of wind turbines to do the same.” //
the best way to analyze the actual cost of power sources is called the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFCOE).
Applying the LFCOE, “using the relatively wind-friendly and solar-friendly geography of Texas as a baseline, is as follows, in dollars per megawatt-hour: natural gas: $40; coal: $90; biomass: $117; nuclear: $122; wind: $291; solar: $413.”
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/AEO2023_LCOE_report.pdf
Back in the Bad Old Days when the wealthy started to enjoy the fruits and freedoms of the Industrial Revolution with steam trains and coal-fired ocean-going liners, the damage to Britain was all too apparent in the coal mines, open-cast mines, the filthy air and disgusting rivers.
Today the solution is simply to relocate the devastation somewhere else. The Chelsea Tractor EV comes with its own consequences. The problem is lithium for batteries and the skyrocketing demand for it, which requires the use of vast evaporation pools in Chile, the world’s second-largest source after Australia: //
There is a common argument from people who support lithium mining: that even if it damages the environment, it brings huge benefits via jobs and cash.
On June 23, New York’s Governor Hochul announced that she had directed the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear energy facility with at least 1 GWe of capacity. During the announcement speech, she provided several bits of information leading to an informed prediction that the facility will initially include 4 BWRX-300’s on a site close to Lake Ontario. ///
Didn't New York just shut down a 1GWe (or more?) nuclear power plant near NYC just a couple of years ago in favor or "renewable energy"? So this is an acknowledgement that shutting it down was a mistake and waste of money.
But in the name of "renewable" energy, Germany is tearing down a forest that may well have been known to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and may have even inspired some of their stories.
In the Reinhardswald near Kassel, known as the Fairytale Forest, a previously untouched natural and cultural landscape with trees over 500 years old, is today being irreversibly destroyed. Why? To protect nature and the climate, the wind industry and green proponents claim. //
The region, which plays a central role in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, is being transformed into a large-scale industrial construction site comprising of 18 large scale turbines.
To build the 244-meter-high wind turbines, large roads are cut into the forest, thousands of trees felled, slopes leveled and large quantities of gravel piled up on the forest floor. All this will cause irreversible damage and destruction to the forest biotope. Critics and conservationists emphasize that the extent of the destruction goes far beyond what one would expect from the construction of a wind turbine in an open field.
The Iberian blackout was a consequence of grid management, not any power source.
The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly. //
It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.
The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.
Notably missing in all of this is any mention of renewable power. Spain has a lot of it, and it tends to be used to meet a higher fraction of demand during the spring and fall, when heating and cooling demand is lowest. Opponents of renewable energy were quick to point to the Iberian blackout as evidence of the unreliability of wind and solar (accusations that The New York Times was willing to echo). The investigation indicates that all these accusations were completely without merit.
Most Americans have probably never heard of the European Union’s (EU) recently passed Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). According to the EU, the “aim” of the CSDDD “is to foster sustainable and responsible corporate behaviour in companies’ operations and across their global value chains. The new rules will ensure that companies in scope identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their actions inside and outside Europe.” //
As my colleagues Justin Haskins and Jack McPherrin note in a recent Heartland Institute Policy Study outlining the CSDDD:
It is not hyperbolic to say the CSDDD is one of the most economically restrictive and nakedly authoritarian laws in the history of western democratic civilization. The directive attempts to globally institutionalize sweeping ESG objectives by mandating practices for large companies doing business in the European Union, regardless of whether those companies are headquartered in the EU. Even worse, the CSDDD forces those companies to impose the same standards on many of the businesses operating within their global supply chains— fundamentally transforming all social and economic activity around the world. It is one of the gravest threats to freedom that Americans face today.
Under the CSDDD, all U.S. businesses, from multinational corporations to small family farms, would have to adhere to the EU’s environmental regulations that prioritize the mass adoption of expensive and unreliable so-called green energy while restricting the production of abundant, affordable, and reliable fossil fuel energy.
In essence, the CSDDD “is a transition plan for climate change mitigation aligned with the 2050 climate neutrality objective of the Paris Agreement as well as intermediate targets under the European Climate Law,” says the EU. //
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods explained on Fox News’ Special Report recently that the EU’s CSDDD represents a non-tariff trade barrier that Trump is intent on eliminating as his team negotiates with EU officials.
Woods also recommended that Congress draft legislation that deems the EU’s CSDDD irrelevant to U.S. businesses. I highly suspect that Trump would sign such a bill with gusto.
There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.
Wind and solar farms require vast acreage and generate energy intermittently, so they work best as part of a diversified electrical grid that collectively provides power day and night. But as the AI gold rush gathered momentum, a surge of new project proposals has created years-long wait times to connect to the grid, prompting many developers to bypass it and build their own power supply.
Operating alone, a wind or solar farm can’t run a data center. Battery technologies still can’t store such large amounts of energy for the length of time required to provide steady, uninterrupted power for 24 hours per day, as data centers require. Small nuclear reactors have been touted as a means to meet data center demand, but the first new units remain a decade from commercial deployment, while the AI boom is here today.
Now, Draper said, gas companies approach IREN all the time, offering to quickly provide additional power generation.
Gas provides almost half of all power generation capacity in Texas, far more than any other source. But the amount of gas power in Texas has remained flat for 20 years, while wind and solar have grown sharply, according to records from the US Energy Information Administration. Facing a tidal wave of proposed AI projects, state lawmakers have taken steps to try to slow the expansion of renewable energy and position gas as the predominant supply for a new era of demand.
https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Apr-25-ARC-Scorecard.pdf
Adding together the above numbers yields the following affordable, reliable, and clean total scores, with lower scores being closer to perfect power sources and higher scores being least compatible with the affordable, reliable, and clean ideal:
Natural gas - 3
Nuclear - 6
Hydro -7
Coal - 8
Biomass - 12
Wind - 22
Solar - 23
President Joe Biden, with strong backing from environmental lobbyists and a last-minute defection from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Bill. These measures allocated billions of dollars in federal credits and loan guarantees to favored industries, all under the banner of environmental protection.
What followed was a Soviet-style industrial strategy in which a handful of Washington bureaucrats determined the winners and losers of America's energy future. //
Biden's green agenda had another critical flaw: financing. Much of it depended on borrowing from China—ironically benefiting Chinese companies dominating the very industries Biden sought to boost. Since the launch of China's "Made in China 2025" initiative, Chinese firms—heavily subsidized by their government—have taken over more than 85% of the global rooftop solar panel market. Battery components for solar installations have even higher Chinese market dominance. In effect, Biden borrowed money from China to finance the growth of Chinese companies that sold solar products to U.S. installers.
The new House bill aims to dismantle this entire framework in one stroke. It eliminates the trading of green credits between corporations, revokes low-interest green loans, and entirely phases out subsidies for renewable energy initiatives.
To those who claim this approach is irresponsible, we pose a simple question: How many more decades should the green energy sector rely on government aid to stay afloat? Sustainable energy and transition projects are essential, but they must prove their viability in the open market—just like oil and gas companies do every day. This is classic Adam Smith-style capitalism: let competition and innovation—not government favoritism—determine success.
Trump also supports nuclear power, one of the cleanest and most efficient methods of generating electricity. //
By issuing appropriate permitting waivers, Trump aims to unlock this potential, even if a modest federal investment is necessary to overcome ideological resistance from the Left.
‘You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already … It’s an environmental disaster.’ //
While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.
The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.
Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste. //
“Globally, we produced 20-25 million tons of solar panels in 2023. They will come offline in roughly 20 years. That is 20-25 million tons of solar waste a year in 2045.”
The International Renewable Energy Agency puts the potential mountain even higher, pointing to studies that put the 2050 figure at 78 million metric tons.
For now, 90 percent of this detritus goes to landfills. And the panel fields and towering turbines must be dismantled, trucked away, usually by diesel-powered vehicles, and then sent to landfills or ports, where they are shipped to poor, developing countries. Fossil fuels may foul the air, but renewables may pollute the ground. //
In many cases, when highly regulated power companies look to build a new plant, laws require them to set aside money in bonds or escrow accounts to cover or defray decommissioning costs, Mills said. That is not always the case. A recently decommissioned coal mine in northern Louisiana may cost $300 million to break down, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which says those costs will probably be borne by ratepayers. But Isaac and Mills believe financial decommissions requirements have been either ignored or insufficiently funded in the renewable market. ///
Compare the millions of tons of renewable waste that is not renewable and the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that is mostly reusable: nuclear waste is easily manageable and won't be scattered all over the landscape.
The mainstream economic narrative in the USA would have us believe that power blackouts are always a bad thing – just think of all that lost productivity! Think of the effect on the GDP!
So I was curious to see this video about the recent blackouts in Spain rack up millions of views on Instagram 👇
I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity. //
That's one of the things about living in Alaska that we all put up with, and most of us are willing to do so because, well, we live in Alaska. But we don't like it. It doesn't help us bond with our neighbors. There's no joy in a 12-hour blackout. No, we just hunker down, fire up our generators, light some candles, and stoke up our wood stoves to stay warm.
In other parts of the country, though, most people don't have generators or battery backups. These folks are just blacked out, and I can guarantee you that they see no "joy" in it.
Virtually every prescription from the climate-scold left involves us giving up something. They want us to give up our rural homes, they want us to give up our pickups and SUVs, they want us to give up our reliable natural gas and nuclear power plants for unreliable and low-density solar and wind power. They want us, in short, to surrender our prosperity, our modern technological lifestyle, all to prevent some fraction of one percent of a degree of warming over the next century. And now they admonish us to find joy in this? That's going to sell about as well as Kamala Harris's "campaign of joy." //
PubliusCryptus
3 hours ago
I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity.
Joy and connection? I see hunger and privation. //
Quizzical
3 hours ago
Whenever the power goes out for very many people, someone dies. Literally. Some people in relatively poor health are literally dependent upon electricity to keep powering the machines that keep them alive. Literally killing people is not something to be glossed over as no big deal. //
Peter Mohan
2 hours ago
As a retired NYC Firefighter I personally witness the joy of the 1977 blackout. Four deaths, hundreds injured, thousands arrested and 1600 buildings destroyed or looted.
Many of the businesses never returned to the poor neighborhoods that they had served. I’m looking forward to a heart attack so I can meet the dedicated doctors and nurses in the nearby emergency room.
This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.
The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.
The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.
If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.
At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.
And it's disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred...
SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW
From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.
"What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.
At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric shock. What exactly does "shake" mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:
-
That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or destroyed. This is called that "opens" a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.
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That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.
-
That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.
What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.
Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off —very sensitive to frequency variations—, 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it was It collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a "0 MW" nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country off.
To ignite a completely dead network again, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.
This is Ivanpah, a solar power facility in the Mojave Desert. Fifteen years ago they got a $1.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy. Now 11 years later, the facility is closing.