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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

BREAKING NEWS: Spain and Portugal Celebrate Historic Achievement: First Renewable Blackout Festival™ a Roaring Success

In a stunning victory for progress, major cities across Spain and Portugal plunged into darkness today… a bold, equity-driven milestone being hailed by experts as “a necessary recalibration of oppressive light privilege.”

Government officials, cloaked in the safety of candlelit diversity councils, were quick to assure citizens that the blackouts had absolutely nothing to do with their relentless obsession with renewables, socialism, or Marxist energy redistribution initiatives.
Instead, they blamed “unexpected atmospheric challenges”… otherwise known as night time.

“This is what success looks like,” declared Iberian Minister for Sustainable Equality™, Juanita de Powerless. “Zero emissions. Zero industry. Zero functioning infrastructure. Welcome to Net Zero: where zero means zero.”

Sources confirm that during the outage, critical DEI teams remained operational… bravely identifying which marginalized communities were being most equitably electrocuted when traffic lights failed.
“True social justice,” noted one Gender Energy Equity™ analyst, “is making sure everyone gets hit by a bus equally.”

Meanwhile, local media proudly reported that while trains, phones, and emergency services collapsed, Spain’s Ministry of Feelings achieved its monthly KPI by holding an inclusive brainstorming session on how to decolonize electricity.

Critics foolishly tried to link the blackouts to decades of grid neglect, mass immigration-fueled demand surges, solar panels that don’t work in the dark, and a population conditioned to think work ethic is colonial violence™… but were quickly fact-checked by experts who graduated with double majors in Critical Energy Studies and Queer Wind Turbine Maintenance.

As night fell over the silent streets of Madrid, citizens were reminded that “decarbonisation” is not just an economic transition… it’s a spiritual journey… into medieval living.

Welcome to the future. Hope you brought a torch… and a towel.

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Wind power is killing a lot of eagles. The federal government is tracking this destruction, but it is all a big secret. We have a right to know what is happening to our eagles. //

By David Wojick
Published April 3, 2025
Imagine there is an industry product that is killing thousands a year and the number is growing. The government is tracking it closely, while keeping the data secret in order to protect the product. Outrageous, right? But that is exactly the case with wind power killing eagles.

Every wind-killed eagle found at an industrial wind site is quickly reported to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Every year each site also submits an annual kill report to FWS. None of this data is publicly available.

The FWS eagle kill data is all a big government secret designed to protect the wind industry from public outrage. This has to stop.

Power lines, though, are not a major source of eagle fatalities. The big "green energy" windmills are, though - or, at least, we think they are. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose job it is to keep this data, won't release the numbers.

https://heartland.org/opinion/the-feds-are-hiding-the-eagle-death-data/

Every wind-killed eagle found at an industrial wind site is quickly reported to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Every year each site also submits an annual kill report to FWS. None of this data is publicly available.

The FWS eagle kill data is all a big government secret designed to protect the wind industry from public outrage. This has to stop.

The public has a right to know about all these eagle kills. In addition, this data would support research on ways to reduce the killing. For example, it has been suggested that painting the blades black would help the eagles avoid the blades. In fact, there are a lot of technologies that could be studied given comprehensive kill data. //

The only possible reason I can think of is that the numbers of eagles and other birds killed by these contraptions is shockingly high, higher than any of us may have suspected. We should note as well that, were you to come across one of these dead eagles and pluck a feather from the carcass, you would be subject to criminal charges and a hefty fine - but the builders of these windmills are in no way held responsible for these eagle and other raptor deaths.

And where is the Audobon Society in all this?

That, folks, is the climate panic-mongers' entire agenda in a nutshell - flawed analysis, lack of full disclosure, questionable science and mathematics, and, as noted, the models are junk. //

But the best part, of course, is that the local people, folks who live near the construction site, got involved. It may have started over concern of messing up their ocean views, but it swiftly became more than that. People looked at the math, they looked at the numbers and the analysis from Shell New Energies and EDF Renewables, who were backing the project, and they didn't like what they saw.

They organized, filed a challenge against the permit, and won. //

The climate-industrial complex is finally facing a breeze it can’t spin.

A hydroelectric generating station is a plant that produces electric power by using water to propel the turbines, which, in turn, drive the alternators.

These power stations generate about a quarter of all the electricity used in the world. With access to vast water reserves, Hydro-Québec uses water to generate almost all of its energy output. In this way, the company helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The price of electricity in German soared from 17 cents per kilowatt hour in April 2020 to $4.69 in August 2022. It is now $1.40—or 8 times what Germans once paid. //

Germany's electricity prices have experienced an increase in the latter half of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, reaching an average of 140.42 euros per megawatt-hour in February 2025. This marks a notable decrease from the record high of over 469 euros per megawatt-hour in August 2022, yet remains above pre-pandemic levels. The ongoing volatility in energy prices continues to impact German households and businesses, reflecting broader trends across Europe's energy landscape.

Now, this is a big, complex issue, and a lot to absorb, but the thumbnail is this: Rising nationalism in Europe is driven in part by frustration over rising energy costs (as well as things like unchecked immigration) and those rising energy costs are in large part due to net-zero schemes to appease climate activists. Britain has gone all-in for renewables, but the renewables aren't consistent, and when the wind isn't blowing, the United Kingdom has been relying on the expensive proposition of starting up natural-gas-powered electrical plants - using Norwegian natural gas. Their backup, incidentally, is gas imported from the United States, and President Trump is planning to ramp up production, but he's also likely to meet American consumer and industrial needs over exports. Interestingly, in the article linked above, "The Telegraph," an outlet not terribly friendly to President Trump, has actually given him credit for doing what's right by America first.

A new study says that many large-scale hydropower projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment.

Dozens of these dams are being removed every year, with many considered dangerous and uneconomic.

But the authors fear that the unsustainable nature of these projects has not been recognised in the developing world.

Thousands of new dams are now being planned for rivers in Africa and Asia.

'They dammed everything' - hydropower gone sour

Are too many hydropower dams being built?

Hydropower is the source of 71% of renewable energy throughout the world and has played a major role in the development of many countries.

But researchers say the building of dams in Europe and the US reached a peak in the 1960s and has been in decline since then, with more now being dismantled than installed. Hydropower only supplies approximately 6% of US electricity.

Dams are now being removed at a rate of more than one a week on both sides of the Atlantic.

The problem, say the authors of this new paper, is that governments were blindsided by the prospect of cheap electricity without taking into account the full environmental and social costs of these installations.

More than 90% of dams built since the 1930s were more expensive than anticipated. They have damaged river ecology, displaced millions of people and have contributed to climate change by releasing greenhouse gases from the decomposition of flooded lands and forests.

Germany is decommissioning its closed nuclear plants, but opportunities for restarting remain. New energy demand and news of Three Mile Island's revival have improved the outlook for closed plants. No significant technical barriers prevent Germany’s nuclear restart, but swift action is needed.

Germany shut down its last nuclear plants on April 15, 2023, and is making significant progress in decommissioning 31 reactors. After years of producing enough electricity for its own needs and exporting the surplus, Germany imported 9 TWh net in 2023 and as of November 25, 2024, increased imports to 25 TWh net. The German economy is expected to shrink by 0.2% in 2024, following a 0.3% decline in 2023. A 2024 survey by Germany’s DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce shows a rising number of businesses are considering reducing production or relocating out of Germany.

A German nuclear restart depends solely on political will. The two most urgent measures include an immediate moratorium on the dismantling of reactors and an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act to allow nuclear power plants to be operated again.

Germany once operated one of the world's largest nuclear power fleets and was a leading provider of nuclear technology. However, public opposition halted nuclear expansion by 1990, leading to a phase-out agreement in 2002. Despite a brief runtime extension under Chancellor Merkel in 2009, the Fukushima disaster in 2011 prompted her to make a rapid reversal of her previous policy, with Germany committing to shut down all nuclear plants by the end of 2022.

To replace nuclear power, Germany planned to rely on a mix of coal, wind, solar, and Russian natural gas from pipelines. The country aimed to gradually phase out coal while increasing renewables and using natural gas as a bridge fuel. However, this strategy faced a significant setback when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, disrupting Germany's plans for cheap Russian gas imports. This crisis sparked public debates about extending nuclear plant operations. Nevertheless, Germany's last nuclear reactors ceased electricity production on April 15, 2023.

The shutdown of Germany’s nuclear plants has had major impacts. Before the final nuclear closures, Germany had been a net exporter of electricity. Now, Germany is a net importer, relying on its neighbors for power. Imports in 2024 have nearly tripled those of 2023 before the start of December. Ironically, about half of this imported energy came from France, Switzerland, and Belgium, where nuclear power provides a substantial portion of the electricity supply.

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then-U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany. //

When the dying Nazi Party got wind of the plan, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had a field day. He screamed to Germans that they were all doomed to oblivion if they lost the war, even growing opponents of the Nazi Party.

Even many Americans were aghast at the plan.

Gen. George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, warned that its mere mention had galvanized German troops to fight to the end, increasing American casualties as they closed in on the German homeland.

Ex-President Herbert Hoover blasted the plan as inhumane. He feared mass starvation of the German people if they were reduced to a premodern, rural peasantry.

But once the victorious allies occupied a devastated Germany, witnessed its moonscape ruined by massive bombing and house-to-house fighting, and discovered that their “ally” Russia’s Josef Stalin was ruthless and hellbent on turning all of Europe communist, the Harry Truman administration backed off the plan.

There is a tragic footnote to the aborted horrors of the Morgenthau Plan. Currently, Germany is doing to itself almost everything Morgenthau once dreamed of.

Its green delusions have shut down far too many of its nuclear, coal, and gas electrical generation plants.

Erratic solar and wind “sustainable energy” means that power costs are four times higher than on average in the United States.

Once-dominant European giants Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes are now bleeding customers and profits. Their own government’s green and electric vehicle mandates ensure they will become globally uncompetitive.

The German economy actually shrank in 2023. And the diminished Ruhr can no longer save the German economy from its own utopian politicians.

The German military is all but disarmed and short thousands of recruits.

German industries do not produce enough ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft to equip even its diminished army, navy, and air force. //

After World War II, the Truman administration rejected the notion of a pastoral, deindustrialized, and insecure Germany as a cruel prescription for poverty, hunger, and depopulation.

But now the German people themselves voted for their own updated version of Morgenthau’s plan—as they willingly reduced factory hours, curtailed power and fuel supplies, and struggled with millions of illegal aliens and porous borders.

Germans accept that they have no military to speak of that could protect their insecure borders—without a United States-led NATO.

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself.

The sudden desire to destroy trees for solar panels comes as the state risks failing to meet its own climate goal of 100% “clean” energy by 2040. If it doesn’t increase its development of so-called renewable energy, it won’t meet its arbitrary timeframe.

The 420 acres about to be bulldozed are part of 4,000 acres of public land that will be flattened to try and meet the 2040 deadline. //

Public land, even - meaning, presumably, land that is held by the state government in trust, as it were, for the people of the state of Michigan. Land that would otherwise be available for a variety of recreational uses, as most public land is.

Now, though, it will be destroyed in favor of solar panels that will take up an enormous amount of space to produce far less energy than a nuclear power plant would generate with a much, much smaller footprint.

This is ridiculous. //

To sum that up, solar arrays require 38 times more land to produce the same amount of electricity as one modern fission plant. Wind is even worse, requiring 140 times the land to produce that same amount of electricity - enough to power about 775,000 typical homes. That doesn't even take into account the issues with reliability or the necessity of battery backups for times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. //

So, why do these "clean energy" goals never include nuclear power? Fission reactors are everything the climate scolds and "clean energy" types profess to want; modern reactors, including molten-salt and small modular reactors, are safe, efficient, and produce no carbon emissions. //

They are literally destroying the environment to protect the environment. //

ConservativeInMinnesota
an hour ago edited
This is another example of progressive greenwashing. This won’t help the environment, it won’t reduce carbon and it isn’t scalable. It also isn’t base power as it won’t work at night or as well depending on the weather. That means another power plant needs to be built o provide power when this doesn't.

Get real and start deploying nuclear energy. Stop buying Chinese solar panels (based on stolen US IP) and leave the trees alone. The real world pollution will be effectively nonexistent, there will be less carbon and we don’t have to give more money to the CCP. //

Quiverfull
22 minutes ago
The deer and the antelope do not play
In the middle of a gross solar array

In other words, people who own homes with garages and driveways can plug their cars right in, meaning they are topped up every day before they leave the house. But someone living in an apartment, like that one of mine from long ago? You are either dependent on fee-charging public charging stations, or you have to procure a really, really long drop cord.

The more people adopt EVs, the more you'll start to see this in American cities - some of those cities and even states are trying to force you to adopt EV use whether you like it or not.

Energy Expert Robert Bryce: “It is a colossal black eye for the wind industry, which has collected tens of billions of dollars in federal tax credits by claiming its landscape-blighting, bird-and-bat-killing, property-value-destroying turbines are an essential part of the effort to avert catastrophic climate change.”

Meredith Angwin @MeredithAngwin
·
Dec 23
Grid frequency drifting outside operational limits implies the system is running at the margins. https://watt-logic.com/2024/12/23/gb-grid-frequency/
Thanks to Kathryn Porter for this analysis!
From watt-logic.com

chrispydog @chrispydog
When I explain this stuff to people: "Have you seen when a spinning top starts to wobble, and what comes next?"

Most people 'get it' pretty fast.
4:34 PM · Dec 24, 2024. //

I then analysed the number of 15-second intervals in each winter season for which the operation or statutory limits were breached. The results are in the table below. As can be seen, in the past 4 years, there have been c 500 times the upper operational limit was breached, but in 2017 – 2019 the number was higher. The lower limit has tended to be breached less often – 2022 was an outlier with a very high number of breaches. There has also been a consistent trend of lower limit breaches increasing in frequency, which is consistent with falling grid inertia (see chart). //

This fits with the expected picture that the grid is becoming less reliable. It is also interesting that when individual occurrences are inspected, it is more often the case that frequency has drifted outside the operational range rather than suddenly falling out as would be expected from an outage. This is more worrying as it points to a general difficulty in maintaining stable frequency – things will always break and trip, and the grid is designed to deal with that, but these drifts outside the range speak more to a wider reduction in stability versus what is expected.

Here's the math behind making a star-encompassing megastructure.

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.

But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere? //

Even if we were to coat the entire surface of the Earth in solar panels, we would still only capture less than a tenth of a billionth of all the energy our sun produces. Most of it just radiates uselessly into empty space. We’ll need to keep that energy from radiating away if we want to achieve Great Galactic Civilization status, so we need to do some slight remodeling. We don’t want just the surface of the Earth to capture solar energy; we want to spread the Earth out to capture more energy. //

For slimmer, meter-thick panels operating at 90 percent efficiency, the game totally changes. At 0.1 AU, the Earth would smear out a third of the sun, and we would get a return on our energy investment in around a year. As for Jupiter, we wouldn’t even have to go to 0.1 AU. At a distance about 30 percent further out than that, we could achieve the unimaginable: completely enclosing our sun. We would recoup our energy cost in only a few hundred years, and we could then possess the entirety of the sun’s output from then on. //

MichalH Smack-Fu Master, in training
4y
62

euknemarchon said:
I don't get it. Why wouldn't you use asteroid material?
The mass of all asteroids amounts to only 3% of the earth's moon. Not worth chasing them down, I'd guess. //

DCStone Ars Tribunus Militum
14y
2,313
"But [Jupiter]’s mostly gas; it only has about five Earth’s worth of rocky material (theoretically—we’re not sure) buried under thousands of kilometers of mostly useless gas. We'd have to unbind the whole dang thing, and then we don’t even get to use most of the mass of the planet."

Hmm. If we can imagine being able to unbind rocky planets, we can also imagine fusing the gas atmosphere of Jupiter to make usable material (think giant colliders). Jupiter has a mass of about 1.9 x 10^27 kg, of which ~5% is rocky core. We'd need to make some assumptions about the energy required to fuse the atmosphere into something usable (silicon and oxygen to make silicates?) and the efficiency of that process. Does it do enough to change the overall calculation though? //

Dark Jaguar Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
11,066
The bigger issue is the sphere wouldn't be gravitationally locked in place because the sun is cancelling it's own pull in every direction. Heck even Ringworld had to deal with this flaw in the sequel. That's why these days the futurists talking about enclosing the sun recommend "Dyson swarming" instead.

Edit: A little additional note. You can't really get the centrifugal force needed to generate artificial gravity across an entire sphere like you can with a ring. A swarm doesn't negate this. If you orbit fast enough to generate that artificial gravity, you're now leaving the sun behind. Enjoy drifting endlessly! No, rather each of these swarm objects are just going to have to rotate themselves decently fast.