Bill Glahn at the Center of the American Experiment tracked energy usage in MInnesota for one hot ugly day, this past Monday:
“Renewables” provide 8% of the energy.
Somehow, though, they’ll be ready to take the entire load (and all those mandated EVs) by 2040?
Reminds me of this classic discourse on solving difficult problems:
I’m going to guess the “miracle”, in this case, will be that everyone involved in setting the policy will be out of government and cashing fat non-profit or lobbying checks by the time energy becomes unaffordable to proles.
I don’t have an X account and it’s probably just as well. X seems to have decided that non-registered users can read some of the entries of some accounts but not in any particular order. And no threads.
Even under these restrictions, Bill Glahn’s account is horrifically interesting.
In 2039. The DFL Trifecta III will pass the COMMANDER MONTGOMERY SCOTT ACT. Which will legalize Dilithium Crystals. In a related events. Two Non-Profits were incorporated the next day. One called DILITHIUM KILLS WALLEYES and another called SCOTTY WAS RACIST. Their press releases state that they are opposed to THE DILITHIUM INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
I remember power generation class as an undergrad, back in 1990, addressing this very issue–that due to political considerations, power generation was falling further and further behind demand. Utilities were doing things like the Ludington pumped storage plant (I camped in its shade one running camp), capacitive balancing of loads, and more.
Now we’re even further behind, pretending to keep pace with systems that are online only about 25% of the time, and like you noted, it’s eventually going to get people killed.
Ironically, one of the solutions I learned 34 years back, allowing utility rates to increase during peak demand, is a great way of making this work. People who would try to keep their home at 70F in August with current rates would likely back off if electric rates went up to fifty cents per kilowatt-hour, and the same price would at the same time incentivize people to find alternative methods of keeping their homes cool–solar, for example, doesn’t work at a dime per kW-H, but maybe at 50 cents or so….
bike,
I would also add, that the operating system for electric power generation, is also way out of date, highly vulnerable to intrusion and it can’t be upgraded without taking down the grid. My last two years in IT was in security and our company did compliance audits for these utilities, so I became keenly aware of the danger.