“The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all. They just stand back and let it all be.” (Bruce Springsteen, “Jungleland”, featuring an emotional, transcendent sax solo by the late Clarence Clemons)
I’ll stand back:
The notion that we’ll soon be exclusively powered by wind and solar is an appalling delusion, but one which comes with a staggering price tag … Adding wind turbines and solar panels to an integrated system that was perfectly capable of delivering power as and when power consumers need it, and at prices that all comers could afford, was always going to end in tears … The simple and unassailable fact is that for every MW of wind or solar there has to be a MW of coal or gas or nuclear or hydro ready, willing and able to pick up the slack, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in. The unnecessary duplication of capital costs is just the beginning … Little wonder, then, that consumers are being whacked with ever-increasing power bills in any country that has fallen for the grand wind and solar delusion.1
All assertions of Wind and Solar power generation reaching cost parity with conventional fossil fuels or nuclear power are patently false. Weather-Dependent power generation Wind and Solar technologies are in fact parasitic in Energy terms on conventional power generation and are not viable to support the power needs of any developed Nation.2
The significant ancillary costs, not accounted for in the calculations above, inevitably also associated with Wind power and Solar PV generators result from:
- their unreliability in terms of both power intermittency and power variability
- the non-dispatchability of Renewables: the wind will not blow, the clouds will not clear away and the world will not stop rotating to order, whenever power is needed by Man-kind.3
Would anyone sane ever buy a car costing between 8 – 25 times the normal price that only works one day in five, when you never know which day that might be? And then insist that its technology is used to power the whole economy.4
The fact of the matter is there isn’t anything sane about this delusion.
1 https://stopthesethings.com/2022/06/05/renewable-energy-delusion-counting-staggering-cost-of-wind-solar-obsession/
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.