Down The Memory Hole...
On Monday, April 28th, the entire country of Spain plunged into darkness. The blackout led to a declaration of national emergency, grounded planes, halted trains... you can figure the rest out.
That it happened only a dozen days after Spain celebrated its grid being powered by 100% renewables (aka wind and solar) is... a coincidence?
Yeah, and I'm the Last King of Scotland.
Renewable energy (aka wind and solar) has a massive unsolved problem. That problem?
When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, the power that is essential to our lives has to come from somewhere, and that 'somewhere' is either from batteries or battery-equivalents or from some source not dependent on Mother Nature's vagaries. The latter, dubbed "dispatchable power" in this article, includes natural gas-fueled generators and nuclear power. Natural gas, despite being clean in myriad other ways, is still carbon-based energy, which makes it anathema to the greens. Nuclear power, despite being "greener" than renewables, is looked upon askance by the enviro-absolutists. "Why" is a topic for another day, but in brief it's a combination of ignorance, petulance, and "too easy" a solution that would hamper the Best-and-Brightests' ability to reshape economies to their liking.
Really. Some of them actually hold that belief.*
Jargon-laced explanations aside, the power outage is very likely the result of a "too much too soon" rush into renewables, which no matter what anyone tells you are not ready for prime time. Adjunct power? Sure. But a nation's grid should not be based on them. It's a preview of what'll happen in other places that are engaging in this form of green economic suicide, and barring a breakthrough invention (which can never be predicted) in storage, it's a matter of when, rather than if.
That one blackout is estimated to have cost $2B in lost productivity, by the way.
Like so many other inconvenient truths (yes, I am mocking Al Gore), coverage of this blackout in the mainstream press will quickly disappear. We see this all over the news-scape. Crimes that rebut preferred narratives fade from public scrutiny very quickly. Mass shootings that don't involve a - the "right sort" of perp and b - the "right sort" of weapon rarely get past local news or a single national story before being memory-holed. Misdeeds by public officials who are on the "good" team get forgotten or retconned. Failed global warming doomsday predictions (and they are legion) are retroactively attributed to the fringe and then ignored.
Nellie Bowles at the Free Press offered another "memory-hole" story. The military helicopter pilot at the center of the DC airliner crash that killed 67 people? Turns out the pilot, a woman, was told to turn by both her instructor (a man) and Air Traffic Control. This raises DEI questions that must not be asked, so it'll likely go into the archives without further ado.
As the Democrats attempt to rebuild their party in the wake of their shellacking this past November - and in the wake of a decline and fracture that began with Obama, it'll be entertaining to see which of their previously 'must-have' policies they throw down the memory hole.
Maybe I'll make a Bingo card.
*Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock observed: "If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for 'business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult."
Re pwr storage: In the 1900's Navy [read: "back in my day"], we used an "Uninterruptible Power System" (UPS) to carry the building load for merely the few minutes it took for the generators to come on line during commercial power outages. UPS was comprised primarily of gigantic battery banks as large as an entire floor of the building. I realize battery technology has improved a thousand fold since then, but the idea of storing enough solar and wind power to serve the vagaries of nature for an entire country is truly mindboggling.
Hmmm 🤔. The Democrats attempt to rebuild their Party! Can anyone name a Democratic policy position that is popular with normal people?? DEI?? Open borders?? Transgender surgery for minors? Boys playing girls’ sports and sharing locker rooms with them??
Before rebuilding anything, the Dems have to realize that most sane people view the Dem positions as repulsive 🤮. Like any program for recovery, the first step is to acknowledge the problem. I see virtually no sincere efforts by Dems to acknowledge their fundamental issues. Rather, they continue to be energized by their self destructive hate for Trump. Their TDS appears to be in stage four, metastasizing as we speak and bringing today’s Democratic Party closer to a merciful death. It can’t happen soon enough.