At Watts Up With That, Paul Homewood analyzes California’s “green” energy mandate, which contemplates both that all electricity will be obtained from “green” sources, and pretty much everything will be electrified. Even a cursory look at the numbers confirms that it can’t be done.
Currently, California’s energy comes overwhelmingly from fossil fuels. Wind and solar are footnotes:
The inherent intermittency of wind makes it ridiculous to rely on wind turbines:
But let’s assume California made a serious, albeit futile, effort to comply with these mandates. How much would it cost? You can follow the link for the details, but Homewood explains why the state’s estimates grossly understate the extent and the cost of the wind and solar facilities that would be required.
And then we come to “storage batteries,” the fairy dust that liberals use to wish away the unsolvable problem of weather-dependent intermittency. How much would the batteries cost? Homewood works it out at around $100 billion a year. The California Energy Commission’s cost estimates assume that the cost of battery storage will fall by two-thirds from current prices. Why? Because of rising demand!
Never mind the skyrocketing price of lithium:
Our energy policy is literally being run by idiots.
In Minnesota, where I live, our governor has just signed a Blackout Bill modeled on California’s, except that it applies only to electricity, not virtually all energy. Unlike California, Minnesota did not even attempt a feasibility study, nor did it make a cost estimate. The wind and solar mandate was enacted, blind. Only one study has analyzed the cost and feasibility of the Minnesota mandate. It estimated the cost at $313 billion, which is a conservative number, in part because it assumes constant prices for the vast quantities of raw materials (copper, cobalt, lithium, etc.) that would be required. That study also found that even after spending $313 billion, Minnesota would not be able to meet its electricity needs reliably.
What can’t happen, won’t happen. These pie-in-the-sky mandates cannot produce all-“green” electricity, let alone energy, any more than King Canute’s order could cause the tide to stop coming in. But unlike Canute’s harmless order (which likely was intended to remind courtiers of the limited nature of human power, even that of a monarch), today’s “green” mandates are doing incalculable damage.
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