Why Wind and Solar Will Never Work

Enormous amounts of money are being made by “green” fraudsters, utilities and politicians who tell us we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. In fact, no such transition is underway; fossil fuel consumption is higher than ever. And no such transition will take place, ever, either in America or anywhere else in the world.

Why? Because wind and solar are both obsolete technologies. They produce electricity less than one-half of the time, a fact that will never change. How can we run a modern economy on intermittent energy sources? We can’t.

If you ask a liberal that question, his answer will be “batteries.” He will admit that wind and solar work only occasionally, but that is no problem, he will tell you, because the electricity they generate can be stored in batteries for later use.

Power can be stored in batteries, of course. We all do this every day, storing tiny amounts on our laptops, smart phones and so on. But our energy demands are almost unfathomably large, and all of the batteries in the world don’t begin to meet those needs. My colleague Isaac Orr created this graphic, which compares energy consumption in just one state in one country, as of 2019, with projected battery storage in the entire world as of 2030. You might as well rely on pixie dust as on batteries:

Batteries are also unbelievably expensive. This is one of the reasons why greenies rarely offer cost estimates for their wind and solar mandates. The turbines, solar panels and transmission lines (which they always leave out) are already too expensive, but in addition you have to either build natural gas plants to operate most of the time, when wind and solar do nothing (greenies always leave out these costs, too) or else hypothesize an insane amount of battery storage (they don’t even try to calculate these costs, let alone consider them).

At Watts Up With That?, David Wojick does the math, backed up by a study that you can read here:

Grid scale storage at the scale needed to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar is impossibly expensive. Even assuming fantastic price reductions…

Let’s pause right there. The idea that batteries will become less expensive is a fantasy. Leftists contemplate an increase in the demand for batteries, and the raw materials (like lithium) they require, by orders of magnitude. That overwhelming demand will make batteries vastly more expensive, not less expensive.

…analysis shows the cost of the required battery storage still nearly equals the $23 trillion annual American GDP. The likely cost would be many times GDP. Clearly this is economically impossible.

Let’s do the math:

We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthrough study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those years’ actual wind and solar production.

Based on his work, which only covered 48 states, our working estimate of the required storage is an amazing 250 million MWh. America today has less than 20 thousand MWh of grid scale battery storage, which is next to nothing. Grid scale batteries today cost around $700,000 a MWh. For 250 million MWh we get an astronomical total cost of $175 trillion dollars just to replace today’s fossil fuel-generated electricity needs with wind and solar. Even the fantastically low cost estimates that some people are proposing puts the cost around the total GDP of America. Even worse, if we get the electric cars the Biden Administration is calling for these astronomical numbers could easily double.

None of this is going to happen. The green grifters will be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on rails long before we Americans all starve to death because our entire incomes, and all of our accumulated wealth, are being devoted to a fruitless search for batteries.

But in the meantime, we will suffer the unreliable energy that is characteristic of a third-world country:

None of this impossibility is being considered in today’s reliability assessments. Not by the States, the utilities, NERC or FERC. Instead, throughout the country fossil fuel power plants are being replaced by wind and solar, without the required storage. The reason is obvious, namely the necessary storage is impossibly expensive.

This is why we are now starting to have blackouts. And they are only beginning. It is worth noting that there is not a single demonstration project anywhere in the world–not one!–to try to show that it is feasible to operate even a single city, town or village on wind and solar energy. The reason is, it isn’t feasible, and the people who are getting rich on the “green” fraud know it.

As a result America’s grid is steadily becoming more and more unreliable. The grid is sick and getting sicker. The obvious solution is for NERC to issue Reliability Standards to constrain the growth of renewables. So far NERC has simply ignored this progressive loss of reliability.

The political forces arrayed behind the wind and solar farce are formidable. But reality is more formidable still. The day of reckoning is coming, and in fact is not far off. Those who are impoverishing Americans and destroying our formerly-reliable electric grid should be storing their ill-gotten money in Swiss bank accounts, so they can make a hasty getaway when the whole enterprise comes crashing down.