Transition? What Transition?

Robert Bryce is one of America’s foremost energy experts. At his Substack site, he describes his recent appearance before the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. The commissioners were glad to hear from Robert:

After I finished, about two dozen people (most of them were state regulators) came forward to say they appreciated my talk and that they’d never heard many of the points I’d made. One utility commissioner told me that the regulators who attend NARUC’s meetings are “not used to having anybody tell the whole story.” I also received several dozen emails from people who said NARUC had never had anyone like me give a speech.

Which is a truly scary reality. From whom are the commissioners accustomed to hearing? Financially self-interested left-wingers:

[A] few conference attendees took to Twitter to complain that I’d been allowed to speak at NARUC. One person in particular, a lawyer who works for Earthjustice, the San Francisco-based NGO that is funded by dark money, had a sphincter-puckered snit on Twitter, saying that I presented “nonsense.” Earthjustice had $151 million in revenue in 2023 and employs more than 200 lawyers in 15 U.S. cities. Another attendee, who works for San Francisco-based Energy Innovation LLC, which doesn’t reveal its donors, got his NARUC knickers in a twist. On Twitter, he claimed I provided so many “falsehoods” that he “couldn’t keep up.” It’s funny, though, that he didn’t name a single falsehood or refute even one of my points.

Typical. Leftists don’t argue, they censor.

What did Robert say that so frightened greenies? Follow the link above for the whole story, but I would highlight two points. First, increasing government-mandated reliance on expensive and ineffective wind and solar power is threatening the reliability of the electric grid:

On February 22, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) issued a report that put the danger facing America’s electric grid in stark terms. In an introduction, MISO’s CEO, John Bear, said, “There are immediate and serious challenges to the reliability of our region’s electric grid.” His remarks must be quoted at length:

The transition that is underway to get to a decarbonized end state is posing material, adverse challenges to electric reliability. A key risk is that many existing “dispatchable” resources that can be turned on and off and adjusted as needed are being replaced with weather-dependent resources such as wind and solar that have materially different characteristics and capabilities. While wind and solar produce needed clean energy, they lack certain key reliability attributes that are needed to keep the grid reliable every hour of the year. Although several emerging technologies may someday change that calculus, they are not yet proven at grid scale. Meanwhile, efforts to build new dispatchable resources face headwinds from government regulations and policies, as well as prevailing investment criteria for financing new energy projects. Until new technologies become viable, we will continue to need dispatchable resources for reliability purposes.

Second, perhaps the most extraordinary fact about energy is that the much-ballyhooed “transition” from fossil fuels to wind and solar simply isn’t happening, despite government mandates and massive subsidies. In fact, it is rapid growth in use of fossil fuels that powers the world’s economy:

There is much more at the link. The bottom line is that a transition from reliable and affordable fossil fuels to unreliable and prohibitively expensive weather-dependent sources of energy would be a human disaster, and therefore, it isn’t going to happen. Ever. Leftists may whine and gnash their teeth, and for now they may reap enormous amounts of ill-gotten money from “green” interests. But what they want, or more likely pretend to want, isn’t possible, and it won’t happen.