Monday, June 27, 2022
Party of Blackouts
As the greenies retire more and more reliable power plants and replace them with wind and solar installations that don’t produce electricity most of the time, the cost of massive redundancy to try to keep the lights on will increase exponentially. This summer we will probably see the first tremors of grid inadequacy caused by reliance on “green” energy. In future years, if environmentalists and the Democratic Party continue to get their way, we will see the earthquake: a future in which America, like a third-world country, will be a place where electricity is available only intermittently and only to a favored few, based on political allegiance.
And make sure you get an electric car that you won't be able to charge!
Under the Hood
Today, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds. It contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminium, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.Via John Hinderaker.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.
The current fossil fuel infrastructure is less invasive than mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
