Sunday, July 31, 2022
This Deal's Getting Worse All the Time
The intermittency of wind and solar power generation means that other, reliable sources have to cycle up and down, repeatedly. This decreases efficiency and increases emissions.
Brilliant.
What Does the "E" Stand For, Pete?
If people want EVs, they’ll buy them. I’d consider buying one myself, if it wasn’t for the fact that the same elitist officials that want to punish us with high gas prices also want to strip us of every scalable source for electricity production at the same time. When Buttigieg and Biden get serious about scaling up electricity production to meet current demand, let alone the additional demand of millions of EVs on that infrastructure, then we can discuss that “incredible transition.”
Energy Dependence
Of course, the U.S. was never reliant on Russia for energy, at least not during the Trump administration. A sensible policy would be to maximize production of U.S. oil and gas so that our allies can rely on us, not on the Russians and not on the Chinese. But that approach is not on the table.
In this article, at least, the focus is on solar energy, but China dominates the market for wind turbines, too. More important, China controls the market for processing the minerals that are needed for these products, no matter where they are manufactured. No word on how, exactly, the U.S. and Australia will ramp up mining on an unprecedented scale to avoid this bottleneck.
The press conference included a brief reference to “long-duration energy storage,” which of course would be required to make wind and solar energy even remotely viable, if prohibitively expensive. But no such storage capacity exists, and it is not on the horizon. And—by the way—what country do you think controls the minerals and mineral processing that are necessary for the giant batteries the “greens” contemplate? Yes, that’s right. China.
