Tuesday, January 31, 2023
You're Gonna Need a Bigger Mine
Liberals want to electrify everything, from your car to your stove. But they also don’t want to mine copper. Like so many things liberals do, this makes no sense. You might as well believe in fairy dust as in “green” energy.
This will end well.
The Futility of Wind
There are several reasons why wind and solar energy are doomed to fail, but the most basic is that they are low-intensity energy sources. They produce ridiculously little electricity per acre. Thus, Robert Bryce, one of our top energy experts, calculated in a paper he wrote for American Experiment that if we wanted to get all of our electricity needs from wind turbines, we would have to dedicate an area twice the size of the State of California.
The Futility of Solar
Or perhaps one should say: utility scale solar energy is useless. In northern climates, like where I live, solar panels produce electricity around 18% of the time—not a lot of electricity, any electricity. The vast majority of the time, they are inert.And,
It’s not just that solar panels do nothing during the night, as Duke Energy recently reminded its customers following a series of blackouts. In the North, solar panels also cease to function when it snows. Which it does, a lot. Sometimes on days when you want to turn on your lights, watch television or operate an appliance.
What is most telling is that no one bothers to shovel off the snow. Do you shovel your driveway? Yes, you need to. But utilities don’t clear snow off solar panels, as one utility executive recently admitted, because they produce so little electricity that paying to shovel them—most likely, paying high school kids—is not cost-effective. That is the ultimate proof of the futility of utility scale solar power.
