Steven Hayward:
As everyone knows, California is leading the bandwagon to have an all-electric car and truck fleet as soon as 2035. The assumption is that people will charge up their batteries overnight when electricity demand drops. The defect in this plan is that while electricity demand starts to fall later in the evening (except during heat waves), California’s supply of electricity also falls because it is lopsided toward wind and especially solar power, the latter of which generates no electricity at night.
John Hinderaker:
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.
And,
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.
