I've tried to get through by submissions to the ESNZ Select Committee and OFGEM going back several years now: many of the predecessor ministers were almost equally dumb it has to be said.
However, together with Kathryn Porter and David Turver I think we do now have the ear of the Tory Shadow Minister, Claire Coutinho, who has announced plans to repeal the Climate Change Act, eliminate ROC taxes and carbon taxes for a start. There will be a lot more to come. We have to hope that she gets to implement those things (if necessary by changing party).
I wouldn't believe anything a Tory politician says, they're all talk, no action. If their lips are moving, you know they're lying. The only hope for Britain is Reform.
Reform have a lot of work to do to produce a workable energy policy. I hope they get there, because they're obviously more likely to win the next election than anyone else. But they simply can't afford to nationalise 50% of utilities, which would in any case result in inefficient entities with frequent strikes, taking us back to the 3 day week of the 1970s. Nor can they afford to cancel existing contracts: the damage to UK reputation for investment would be severe, not unlike when Chavez took over in Venezuela.
They need to sit down with people who understand what it will take to keep the lights on while unwinding the complex legislation and treaties and rulebooks. Disassembly has to be in the right order, otherwise the system will break and they will get the blame.
Well there's your chance, lobby Farage and gang to take David Turver on as shadow minister of energy. It would be like Trump making Chris Wright head of DOE. Does any European nation actually have a qualified energy dept head?
Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Iceland, if we expand the criteria to include people with an engineering background. All are recent appointees, since 2021. It's a sign that behind the scenes politicians are waking up the fact that we are heading for energy disaster, with more crises like Spain sure to emerge in future.
Whatever sanity they might bring is unlikely to avert disaster, but at least the politicians will be able to say with a straight face that they recognised there was a problem on the horizon and have taken steps to remedy the situation.
I'm not an energy expert by the way. I just spend a lot of time learning online as part of my research as a writer. That's why I used the term energy versant insiders- it's another way of saying awake to the very real problems we face. I want to get the hard science right for a sci fi novel I'm planning to write. There are some really fascinating articles about sequential duplication and its role in human's accelerated rate of evolution.
We should make Energy Ministers take a test- they have to be able to perform the Maths for a pretty basic application of Bernoulli's principle, without reference to online or other sources. A slightly more complex practical use of Boyle's Law might be another example.
Nice to see a few. Not Canada, unlike previous ones (like a Greenpeacer), he at least has an MBA, but is a 20 yr Goldman Sachs employee. And it is the Big Banks that have been the most ardent promoters of the Net Zero economic destruction dogma, along with other blatant wealth transfer scams like Cap n Trade, Carbon Credits, RPS, RECs, while blockading finance of Nuclear Power.
And the one in Britain, Ed Miliband, is a real bird-brain, a walking disaster.
It's really refreshing to see somebody with a rational viewpoint. I also agree that the Tories and Labour are dead forever. Even the most disastrous Reform government won't make up for their abject duplicity and betrayal on net legal migration- more so given that even the rather lukewarm and rose-tinted estimates from the OBR have conclusively proved that net legal migration has been absolutely disastrous for Britain.
After all, it's not by coincidence that the greatest rise in American living standards in American history was accompanied by a fall of foreign-born citizenship from 15% to 5%. Tight labour markets cause businesses to prioritise capital investment for increased productivity, as well as the more normal direction of financial resources towards expansion.
Here's an interesting development for energy versant insiders. In America, in many regions, Data Centres have taken to building their own gas-fired power supply for energy security, bypassing local bureaucracies. Growth in the UK tech sector has been one of the very few bright shining lights in an otherwise dismal economic landscape. Reform should be making backroom deals with the data centre companies now. The best and most carbon efficient gas turbines have a wait time of eight years, although the data centre companies seem to be able to wrangle this down to around six years.
We should be doing deals for the data centres to supply on a contract basis for peak demand periods. It's not as though many people are consulting AI when Strictly Come Dancing is on.
Thank you, a very clear and concise explanation that helps me to better understand! Ah yes, be very careful of electricity generators that are non-dispatchable and are not able to provide ancillary services.
This thorough, detailed, quantitative analysis was done by Zoe Hilton, Michael Wu and Aidan Morrison of the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia and was published on Oct. 2, 2025. Australia is really struggling with a renewable energy transition and costs are skyrocketing. In my opinion, it shows how critically important dispatchable electricity generators are that provide ancillary services to the electricity grid, IBR's are not capable of either (Inverter-based resources, those that generate Direct Current (DC) electricity and have it converted to Alternating Current (AC) electricity, which are wind, solar and batteries) https://www.cis.org.au/publication/the-renewable-energy-honeymoon-starting-is-easy-the-rest-is-hard/
Sandia National Laboratories released a report in January, 2025 discussing challenges with replacing synchronous generator resources with inverter-based resources. "Utility Experience with Inverter Based Resource Impacts on Transmission Protection". https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376421514356858880/
Thanks for sharing these sources Todd–very interesting stuff! The analysis by Hilton, Wu, and Morrison is really good so far. It makes clear that as renewable levels get higher, the harder and more expensive it gets to add more. Good thing to remember in the US right now, as people try to claim the opposite. Couldn't agree more with the following:
"An undeniable trend has emerged. No country has reached wind and solar penetration levels above 90%, and those that come closest have some of the highest electricity costs in the world. Very few countries have exceeded around 40%, and those that do end up with elevated electricity prices."
Costly electricity undermines electrification to "clean energy" if that is your goal. Industry moves elsewhere. Consumers persist with alternative fuels and become poorer. Efficiency that pays for itself is prudent, but trying to make basically imprudent measures apparently necessary just makes everyone poorer. Grenfell Tower was a £10m insulation project with a 200+ year payback before financing costs: that cost 72 lives as well. The first task is to lower the cost of energy which makes society richer, and more able to afford to take care of its environment. See the EROI energy cliff and Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.
That’s all true IF you don’t care about the impact of climate change on future generations. Actually it is already affecting us today. Look at the unusually high summer temperatures across the globe plus the once in 100-year storms that we now see every year or two. Then there are the wildfires….
It's true regardless. It's precisely because I do care that attempts to reduce our standards of living back to the Stone Age are going to affect future generations badly that I oppose them. They are already far more damaging than any claims about changes in climate. I see you have swallowed the propaganda that ignores the history about wildfires which used to be hugely worse than today (and I note that big fires like Palisades are in fact not climate but arson). Many temperature records are due to poorly sited weather stations, and the use of modern thermometers that react to short heat blasts compared with the lagged reaction of the old Sixsmith design, and rising UHI, which is not climate. There is also a persistent massaging of the past temperature history to cool the historical record, often on spurious grounds.
Perhaps you should start by reading what the IPCC has actually said about trends in climate, rather than the propaganda versions.
Blackouts - none since 2016 that weren't caused by coal outages, but total lost time per customer less than 1/3rd of the US.
Auxilliary services: much faster and cheaper supplied by batteries and syncons- SA's first battery captured 80% of the FCAS market in its first year at an 80% discount below previous prices.
Power costs up faster in FF states than renewable states.
SA is still expensive because its price is still set by gas, gas prices have risen 8 fold in 12 years, but in this years price rises SA 73% renewables retail price was up 1%- In NSW-65% coal and gas price was up 9%
But the real story about the cost of Electricity in South Australia is the most wise South Australians are getting off retail bills.
They are doing this by installing large Residential-scale Storage paired with DC-coupled Rooftop Solar PV, and using wholesalers like Amber to make money on the wholesale market.
thanks for an exceptionally clear explanation of why the drive for more wind and solar is a fool's errand, although given it is being made by fools, er politicians, I guess we cannot be that surprised. Here in NJ, I desperately hope that Jack Ciatterelli wins the governorship because the Sherrill energy plan is a disaster
While I don't care for the "all of the above" language Ciatterelli endorses, he will 100% be better than Sherrill, as he supports banning offshore wind and withdrawing from RGGI. I found this from Sherrill to be pretty funny:
"So on Day One as New Jersey’s next governor, I’m going to declare a State of Emergency on Utility Costs and freeze your utility rates, massively build out cheaper and cleaner power generation... Prices are spiking because of a huge power shortage — I’ll transform New Jersey’s energy picture to build new, cheaper, and cleaner energy generation..."
So she's going to freeze rates but spend tons of money on resources that won't fill the power shortage gaps!
None of the plans for reducing greenhouse gasses, anywhere, have been sensible and every single one was doomed to failure from the start, with the added damage of catastrophically expensive electricity and disastrous decreases in reliability.
This was apparent to anyone who did a lick of research and was capable of a little tiny bit of math.
Given that the climate alarmists refuse to present any plans that would actually achieve their stated goals, why in the world would we have a concern for their goals?
"Reducing greenhouse gasses" is just code for destroy industrial civilization. It has never been an effort to improve human lives now or in the future.
Hint: Germany, the example all the climatistas want to imitate still emits over 400 grams of CO2 per KWHr generated and has squandered over a trillion Eu. while destroying their economy with expensive energy.
Meanwhile, next door in similarly industrialized France, they have emitted less than 60 grams per KWHr generated for the last 20 years and have affordable, clean electricity.
Why was Germany held up as the example to follow when they are an abject failure?
Why would anyone advance a movement that advocates self destruction?
And so the EUSSR fines France for Euro1.1B for not building enough wind & solar. No fines for Germany. And Austria tries to block any EU country from building nuclear with endless lawsuits. And the EUSSR kangaroo court forced Britain to buy the most expensive and worst designed modern reactor on the planet.
Could be because Malthusian Banksters control both. In their latest plan (2024) for projected 2050 World primary energy mix they want, nuclear 2.8%, biomass 19%, fossil 18.4%, renewables (wind + solar + hydro) 60%.
Another reason why they hate nuclear so much, notably fast reactors and practical fusion reactors. It's now known that they can produce vast amounts of gold by transmutation of mercury. A very substantial portion of a reactors income. Enough to collapse the World gold price.
You are absolutely wrong in claiming that all efforts to reduce GHG have been unsuccessful. The US power sector dramatically reduced its emissions by substituting natural gas for coal.
The "climatistas" are agnostic regarding how to combat climate change. The are not committed solely to wind/solar/batteries. Nuclear power is acceptable as is geothermal, hydro, tidal power, and non-battery forms of storage. Most also will accept limited amounts of natural gas generation to ensure grid reliability. It's all a question of what is the cheapest solution.
It's value is very uncertain, but what I do know is that the world at large, and I mean at large, will continue to release CO2 from combustion for a very long time. It is a foregone conclusion that no matter what we do concentration of CO2 will rise. Thus, I see no value to us saving our minority of CO2 release in a way that costs us real money.
The US is still one of the largest sources of GHG. Of course it costs “real” money to reduce emissions. The relevant question is how much is a prudent amount to spend - and the answer is definite not zero if you care about the welfare of future generations.
Pielkie has run thru the data generated by the Ipcc and it’s pretty clear there is no detectable emergency right now.
According to the table in working group 1, only one item (heatwaves) is shown to be increased by AGW.
According to them.
But if they are tracking 13 parameters and 12 show low confidence of detection of any change outside of natural variation the proper question is why do you assume that one variable has been changed by us?
They all believe co2 “will” cause a problem to whatever extent but that is reliant on faith in the models.
No thanks.
If anyone is actually worried about emissions then the only path is nuclear.
If there is no emergency now but there might be in 2100 then we have lots of time to implement nuclear.
The problem is those who wish to wreck our energy systems at enormous expense, leaving nothing for any adaptation costs. I'd agree that it's already looking unavoidably bad on that account. But we can stop it getting a whole bunch worse.
Even the ipcc states that there is no confidence of detecting AGW before then and that detection prediction based on models and assumptions.
You are free to believe them, I’m 60 and neither I or likely my children will still be around to find out.
But no, I’m not worried about “climate emergency”, instead I look around and see the best period in human history, far better than the catastrophe of the little ice age.
But you have done a far superior job of presenting the data.
I'm sure someone will pipe in with "But we have Batteries" which on the face of it is true. However, we need a massive amount of energy storage (GWh) to even begin to offset the effect of diminishing returns.
And that adds significantly to both investment needed (Capex) and FCOE (Full Cost of Electricity Delivered to the Grid) making the net cost of renewables much higher than what we are constantly told. In fact it makes it more costly than nuclear!
Good comment. People have an idea that wind/solar is not only "free fuel" but is very cheap to build. Actually it is fast to build, which when searching for a way to close some capacity gap causes utilities to over-value its utility. Being able to build 600MW (nameplate) wind plants and commission it in two years to begin earning rate of return on rate base, versus five years for a coal thermal plant, makes financial people lose a sense of the goal -- delivery of service.
Once capacity factor is taken into account, wind is pretty expensive. A latest 695MW wind plants proposed for the Laramie Range in Wyoming is estimated to cost $1.60 per Watt. Then consider that annual capacity factor is unlikely to exceed 40% and the hidden cost of endless taxpayer subsidies, and the actual cost is probably over $5.00 per watt delivered -- and all without considering how wind adds to operational complexity and the diminished utility of coal plants.
Yes, sir, we are approaching nuclear sorts of costs.
Love the piece–you brought up a great point about transmission limits, too. Not many people realize that. You can build all the "cheap" intermittent energy you want, but that doesn't mean the grid can handle it or that generation will occur when needed. This is frequently the case already, as wind has largely saturated high wind areas.
And you're exactly right, the battery storage "solution" simply affirms the inefficiency of a W/S/B system at large, and acknowledges that the cost of wind and solar doesn't end with setting them up.
In many areas average demand is around 60% of peak demand, (it varies surprisingly little globally, partly because of lower use overnight). So that is the typical average utilisation you can expect for transmission assets, discounted by a safety factor against overload. However, for renewables the equations are very different: immediately solar is limited to no more than about 25% even in the most favourable locations, and wind is little better. So the cost per MWh.mile of delivery is immediately double. Add in the need for extra stabilising kit and it's more still.
In the UK we have an underbuild of transmission capacity relative to peak output which therefore results in transmission constrained curtailment. But that peak output may not have a market anyway even if the transmission capacity were provided. That will be an increasing problem, so the justifiable level of transmission relative to peak output falls. I have just been analysing paid for curtailment in the UK, which peaked at 7GW in 2024 and totalled 8.3TWh. I found that it would only have been worth providing 1.4GW of additional transmission to reduce the curtailment.
My answer to "batteries" is always this article. It's old, but still relevant. I originally saw it on Barry Brooks "Brave New Climate" blog and many of the comments and discussion were excellent (normal proportion of useless comments as well). Unfortunately, even though Ben Heard is maintaining Brave New Climate, that article does not appear to be accessible any more which means the comments are lost. Sigh.
Required reading for every regulator and policy maker? Far past the time for them to get educated and to stop pushing the green agenda lies. Thanks guys for another excellent article on Saturday morning. On a side note, the coal plants close to us (middle GA) that have been taken off line have also been torn down. More and more ridiculous solar farms popping up everywhere 😢
Agreed! GA has been going to town retiring coal plants–down from 13 GW in 2010 to under 6 GW today. Bowen and Scherer were orginally slated for retirement in 2035 and 2028, but now that they're expecting large demand growth from data centers, GA Power is attempting to extend the Scherer and Bowen through 2039. Irrational decisions were easy when demand growth was flat, and now we're paying the price. Imagine if we were even further along the so-called energy transition
Roger that. Google and Amazon just bought in 2 locations that are pretty close to Scherer. From my limited knowledge they are only operating 2 generators currently. What a shame they are not producing with all 4 onsite. Massive increases in land prices are about to smack us in the face too with Google and Amazon paying small fortunes for their respective tracts.
Thank you. This is all new to me. The more you learn about wind and solar, the worse it gets. If only the dimwits in the N.Y. legislature were paying attention to the alarms being sounded by NYISO.
Absolutely. The link from NYISO above has some beauties. I especially enjoy this one:
"Combined with the large amount of total power that must be derived from new renewable generation under CLCPA mandates, the potential acreage required to install these resources will be significant and likely will result in siting uncertainty. For example, a utility-scale solar plant typically needs approximately between 3 to 5 acres of land per MW of generating capacity and land-based wind typically needs approximately 15 acres per MW, while 25 acres of land could accommodate a 1,000 MW (1 GW) combined cycle power plant. Siting of renewable generation, therefore, requires not only a location with an abundance of the natural resources to serve as fuel (i.e., solar or wind) but also sufficient access to land to accommodate the footprint of the facility. Such uncertainty in locating real property and siting new renewable resources could be significant and affect the ability of developers to secure specific connection points of new renewable generation and DEFR projects, especially in the longer term (i.e., 2035 and beyond) as New York approaches its zero-emissions grid mandate."
Mitch, the actual amount of land used for wind plants out here (Wild West) runs around 100 acres per MW nameplate capacity. Possibly in NY they are installing very different sorts wind turbines, but I would bet good money that, like everything else written among the NY energy activists, the amount of land needed for wind is hugely under-estimated.
That's true, I normally see much higher ranges and 25 is on the lower end of the scale. Oftentimes they don't account for the entire facility, which is likely the case here. At least there is still the realization that coming up with the land to site wind and solar facilities will be difficult going forward
Since they have both average and marginal ELCC for a whole bunch of different penetration levels, you can back calculate a lot.
But basically solar on its own has negligible capacity value, and solar augments BESS capacity value reasonably up to the point the provide ~3500MW of ELCC value from 5GW 4hr BESS and 7.5GW solar. (In a 19GW average output system) To double the firm value, you need ~5X the installed PV BESS, but that first bit is pretty reasonable.
The fastest decade long nuclear growth was in Sweden at 650 kwh/yr/capita from 1976-1986. At 350M x 650kwh/yr = 230 TWh/yr new generation. Over 10% of 2024 US electricity production.
In the USA, they were putting a new NPP on the grid every month, with two new ones on order by 1974. At that rate the US would have been over 90% nuclear by the 1990's.
And nobody can claim even one life was saved by their nuclear blockade. In fact they likely killed millions of people. And they still repeat the same, tired old mantra, "SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY". This from the same people who are bending over backwards to start a Nuclear war with Russia. They've already killed a million in Ukraine. Millions more in their other endless wars. But their all about "SAFETY", yep. If you believe that one, I got 3 bridges to sell you, cheap.
This is a very thorough look at wind and solar capacity factors. You EBBs do great work in my estimation. What you've done here is provide a badly needed explanation of a complex topic. People need to know that capital can be badly invested, can have very poor utility (capacity factor is very closely related to the utility of one's capital investments), and then be able to use this information to weigh their political desires against costs of a fundamental societal input.
I might mention that the problem with capacity factor endemic to wind and solar doesn't stay confined there. It spreads throughout the power delivery system. It is a universal observation that capacity factors of thermal plants decline as wind/solar invade more of the grid. It occurs everywhere on Earth. Capacity factors of U.S. coal plants have been declining since 2013, with the exception of a bump up after Covid, and are most recently approaching 40%. Most "renewable" energy enthusiasts explain this a showing that the current level of coal capacity was never needed in the first place, but the actual explanation is disquieting.
I explained why this is so in an essay at WUWT in November of 2023. (See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/05/setting-utility-rates/) but the short story is that mixing generating assets with very different operating characteristics together, and the worst of the lot being intermittent but encourage to have dispatch priority, causes all of it to walk hand-in-hand to lower and lower capacity factor. Even transmission lines and grid storage...
By the way, EBBs, note that I mention Center for the American Experiment in that essay. I like your work!
I show the trade-offs between dispatchable utilisation and rising marginal curtailment of incremental wind for the UK. By the time nominal wind capacity is twice average demand (so still insufficient to meet demand with theoretical costless storage), you get to 80% marginal curtailment meaning that the wind has to earn 5 times as much from the 20% of its output that is useful. Meanwhile still almost 25% of supply is from dispatchable power (I assume some nuclear baseload).
You've done nice work there. The problem is that it doesn';t take much added complexity to reach a point of doing an incomprehensible optimization problem. The local utility here just turns the problem over to Aurora -- with the usual issues about output reflecting assumptions to input.
Like you, I also treated wind/solar as a joint input with fixed ratio of nameplate ratings. There is a bit of an issue here in that there are locales with very good solar in one part of the system, good wind resource in another, and with wind/solar highly correlated with one another. Solar curtails wind at midday.
And your point about needing as many years of data as possible to arrive at a real solution is true because of interyear variability. However, in my case I knew that 2022-2023 would be a difficult year after having experienced it. Once a person knows that in one historical years the solution to an all wind/solar grid is too expensive to contemplate -- then why continue beating that dead horse?
This is interesting work although there is a shorter road to the same destination. It is time to give up on wind and solar power because trillions of dollars spent worldwide on RE have only delivered more expensive and less reliable power with serious environmental impacts.
The elephant in the room is the impact of severe wind droughts or dunkelflautes over continental areas, demonstrated by the Australians Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang over a decade ago. The Energy Realists of Australia picked up this work and circulated a series of briefing notes on the whole range of energy issues. The energy teams at the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public affairs have so far not bothered to circulate this work or engaged in collaborative consultation. These are the notes.
As for ignoring wind droughts, prudent dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the “wind drought trap” closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions. See Texas in February 2021! Fluctuations in solar and wind input pose the same threat in the daytime where grids lack inertia, see the pain in Spain, 2025.
You may be right but it depends on the cost of the input energy vs the value of the output energy. All BTUs are not equal. Electricity is generally more valuable than fossil fuels.
A more relevant criterion is the Life Cycle Cost (LCC).
Nonsense, it has a cost per kwh generated same as any other electricity sources. Any wasted energy just pushes that cost up proportionately. Oil, gas & coal are free also, it just takes effort = cost to harvest them. Thorium, the most energetic of our energy sources, they will pay you to get rid of it. So the fuel cost is negative.
If the input energy is free (and sunlight is) losses are irrelevant. In contrast, oil and gas are not free; they need to be extracted and processed into useable fuels, then transported to the generators.
No real difference. To double solar energy output you need to double the panel area and everything else at double the cost. Actually could be more than double for the reasons mentioned in this article. Same as oil, double the energy, double the fuel and generation at double the cost.
You can get free energy from falling rain. Just build an elevated catch basin to collect it and run it through a turbine. Easy stuff. But not practical due to cost & intermittency, unless nature supplies a giant catch basin for free, which supplies large rivers.
Nothing whatsoever. Entropy ain't a problem. EROI, efficiency, cost, decommissioning, waste disposal/recycling, materials inputs vs supply, scaling, geographic limitations, grid duplication, intermittency, seasonal variation, are all big problems, not all the problems by any means.
For solar PVs Low thermal efficiency means that lots of solar radiation is turned into heat that then is trapped in the atmosphere. And then illiterate solar proponents try to complain about waste heat from Nuclear Power... Go figure.
You are really confused. If the solar PV were not there to convert some of the radiation where would it go? You are ignoring the simple fact that all solar radiation reaching the earth warms the planet.
Use your imagination and assume that the roof would be painted reflective white instead dark, absorbing solar PV. Light reflected to space is not heating the planet/atmosphere while light absorbed does. That is the reason of the positive feedback of loosing snow/ice. Painting lots of normaly dark spaces white would cool planet, making them less reflective does the opposite.
Ice loss in the Arctic peaks in September, close to the equinox. After that, the pole spends six months in night, and everywhere down to the Arctic Circle gets to have 24 hour nights. Solar radiation becomes minimal, but radiation to space continues. Open ocean is a much better emitter than snow covered ice, and so it helps the planet cool faster. Of course, it also aids re-freezing.
To elaborate, the electricity produced with solar PV will ultimately be converted to heat that gets reradiated into space just like that reflected from a white roof, though most likely at different wavelengths. That will likely cause different amounts being retained by the greenhouse gas effect.
If a person looks at the document supposedly backing up that graphic, the story becomes more difficult to explain.
The assumed decline in solar cost of delivered energy looks to be entirely the result of a lowered cost of the battery backup. But the report suggests this is the result of battery costs declining. Note, in the PDF backing up this graph...
"declined 14% to a record low of $139/kWh, according to analysis by research provider BloombergNEF (BNEF). This was driven by raw material and component prices falling as production capacity increased across all parts of the battery value chain, while demand growth fell short of some industry expectations."
Demand falling short of expectations....Ahem, what happens when demand explodes?
Also, the cost of battery storage is only partially the cost of batteries. No matter how batteries costs decline, there is the cost of auxillary equipment which then becomes a larger fraction of storage cost.
And it's time to clarify how battery storage works in practice. I tell people that to just get through one test year I looked at in detail (Nov 2022->Oct 2023, in PACE) I needed around 220-250 hours times average system demand to just get by. People reply to me "But our wind droughts are never as long as 250 hours!"
This is beside the point, battery storage gets whittled away during unproductive seasons, like Autumn, and when production returns briefly there isn't enough production to get the batteries fully charged again. This is followed by another lull that whittles down stored energy further. And so it goes... The cost of needed storage is astronomical. It could be offset by additional overbuilding of wind/solar, but this leads to reduced capacity factors, for every asset on the grid.
Wish someone would explain this concept to the UKs mentally challenged energy secretary.
Unfortunately he is not only mentally challenged, but academically illiterate regarding science, and aurally deaf as a post, to any criticism
I've tried to get through by submissions to the ESNZ Select Committee and OFGEM going back several years now: many of the predecessor ministers were almost equally dumb it has to be said.
However, together with Kathryn Porter and David Turver I think we do now have the ear of the Tory Shadow Minister, Claire Coutinho, who has announced plans to repeal the Climate Change Act, eliminate ROC taxes and carbon taxes for a start. There will be a lot more to come. We have to hope that she gets to implement those things (if necessary by changing party).
I wouldn't believe anything a Tory politician says, they're all talk, no action. If their lips are moving, you know they're lying. The only hope for Britain is Reform.
Reform have a lot of work to do to produce a workable energy policy. I hope they get there, because they're obviously more likely to win the next election than anyone else. But they simply can't afford to nationalise 50% of utilities, which would in any case result in inefficient entities with frequent strikes, taking us back to the 3 day week of the 1970s. Nor can they afford to cancel existing contracts: the damage to UK reputation for investment would be severe, not unlike when Chavez took over in Venezuela.
They need to sit down with people who understand what it will take to keep the lights on while unwinding the complex legislation and treaties and rulebooks. Disassembly has to be in the right order, otherwise the system will break and they will get the blame.
Well there's your chance, lobby Farage and gang to take David Turver on as shadow minister of energy. It would be like Trump making Chris Wright head of DOE. Does any European nation actually have a qualified energy dept head?
Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Iceland, if we expand the criteria to include people with an engineering background. All are recent appointees, since 2021. It's a sign that behind the scenes politicians are waking up the fact that we are heading for energy disaster, with more crises like Spain sure to emerge in future.
Whatever sanity they might bring is unlikely to avert disaster, but at least the politicians will be able to say with a straight face that they recognised there was a problem on the horizon and have taken steps to remedy the situation.
I'm not an energy expert by the way. I just spend a lot of time learning online as part of my research as a writer. That's why I used the term energy versant insiders- it's another way of saying awake to the very real problems we face. I want to get the hard science right for a sci fi novel I'm planning to write. There are some really fascinating articles about sequential duplication and its role in human's accelerated rate of evolution.
We should make Energy Ministers take a test- they have to be able to perform the Maths for a pretty basic application of Bernoulli's principle, without reference to online or other sources. A slightly more complex practical use of Boyle's Law might be another example.
Nice to see a few. Not Canada, unlike previous ones (like a Greenpeacer), he at least has an MBA, but is a 20 yr Goldman Sachs employee. And it is the Big Banks that have been the most ardent promoters of the Net Zero economic destruction dogma, along with other blatant wealth transfer scams like Cap n Trade, Carbon Credits, RPS, RECs, while blockading finance of Nuclear Power.
And the one in Britain, Ed Miliband, is a real bird-brain, a walking disaster.
It's really refreshing to see somebody with a rational viewpoint. I also agree that the Tories and Labour are dead forever. Even the most disastrous Reform government won't make up for their abject duplicity and betrayal on net legal migration- more so given that even the rather lukewarm and rose-tinted estimates from the OBR have conclusively proved that net legal migration has been absolutely disastrous for Britain.
After all, it's not by coincidence that the greatest rise in American living standards in American history was accompanied by a fall of foreign-born citizenship from 15% to 5%. Tight labour markets cause businesses to prioritise capital investment for increased productivity, as well as the more normal direction of financial resources towards expansion.
Here's an interesting development for energy versant insiders. In America, in many regions, Data Centres have taken to building their own gas-fired power supply for energy security, bypassing local bureaucracies. Growth in the UK tech sector has been one of the very few bright shining lights in an otherwise dismal economic landscape. Reform should be making backroom deals with the data centre companies now. The best and most carbon efficient gas turbines have a wait time of eight years, although the data centre companies seem to be able to wrangle this down to around six years.
We should be doing deals for the data centres to supply on a contract basis for peak demand periods. It's not as though many people are consulting AI when Strictly Come Dancing is on.
I'm certain he knows. Destroying the country is the goal.
No doubt about it. That's what happens when you put the Malthusian Banksters in charge of your gov't:
Cancelled democracy and social uprising - 'money-lending oligarchies' plans' to 'dominate the world', Neil Oliver & Alex Krainer, GBNews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd0xHwX1OXw
Thank you, a very clear and concise explanation that helps me to better understand! Ah yes, be very careful of electricity generators that are non-dispatchable and are not able to provide ancillary services.
This thorough, detailed, quantitative analysis was done by Zoe Hilton, Michael Wu and Aidan Morrison of the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia and was published on Oct. 2, 2025. Australia is really struggling with a renewable energy transition and costs are skyrocketing. In my opinion, it shows how critically important dispatchable electricity generators are that provide ancillary services to the electricity grid, IBR's are not capable of either (Inverter-based resources, those that generate Direct Current (DC) electricity and have it converted to Alternating Current (AC) electricity, which are wind, solar and batteries) https://www.cis.org.au/publication/the-renewable-energy-honeymoon-starting-is-easy-the-rest-is-hard/
Aidan Morrison is interviewed about this report on Australian TV, 6 minutes, 30 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I31PmUVcjk Aidan Morrison also provides some further insights on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381113679511166976/
Sandia National Laboratories released a report in January, 2025 discussing challenges with replacing synchronous generator resources with inverter-based resources. "Utility Experience with Inverter Based Resource Impacts on Transmission Protection". https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376421514356858880/
Thanks for sharing these sources Todd–very interesting stuff! The analysis by Hilton, Wu, and Morrison is really good so far. It makes clear that as renewable levels get higher, the harder and more expensive it gets to add more. Good thing to remember in the US right now, as people try to claim the opposite. Couldn't agree more with the following:
"An undeniable trend has emerged. No country has reached wind and solar penetration levels above 90%, and those that come closest have some of the highest electricity costs in the world. Very few countries have exceeded around 40%, and those that do end up with elevated electricity prices."
Elevated electricity prices is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s all a matter of how much.
Underpricing electricity encourages wasteful usage and discourages the adoption of prudent efficiency measures.
Costly electricity undermines electrification to "clean energy" if that is your goal. Industry moves elsewhere. Consumers persist with alternative fuels and become poorer. Efficiency that pays for itself is prudent, but trying to make basically imprudent measures apparently necessary just makes everyone poorer. Grenfell Tower was a £10m insulation project with a 200+ year payback before financing costs: that cost 72 lives as well. The first task is to lower the cost of energy which makes society richer, and more able to afford to take care of its environment. See the EROI energy cliff and Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.
That’s all true IF you don’t care about the impact of climate change on future generations. Actually it is already affecting us today. Look at the unusually high summer temperatures across the globe plus the once in 100-year storms that we now see every year or two. Then there are the wildfires….
It's true regardless. It's precisely because I do care that attempts to reduce our standards of living back to the Stone Age are going to affect future generations badly that I oppose them. They are already far more damaging than any claims about changes in climate. I see you have swallowed the propaganda that ignores the history about wildfires which used to be hugely worse than today (and I note that big fires like Palisades are in fact not climate but arson). Many temperature records are due to poorly sited weather stations, and the use of modern thermometers that react to short heat blasts compared with the lagged reaction of the old Sixsmith design, and rising UHI, which is not climate. There is also a persistent massaging of the past temperature history to cool the historical record, often on spurious grounds.
Perhaps you should start by reading what the IPCC has actually said about trends in climate, rather than the propaganda versions.
“… the Stone Age?” You are an artist in hyperbole.
Australia is really struggling?
How is that?
Blackouts - none since 2016 that weren't caused by coal outages, but total lost time per customer less than 1/3rd of the US.
Auxilliary services: much faster and cheaper supplied by batteries and syncons- SA's first battery captured 80% of the FCAS market in its first year at an 80% discount below previous prices.
Power costs up faster in FF states than renewable states.
SA is still expensive because its price is still set by gas, gas prices have risen 8 fold in 12 years, but in this years price rises SA 73% renewables retail price was up 1%- In NSW-65% coal and gas price was up 9%
Good comment, Peter.
But the real story about the cost of Electricity in South Australia is the most wise South Australians are getting off retail bills.
They are doing this by installing large Residential-scale Storage paired with DC-coupled Rooftop Solar PV, and using wholesalers like Amber to make money on the wholesale market.
thanks for an exceptionally clear explanation of why the drive for more wind and solar is a fool's errand, although given it is being made by fools, er politicians, I guess we cannot be that surprised. Here in NJ, I desperately hope that Jack Ciatterelli wins the governorship because the Sherrill energy plan is a disaster
While I don't care for the "all of the above" language Ciatterelli endorses, he will 100% be better than Sherrill, as he supports banning offshore wind and withdrawing from RGGI. I found this from Sherrill to be pretty funny:
"So on Day One as New Jersey’s next governor, I’m going to declare a State of Emergency on Utility Costs and freeze your utility rates, massively build out cheaper and cleaner power generation... Prices are spiking because of a huge power shortage — I’ll transform New Jersey’s energy picture to build new, cheaper, and cleaner energy generation..."
So she's going to freeze rates but spend tons of money on resources that won't fill the power shortage gaps!
Every time she opens her mouth she proves she has no idea what she’s talking about
You obviously do not value reducing greenhouse gases. Why not admit that upfront?
Only because they are not an existential problem. Resources are better spent elsewhere
Based on what, other than your unsupported opinion?
None of the plans for reducing greenhouse gasses, anywhere, have been sensible and every single one was doomed to failure from the start, with the added damage of catastrophically expensive electricity and disastrous decreases in reliability.
This was apparent to anyone who did a lick of research and was capable of a little tiny bit of math.
Given that the climate alarmists refuse to present any plans that would actually achieve their stated goals, why in the world would we have a concern for their goals?
"Reducing greenhouse gasses" is just code for destroy industrial civilization. It has never been an effort to improve human lives now or in the future.
Hint: Germany, the example all the climatistas want to imitate still emits over 400 grams of CO2 per KWHr generated and has squandered over a trillion Eu. while destroying their economy with expensive energy.
Meanwhile, next door in similarly industrialized France, they have emitted less than 60 grams per KWHr generated for the last 20 years and have affordable, clean electricity.
Why was Germany held up as the example to follow when they are an abject failure?
Why would anyone advance a movement that advocates self destruction?
And so the EUSSR fines France for Euro1.1B for not building enough wind & solar. No fines for Germany. And Austria tries to block any EU country from building nuclear with endless lawsuits. And the EUSSR kangaroo court forced Britain to buy the most expensive and worst designed modern reactor on the planet.
Yes. I had hopes for the UK after Brexit that they would get themselves out from under the Germanic/Austrian energy suicide pact.
Then they grew their own home-grown insanity.
Sigh.
Could be because Malthusian Banksters control both. In their latest plan (2024) for projected 2050 World primary energy mix they want, nuclear 2.8%, biomass 19%, fossil 18.4%, renewables (wind + solar + hydro) 60%.
Another reason why they hate nuclear so much, notably fast reactors and practical fusion reactors. It's now known that they can produce vast amounts of gold by transmutation of mercury. A very substantial portion of a reactors income. Enough to collapse the World gold price.
You are absolutely wrong in claiming that all efforts to reduce GHG have been unsuccessful. The US power sector dramatically reduced its emissions by substituting natural gas for coal.
Which was not a part of the climatista's plans. It had nothing to do with the wind/solar/battery fantasy.
The "climatistas" are agnostic regarding how to combat climate change. The are not committed solely to wind/solar/batteries. Nuclear power is acceptable as is geothermal, hydro, tidal power, and non-battery forms of storage. Most also will accept limited amounts of natural gas generation to ensure grid reliability. It's all a question of what is the cheapest solution.
It's value is very uncertain, but what I do know is that the world at large, and I mean at large, will continue to release CO2 from combustion for a very long time. It is a foregone conclusion that no matter what we do concentration of CO2 will rise. Thus, I see no value to us saving our minority of CO2 release in a way that costs us real money.
The US is still one of the largest sources of GHG. Of course it costs “real” money to reduce emissions. The relevant question is how much is a prudent amount to spend - and the answer is definite not zero if you care about the welfare of future generations.
Pielkie has run thru the data generated by the Ipcc and it’s pretty clear there is no detectable emergency right now.
According to the table in working group 1, only one item (heatwaves) is shown to be increased by AGW.
According to them.
But if they are tracking 13 parameters and 12 show low confidence of detection of any change outside of natural variation the proper question is why do you assume that one variable has been changed by us?
They all believe co2 “will” cause a problem to whatever extent but that is reliant on faith in the models.
No thanks.
If anyone is actually worried about emissions then the only path is nuclear.
If there is no emergency now but there might be in 2100 then we have lots of time to implement nuclear.
And stop wasting money on garbage renewables.
No problem before 2100? Is that your attempt at humor? 2050 is already looking bad -and unavoidable.
The problem is those who wish to wreck our energy systems at enormous expense, leaving nothing for any adaptation costs. I'd agree that it's already looking unavoidably bad on that account. But we can stop it getting a whole bunch worse.
I live in the southern canadian prairies and the only existential threat I face is grid collapse at -40.
There is nothing else that concerns me much as we are probably 3000 years from the glaciation chasing us south.
2050 is looking bad?
Based on what?
Even the ipcc states that there is no confidence of detecting AGW before then and that detection prediction based on models and assumptions.
You are free to believe them, I’m 60 and neither I or likely my children will still be around to find out.
But no, I’m not worried about “climate emergency”, instead I look around and see the best period in human history, far better than the catastrophe of the little ice age.
Have a good one
I have long been aware of the diminishing returns, but previously I hadn't seen quantitative analyses - thank you.
I wrote about "The Natural Law of Diminishing Returns" in Jan.'24, and how it applies to wind and solar - explaining the how and why of it. https://alchristie.substack.com/p/the-natural-law-of-diminishing-returns?utm_source=publication-search
Glad you have raised this issue. I have been talking about it for several years: https://wrjohn1.substack.com/p/wind-solar-and-the-effect-of-diminishing
But you have done a far superior job of presenting the data.
I'm sure someone will pipe in with "But we have Batteries" which on the face of it is true. However, we need a massive amount of energy storage (GWh) to even begin to offset the effect of diminishing returns.
And that adds significantly to both investment needed (Capex) and FCOE (Full Cost of Electricity Delivered to the Grid) making the net cost of renewables much higher than what we are constantly told. In fact it makes it more costly than nuclear!
Keep up the good work
Good comment. People have an idea that wind/solar is not only "free fuel" but is very cheap to build. Actually it is fast to build, which when searching for a way to close some capacity gap causes utilities to over-value its utility. Being able to build 600MW (nameplate) wind plants and commission it in two years to begin earning rate of return on rate base, versus five years for a coal thermal plant, makes financial people lose a sense of the goal -- delivery of service.
Once capacity factor is taken into account, wind is pretty expensive. A latest 695MW wind plants proposed for the Laramie Range in Wyoming is estimated to cost $1.60 per Watt. Then consider that annual capacity factor is unlikely to exceed 40% and the hidden cost of endless taxpayer subsidies, and the actual cost is probably over $5.00 per watt delivered -- and all without considering how wind adds to operational complexity and the diminished utility of coal plants.
Yes, sir, we are approaching nuclear sorts of costs.
It's even more expensive when taking into account capacity value, especially when they diminish to ~10% in the future.
Love the piece–you brought up a great point about transmission limits, too. Not many people realize that. You can build all the "cheap" intermittent energy you want, but that doesn't mean the grid can handle it or that generation will occur when needed. This is frequently the case already, as wind has largely saturated high wind areas.
And you're exactly right, the battery storage "solution" simply affirms the inefficiency of a W/S/B system at large, and acknowledges that the cost of wind and solar doesn't end with setting them up.
In many areas average demand is around 60% of peak demand, (it varies surprisingly little globally, partly because of lower use overnight). So that is the typical average utilisation you can expect for transmission assets, discounted by a safety factor against overload. However, for renewables the equations are very different: immediately solar is limited to no more than about 25% even in the most favourable locations, and wind is little better. So the cost per MWh.mile of delivery is immediately double. Add in the need for extra stabilising kit and it's more still.
In the UK we have an underbuild of transmission capacity relative to peak output which therefore results in transmission constrained curtailment. But that peak output may not have a market anyway even if the transmission capacity were provided. That will be an increasing problem, so the justifiable level of transmission relative to peak output falls. I have just been analysing paid for curtailment in the UK, which peaked at 7GW in 2024 and totalled 8.3TWh. I found that it would only have been worth providing 1.4GW of additional transmission to reduce the curtailment.
My answer to "batteries" is always this article. It's old, but still relevant. I originally saw it on Barry Brooks "Brave New Climate" blog and many of the comments and discussion were excellent (normal proportion of useless comments as well). Unfortunately, even though Ben Heard is maintaining Brave New Climate, that article does not appear to be accessible any more which means the comments are lost. Sigh.
https://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/2014/11/04/guest-blog-john-morgan-the-catch-22-of-energy-storage-and-eroi/
Great article, thanks for sharing.
Euan Mearns produced a similar piece that attracted a large amount of comment.
https://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
Need to ask them how many batteries to get through a prairie winter high pressure at -40 for two weeks with zero wind.
The answer is the old “if you have to ask you can’t afford it”.
No one can.
Besides each pile will be the largest toxic firebomb in history the weight of which will cause a black hole to form.
Required reading for every regulator and policy maker? Far past the time for them to get educated and to stop pushing the green agenda lies. Thanks guys for another excellent article on Saturday morning. On a side note, the coal plants close to us (middle GA) that have been taken off line have also been torn down. More and more ridiculous solar farms popping up everywhere 😢
Agreed! GA has been going to town retiring coal plants–down from 13 GW in 2010 to under 6 GW today. Bowen and Scherer were orginally slated for retirement in 2035 and 2028, but now that they're expecting large demand growth from data centers, GA Power is attempting to extend the Scherer and Bowen through 2039. Irrational decisions were easy when demand growth was flat, and now we're paying the price. Imagine if we were even further along the so-called energy transition
Roger that. Google and Amazon just bought in 2 locations that are pretty close to Scherer. From my limited knowledge they are only operating 2 generators currently. What a shame they are not producing with all 4 onsite. Massive increases in land prices are about to smack us in the face too with Google and Amazon paying small fortunes for their respective tracts.
Thank you. This is all new to me. The more you learn about wind and solar, the worse it gets. If only the dimwits in the N.Y. legislature were paying attention to the alarms being sounded by NYISO.
Absolutely. The link from NYISO above has some beauties. I especially enjoy this one:
"Combined with the large amount of total power that must be derived from new renewable generation under CLCPA mandates, the potential acreage required to install these resources will be significant and likely will result in siting uncertainty. For example, a utility-scale solar plant typically needs approximately between 3 to 5 acres of land per MW of generating capacity and land-based wind typically needs approximately 15 acres per MW, while 25 acres of land could accommodate a 1,000 MW (1 GW) combined cycle power plant. Siting of renewable generation, therefore, requires not only a location with an abundance of the natural resources to serve as fuel (i.e., solar or wind) but also sufficient access to land to accommodate the footprint of the facility. Such uncertainty in locating real property and siting new renewable resources could be significant and affect the ability of developers to secure specific connection points of new renewable generation and DEFR projects, especially in the longer term (i.e., 2035 and beyond) as New York approaches its zero-emissions grid mandate."
Mitch, the actual amount of land used for wind plants out here (Wild West) runs around 100 acres per MW nameplate capacity. Possibly in NY they are installing very different sorts wind turbines, but I would bet good money that, like everything else written among the NY energy activists, the amount of land needed for wind is hugely under-estimated.
That's true, I normally see much higher ranges and 25 is on the lower end of the scale. Oftentimes they don't account for the entire facility, which is likely the case here. At least there is still the realization that coming up with the land to site wind and solar facilities will be difficult going forward
Duke’s solar and storage ELCC study is particularly interesting:
https://www.duke-energy.com/-/media/pdfs/our-company/carolinas-resource-plan/2025/attachment-i-elcc-study-web.pdf?rev=7c38fcbe9b324c07979083de3f3dd716
Since they have both average and marginal ELCC for a whole bunch of different penetration levels, you can back calculate a lot.
But basically solar on its own has negligible capacity value, and solar augments BESS capacity value reasonably up to the point the provide ~3500MW of ELCC value from 5GW 4hr BESS and 7.5GW solar. (In a 19GW average output system) To double the firm value, you need ~5X the installed PV BESS, but that first bit is pretty reasonable.
Yep. And nuclear is 95%. Every. Damn. Month.
Doesn't get better than that
True! But how much nuclear capacity do you think we can add over the next 10 years?
The fastest decade long nuclear growth was in Sweden at 650 kwh/yr/capita from 1976-1986. At 350M x 650kwh/yr = 230 TWh/yr new generation. Over 10% of 2024 US electricity production.
In the USA, they were putting a new NPP on the grid every month, with two new ones on order by 1974. At that rate the US would have been over 90% nuclear by the 1990's.
And nobody can claim even one life was saved by their nuclear blockade. In fact they likely killed millions of people. And they still repeat the same, tired old mantra, "SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY". This from the same people who are bending over backwards to start a Nuclear war with Russia. They've already killed a million in Ukraine. Millions more in their other endless wars. But their all about "SAFETY", yep. If you believe that one, I got 3 bridges to sell you, cheap.
You didn’t answer my question. But I’ll save you the effort: NONE!
@SmithFS Couldn't have said it better. 👍
There is no emergency
Hence we have time to do it right.
The words “crisis” and “emergency” are specifically used to kill debate and prevent rational choices.
Anyone using those words must be removed from the conversation so the sane can get on with it.
This is a very thorough look at wind and solar capacity factors. You EBBs do great work in my estimation. What you've done here is provide a badly needed explanation of a complex topic. People need to know that capital can be badly invested, can have very poor utility (capacity factor is very closely related to the utility of one's capital investments), and then be able to use this information to weigh their political desires against costs of a fundamental societal input.
I might mention that the problem with capacity factor endemic to wind and solar doesn't stay confined there. It spreads throughout the power delivery system. It is a universal observation that capacity factors of thermal plants decline as wind/solar invade more of the grid. It occurs everywhere on Earth. Capacity factors of U.S. coal plants have been declining since 2013, with the exception of a bump up after Covid, and are most recently approaching 40%. Most "renewable" energy enthusiasts explain this a showing that the current level of coal capacity was never needed in the first place, but the actual explanation is disquieting.
I explained why this is so in an essay at WUWT in November of 2023. (See: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/05/setting-utility-rates/) but the short story is that mixing generating assets with very different operating characteristics together, and the worst of the lot being intermittent but encourage to have dispatch priority, causes all of it to walk hand-in-hand to lower and lower capacity factor. Even transmission lines and grid storage...
By the way, EBBs, note that I mention Center for the American Experiment in that essay. I like your work!
Please see my comment later here
https://open.substack.com/pub/energybadboys/p/more-is-less-with-wind-and-solar?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=167689470
I show the trade-offs between dispatchable utilisation and rising marginal curtailment of incremental wind for the UK. By the time nominal wind capacity is twice average demand (so still insufficient to meet demand with theoretical costless storage), you get to 80% marginal curtailment meaning that the wind has to earn 5 times as much from the 20% of its output that is useful. Meanwhile still almost 25% of supply is from dispatchable power (I assume some nuclear baseload).
You've done nice work there. The problem is that it doesn';t take much added complexity to reach a point of doing an incomprehensible optimization problem. The local utility here just turns the problem over to Aurora -- with the usual issues about output reflecting assumptions to input.
Like you, I also treated wind/solar as a joint input with fixed ratio of nameplate ratings. There is a bit of an issue here in that there are locales with very good solar in one part of the system, good wind resource in another, and with wind/solar highly correlated with one another. Solar curtails wind at midday.
And your point about needing as many years of data as possible to arrive at a real solution is true because of interyear variability. However, in my case I knew that 2022-2023 would be a difficult year after having experienced it. Once a person knows that in one historical years the solution to an all wind/solar grid is too expensive to contemplate -- then why continue beating that dead horse?
This is interesting work although there is a shorter road to the same destination. It is time to give up on wind and solar power because trillions of dollars spent worldwide on RE have only delivered more expensive and less reliable power with serious environmental impacts.
The elephant in the room is the impact of severe wind droughts or dunkelflautes over continental areas, demonstrated by the Australians Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang over a decade ago. The Energy Realists of Australia picked up this work and circulated a series of briefing notes on the whole range of energy issues. The energy teams at the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public affairs have so far not bothered to circulate this work or engaged in collaborative consultation. These are the notes.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
As for ignoring wind droughts, prudent dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the “wind drought trap” closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions. See Texas in February 2021! Fluctuations in solar and wind input pose the same threat in the daytime where grids lack inertia, see the pain in Spain, 2025.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/defusing-the-wind-drought-trap
If that is not convincing enough to convince you, wind and solar are parasites, living on more efficient sources of power.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-the-energy-thieves-a0c
The first picture sent me 😂😂 phenomenal read, though! Thanks!
Great explanation. This should be included in control theory primer.
Been looking for a great primer on this. Top class.
You know that the $hitty part is? With a carbon turbine you can actually measure entropy(losses). With solar and wind it seems impossible.
It is all a political sham in which the "Bolsheviks"(extreme minority) are the 'winners' in terms of stealing our money.
Why are you hung up on measuring entropy? Losses don't matter for solar because the input fuel (sunlight) is free and unconstrained.
The energy used to manufacture solar and wind far exceeds their output, that is my point.
You may be right but it depends on the cost of the input energy vs the value of the output energy. All BTUs are not equal. Electricity is generally more valuable than fossil fuels.
A more relevant criterion is the Life Cycle Cost (LCC).
Nonsense, it has a cost per kwh generated same as any other electricity sources. Any wasted energy just pushes that cost up proportionately. Oil, gas & coal are free also, it just takes effort = cost to harvest them. Thorium, the most energetic of our energy sources, they will pay you to get rid of it. So the fuel cost is negative.
If the input energy is free (and sunlight is) losses are irrelevant. In contrast, oil and gas are not free; they need to be extracted and processed into useable fuels, then transported to the generators.
No real difference. To double solar energy output you need to double the panel area and everything else at double the cost. Actually could be more than double for the reasons mentioned in this article. Same as oil, double the energy, double the fuel and generation at double the cost.
You can get free energy from falling rain. Just build an elevated catch basin to collect it and run it through a turbine. Easy stuff. But not practical due to cost & intermittency, unless nature supplies a giant catch basin for free, which supplies large rivers.
What does any of this comment have to do with entropy?
Nothing whatsoever. Entropy ain't a problem. EROI, efficiency, cost, decommissioning, waste disposal/recycling, materials inputs vs supply, scaling, geographic limitations, grid duplication, intermittency, seasonal variation, are all big problems, not all the problems by any means.
For solar PVs Low thermal efficiency means that lots of solar radiation is turned into heat that then is trapped in the atmosphere. And then illiterate solar proponents try to complain about waste heat from Nuclear Power... Go figure.
You are really confused. If the solar PV were not there to convert some of the radiation where would it go? You are ignoring the simple fact that all solar radiation reaching the earth warms the planet.
Use your imagination and assume that the roof would be painted reflective white instead dark, absorbing solar PV. Light reflected to space is not heating the planet/atmosphere while light absorbed does. That is the reason of the positive feedback of loosing snow/ice. Painting lots of normaly dark spaces white would cool planet, making them less reflective does the opposite.
Ice loss in the Arctic peaks in September, close to the equinox. After that, the pole spends six months in night, and everywhere down to the Arctic Circle gets to have 24 hour nights. Solar radiation becomes minimal, but radiation to space continues. Open ocean is a much better emitter than snow covered ice, and so it helps the planet cool faster. Of course, it also aids re-freezing.
Good point, assuming the greenhouse effect doesn’t trap the eradicated heat.
To elaborate, the electricity produced with solar PV will ultimately be converted to heat that gets reradiated into space just like that reflected from a white roof, though most likely at different wavelengths. That will likely cause different amounts being retained by the greenhouse gas effect.
IEA International Energy Agency, long term friends of fossil fuels do not agree. You have to look at integrated system costs.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-value-adjusted-lcoe-for-solar-pv-plus-battery-storage-coal-and-natural-gas-in-selected-regions-in-the-stated-policies-scenario-2022-2030
If a person looks at the document supposedly backing up that graphic, the story becomes more difficult to explain.
The assumed decline in solar cost of delivered energy looks to be entirely the result of a lowered cost of the battery backup. But the report suggests this is the result of battery costs declining. Note, in the PDF backing up this graph...
"declined 14% to a record low of $139/kWh, according to analysis by research provider BloombergNEF (BNEF). This was driven by raw material and component prices falling as production capacity increased across all parts of the battery value chain, while demand growth fell short of some industry expectations."
Demand falling short of expectations....Ahem, what happens when demand explodes?
Also, the cost of battery storage is only partially the cost of batteries. No matter how batteries costs decline, there is the cost of auxillary equipment which then becomes a larger fraction of storage cost.
And it's time to clarify how battery storage works in practice. I tell people that to just get through one test year I looked at in detail (Nov 2022->Oct 2023, in PACE) I needed around 220-250 hours times average system demand to just get by. People reply to me "But our wind droughts are never as long as 250 hours!"
This is beside the point, battery storage gets whittled away during unproductive seasons, like Autumn, and when production returns briefly there isn't enough production to get the batteries fully charged again. This is followed by another lull that whittles down stored energy further. And so it goes... The cost of needed storage is astronomical. It could be offset by additional overbuilding of wind/solar, but this leads to reduced capacity factors, for every asset on the grid.
If you think the IEA is a friend to fossil fuels, you have not been paying attention. They completely embraced the "green" agenda around 2018.