When The Laws Of Physics Get In The Way

On Sunday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article about the problems with the government’s push toward green energy. The main problem is the laws of physics. Those laws are unavoidable and unbreakable.

The article quotes Isaac Orr at American Experiment:

It is a well-understood phenomenon that wind generation in the Midwest essentially disappears when the mercury dips below -22° F. Electricity generation from wind turbines drops under these circumstances because wind turbines are programmed to automatically shut off when the temperatures get this cold to prevent them from breaking.

The article at American Experiment includes the following graph:

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

The basic point here is that wind energy shows up only sporadically and unpredictably, and tends to disappear when it is needed the most. The worst time for a blackout is when the mercury is at -20, as it was yesterday where I live. Note where electricity was actually coming from in the chart above: coal, the dark brown line, was the principal source, while natural gas, the light brown line, is only slightly behind. These are the sources that liberals want to do away with. Wind was flighty; sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t. Is that how you want your light switches to operate? And if you can find solar energy on this chart, a technology in which many billions of dollars have been invested, your eyes are sharper than mine.

On energy, we are in a race against time. We need to inform voters before the lavishly-funded “green” energy lobby destroys our electrical grid and our economy, at great profit to them but at ruinous loss to the rest of us.

Please read the article posted in 2014 to see what happened when Spain decided to rely strictly on green energy. Recently the European Union seems to have had a small awakening regarding the perils of relying solely on green energy (article here).