Defusing the wind drought trap
Can the US escape from the wind drought trap? First printed in The Australian Spectator, February 2025.
The US was only one Democrat Administration away from disastrous power failures because the country is in the jaws of the wind drought trap. It is up to the Trump Administration to get them out, and to show the way for all the other western nations where suicidal net zero policies are in place.
The power crisis experienced by Texas in February 2021 was a taste of things to come when a bitter cold spell and low winds overnight caused a partial blackout of the State. The inadequately winterised gas supply under-performed and a complete blackout was only narrowly averted. Hundreds died and a complete blackout would have killed many thousands.
The trap was slowly over several years as subsidies and mandates enabled wind and solar power to DISPLACE coal without being able to REPLACE it.
There is a ‘frog in the saucepan’ effect because coal power retires one plant at a time and this does not cause alarm while there is spare capacity. Eventually the spare capacity runs out and the grid will fail during wind droughts at night, when therte are extreme weather conditions or unscheduled outages of contentional power. The trap only causes public alarm when it is too late, as we see in Britain and Germany.
All the grids in the US are moving rapidly in the same direction with data centres proliferating and grid managers are becoming increasingly agitated. Apparently, they have not effectively shared their concerns with the general public and there is no electoral pressure on the lawmakers to change course. The incoming administration could deliver a crash course in wind literacy by encouraging people to locate the dashboard for the local grid to find how much power wind and solar are contributing at breakfast and dinnertime. That will indicate whether the meal could be served hot if heating depends on the intermittent providers.
Grids around the world.
Texas https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot
Britain https://grid.iamkate.com/
Aust https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/RenewEconomy/
Support for the so-called renewable energy transition should collapse when people regularly check the dashboard for their local grid.
The tipping point and the red zone.
The trap closes when the conventional power capacity (traditionally dominated by coal) declines to a critical point, a ‘tipping point’, where there is not enough to meet the base load overnight. Then the grid is in a ‘red zone’ where windless nights are potentially lethal because there is no wind or solar generation, regardless of the amount of installed capacity.
The incompetence or negligence of the government meteorologists around the world allowed this situation to develop because they didn’t issue wind drought warnings even though they know that high pressure systems are associated with low winds.
Consequently, the Dunkelflautes came as a surprise in Europe even though mariners and millers must have experienced them for centuries.
The plot thickens when we discover that at least some global meteorological services must have known about wind droughts because the first Assessment Report of the IPCC recommended a survey of the wind resources of the world to assess the prospects for large-scale wind power. That would have been led by the World Meteorological Organization and the official meteorological bodies around the world.
Moreover, the WMO was one of the bodies that Maurice Strong tasked to write a paper to get the message of warming alarmism incorporated in the UN Environmental Program and the charter for the IPCC that acted as the scientific spearhead of the movement.
The climate alarmists in the UN apparently set out to wreck the capitalist economies of the West (to save the planet?) and they have practically achieved that objective in Britain and Germany where the lights are kept on precariously with imported power while they deindustrialise to reduce demand.
Australia is on the cusp and it remains to be seen whether the old coal burners can keep running for a decade or three until nuclear power may be available at scale.
Turning to the United States, there is no time to waste to avoid the trap by saving coal and gas generators from the EPA regulations that were designed to close them down.
Community support for the Net Zero program must be undermined by explaining the wind drought problem, which makes the energy transition impossible, and the cost of the program, which makes the effort prohibitively expensive. The public need to know that trillions of dollars have been spent to make power more expensive and less reliable, with catastrophic damage done to the planet.
At the same time, meteorologists should be put on the rack and forced to confess that they have been playing a devious game in the team of UN agencies devoted to bringing down the fossil fuel foundations of prosperity in the western world. Evidence of this plan (call it a conspiracy if you like, but some of it was out in the open) will justify the termination of financial support to the offending agencies.
On the home front, leadership from the federal administration and support from red states, could mount a campaign to give climate and energy realism a moral ascendancy over the ideological, financial, and political interests that support the climate industrial complex and the net zero ponzi scheme.
Simple as the ABC of intermittent energy!
What could go wrong?
This was originally published by The Spectator Australia on line.
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