Wind and solar ain't capacity!

NOT ON A WINDLESS NIGHT!

Like the man said, oils ain’t oils!

Build as much wind and solar capacity as you like, but there is nothing there when the sun and wind are off duty.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, like the lowest point of a fence, a dam or a flood levee.

The sustainability of a grid loaded with wind and solar is limited by the lowest level of delivery, but the enthusiasts are captivated by the ever-increasing high points as more facilities are installed.

Sadly, the high numbers don’t count during a nocturnal wind drought, as we saw in Texas during the week 19-26 January 2026.

THE THREE LEGS OF THE GREEN ENERGY TRANSITION ARE TOO WEAK

The solar leg fails every night.

The wind fails during severe wind droughts. Sometimes there is very little wind over the whole of SE Australia for periods up to three days and nights.

And what about batteries to fill the gaps?

Bill Gates is a student of storage technology, and he blows up when he hears the word batteries.

Several orders of magnitude too small!

Do the arithmetic on the cost of batteries to ride through 16 hours of the night in South Eastern Australia with little wind and no coal.

16 hours x 20 GW of base-load power equals 320 GWh (GW hours).

Reduce the demand to 200 GWh to allow for hydro, some wind, gas, and biomass, and to simplify the arithmetic.

Count the cost of the batteries required to store 200 GWh of power, at (say) half a billion per GWh. In round figures that is a hundred billion for a night and there may be three in a row. Moreover, the batteries will have to be replaced every ten years or so.

We are told that the cost of batteries is plummeting, and more four-hour batteries are on the way. Where is the evidence?

Pacific Green has been working on major battery projects, including four-hour batteries near the Heyward interconnector between SA and Victoria. At a conference in Brisbane in 2024, it was reported: ‘To make four hours work, it’s a high capital commitment … probably close to $600 million to $700 million per 1000 megawatt-hours.’

The calculation above used $500 million to allow for ‘plummeting’ prices, but as Bill Gates said, they are still orders of magnitude too large to be feasible.

Winter storms in the US have demonstrated the pathetic performance of wind, solar, and batteries.

A severe storm in Texas in 2021 almost blacked out the entire state because the gas system was not winterised to the standard of the colder northern states. Gas, wind, and solar all struggled and Renewable Energy lobbyists effectively deflected criticism by pointing the finger at gas.

This year, another storm with extremely cold conditions struck Texas from January 19-26. With the gas system upgraded since 2021, gas, coal, and nuclear weathered the storm while wind, solar, and batteries failed.

This is a day-by-day account of the ‘natural experiment’ in Texas.

That should be enough to show that the transition to so-called Renewable Energy will not happen on the back of wind, solar and batteries.