When you buy something, you want it to be reliable. Whether your purchase is a car, a lawnmower, or a refrigerator, you want it – you need it to work, reliably, day in and day out, all the time. It's of damn little use if it doesn't work reliably.
That's what we expect from our modern high-tech lifestyle. Reliability in most technology has increased dramatically in the last few decades; anyone who has been driving since the late '70s can attest to this. I once had a '65 Mustang, the dream car of many a classic car aficionado; but many years later, while on a West Coast gig, I had as a rental car for three weeks a 2008 Mustang convertible. The 2008 Mustang, while not having the nostalgia appeal, was just a vastly better car in every measurable way than the '65 – it was faster, handled better, had more usable power, got better gas mileage, and was more reliable.
We expect an increase in reliability in modern tech – unless one is a climate scold, and unless the topic in question is solar and wind power:
Wind and solar have been growing as a share of US electrical power generation over the last two decades. State and federal mandates and subsidies have driven the expansion of renewables because of their inherently and intermittent nature. But it’s clear that renewable electricity sources have a third strike: they are fragile and prone to weather damage and destruction.
Twenty-three states now mandate Net Zero electricity by as early as 2035. Their aim is to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind and solar generators. Wind and solar have grown from near zero in 2000 to 14.1% of US electricity generation in 2023 (10.2% wind and 3.9% solar).
Ay, that's the rub. As it turns out, the issues with wind and solar are a matter of inputs and outputs; the inputs being wind and sunlight, the output being electricity. The problem with wind and solar power is that the inputs are unreliable. The advantage of natural gas, coal, or nuclear power is that the inputs are reliable.
But there's more to the reliability question than that:
Wind and solar systems are located on ridge lines, on plains, and offshore, and are exposed to weather forces that usually don’t affect building-housed coal and gas generators. In addition, these systems require about 100 times the land area of traditional generators to deliver the same average electricity output, increasing the chances of storm damage. Damage incidents are rising as more and more systems are deployed.
In May 2019, a massive hailstorm in West Texas destroyed 400,000 solar modules of the Midway Solar Project, about 60% of the facility. The project was only one year old. The system was rebuilt, costing insurers more than $70 million.
You see the problem. Both wind and solar installations are not only subject to the problem of intermittent inputs but also to weather. Severe weather in particular can wreak havoc on these complex, expensive, and fragile systems. Wind in particular is a bad idea, as it not only costs more to build each windmill than one is likely to recover in electricity, but they are massive and ugly as well. If nothing else turned the public off of these massive wind-turbine farms – aside from the expense (oh, and all the materials that can only be sourced from fossil fuels) and the difficulty in disposing of the turbine blades when their useful lives are up, is the massive footprint these things require to develop power on a scale that’s even remotely adequate for the power grid.
This isn’t just a boondoggle. It is fraud on a massive scale.
See Related:
America's Energy Inventory: An Argument for Coal
Why Net Zero Schemes Will Inevitably Lead to Energy Rationing
NIMBYism Returns to Haunt Green Energy Advocates and Climate Scolds
This whole problem presents a doom loop of unreliable and fragile electrical generation. The climate scolds would have us believe that the weather is growing hotter/colder/more unpredictable because of human activity causing climate change. And to solve the climate change that we have supposedly solved, we must restrict further our use of reliable energy sources for unreliable and fragile "green" energy systems like solar and wind power, which clutter up the landscape and are less reliable and more expensive than the traditional source.
If private businesses or homeowners want to try wind and/or solar on their own property, fine; they are welcome to do so at their own cost, and then we’ll see if they can prove efficiency or even capability in the marketplace.
But the climate scolds don't want to allow us that choice. Again, it's not about climate. It's about control. It's about an agenda that would have us surrender part – or all – of our modern, technological lifestyle, that is responsible for much of our modern creature comforts, including your ability to peruse modern online news sources, like RedState.
That's all there is to it. When you accept that it's all about control, the rest all starts to make sense.
