How Green Energy Fantasies Can Amplify Civil Unrest

[Kamaji]

How Green Energy Fantasies Can Amplify Civil Unrest

Policies that make energy scarce and expensive, promoted by wealthy elites, have weakened many nations, including the United States.

By Chuck Devore
February 4, 2022

Policies that make energy scarce and expensive, promoted by wealthy elites, result in domestic unrest while diminishing a nation’s ability to vigorously pursue its national interests. Since 2011, this has been the case in Egypt, France, Kazakhstan, Germany, and others. Even California and Texas are grappling with similar problems.

Texas is approaching the one-year anniversary of its epic four-day electrical blackout, triggered by a polar vortex bringing record cold and freezing rain, but exacerbated by the state’s growing dependence on federally subsidized unreliable wind and solar.

That conservative Texas, America’s energy capital, isn’t immune to the trendy push to decarbonize at all costs, should be a warning that the forces of energy chaos are formidable. Decades of federal subsidies for wind and solar have caused those resources to be overbuilt in the Lone Star State, leading to extreme price volatility and distorted, sometimes even negative, wholesale prices.

Texas’s energy-only market relies on prices alone to incentivize new investment, and subsidies for more variable energy mean that the reliability of coal, natural gas, and nuclear is not properly valued. As a result, year after year, wind and solar capacity grow while coal and natural gas generation atrophy.

*  *  *

See Egypt, Kazakhstan, and France

The 2011 revolution that toppled Egypt’s long-time president, Hosni Mubarak, was triggered by technocrats who argued the regime could no longer subsidize the cost of food staples and cooking gas. The heavy energy subsidies encouraged a vigorous black-market trade as people made money by reselling natural gas and butane at market prices.

*  *  *

Germany’s Failed Greening

Germany is a particularly vexing example of how political expediency can drive an entire nation off an obvious policy cliff. Germany made an early push to decarbonize (called Energiewende) while also decommissioning its nuclear power plants. This effort has placed Germany — and western Europe, by extension — at the mercy of Russian natural gas.

*  *  *

Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/04/how-green-energy-fantasies-can-amplify-civil-unrest/

[IsailedawayfromFR]

How Green Energy Fantasies Can Amplify Civil Unrest

Policies that make energy scarce and expensive, promoted by wealthy elites, have weakened many nations, including the United States.

By Chuck Devore
February 4, 2022

Policies that make energy scarce and expensive, promoted by wealthy elites, result in domestic unrest while diminishing a nation’s ability to vigorously pursue its national interests. Since 2011, this has been the case in Egypt, France, Kazakhstan, Germany, and others. Even California and Texas are grappling with similar problems.

Texas is approaching the one-year anniversary of its epic four-day electrical blackout, triggered by a polar vortex bringing record cold and freezing rain, but exacerbated by the state’s growing dependence on federally subsidized unreliable wind and solar.

That conservative Texas, America’s energy capital, isn’t immune to the trendy push to decarbonize at all costs, should be a warning that the forces of energy chaos are formidable. Decades of federal subsidies for wind and solar have caused those resources to be overbuilt in the Lone Star State, leading to extreme price volatility and distorted, sometimes even negative, wholesale prices.

Texas’s energy-only market relies on prices alone to incentivize new investment, and subsidies for more variable energy mean that the reliability of coal, natural gas, and nuclear is not properly valued. As a result, year after year, wind and solar capacity grow while coal and natural gas generation atrophy.

*  *  *

See Egypt, Kazakhstan, and France

The 2011 revolution that toppled Egypt’s long-time president, Hosni Mubarak, was triggered by technocrats who argued the regime could no longer subsidize the cost of food staples and cooking gas. The heavy energy subsidies encouraged a vigorous black-market trade as people made money by reselling natural gas and butane at market prices.

*  *  *

Germany’s Failed Greening

Germany is a particularly vexing example of how political expediency can drive an entire nation off an obvious policy cliff. Germany made an early push to decarbonize (called Energiewende) while also decommissioning its nuclear power plants. This effort has placed Germany — and western Europe, by extension — at the mercy of Russian natural gas.

*  *  *

Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/04/how-green-energy-fantasies-can-amplify-civil-unrest/

Texas is the top wind energy producer in the country.  So big, that Governor Abbott the week before the winter storm hit chose to receive the Wind Leadership Award from the Wind Industry celebrating his focus on unreliable wind power.  This plus his appointments of close political hack lawyers to supervise the Public Utility Commission (All of which he later had to fire for incompetence and to deflect off himself) exposed him as just another politician as supporting the unreliable fantasy of renewable power replacing conventional power.

So much so that myself and many others will not vote for him this year as Governor.