Renewable Energy

Unreliables Made US Power Grid Fragile

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kite and Key explain how and why US and Canada electricity is on the brink of blacking out when needed.  For those prefering to read, below is a transcript with my bolds and some added images.

Five seconds.  That’s about how long you’ve been watching this video.  And in 2025, it was also the amount of time it took for 60 percent of the electricity supply in Spain … to vanish from the country’s grid.  Which led to 10 hours of darkness — in parts of four countries.  It’s a nightmarish scenario — and there’s a good chance that it’s coming to America soon.

Electricity. It’s the backbone of our entire world.

Your house. Your town. Your … excessive enthusiasm for Christmas. We build our lives around the assumption that when we flip a switch, it’ll be there for whatever we need — whether it’s controlling the climate in our homes, refrigerating our food, or just making sure the neighbors can see you’ve portrayed Santa committing a class B felony.

And, when you consider the history, you can see just how quickly we’ve gotten used to this. When Thomas Edison opened America’s first commercial power plant in 1882, it served 59 customers in lower Manhattan.ii By the time another 40 years or so had passed, America’s electricity consumption looked like this:iii

By 1929, the U.S. was generating more power than the rest of the world combined.iv And in the century since, our appetite has only grown. In 2025, the government’s Energy Information Administration reported that the country consumed 14 times more electricity than it had in 1950.v

All of which sounds like a standard story of progress: As the decades pass, and technology evolves, things that once seemed miraculous become so commonplace that we can take them for granted.

But here’s the thing: We should definitely not be taking them for granted. Because the days of assuming we know what’s going to happen when we flip the switch … may be coming to an end.

In 2023, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the government body that regulates electricity transmission — appeared before a Senate committee with a series of dire warnings.

One of them testified that “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”vi

Another said that “The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”vii

And then he added “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”viii

And while we don’t like to editorialize here at Kite & Key … that sounds bad.

The data shows that these concerns aren’t exaggerated.

In 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — the body charged with making sure that the power grid is dependable — warned that nearly half of America’s population was going to be at high risk of rolling blackouts in the next few years.ix

In fact, by the end of the decade every single region of the U.S. and Canada is projected to be at least elevated risk … with the single exception of the Canadian province of Saskatchewanx — which makes sense because Saskatchewan literally has more cows than people.xi

So, if there’s a blackout there … well, you know what happened.

But all of this leads to an obvious question: How does this happen? It’s been almost 150 years since Thomas Edison got the ball rolling and somehow we’re getting worse at this? What’s going on here?

To unravel this mystery, go back to those officials testifying before Congress.

One of them summed up the problem in four words: “The math doesn’t work.”xii

Here’s what he meant by that: In many cases we’re actually losing power — as in, we’ll have less of it in a few years than we do now.

Take, for example, the PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest power grid operator, which serves 65 million customersxiii in 13 states.xiv

In 2023, PJM issued a report estimating that it might lose about 40 gigawatts of electricity — more than 20 percent of its capacity — by the year 2030, thanks to power plant retirements.xv

Which isn’t the end of the world, right? You just bring on new power sources! Which is what they’re doing!

Here’s the problem: The high-end estimate of those new sources … is a little over 30 gigawatts.

In other words, they’re replacing 40 … with 30.

Also known as: “The math doesn’t work.”

And similar situations are happening all over the country.

Why? Well to understand that, we have to understand how the economics of electricity works.

And you might be thinking “But, Kite & Key, that sounds excruciatingly boring.” And it is, dear viewer!

Or at least it would be if you hadn’t chosen the one channel that understands it’s so boring that you have to explain it with the assistance of adorable puppies dressed as economists.

Here’s the way this all goes down: In any given part of the country, you might have lots of potential sources of electricity — natural gas, solar, coal, wind, nuclear. And at any given moment all those sources are selling power at different prices.

Now, the decision as to which one to use is not made by you, the customer. It’s made by the people responsible for coordinating the system, who take bids from electricity producers — sometimes as often as every five minutes — and buy whatever options are cheapest at the time until they’ve got enough power to meet demand. None of which seems crazy — adequate energy at low prices is pretty much what everyone wants.

But here’s where this gets complicated: In some cases … cheap electricity comes with unintended consequences.

Here’s what we mean.

Not all energy sources are created equal.

Map of Diminishing Capacity Values for Major RTOs (Regional Transmission Operators)

Some of them like nuclear and most coal plants are what’s referred to as “baseload power” — they can essentially run all the time.

Others like natural gas plants are “dispatchable,” meaning you can quickly turn them on or off depending on demand.

Then there are sources like wind and solar which are “intermittent” — in other words, you only get power from them when the weather is cooperating.xvi

And this is where the problem creeps in.

In 2024, the government reported that wind, on average, only produces energy about 1/3 of the time.xvii For solar, it was less than 1/4 of the time.xviii By contrast natural gas was around 60 percent and nuclear was at 90 percent.xix

But when wind and solar are working they can be incredibly cheap. In fact, because they’re heavily subsidized by the government, their prices can actually go negative — they can pay the grid to take their powerxx — and still stay in business.

Needless to say, all the other electricity producers … can’t do that.

Which makes them less profitable.

Which leads an increasing number of them to close.

Which leads to a world where we’re increasingly dependent on
electricity sources that literally don’t produce any energy most of the time.

Those 40 gigawatts PJM may lose? Almost all coal or natural gas. The up to 30 gigawatts that will partially replace it? Mostly wind and solar.xxi

Which is the kind of thing that leads otherwise boring bureaucrats from places like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to yell “the red lights are flashing!” at members of Congress.

Because by privileging the energy sources that work the best some of the time
… we’re gutting the energy sources that work the best all of the time
— the ones that actually determine whether you’ll have power.

There’s no doubt that wind and solar are going to be important parts of America’s energy future. But imagining that they can carry the burden of the entire system today is risking disaster.

When wind and solar can’t produce, we rely on sources like nuclear, natural gas, and even coal to keep the lights on.xxii But if we cut out that part of the equation — if we don’t build to ensure resiliency — we’re placing our standard of living on a knife’s edge. And if we get that balance even slightly wrong, well…

 

 

No, WSJ: 9 Reasons Why “Green Energy” Makes Even LESS Sense Today

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Green Energy is a mirage that retreats as you approach.

Terigi Ciccone wrote an Open Letter to Ed Ballard Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Open Letter to Ed Ballard
Re: “Why Green Energy Makes More Sense With Each Price Shock” (WSJ, April 9, 2026)

Dear Mr. Ballard,

I have sent you several detailed emails over the past few years outlining the engineering and economic realities of integrating variable renewable energy (VRE). You have never replied. Your latest column—celebrating the Iran/Hormuz crisis as yet another “proof” that solar-plus-battery is now the rational choice—is the latest example of journalistic cheerleading that substitutes press-release optimism for rigorous system-level analysis. As a power-plant design engineer with decades of hands-on experience specifying dispatchable generation, I write this open letter to correct the record, not in theory, but in the hard language of capital costs, ancillary services, capacity factors, and ecological externalities that your piece airbrushes away.

Your star exhibit is the Philippines’ MTerra Solar project: 3.5 GW solar + 4.5 GWh battery storage, fast-tracked amid LNG shortages, now supposedly delivering 13 hours of power “marginally below” LNG cost. You quote Actis investor Rahul Agrawal: “This is not theory. This is actually happening on the ground now.” Indeed, it is—but the ground truth is far uglier than your narrative admits.

1. Intermittency is not a rounding error; it is the dominant cost driver. Even with batteries, MTerra is engineered for ~12–13 hours of mid-merit output. The remaining 11–12 hours (and any multi-day typhoon-induced lull) still require dispatchable backup. My own peer-reviewed analysis of ancillary-service burdens shows that adding solar and wind to a reliable grid inflates total system costs by 135–235 % once frequency regulation, inertia, voltage support, and ramping are properly valued. The raw LCOE of ~$40/MWh becomes a delivered cost of ~$500/MWh.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “A Narrow Lens on Ancillary Services: Overlooking the Full Costs and Ecological Damage of Solar and Wind Integration” 

2. The “phenomenal” price drop in Chinese panels and batteries is a geopolitical trap, not progress. You correctly note falling panel costs, but you fail to mention that China controls ~85% of solar manufacturing and ~80% of the battery supply chain. Swapping Middle-East oil dependence for Beijing’s critical-mineral monopoly and state-subsidized overcapacity is not energy security; it is energy servitude. When those subsidies or export policies shift, the “cheap” becomes expensive overnight.

3. Full-system costing reveals multipliers your LCOE ignores. Economist Bjørn Lomborg has repeatedly documented the same reality using Value-Adjusted LCOE (VALCOE). A peer-reviewed study he cites shows that once reliability and backup are included, wind power becomes 11–12× and solar up to 38–42× more expensive than combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT).
Bjørn Lomborg, “Why solar and wind power aren’t winning,” Financial Post, 17 April 2024 
(Identical findings appear in Lomborg’s “The True Cost of Wind and Solar Energy,” NH Journal, 20 May 2024.)

Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.

My own comparison of 1 GW reliable output at 99.9 % uptime reaches the same conclusion: onshore wind requires 5.6× and offshore wind 7.2× the capital investment of a CCGT, once overbuild, storage, transmission, and peaker plants are added.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “The Well Hidden and Distorted Costs of Renewables: A Comprehensive Comparison of Wind Power and Combined Cycle Gas Turbine Plant” 

Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.

4. Academic “System LCOE” literature confirms the same directional truth— Falko Ueckerdt, Lion Hirth, and colleagues introduced System LCOE precisely because standard LCOE is misleading at high VRE penetrations. Their 2013 analysis (and subsequent updates) shows integration/profile costs can equal or exceed generation costs themselves once wind shares exceed ~20 %. At the levels now being forced, those costs become an economic barrier.
Ueckerdt et al., “System LCOE: What are the costs of variable renewables?” Energy 63 (2013) 61–75 

5. Ecological and material externalities are catastrophic. Your column is silent on land use (10× that of nuclear or gas for equivalent firm power), avian/bat mortality, 78 million tons of non-recyclable solar waste projected by 2050, and the concrete-steel-copper footprint of batteries that must be replaced every 8–12 years. My third paper tallies these hidden costs in full.
See: Terigi Ciccone, “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again” 

Moreover, the raw-material demands are staggering. Utility-scale solar and wind installations consume vastly greater quantities of concrete, steel, copper, silver, rare-earth elements, and other minerals per unit of firm, reliable electricity than any dispatchable source. This triggers massive mining operations with severe habitat destruction, water contamination, and toxic tailings. Manufacturing these components remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels for the energy-intensive processes of silicon purification, steel smelting, and mineral extraction. In full life-cycle terms, many VRE systems may never recover the total primary energy invested in their construction, installation, maintenance, and eventual replacement—rendering the entire enterprise an energy and cost sink rather than a net contributor.

Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero

6. Real-world stress tests expose the fantasy. Philippine typhoons shred solar farms; Florida hurricanes do the same. After every major storm, we see acres of twisted panels and batteries that cannot survive Category 4 winds. Yet the same voices warning about climate risk keep prescribing an energy system that collapses precisely when the weather turns ugly.

7. Ultimately, we are inflicting these enormous costs for no good reason. The entire policy edifice rests on the assumption that anthropogenic CO₂ is the primary driver of dangerous warming. In reality, CO₂’s greenhouse effect is already near saturation in its principal absorption bands; additional emissions yield only minuscule marginal forcing. The true temperature powerhouses on Earth are gravitational auto-compression (the dry adiabatic lapse rate driven by atmospheric mass and pressure) and the dominant water-vapor/latent-heat cycle, which together govern the vast majority of Earth’s energy balance.

We are dismantling reliable, dispatchable power systems, subsidizing
foreign supply chains, and covering productive land in fragile panels
—all to chase a trace-gas tail that cannot wag the climatic dog.

8. Increased atmospheric CO₂ is demonstrably greening the planet. NASA satellite data confirm that rising CO₂ has driven substantial global greening over recent decades. The increase in leaf area is equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States, with CO₂ fertilization responsible for approximately 70 % of this greening across 25–50 % of vegetated lands. Far from harming the biosphere, higher CO₂ levels are enhancing vegetation growth, boosting agricultural yields, and expanding natural habitats worldwide.

9. Humans are not the sole source of rising atmospheric CO₂. As I document in detail in “Revised: Let’s Make Electricity Affordable Again,” natural sources—including volcanic activity, oceanic degassing, and other geological processes—play a far more significant role in the global carbon cycle than the prevailing narrative acknowledges. Attributing nearly all recent increases to human emissions oversimplifies complex geophysical realities and ignores the “Volcanic Vibes” that have shaped atmospheric CO₂ long before industrial civilization.

Mr. Ballard, energy crises do not “hammer home” the virtues of green energy. They expose its fatal engineering defects: zero inertia, negative correlation with demand, dependence on foreign supply chains, and an energy return that fails even basic life-cycle scrutiny. The rational response is an all-of-the-above portfolio anchored by dispatchable, high-capacity-factor sources—modern CCGT, nuclear (including SMRs), and geothermal—with targeted renewables only where they demonstrably lower system cost without compromising reliability.

Your repeated refusal to engage with the peer-reviewed literature or
practicing engineers suggests a commitment to narrative over evidence.

I invite you, once again, to reply—publicly or privately—and defend your claim that solar-plus-battery “makes more sense with each price shock” once full system costs, ecological and material realities, geopolitical risks, and the actual physics and benefits of atmospheric CO₂ are included. Until then, this open letter stands as the record of your April 9 column that you omitted. Let’s bury the narrative. 🔥

Respectfully but firmly,
Terigi Ciccone Ret. Gas Turbine Engineer for power generation and aviation, an independent researcher on climate, Sarasota, Florida, USA

 

 

Follow the Money Leaving Wind Farms

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Boluwatife Remy reveals what many have overlooked, widespread disinvesting in wind power.  Not so long ago, the climate feaful were badgering education and religious institutions, among others, to disinvest in hydrocarbons from Big Oil companies.  Well, the worm has turned.  Remy’s article at benzinga is
Why Shell Is Selling Its Wind Farms—And What It’s Building Instead. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The energy transition was supposed to be the defining corporate story of the 2020s. For Shell (NYSE:SHEL), it has become the story of what the company tried, reconsidered, and is now unwinding at a pace that leaves little room for ambiguity about where management stands.

Bloomberg reported Friday that Shell is preparing to offload a portfolio of offshore wind farms in a transaction expected to generate more than $1 billion. Rothschild and PJT Partners are handling the advisory work, with the formal sale process targeted for 2027. Shell said nothing publicly. What the company has not stayed quiet about, expressed through a long sequence of exits and disposals over the past two years, is the direction it has chosen and the conviction behind it.

This Is Not a One-Off Decision

Anyone tempted to read the Bloomberg report as an isolated portfolio adjustment has not been following what Shell has been doing since Wael Sawan took the chief executive role with an explicit mandate to tighten the company’s strategic focus and restore the return on capital that investors had been pushing for.

The wind exits have been coming in steady succession. Shell walked away from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project in the United States, absorbing a $1 billion writedown after concluding the numbers no longer worked. It sold its half of the MarramWind floating offshore wind development off Scotland to joint venture partner ScottishPower Renewables and abandoned the CampionWind project it had been developing independently.

Positions in other offshore wind assets across multiple markets have been quietly sold down as each successive review of the business case reached the same conclusion. The explanation attached to each departure has been consistent: the project either fails to meet the company’s return thresholds or no longer fits what Shell believes it does well.

One exit looks like a portfolio decision. A dozen exits
over twenty-four months looks like a verdict.

What Shell Is Building in Place of Wind

The company Sawan is assembling has a narrower and more deliberate focus than the Shell that spent the early 2020s presenting sweeping energy transition commitments to investors and government audiences. Liquefied natural gas trading and upstream oil and gas production are where the strategy now concentrates, businesses where Shell carries genuine competitive advantages built over decades that no amount of capital could quickly replicate elsewhere.

That repositioning is not unique to Shell. The same reassessment has been running simultaneously across the major integrated oil companies. BP has been selling renewable assets and reorienting capital toward upstream production. Equinor reduced its renewable energy workforce by around 20% while boosting spending on oil and gas. TotalEnergies negotiated an exit from nearly $1 billion in U.S. offshore wind leases and committed the equivalent amount to domestic fossil fuel development instead.

 The companies that arrived at the 2021 and 2022 investor days with ambitious clean energy targets have each, at their own pace and with varying degrees of public candor, concluded that those targets were built on assumptions that did not hold.

How Offshore Wind Lost Its Financial Logic

The deterioration in offshore wind economics between 2021 and 2024 was sharper than almost anyone inside the industry publicly acknowledged while it was happening. Construction costs climbed as specialist installation vessels became scarce and supply chains struggled to keep pace with the volume of projects that had been approved simultaneously across European and American markets.

Interest rates moved from near zero to levels that fundamentally changed the math on capital-intensive long-duration infrastructure. Turbine manufacturers, squeezed between fixed-price contracts and rising input costs, ran into serious financial difficulty.

The gap between what projects were expected to cost when developers submitted bids and what actually arrived on the invoice became a recurring crisis.

Contracts got cancelled. Projects got written down. 

Governments that had structured power purchase agreements around cost assumptions from a different era found themselves in renegotiations that pleased nobody. The companies carrying the heaviest exposure to offshore wind at the peak of the enthusiasm cycle spent years managing the fallout from decisions that looked reasonable in 2020 and looked considerably less so by 2023.

What This Means for Shell Shareholders

Selling wind farms that are not generating acceptable returns and redirecting the proceeds into businesses that are creates a cleaner financial picture for investors who have been watching Shell carry underperforming assets longer than they would have preferred. 

Shell has been among the more aggressive capital returners among the major oil companies, and management has been consistent about treating buyback capacity and dividend sustainability as priorities that outrank maintaining positions in low-return businesses.

The assets being brought to market will find buyers. Infrastructure funds and specialist renewable developers have been steady acquirers of divested offshore wind portfolios throughout this cycle, often able to hold the assets more cheaply than integrated oil companies whose capital costs and return expectations create a structural disadvantage in low-margin infrastructure. Shell selling is not the same as the assets disappearing. It is the assets moving to owners better suited to hold them.

What stays with Shell is the part of the energy business it has decided it is actually good at. For investors, that clarity is worth more than a diversified portfolio of businesses generating mixed returns and requiring constant explanation.

See Also: Wind Power Economic Failure

The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

US to Partner Belgian Nuclear Power Revival

Posted on by Ron Clutz

BREAKING: U.S. Unleashes $10 Billion Nuclear Shockwave To Revive Belgium’s Energy!

Mackenzie Web reports on an announcement in Belgian news site La Libre “The United States wants to help Belgium restart its nuclear power plants, Donald Trump is fully behind the project” (translation) Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In a bold revelation, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White announced a game-changing investment plan that shifts the energy landscape of Europe. America is prepared to finance up to 50 percent of new nuclear reactor construction in Belgium, potentially injecting $10 billion into this initiative. His remarks, delivered to the Belgian newspaper La Libre, signal a renewed focus on nuclear energy as a reliable power source. White, clearly aligned with Trump’s energy strategy, stated,

“Washington is all-in on helping Belgium reverse decades of suicidal green phase-out madness.”

Several MEPs (mainly Greens) hold up anti-nuclear posters at EU debate.

This renewed commitment comes at a pivotal time for Belgium as it seeks to reclaim its energy independence. The country’s new right-leaning government, led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever, is actively nationalizing its nuclear fleet and abandoning plans to decommission existing reactors. No longer willing to rely on inconsistent renewable energy sources, Belgium is stepping back into its nuclear past, which had been shunned during years of leftist climate policies prioritizing wind and solar over proven energy sources. As White puts it, the reality of energy security is finally sinking in.

American companies Westinghouse and GE Vernova are set to lead the charge in this nuclear renaissance. Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor, equipped with advanced passive safety features, promises a safer, more efficient alternative to outdated technologies previously favored in Europe. With an impressive capability for 72 hours of blackout protection, this reactor is already in operation in the U.S. and China, demonstrating its reliability. Similarly, GE Vernova’s BWRX-300 small modular reactor boasts rapid deployment capabilities, making it a perfect fit for Belgium’s urgent energy needs.

BWRX-300 Small Modular Reactor | GE Vernova Hitachi

The significance of this investment stretches beyond economics; it also reinforces America’s longstanding alliance with Belgium. White highlighted that this initiative harkens back to an 80-year partnership where the Belgian Congo’s uranium was pivotal in America’s atomic endeavors during World War II. The contribution of Belgian resources in winning past conflicts illustrates the strategic bonds between the two nations, and today’s nuclear cooperation continues that legacy. As White emphasizes, this is not merely a financial deal—it is a calculated move toward mutual security, ensuring that European nations can break away from fluctuating foreign energy supplies.

Moreover, this initiative marks a decisive pivot from recent energy decisions that left European nations vulnerable. The reliance on Russian and Middle Eastern sources has proven costly and unstable, especially amid geopolitical tensions. White asserts that under this new agreement, Belgium can expect “no more blackouts” and “no more skyrocketing bills,” fundamentally changing the energy conversation in Europe. With the U.S. stepping up to fill this critical void, the interests of American energy innovation directly align with the needs of a nation seeking stability.

In summation, this announcement is a shot across the bow to proponents of renewable energy who have long championed policies ignoring the realities of energy demand and practicality. The message is clear: America is not just offering financial assistance; it is providing a framework for a robust nuclear future. While globalists may resist this trend, the power of American engineering and technology is poised to reshape Belgium’s energy landscape, ensuring real leadership is showcased on the world stage. The green dream is receding, while the nuclear renaissance emerges, casting doubt on the feasibility of relying solely on renewables.

Why Your Energy Bill is So High (Kathryn Porter)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A part of Battle of Ideas Festival 2025 was the above presentation explaining plainly why UK energy has become so expensive. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my added bolds and images.

Why are our electricity bills so high? We’re told as Craig referenced that it’s all the fault of gas. Now this argument is going to come to somewhat crashing reality in the next year. I was just checking the prices now and from yesterday’s close we’re now 87 percent down from the highs in 2022.  Now has anybody seen an 87 percent reduction in their bills, hands up, anybody? Oh that’s a huge shock. Next year gas analysts expect that the gas price will return to its long-term average pre-2021.

So the gas crisis actually began in the autumn of 2021, about six months before the invasion of Ukraine and it was to do with the recovery from COVID.  Basically during COVID demand for gas fell because industrial activity dropped, a lot of upstream production was shut in and it takes time to bring that back, you can’t just turn on the tap in most cases, it requires quite a bit more work than that. So there was a delay in bringing that production back online and when you have more demand than you’ve got supply then prices go up and then Putin took advantage of this in the following February and well we all know what happened then.

Since then in the upstream sector they’ve been busy bringing new LNG, liquefied natural gas projects, on stream.  By the end of this year there’ll be enough new LNG to fully replace all of Russian gas and sometime next year we’re expecting the global gas market to go back into length. So there’ll be more supply globally than there is demand and prices are expected to fall. In fact the only reason why Miliband could possibly deliver the 300 pound reduction in bills would be because of gas prices falling.

Unfortunately I think he’s going to more than offset that with higher subsidy costs. So the first thing is that gas is not expensive and really for 25 years we had very low and very stable gas prices. Gas was cheap, in fact the cheapness of gas was what enabled the energy transition to even begin. I wrote a report earlier in the year about the cost of renewables, if you do a chart that shows the wholesale price of gas, the wholesale price of electricity and then the domestic price of electricity what you find is that the wholesale gas price was low and stable until 2021.

The wholesale electricity price was basically the wholesale gas price plus a little bit which is what you’d expect and then the domestic price was the wholesale price of electricity plus a little bit. And again you’d expect that you buy a wholesale, you pay for it to be delivered to your house, you’ve got to pay the supplier some money for you know doing the admin for that, they want to take a bit of profit, there’s some taxes, that’s what you’d expect.

Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.

But from 2006 this relationship started to break down and what we saw was a steep increase in what households were paying despite a flat trajectory for wholesale prices. Why was this? It was because we were adding on policy costs. We’re subsidizing renewables, we started using suppliers to do all sorts of other social programs, wealth redistribution, literally the warm homes discount is suppliers.  They phone up the department for work and pensions and they find out which of their customers are eligible and then they calculate how much that discount is going to cost and then they add on an admin fee and then they spread that cost out across all our other customers.

They take money from one group of customers to give to another. This is wealth redistribution, it’s not the job of private companies. The energy company obligation, we’ve heard about that in the news this week where I think the National Audit Office has written a report saying how inefficient it is, how low quality the work is.  Well guess what, energy companies are not experts in construction. They are being expected to engage in sub contracts to companies that will come in and install insulation and similar things in your home. They don’t know anything about this, this isn’t part of their core business.

Typically as wind and solar power share of supply increases, distribution and transmission costs rise sharply.

It’s a hugely inefficient thing to expect suppliers to do and the cost of all that is added to bills.  The smart meter rollout, we’re the only country in the world that expects suppliers, retailers, to install network equipment in people’s homes. Everyone else got the network companies to do it, you know, duh.  And what’s even worse is that the supply business was created within the Utility Act 2000. It was the final part of unbundling the energy system and almost immediately both the governments and the regulators started telling everyone that suppliers were greedy profiteers that couldn’t be trusted.

And then they expressed shock that nobody wants these greedy profiteers who can’t be trusted to install devices in their home that would give the greedy suppliers that can’t be trusted lots of information about how they’re using electricity and gas and potentially enable them to change your prices remotely, put you onto prepayment tariffs remotely and do all sorts of other stuff remotely, potentially without your permission.  And they were just kind of shocked that people didn’t want to do that. So the whole market is completely dysfunctional.

Now, when we come to the real costs and the real reasons that our bills are so high has to do with renewables.  When we build renewable generation, we have to provide a big subsidy. Now, a lot of people think, well, the wind and the sun are free. And this is true. Wind energy and solar energy is free. But the equipment needed to turn that energy into electricity is not free. That’s actually pretty expensive.

Now, imagine that we only had renewables on our grid. And when you’re setting prices, normally, the price at which you sell your goods is linked to your short run marginal operating cost, which for wind and solar is close to zero. Essentially, you’d be giving it away.  How are you going to recover your capital costs for that expensive equipment if you have to give away your products? You’re never going to be able to do it. So basic economic theory will tell you that renewables will never be built without subsidies. They are always going to require subsidies because you will never be able to recover the capital costs to selling the electricity at the short run marginal operating cost of that electricity.

So we give subsidies to renewables. And that subsidy is higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. So the argument about gas pushing your bills up is nonsense. These subsidies are higher than the cost of generating electricity with gas. And the way the new subsidies work is that the generators are guaranteed a fixed price, and they receive that by selling that electricity in the market. And then if that’s lower than this fixed price, they get a top up.

And it’s a one for one relationship. If you lower the wholesale price of electricity by one pound, you increase the subsidy cost by one pound. And the subsidies are added to our bills. They come straight out of our pockets. So when people say, oh, we’ve got to get off gas, we’ve got to stop marginal pricing. People talk about marginal pricing as if we’re some weird outlier in the world markets doing this strange marginal pricing thing, taking the most expensive form of generation to set the price.

Every deregulated power market in the world sets the electricity price through marginal pricing. In fact, most commodity markets do the same thing. This isn’t weird. It’s completely normal.

And if you decided to change price formation to lower the wholesale price, your bill will stay the same. You’re just moving money in different buckets around the bill. Now the bit that says wholesale price will go down, and the bit that says policy costs will go up. But the amount you pay will stay the same. And so this is the whole misinformation that we have.

The other issues with renewables are you’ve got to pay for backup. They have low energy density, so you need a lot more wires to connect them. A good sized gas power station, 800 megawatts. If you wanted an equivalent size wind farm, you need 60 turbines. So that’s 60 times more wires. But to get the same amount of electricity over the year, because your wind is only working about a third of the time compared with about 86% of the time for gas, you need something like 150 times the wires. You need 150 turbines.

All that gets added onto your bills. The cost of backup to make sure you’ve got generation available when it’s not windy and sunny, that goes straight onto the bill.  And the real-time balancing cost, where you’re having to even out the impact of clouds and gusts of wind, all goes on the bill. And so this is why our bills are so high.

X-Weather Shattered Solar, Coal Undaunted

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero

Energy Bad Boys draw the lessons from an Indiana tornado impacting power supply in their blog article Solar Scattered, Coal Still Standing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

What an Indiana tornado revealed about the cost of fragile power

On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheatfield, Indiana, had 2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).

The Chief Deputy of Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, Brandon Napier, noted, “Just the path of the tornado that came through, we have several large solar fields to the east of the town here it went right through the solar field and just ripped a lot of them out.”

While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requiring the plant to continue operations. Click on the map below to explore the custom Google Map we made this week of the facilities.

To enlarge, open in new tab.

This article will explore the cost of the destroyed solar facility compared to the nearby R.M. Schahfer Plant, and explore how energy costs have changed in the NIPSCO service territory in response to changes in the company’s generation fleet, using some cool data from S&P Global.

According to S&P Global, the Dunns Bridge solar projects were built to “support Northern Indiana Public Service’s goal of becoming coal-free by 2028, reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent by 2030, compared to a 2005 baseline, according to the utility.”

The situation begs several questions:

  • If climate change is going to make the weather more extreme, how does it make any sense to shut down coal plants and build energy generation facilities, like solar, that are destroyed by extreme weather?
  • Are the company’s coal-free and emissions reduction goals increasing the company’s exposure to costs associated with weather events, and why should ratepayers be saddled with these additional costs?
  • Was there any damage to the R.M. Schahfer coal plant or the onsite battery storage facility at Dunns Bridge?
  • What type of insurance policy is in place for the solar facility, and what deductible would the company be required to pay, if any?
  • What liability, if any, does the company have for the cleanup of the site and surrounding areas?
  • How is any of this in the best interests of ratepayers?

The Cost of Tornado-Truncated Solar Facility

Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.

Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.

We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.

Energy Realists Saved the US Grid (Alex Epstein)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Alex Epstein explains how legacy media is mixing up the good guys and bad guys in a recent message Politicians Who Cut Solar and Wind Subsidies Saved Our Grid.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Last year, America was already in a serious electricity reliability crisis. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation—the body charged with assessing grid reliability—found that over half the country is facing the risk of power shortfalls over the next decade.¹

That crisis is far from over. But now, for the first time in years, the economics of building reliable power plants are turning around. And we owe this to a handful of politicians who led the charge to cut solar and wind subsidies in the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Solar and wind subsidies were defunding reliable power plants

To understand what these politicians accomplished by cutting solar and wind subsidies, you have to understand the condition of the grid as of last year.

For decades, the federal government paid massive subsidies—the “Investment Tax Credit” and “Production Tax Credit”—to solar and wind projects. These subsidies didn’t just take hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. They systematically destroyed the economics of the reliable power plants that keep our grid running.

When subsidized solar and wind flood the grid with cheap electricity every time the sun shines or the wind blows, they take away operating time and therefore revenue from reliable power plants.

Thanks to subsidies many reliable plants had no choice but to shut down prematurely, while investors were deterred from investing in building new reliable plants whose revenue under subsidies and unfair market rules would be taken by unreliable generation.

Subsidies were a big reason why as electricity demand increased over the past decade, America saw a decline in reliable capacity.

The IRA accelerated the catastrophic effects of solar and wind subsidies

Then came the “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022. The IRA increased solar/wind subsidies, and it also extended them for over a decade. These subsidies were projected to cost taxpayers over $1 trillion over that decade.²

But the damage to the grid would have been incomparably greater than the tax bill. The biggest cost by far was the defunding and disincentivizing of reliable power plants.

By 2024, solar and wind “capacity,” which as we saw during a recent winter storm can’t be relied on at all³, represented 70% of all new electricity additions in the US.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright was not exaggerating when he said solar and wind subsidies are “a big mistake,” which “result in higher costs and less reliable electricity.”⁴

A handful of energy freedom fighters cut solar/wind subsidies in the “Big Beautiful Bill”

When the “Big Beautiful Bill” budget negotiations began early last year, the solar/wind subsidy lobby descended on Washington in full force. The expected outcome was that Republicans, despite running on a promise to dismantle the IRA, would keep most of the solar and wind subsidies.

That’s not what happened. Instead, a handful of energy freedom advocates
fought relentlessly to cut the IRA’s solar and wind subsidies—and won.

The initial draft of the budget bill produced by the House Ways and Means Committee included a long “phase-out” of the subsidies that would have allowed new solar and wind projects to continue receiving 10-year subsidies well into the 2030s and even 2040s.⁵

When this bill came to the House Budget Committee for review, Representatives Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, Josh Brecheen, and Andrew Clyde withheld their support (voting “no” or “present”). Because the Republican majority on the committee is very slim, their votes were crucial. This stalled the bill, and they were able to work through the weekend to significantly limit subsidy eligibility to projects that were “placed in service,” i.e., operational, by 2028.

Solar and wind lobbyists threw a fit, claiming that cutting subsidies would raise electricity prices and destroy the grid. But Roy, Norman, Brecheen, and Clyde didn’t back down. And in later stages of the process, they were joined by more energy freedom politicians, including Rep. Scott Perry on the House side, and Senators Mike Lee, Rick Scott, and Ron Johnson on the Senate side.

Unfortunately, a last-second change by the Senate (sneaked in by the solar/wind lobby) weakened the House’s solar and wind subsidy cuts by allowing projects to collect subsidies if they are technically “in construction” (an easy threshold to meet) by July 4, 2026, at which point they have 4 years to be “placed in service.”⁶

Nevertheless, the final “Big Beautiful Bill,” significantly cuts solar and wind subsidies for projects. The upshot: Starting July 5, 2026, virtually no new subsidy-collecting solar/wind projects can be initiated. (They can only collect subsidies if they are actually “placed in service” by the end of 2027, a standard most new subsidy-seeking projects won’t be able to meet.)

Politicians who cut subsidies are wrongly being blamed for rising electricity prices

As soon as the “Big Beautiful Bill” was passed, the solar-and-wind lobby began blaming the politicians who cut solar/wind subsidies for depriving our grid of power and causing electricity prices to rise.

Not only is the timeframe of this claim absurd—the subsidy cuts would not even go into effect for another year—it gets the relationship between subsidies and price increases exactly backwards.

Solar and wind subsidies have contributed to the electricity price increases we’ve seen so far—by forcing the premature shutdown of the reliable power plants our grid needs to function. (And we’re also paying for the subsidies through taxes and inflation.) Cutting these subsidies was necessary to stop price increases going forward.

The energy freedom fighters who cut solar/wind subsidies did not deprive the grid of power; they did more than anyone to ensure that the grid had electricity when it needed it most. They set up a market where new reliable plants can be profitable. And they did not increase electricity prices, they created the necessary conditions for electricity prices to decrease.

In fact, that’s exactly what we’re seeing already.

The solar/wind subsidy cuts in the “Big Beautiful Bill” are already saving our grid

After the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, investors looked at the electricity market and saw that building reliable power would soon become much more profitable than if the solar/wind subsidies had continued. At the same time, they became more and more aware that they need ultra-reliable power to power AI data centers.

The US nearly tripled its gas-fired capacity in development in 2025, reaching 252 GW—more than any other country⁷. Developers plan to add 18.7 GW of combined-cycle natural gas capacity by 2028⁸. Major utilities are announcing record capital plans to build reliable generation.

This is what happens when you stop paying people to build an inferior product. Capital flows to what actually works: power plants that can run when you need them, in the quantity you need them, regardless of the weather.

The AI data center boom makes the timing of the solar/wind subsidy cuts even more crucial. Data centers need power that is available 24/7, 365 days a year. The subsidy cuts arrived just in time to help redirect investment toward the reliable generation that America’s growing digital economy urgently needs.

The lesson: Energy freedom works

Any energy source that is genuinely cost-effective will thrive without subsidies. The path to affordable, reliable electricity isn’t subsidies for some politicians’ and lobbyists’ preferred energy sources—it’s the freedom to produce and invest in the energy sources that actually work.

A year ago, NERC was warning that more than half the country faced electricity shortfalls. Today, the market is responding to restored price signals by building reliable power at a pace we haven’t seen in decades.

The politicians who cut solar and wind subsidies didn’t just save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. They saved our grid.

Solar Panels Replace Spanish Olive Trees

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

 

Spanish Solar Farms, Where hundreds of thousands of ancient olive trees are being ripped out to build massive solar factories. Trees, bees and insects all wiped out leaving increased temperatures caused by the heat island effect of the panels. Just so sad 😩😩😩. Plus Where will they all go when they are broken, damaged, and no longer function in 15 years time?

 

    • Centuries-old olive groves in Spain’s Andalusia region are being uprooted to make way for solar energy projects, sparking resistance from farmers who see their livelihoods and cultural heritage threatened.
    • The regional government uses a Franco-era expropriation law to seize land “in the public interest,” while farmers and activists accuse authorities of prioritizing corporate profits over local agriculture.
    • Jaén, known as the “olive oil capital of the world,” could lose up to 100,000 trees, devastating small farmers and cooperatives, with some groves dating back over 1,000 years.
    • Spain’s aggressive push for 81 percent renewable energy by 2030 is clashing with rural sustainability, as solar projects bring few local jobs and risk depopulation, while also raising transparency concerns.
    • The groves combat desertification and were considered for UNESCO status, but their destruction threatens ecological balance and forces younger generations to leave, raising ethical questions about green energy transitions.

In the sun-drenched plains of southern Spain, a bitter conflict is unfolding as centuries-old olive groves – some dating back to Roman times – are being uprooted to make way for solar energy projects.

The regional government of Andalusia, leveraging a Franco-era expropriation law, has declared the land seizures “in the public interest.” This has sparked fierce resistance from olive farmers who see their livelihoods and heritage under threat. With Spain leading Europe’s renewable energy push, the clash highlights the tension between green energy ambitions and the preservation of agricultural and cultural legacies.

The province of Jaén, often called the “olive oil capital of the world,” is at the center of the dispute. Here, olive trees blanket over 600,000 hectares, forming a landscape so vast it’s known as the “Sea of Olives.” Many of these trees are centuries old, with some exceeding 1,000 years. (Source: A crime against nature: Ancient olive trees uprooted for solar farms in Spain )

Net Zero Fails Science, Math and People

Posted on by Ron Clutz

in the video above, Ron Barmby joins Angela Wheeler to discuss Sunset on Net Zero and the why green energy schemes fail.  He questions the scientific, economic, and engineering basis of global net-zero policies. Drawing on physics, real-world observations, and decades of experience, he argues that CO2’s warming effect is small and diminishing. He also challenges climate models that rely on unverified assumptions.  Barmby warns that many green energy solutions are impractical and that net-zero policies disproportionately harm the poor.

For those preferring to read, I provide below a lightly edited transcript in italics with added images.  AW refers to Angela Wheeler and RB to Ron Barmby.  H/T Climate Change Dispatch.

I think [Net Zero] is insane. It is pointless to pursue it because it will make no difference to the climate or to climate change. The climate will change as it wants to change, no matter how much CO2 we put in the air. So it’s a pointless thing to do. It is unachievable. And in the end, as always, it’s the poorest among us that will pay the highest price proportionally.

AW:  This is Climate Debrief, brought to you by the CO2 Coalition. I’m Angela Wheeler. There’s a recently published book, Sunset on Net Zero, a heretics guide to the futile CO2 target.  You’re going to hear from the author, CO2 Coalition member Ron Barmby. Ron is a professional engineer with a master’s degree from the University of Alberta and a four-decade career that’s taken him to over 40 countries across five continents. Ron’s adventures have shown him firsthand how societies really are adaptable to shifting climates.

Thank you for taking the time, Ron. Thank you for having me, Angela. Part one of your recent book is titled How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Carbon Dioxide.  Did you have a moment of clarity where this all made sense or did this happen over a period of time?

RB: It sort of happened over a period of time when the Al Gore movie came out. At first, I was impressed with it and I thought, well, this all makes sense. And then as other writers started pointing out the flaws in that movie, I decided I should look into this more too.

Al Gore with a version of the Hockey Stick graph in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth

And as an engineer, I have a background in physics and I realized that a lot of the physical characteristics that Al Gore was talking about simply aren’t true. So it developed over time. And as it developed over time, some of my friends said, Ron, you should write this down. And so I did. And that was my first book. The second book, the one that you just mentioned, is sort of an update of what’s happened since 2020 when the first book was published.

AW: What is your analysis of this global effort to reach net zero?

RB: Well, I think it’s insane. That’s what I think. It is pointless to pursue it because it will make no difference to the climate or to climate change.

I now declare the Paris Agreement for Climate Change open for signature. More than 170 countries signed the Paris Agreement. They are pledging to take steps to limit the rise of global temperatures to well below two degrees Celsius.
–Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General

The climate will change as it wants to change, no matter how much CO2 we put in the air. So it’s a pointless thing to do. The second part of it, it is unachievable.

And that’s where my engineering background comes in and many of the engineers that are part of the CO2 coalition. What they want to achieve simply can’t be done in a reasonable time frame at a reasonable cost, and it can’t be done globally. And the third thing about it is the whole thing is unfair because it punishes those that are trying to reduce CO2 emissions to the benefit of those who are only paying lip service to CO2 emissions. And in the end, as always, it’s the poorest among us that will pay the highest price proportionally.

AW: Your book sums it up well in stating that warming from future CO2 is too trivial and too gradual to justify drastic policy. Could you explain that?

RB: Well, there was a paper written in 2019 by two coalition members, Dr.  Wijngaarden and Dr. Happer.
That paper explained from physicist to physicist how we can actually measure the amount of CO2 warming that has happened. And by measuring that amount, it confirmed the equations that would predict what would happen if we doubled the CO2 emissions again, or came to a complete doubling. And looking into that paper, I tried to explain in everyday terms how valid it is and what it means. And so in that investigation, I came to the conclusion that this is understandable by many, many people. And if we got the word out, that might help shift the view on the alarmism of carbon dioxide induced global warming.

[From Wijngaarden and Happer study: My synopsis is Climate Change and CO2 Not a Problem

“Right in the middle of these curves, you can see a gap in spectrum. The gap is caused by CO2 absorbing radiation that would otherwise cool the Earth. If you double the amount of CO2, you don’t double the size of that gap. You just go from the black curve to the red curve, and you can barely see the difference. The gap hardly changes.”]

AW: Is it your position that the push for net zero stems from political exaggeration, followed by media amplification and not empirical science? Is that a fair assessment?

RB: I think that’s a fair assessment. And Margaret Thatcher is one person that I like to quote on that. Many people don’t realize that Margaret Thatcher was trained in Oxford as a chemist, as a research chemist. So she was one of the big people behind pushing for the Paris Agreement. And she wanted to reduce CO2 emissions because she was concerned. But she knew how the scientific method worked because she was trained in it. And when she saw the first reports come out, she changed her mind.

And she said, kind of paraphrasing Hamlet, that there isn’t method in their madness, there is actually madness in their method. And what Margaret Thatcher pointed out was that the desire to control CO2 emissions worldwide is something that would require a worldwide organization to organize and enforce. And so she saw it in that perspective, that it was a grand multinational global socialist effort to control the economy.

She was not far off. But I do think that on the other end of the spectrum, capitalists have found a way to exploit this energy transition and make money that they would otherwise not be able to make.

AW: Regarding net zero, your compelling argument cites the work of two other CO2 coalition members, our chairman, Dr. William Happer, and Dr. William Don Wingarden. Their work, as you mentioned, initially a series of academic papers by physicists for physicists, focuses on measuring thermal radiation transfer and had a truly profound effect because it undermines net zero. For one, they use real observations, not models. Can you please explain the difference and why is it worth noting?

RB: The scientific method is a way to make sure that we’re not fooling ourselves, that we think we understand something that we don’t really understand. And it was one thing that another CO2 member, Dr. Clauser, pointed out in his talk to Korean physicist students a couple of years ago. You have to go into science with an open mind and an unbiased mind. And you have to report faithfully what you observe. And it’s the observations of physical reality that is the link to truth in science.

So the computer models that the IPCC relies on aren’t based on observations that are linked to reality. They’re based on biases that the computer programmers put into their own models. And the brilliance behind the Van Wingarden and Happer study is that they found an existing public domain database that contained the observations needed to show that the effect of CO2 warming was very small and it’s diminishing rapidly.  Another important thing to mention is that Dr. Happer and Dr. Van Wingarden’s math matches real world data from space. This follows the scientific method, observe, predict, test, repeat.

AW: What you’re saying, and especially in your book, that the scientific method is so important, do you feel it is being neglected and perhaps not followed at the university level today?

RB: Unfortunately, I think, Angela, it’s worse than that. It’s not followed, maybe not at the university level, but I think it’s the elementary, junior high, and high school level where it needs to be brought back into the curriculum and taught. It’s when 10 and 12 year old students come home and they’re convinced that CO2 is something to be afraid of. That’s where the problem starts.  And I think that’s where the problem has to be fixed.

AW: Regarding the paper by Dr. Happer and Dr. Van Wingarden, they didn’t just claim CO2 impact is small. They measured it, verified it, and anyone can check their data. They replaced alarmist models with hard, observable facts. How can anyone argue that?

RB:  Angela, I don’t think anyone has argued with that. I think the mainstream media and the IPCC have simply ignored it. They haven’t addressed it. Coming out in the United States is a presidential directive that all science backed by the federal government must meet the scientific method standards. And I think that’s going to be a huge change worldwide when organizations, both federal and international organizations, when they are held to the standard of the scientific method, I think their karmic alarmism is just going to melt away.

AW: As a former teacher and also as a mother and now a GG, I was gratified to see your chapter Stop Scaring the Children. What compelled you to write this chapter?

RB: I’m a grandfather, and my grandkids are very concerned about CO2. And so it takes me a long time to explain to them that there’s nothing to worry about. And unfortunately, in a more of a millennial generation, there’s been a lot of extreme anxiety among that generation about climate change. And unfortunately, there’s been some tragedies that have resulted because of that. So I think it’s important to stop scaring the children. If you want to deal with a scientific methodology or a proposition you want to promote, bring it forward to trained people who can discuss it intelligently with you. Don’t bring it into the classroom of an elementary school and scare children with it.

AW: Ron, the second part of your book is Engineering 101 is the doomsday book for net zero. Why is that?

RB: Well, because there are all of the green energy sources and the green machines that run on them, and many of them just simply fail when you try to build them. And I think I quote in my book, it was James Michener who said scientists dream of great things, but engineers build them. Well, you can have great dreams. You can dream of creating a solar guidance star like Dr. Hapur did, but it’s up to the engineers to build them. And everyone is crossing their fingers until the thing actually works.

And a lot of the propositions that are out in the mainstream media, how we can avoid or reduce our CO2 emissions are either uneconomic or they hurt the environment more than they help, or they simply don’t work. And that’s my engineering perspective coming into play.

AW: I see. And that makes me think of models, climate models. For example, you can create the model, but from an engineering standpoint, and with regard to net zero, is it impossible to come up with the conclusions that they do with models?

RB: In the case of climate, yes, it is. Now in engineering we use models for a number of things, because we have verified that the equations we’ve put into the model are correct, and they can predict what might happen. And you can see that in flight simulators.

In my own background, reservoir engineering models are based on the Darcy equation, and they’re quite good at predicting what will happen, because those equations stand up to the scientific method. And so when your equations can predict what happens in the future, and it actually happens, then you verified the equation, then you verified the model. The IPCC models, they have equations in there and assumptions that simply aren’t verified, and they don’t predict accurately.

One thing that came out of the Van Wintergaarden and Happer paper, and other papers that are associated with members of the CO2, is that the CO2 warming from the IPCC models has to be at least doubled, and some would claim quadrupled, in order to get the alarmist levels of warming that they predict. And so that factor of two or four just thrown in to cause more anxiety, that’s not science, that’s scare tactics. And it’s important to point out that the IPCC is a government organization, it’s not a science organization.

AW: And the other thing is, they say carbon dioxide is the control knob for temperature, and that’s not the case, correct?

RB: You’re absolutely correct. We run on an energy balance, and that energy balance coming from the sun has part to do with the climate on earth. And as Gregory Wrightstone pointed out in his book, 90% of the global warming effect of CO2 is already behind us. So the next 10% is going to be minimal. So the next 10% is not the control knob of temperature on earth. Now, if there was no CO2 on earth, as there is no CO2 on the moon, the first amounts of CO2 added would have a dramatic effect on temperature. But that’s way, way behind us.

AW: Well, in concluding our conversation, I would like to let our viewers and listeners know that they can get your new book, Sunset on Net Zero, A Heretic’s Guide to the Futile CO2 Target at Amazon. Ron, there are many excellent points in your book we didn’t get to. I hope you will join us again soon on Climate Debrief. I’d love to, Angela. Thank you very much.

 

Wind and Solar Ruin Grid Transformers

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Reported in South China Morning News US transformers are ageing. Renewable energy could make things worse, China study finds.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

Team in China finds that high renewable energy integration
could make power transformers age nearly a quarter faster

As US President Donald Trump continues to wage war against renewable energy, a new Chinese study revealing the strain that renewable integration places on power transformers could give him fresh technical ammunition.
The researchers discovered that high renewable energy integration could make power transformers, vital
components that regulate voltage in electricity grids, age faster than previously thought.  High levels of wind and solar energy increased bidirectional power flow switching – the movement of electricity in both directions – causing additional stress that current standards did not account for, the Chongqing-based team found.

In a world grappling with transformer shortages and surging energy demand from electrification and the growth of artificial intelligence data centres, the findings suggest that renewables could place even greater strain on ageing grids, like those in the United States and Europe.

When testing their new proposed model, the team found that two-way flow caused transformers to age 23 per cent faster than accounted for by current standards, according to a paper published in the Chinese-language journal Power System Technology on January 16.

Aerial footage shows damage to burnt out power transformers near Heathrow

“This paper focuses, for the first time, on the impact of frequent bidirectional power flow switching caused by high‐penetration wind and solar integration on the operational characteristics and insulation lifespan of power transformers,” the team said.

The researchers, from the Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company, also built a “long-term lifetime loss accumulation calculation framework” – which could be used to assess the condition of transformers and guide operation and maintenance.

Speaking before the UN General Assembly in September, Trump said that renewable energy options were a “joke” and that wind turbines were “so pathetic and so bad” and expensive to operate.  In January, in his address before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump said: “China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.  “They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them.”

Hitachi Energy Chongqing Transformer Co. Ltd. is located in Chongqing City. As one of the largest transformer factories worldwide within Hitachi Energy, the company focuses on the design and manufacture of power transformer, shunt reactor and HVDC transformer (High Voltage Direct Current).

Traditional energy grids had a centralised, one-way flow of power from the producers to the consumers. This is shifting towards a two-way system where electricity can also flow back from solar, wind and energy storage sources into the grid.

Transformers are a basic and critical component of electric grids, adjusting the voltage of electricity so it can travel efficiently through the grid.  They can either “step up” or increase the voltage so electricity can travel long distances through power lines without losing strength, or “step down” the voltage once it reaches its destination so it can be safely used by appliances.

Power transformers are large units which transmit high-voltage electricity over long distances, while distribution transformers are smaller units that help supply local areas.

As transformers age, their components can degrade, which can lead to higher maintenance demand, limit efficiency and reliability, and increase the risk of a major grid failure.  The average age of power transformers in use worldwide is around 40 years, according to electrical equipment supplier Reinhausen.

In the US and Europe – home to the oldest power grids in the world – some transformers date back even further. Much of the US electric grid infrastructure was built 50 to 75 years ago, and nearly 70 per cent of power transformers in the country are over 25 years old, according to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison last May.

More than half of the transformers in this country are becoming too old to reliably function and can fail at any time.  We not only need to build new transformers, but we also need to replace the ones that are ageing out.     — US Department of Energy in 2024

But expanding and replacing transformer infrastructure is not only expensive, it could even be impossible in the short term due to long delivery times and a global shortage of power transformers, according to Reinhausen.

Average lead times for large power transformers had almost doubled since 2021, with securing transformers taking up to four years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report last February.

According to the IEA, the production of power transformers is technically complex and requires advanced facilities. China, South Korea, Turkey, and Italy accounted for 50 per cent of total global power transformer trade in 2023, it said, with China alone representing half that share.

Top 10 Power Transformer Manufacturers In The World

Both the US and Europe have more than doubled their import trade value for power transformers since 2018. The US primarily sources transformers from Mexico, Europe and South Korea, while China now accounts for over 60 per cent of the European Union’s imports, according to the IEA.

Imports account for an estimated 80 per cent of the US power transformer supply, and 50 per cent of the distribution transformer supply, according to a report by energy research and consultancy group Wood Mackenzie in August.

In the US, the supply shortage for power transformers hit 30 per cent in 2025,
while the shortage for distribution transformers hit 10 per cent, the report said.