Green cars in a cold, white world

 What happens when all the gas cars and trucks are gone?  

What will we do when the wind doesn’t blow                                and the sun doesn’t shine?  

[Smart] Politician who have followed the Green Dream for awhile are finding the ideal of a fossil-free or nuclear-free world can quickly become a nightmare.  So why is Oregon sliding into the fossil-free pit without having learned from obvious examples of failure, undeniable  physics or a simple reality check?  Why are pretty ideals of perfection more powerful than reality for some?  Dreams of a Utopian existence are OK for kids, but when our leaders exhibit such naivety, it becomes scary, and a sign they need to be replaced.  

Warning:  The catastrophes that are to come are not a surprise to those who have been planning the transformation of America (and the world).  They welcome your suffering and inconvenience as a sign of their progress.  

Opinion: Imagine Virginia’s icy traffic catastrophe — but with only electric vehicles

Washington Post, January 4, 2022  By Charles Lane

Sometime after 3 a.m. Tuesday, as an epic 48-mile winter traffic jam on Interstate 95 in Virginia dragged on, a long-haul trucker from Canada heard a knock at the door of his cab. It was one of the hundreds of other motorists stuck in subfreezing temperatures with no food or water.

The not-so-unprecedented event — essentially a repeat of what happened on a wintry night in the D.C. area 11 years ago this month — therefore provides a reality check on the push by government and business to electrify cars and trucks.

It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. 

Any EV driver stuck on I-95 was right to be anxious — not only about a rapidly dying battery but also about recharging it. Cold would make that process much more time-consuming, assuming there was a charging station nearby, and that the electric power system hadn’t gone out (as it did in parts of Virginia on Monday).

Read the entire article at:     https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/04/imagine-virginias-icy-traffic-catastrophe-with-only-electric-vehicles/

Texas Ice Storm Highlights Fragility of Wind Power

Center for Accountability in Science, February 18, 2021

Texas’s use of wind power turned a bad storm into a nightmare for millions of Texans who were left to ration their power — or left without power altogether. As ice built up on the blades of the turbines, much of the state’s generation of wind power went still. In many states, going without wind power would not be a significant problem, but in Texas, wind power is the second-largest source of energy, with natural gas being the top source. Roughly 23 percent of Texas’s power grid is fueled by wind power. 

To get the wind turbines back in action, renewable energy providers had to turn to some fossil-fuel-powered friends: helicopters. The helicopters are used to fly a de-icing solution up to the turbine blades to clear the ice safely without the risk of harming anyone below. The juxtaposition of a fossil-fuel-powered helicopter being used to rescue a wind turbine garnered a lot of attention on social media. 

The ice storm in Texas has demonstrated the dangerous mindset of demonizing any one product, such as fossil fuels. No one energy source is all good or all bad. 

Texas has been able to thrive using wind power, but it is not a universally reliable energy source. Cities and states must recognize that unexpected issues can arise and they need to have a diversified power grid that can handle these unforeseen events.

Europe Energy Crisis Goes Global

To see climate politics turn really crazy, add fuel shortages and high prices.

Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2022. Opinion. By Holman Jenkins

Hard to believe, but politics sometimes exhibits a pull toward the rational, especially when voters find it difficult to pay their bills, heat their homes and keep their jobs.

That’s happening in Europe now thanks to home-heating and electricity prices up 300% at the wholesale level since last winter. In a quote echoed across the continent, one of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s parliamentary allies warned on the weekend of “catastrophic” damage to the government: “Elections are won and lost in people’s wallets.”

By undiversifying its base-load power supply away from dirty coal while also dumping nuclear, Europe has invited all the consequences you read about: ill-advised reliance on Russian natural gas, frantic bidding wars with China for liquefied-gas shipments, fear of rolling blackouts whenever a French nuclear plant needs maintenance or the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud

The gestures governments have been enacting are “not meaningful in the race to combat climate change.”

The electric vehicles that politicians particularly love to subsidize “will not significantly reduce carbon dioxide output, only shift its location.”   … European investors simply relocated their emissions-heavy processes to places outside the European Union.

And yet the U.S. is not immune to these pathologies. Texas discovered as much in last winter’s epic blackouts. After the state chose for decades to throw money at renewables rather than freeze-proof its energy infrastructure, the out-of-state power supplies that were supposed to be its insurance policy never materialized. Ditto California, which invested in renewables rather than fireproof its grid and now is beyond out-of-state rescue. Its citizens suffer recurrent intentional blackouts to reduce fire risk. One of these winters, the Northeast will experience its own calamitous outages due to its refusal to authorize the gas pipelines and power plants needed to support a crowd-pleasing rush to renewables.

                                                        zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

The Northwest will experience outages too as clean natural gas and renewable nuclear options are taken off the table. And still, no Faraday cages for the transformers that power the grid!  That long dark winter of death Biden talks about won’t be about a virus, but a pandemic of ideological destruction.