I've been around since before clean energy was cool. Does that make me a dinosaur? Maybe, but it also gives me perspective.
Let's dial it back to 2008 or so. Clean energy was a dream, a wish, and a lot of people didn't believe in climate change because they were allowed to think free thoughts. Believe it or not, this was in the time before climate change became a new religion. Like a lot of people back then, I thought clean energy might be a good idea. Of course, back then it consisted of ideas like energy efficiency, distributed generation, and a very limited amount of wind energy. Solar was something you put on your own roof to reduce your energy costs and provide power during outages... if the sun was shining. Clean Energy was local.
But even at that time, there were rumblings from people who lived near small wind turbine installations complaining that they hated them. They were noisy and they decimated birds and bats. We should have listened back then...
However, the political winds soon changed direction and clean energy got a little bolder, and much better funded. Suddenly, wind turbines were the place to be to shovel tax dollar into your pocket as fast the blades spun. Big Wind was born, and it was HUNGRY! It proceeded to cover vast portions of the Midwest, where farmers were told they could farm around them and collect a huge windfall, pardon the pun. Some fell for it and were instantly sorry. Others fell for it but moved away with their windfall because who needs to do the hard work of farming when you can sit on the porch and watch the turbines spin? Of course, sitting on THAT porch was no longer pleasant, so they rented their farmland and moved elsewhere.
This is the moment in time when Big Wind got all chummy with Big Green. Suddenly, public interest groups like Sierra Club and Earth Justice were living just a little better with generous grant funding from clean energy foundations and other important donors. And these public interest groups soon stopped talking about energy efficiency, distributed generation, and local solutions and started talking about wind "farms", tax credits, and a completely contrived non-product, "Renewable Energy Certificates." A REC is defined as "the environmental and social attributes of clean energy generation." As if an electron can be separated from its attributes. RECs aren't real. The attributes go with the electron. Whoever uses the electron gets the attributes. You can't sell those separately to another user. But, yes they did. Something was starting to stink.
Big Wind said it needed lots of government funding and tax breaks. It said they could power our entire country with their wonderful new generators. If they overbuilt them to a mind-boggling degree, then they would always be producing the power we needed somewhere. So our government gave them all the funding they wanted. Big Wind, Big Green and Big Government declared fossil fuel dead.
So they built way too many wind "farms" in certain areas, but not anywhere near where the important elite people lived. Those people were fortunate enough to beat them back with political pressure and fat wallets. It's the regular folks who got saddled with them.
Except wind turbines are not reliable. They only produce energy when nature provides the fuel. And it soon became apparent that we could not power our country with just one source for electricity that was not reliable all the time.
Enter Big Solar. The collective Bigs (wind, solar, green and government) said we could reliably power our entire country if they could also build a massive amount of solar "farms". So the government funded those as well and the energy companies proliferated and began to build solar on every piece of farmland they could lease. People began to hate them as much (or more) than wind turbines. Solar is quiet, they said. Solar has no moving parts. Solar is cheap if we import the panels from China. They told us that if we had lots of wind turbines and solar panels that we could power our entire country with them. They insisted if we had enough solar and wind, something would always be generating enough power to supply our needs.
Except solar isn't reliable. It only produces energy when nature provides the fuel. Vast regions, such as the Midwest, that covered their ground with wind and solar soon began to have reliability issues. It was feast or famine -- too much wind and solar, or not enough, depending on weather. Storage was not a practical or economic solution. It soon became apparent that even with a huge amount of wind and solar, it just wasn't true that something was always generating enough power to serve the region.
Meanwhile, due to all the government subsidies, wind and solar became the cheapest power available. Because the cost of producing it was funded by the government, these generators could bid into regional markets at low cost, maybe even zero. How about that? Some "free" power courtesy of trillions of your tax dollars! Except that's not really how markets work. Generators bid in and the bids are stacked in price order. Beginning at the lowest cost, the market buys available resources in order. When the need is covered, the buying stops. The highest price paid is then paid to every generator in the stack. So, even if a resource is bid at zero, it ends up earning the top clearing price. But, back on topic. Because reliable generators like gas, nuclear, coal that can run when we need them have an actual, unsubsidized cost, they cannot bid in at zero. Therefore, they are higher in the cost stack. Some are just priced out of the market. If you're too expensive to compete, you make no revenue. No revenue means you are out of business. So, the coal, gas, and nuclear plants began to close. And the Bigs crowed about how many "dirty" power plants they had closed and how wonderful everything was.
But wait... big wind and solar are not reliable all the time and without those "dirty" plants to back them up, we started to have reliability problems that could tank the whole wind and solar scheme. So they told another lie to prop up the first two.
Suddenly, we need a whole bunch of new electric transmission lines so that wind and solar can be shipped to other regions of the country. Certainly if they could spread their failure over an even bigger area from coast to coast, their other lies about wind and solar being able to produce reliable power when needed would finally pan out. Now that reliability issues have surfaced and continue to expand every year, they blame it on "extreme" weather caused by climate change, and not on reality: there are not enough "dirty" plants to back up wind and solar. Wind and solar cannot supply reliable power for our nation without a huge amount of back up nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants. Reliability issues are incorrectly blamed on the weather and climate change.
Building an enormous amount of solar, wind and transmission isn't going to change the weather. See how that circular argument goes? Clean energy causes reliability problems but that's only because the weather is extreme because of climate change. If we just keep building wind and solar, we can change the climate and stop extreme weather and then clean energy will be reliable. Ya know, I think your arrogance has gone to your head. You can't change the weather. It's not "extreme" due to climate change. That's just one more lie from the Bigs.
If we continue down the path where clean energy needs new transmission subsidies, what's next? Big transmission isn't going to solve our problems. It's just going to make the failure and reliability issues even bigger. Big transmission is just another lie, meant to prop up the earlier lies of Big Solar, Big Wind and Big Green. But it is a series of lies that our current Big Government supports in its quest for power.
Whoever controls the power has the power.
It's time to stop. I don't believe the lies anymore. Bring back the local solutions.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!
Let's dial it back to 2008 or so. Clean energy was a dream, a wish, and a lot of people didn't believe in climate change because they were allowed to think free thoughts. Believe it or not, this was in the time before climate change became a new religion. Like a lot of people back then, I thought clean energy might be a good idea. Of course, back then it consisted of ideas like energy efficiency, distributed generation, and a very limited amount of wind energy. Solar was something you put on your own roof to reduce your energy costs and provide power during outages... if the sun was shining. Clean Energy was local.
But even at that time, there were rumblings from people who lived near small wind turbine installations complaining that they hated them. They were noisy and they decimated birds and bats. We should have listened back then...
However, the political winds soon changed direction and clean energy got a little bolder, and much better funded. Suddenly, wind turbines were the place to be to shovel tax dollar into your pocket as fast the blades spun. Big Wind was born, and it was HUNGRY! It proceeded to cover vast portions of the Midwest, where farmers were told they could farm around them and collect a huge windfall, pardon the pun. Some fell for it and were instantly sorry. Others fell for it but moved away with their windfall because who needs to do the hard work of farming when you can sit on the porch and watch the turbines spin? Of course, sitting on THAT porch was no longer pleasant, so they rented their farmland and moved elsewhere.
This is the moment in time when Big Wind got all chummy with Big Green. Suddenly, public interest groups like Sierra Club and Earth Justice were living just a little better with generous grant funding from clean energy foundations and other important donors. And these public interest groups soon stopped talking about energy efficiency, distributed generation, and local solutions and started talking about wind "farms", tax credits, and a completely contrived non-product, "Renewable Energy Certificates." A REC is defined as "the environmental and social attributes of clean energy generation." As if an electron can be separated from its attributes. RECs aren't real. The attributes go with the electron. Whoever uses the electron gets the attributes. You can't sell those separately to another user. But, yes they did. Something was starting to stink.
Big Wind said it needed lots of government funding and tax breaks. It said they could power our entire country with their wonderful new generators. If they overbuilt them to a mind-boggling degree, then they would always be producing the power we needed somewhere. So our government gave them all the funding they wanted. Big Wind, Big Green and Big Government declared fossil fuel dead.
So they built way too many wind "farms" in certain areas, but not anywhere near where the important elite people lived. Those people were fortunate enough to beat them back with political pressure and fat wallets. It's the regular folks who got saddled with them.
Except wind turbines are not reliable. They only produce energy when nature provides the fuel. And it soon became apparent that we could not power our country with just one source for electricity that was not reliable all the time.
Enter Big Solar. The collective Bigs (wind, solar, green and government) said we could reliably power our entire country if they could also build a massive amount of solar "farms". So the government funded those as well and the energy companies proliferated and began to build solar on every piece of farmland they could lease. People began to hate them as much (or more) than wind turbines. Solar is quiet, they said. Solar has no moving parts. Solar is cheap if we import the panels from China. They told us that if we had lots of wind turbines and solar panels that we could power our entire country with them. They insisted if we had enough solar and wind, something would always be generating enough power to supply our needs.
Except solar isn't reliable. It only produces energy when nature provides the fuel. Vast regions, such as the Midwest, that covered their ground with wind and solar soon began to have reliability issues. It was feast or famine -- too much wind and solar, or not enough, depending on weather. Storage was not a practical or economic solution. It soon became apparent that even with a huge amount of wind and solar, it just wasn't true that something was always generating enough power to serve the region.
Meanwhile, due to all the government subsidies, wind and solar became the cheapest power available. Because the cost of producing it was funded by the government, these generators could bid into regional markets at low cost, maybe even zero. How about that? Some "free" power courtesy of trillions of your tax dollars! Except that's not really how markets work. Generators bid in and the bids are stacked in price order. Beginning at the lowest cost, the market buys available resources in order. When the need is covered, the buying stops. The highest price paid is then paid to every generator in the stack. So, even if a resource is bid at zero, it ends up earning the top clearing price. But, back on topic. Because reliable generators like gas, nuclear, coal that can run when we need them have an actual, unsubsidized cost, they cannot bid in at zero. Therefore, they are higher in the cost stack. Some are just priced out of the market. If you're too expensive to compete, you make no revenue. No revenue means you are out of business. So, the coal, gas, and nuclear plants began to close. And the Bigs crowed about how many "dirty" power plants they had closed and how wonderful everything was.
But wait... big wind and solar are not reliable all the time and without those "dirty" plants to back them up, we started to have reliability problems that could tank the whole wind and solar scheme. So they told another lie to prop up the first two.
Suddenly, we need a whole bunch of new electric transmission lines so that wind and solar can be shipped to other regions of the country. Certainly if they could spread their failure over an even bigger area from coast to coast, their other lies about wind and solar being able to produce reliable power when needed would finally pan out. Now that reliability issues have surfaced and continue to expand every year, they blame it on "extreme" weather caused by climate change, and not on reality: there are not enough "dirty" plants to back up wind and solar. Wind and solar cannot supply reliable power for our nation without a huge amount of back up nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants. Reliability issues are incorrectly blamed on the weather and climate change.
Building an enormous amount of solar, wind and transmission isn't going to change the weather. See how that circular argument goes? Clean energy causes reliability problems but that's only because the weather is extreme because of climate change. If we just keep building wind and solar, we can change the climate and stop extreme weather and then clean energy will be reliable. Ya know, I think your arrogance has gone to your head. You can't change the weather. It's not "extreme" due to climate change. That's just one more lie from the Bigs.
If we continue down the path where clean energy needs new transmission subsidies, what's next? Big transmission isn't going to solve our problems. It's just going to make the failure and reliability issues even bigger. Big transmission is just another lie, meant to prop up the earlier lies of Big Solar, Big Wind and Big Green. But it is a series of lies that our current Big Government supports in its quest for power.
Whoever controls the power has the power.
It's time to stop. I don't believe the lies anymore. Bring back the local solutions.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!
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