We’ve shared stories about cities, states, and nations forced to pay so-called renewable providers for this or that. Taxpayers paid subsidies to get them built, and subsidized them to make the price appear reasonable. Taxpayers pay extra in taxes, licensing, fees, fines, and the rest to feed that beast, on top of the price they pay for the electricity they actually use, and they even have to pay when there’s no wind or sun. But it also applies if there’s too much of either or both.
The grid infrastructure is so behind the demand of woke politicians and activist groups to plan these things (both funded by wind and solar lobbies) that excess generation is just as or more likely to bring the grid down, so you also get to pay them to stop generating power or pay consumers to use more.
Energy chiefs are drawing up plans to stop the electricity grid being overwhelmed by solar power this summer.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) said it would be forced to use “more tools, more often” to keep power networks stable when sunny weather caused surges in energy generation.
This would include paying households and factories to consume excess power for the first time, as well as potentially issuing unprecedented orders to switch off large power stations.
Given that Miliband also wants to triple wind power too, we could easily have 70 GW of wind and solar chasing less than 40 GW of demand.
According to the Telegraph, we might have to pay a large power station to shut down under such circumstances. Yes, the same power stations Miliband wants to close! But the Telegraph misses the point – there will no gas or biomass power stations contracted to supply at that time of day, because there is already too much capacity projected.
The grid has long needed to be hardened, and there will always be occasional brownouts or blackouts, but typically that’s just due to storms and transmission line issues. Large outages are a combination of system failures, and rare, but thanks to expensive and neither renewable nor green wind and solar, we get the risk we already had with all these new problems at significantly higher prices, and realistically, a lot more downtime risk.
No wind or sun, no electricity (battery storage backups are neither economically nor physically realistic). Too much sun and wind, and again, the risk of no electricity (and battery storage backups are neither economically nor physically realistic here either). It appears we’ve literally run into a room full of loaded guns with nothing but a promissory note to reimburse generators for a bad deal we subsidized in the first place.
One more point. When they are decomissioned and end of life, you’ll likley have to pay for that too because there’s no industry wide plan for what to do with the leftovers, some of which are incredibly toxic when damaged or scapped.
