Environmentally Friendly Blackouts

What happens when a nation succumbs to environmentalism and tries to rid itself of dirty energy?

What happens to it when it mandates clean sources of renewable energy?

You guessed it: the lights go out.

Currently, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is hard at work trying to revolutionize the way we produce electricity. It wants to shut down coal burning sources in favor of solar panels and windmills.

They are so much cleaner that no one asks whether they can do the job.

Everyone loves “renewable energy.”  If we are worship the goddess Nature, She will bountifully provide all the energy we need. How could She not?

The renewable energy mania has not yet become fully operational in America. Before we go too far down the road, we should examine what out-of-control environmentalism has produced in another place, that being Germany.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Germany has become a laboratory for crackpot environmentalism.

Happily for us, but not for the German people, the cost of renewable energy is an extreme risk of power outages. That is, blackouts.

The choice is not between coal and wind; the choice is between coal and nothing.

The German newspaper Die Welt, reports:

Last winter, on several occasions, Germany escaped only just large-scale power outages. Next winter the risk of large blackouts is even greater. 

Last year the situation was very bad:

The dramatic tone of the report by the Federal Network Agency (FNA) on the near-blackouts last winter is hard to overestimate: although the cold spell was short and mild, the situation in the German electricity network was “very serious” according to the Agency.

Next winter is likely to be worse:

Next winter, which will possibly be even more severe, everything could get much worse, officials warn. Because then even less base-load gas- and coal-fired power plants will be available to reliably compensate for wind lulls and the almost complete absence of solar power for months.

Wind lulls and less sunshine… who would have imagined such a thing?

Whose fault is it?

The culprit for the looming crisis is the single most important instrument of German energy policy: the "Renewable Energy Law" (EEG). It stipulates the priority of green electricity supply. What was once useful as an aid for the market introduction of wind and solar power, has today, 12 years later, disastrous side effects.

It pushes those plants which alone can guarantee a stable power supply, i.e. gas- and coal-fired power plants, out of the market far too early. More and more facilities are being decommissioned. The result is a significantly higher risk of large-scale power outages, so-called blackouts, whose duration and propagation is hard to predict.

How much will blackouts cost?

The economic cost of a wide-scale blackout are measured in billions of Euros per day. If power outages last longer, one has to expect a high number of deaths. The most important test of energy policy is now the stability of power – so far only the cost of the green energy transition has been focused upon.

Because the federal government does not have the guts to start an overdue and fundamental debate about the usefulness of a 12-year-old, now totally outdated, "launch aid" called EEG, it now threatens to over-steer, with the green energy transition ending up in a crash. Fasten your seat belts.

Reactionary environmentalists so love Nature that they are even willing even to sacrifice human lives to Her.