By Arif @Adobe Stock
American Cavies and Magical Green Thinking
Will Minnesota be left fumbling in the dark? Governor Tim Walz has signed one of America’s most aggressive climate laws. The law mandates that 100% of the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2040. Reports the WSJ, “Politicians like Mr. Walz are destroying the electricity markets that are essential to economic success and even individual survival.” By pursuing net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, a combination of state mandates and utility company decisions are moving away from those reliable sources toward unreliable wind and solar power.
The Inevitable becomes Reality
Two things that will happen:
- the wind will stop blowing
- the sun won’t shine
Tragedy of the Commons: Running Short of Power
Mr. Walz and net-zero backers surely assumed they could buy backup power from across the region, but other states assumed the same thing. In a classic tragedy of the commons, Mr. Walz and other leaders act as if they don’t realize their neighbors are also on track to run short of power.
Minnesota is moving to close its largest power station—the coal-fired Sherco plant—by the end of the decade. It has already shut down one of the plant’s three units, with the second going offline by 2026. The largest solar project in the Upper Midwest is supposed to replace it, but when it fails, Minnesota will have to rely on other power sources to keep the lights on.
Will Minnesota Keep the Lights On?
The largest solar project in the Upper Midwest is supposed to replace it, but when it fails, Minnesota will have to rely on other power sources to keep the lights on.
Well, why not get power from Wisconsin? Isn’t the Badger State relatively close?
The Badger State has its own net-zero mandate and is rapidly decommissioning power plants, while its largest utility plans to phase out coal power within a decade. Likewise, Illinois, where a net-zero requirement has already contributed to power-supply issues, with multiple plant closings under way.
Francis Menton, aka the Manhattan Contrarian, would require a demonstration program, including farming and manufacturing, to show how a zero-emissions electrical grid is supposed to work for America’s guinea pigs. A demonstration program seems like the logical first step before trying to build such a thing for our entire population of three hundred million as involuntary domestic cavies.
In the Manhattan Contrarian, Mr. Menton introduces readers to a new green voice: that of Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman, who in 2022 took out the former congresswoman, Liz Cheney, in a primary.
In Jackson, WY, earlier in the month, Ms. Hageman went public with her demand at a town hall meeting.
[Hageman] proposed a pilot project that would strip Boulder, Colorado, a progressive enclave, of its fossil fuel infrastructure — all to be replaced with windmills and solar panels on the city’s open space. “The pilot project is, you take out all their gas stations,” she said to a crowd of about 70 people in the Teton County Library. “We take away all their internal combustion engines — cars. We take away all of their highways and streets, because that’s all oil-and-gas-produced.” . . . “They’ve been a no-growth city for decades,” Hageman said, “so they have a lot of open space around them. We fill out open space with windmills and solar panels, and we’ll see if we can actually run a city of 100,000 people [with] no fossil fuels whatsoever.”
Once the applause and laughter faded, grumpy Boulder City Councilman Mark Wallach alerted voters to how much he was not entertained. Mr. Menton gives Wallach’s reaction:
“One of the things that makes people so leery of politics and politicians is when people make ridiculous suggestions like that,” [Wallach] said in a telephone interview with WyoFile. “Nobody on the Boulder Council suggested we can do without all the fossil fuels at this point,” he said. “We make efforts to do better — to recognize that climate change is real and we do things we can do to combat it.”
At this point, Mr. Menton has heard enough. Back straight and leaning forward, he asks, “What am I missing?
If the good people of Boulder are demanding that the whole country be force-marched to a zero emissions future, why shouldn’t they be willing to step up themselves and show that the goal is feasible to achieve? A simple zero-emissions-grid demonstration project is all that it will take.
Mr. Menton also wonders why Congressman Hageman needs to be punitive about green energy claims.
The claim of the green energy advocates is that electricity from wind and sun are cheaper than electricity from hydrocarbon fuels, and that electric cars and electric heat will be cheaper and better than the cars and heat we have now.
… there is no need to forcibly take away the cars and the gas stations. Just have them build the magical zero-emissions grid and, if they can do it, they will have plenty of electricity to power everything, and the gas-powered cars and gas stations will rapidly fade away.
Do you remember what happened in February 2021? It turned out to be the worst wind drought so far in US history, as noted by one of Mr. Menton’s fans:
Texas needed seven days of natural gas (or battery) backup for that wind drought. But Texas natural gas production declined during the very cold weather and could not meet demand! Having more Texas natural gas power plants would not have helped because there was not enough just in time natural gas production for the existing February 2021 natural gas power plants.
Inconvenient Truths
Mr. Menton has written many times of the Gorona del Viento project on El Hierro Island in Spain’s Canary Islands.
Suffice it to say that El Hierro was absolutely intended to be a demonstration of a zero emissions grid. A facility of five large wind turbines and a massive pumped-storage hydro backup facility (Gorona del Viento) was built and opened in 2014. The website of Gorona del Viento continues to proclaim on its opening page: “An island 100% renewable energy.” Hah!
It’s an island of about 10,000 people. Average electricity demand is 4-5 MW, and peak demand is about 7.5 MW. Roger Andrews did an independent analysis of the project for the Energy Matters website back in 2017. They built wind turbines with nameplate capacity of 11.5 MW on a mountainside in the trade-winds zone — about the most favorable wind conditions in the world. The hydro storage facility has a capacity of some 270 MWh, which is about 54 – 68 hours of average usage. (By contrast, New York governor Kathy Hochul has a big storage initiative to spend about $10 billion to build one hour of storage.). Doesn’t it sound like El Hierro has what they need to make this work?
For the full year 2023, the percent of electricity for the island supplied by the wind/storage system for the full year was 35%. The other 65% came from the backup diesel generator. The best month for the wind/storage system was July, when it supplied 62% of the island’s electricity. But then there was October, when it only supplied 10%.
A Failing Electric Grid
Many of the US grid operators responsible for balancing electricity between states have warned about what’s coming, continues the WSJ.
The CEO of Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator, which oversees most of the Great Lakes region’s electric grid (including Minnesota), recently noted that the energy transition poses “material, adverse challenges to electric reliability,” and that wind and solar power “lack certain key reliability attributes that are needed to keep the grid reliable every hour of the year.”
In other words, replacing traditional generation with wind and solar means an electricity grid that routinely fails.
Voters need to hope state leaders wake up, and soon.
There’s zero chance Mr. Walz will abandon his signature climate policy during a national campaign, but no state should endanger its economy and residents by pursuing net zero.
