An Energy System that Works?

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Energy storage is the Achilles Heel of Climate extremists, explains the Manhattan Contrarian. Despite the climate extremists – the media, academia, most big corporations, and the Executive Branch of the government – apparently controlling all the commanding heights of our culture, Francis Menton advises doubters not to worry.

Why Not Worry?

The Big Blowback

What matters, Mr. Menton assures readers, is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work. It cannot work. The real question is when and how it fails. Or, how big the political blowback will be when the inevitable happens.

The main Achilles heel of the proposals is the problem of energy storage.

Environmentalist Turned Climate Skeptic

There are some discouraged skeptics out there. As an example, the Manhattan Contrarian cites Michael Schellenberger, an environmentalist who recently came to the reckoning that the climate alarm is a scam.

How Did Schellenberger Come to His Reckoning?

In 2020 he published the book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.” But despite getting his own views out there in a book, in the Spiked interview he remarks that essentially all voices of reason on the subject of climate, including his own, are getting completely drowned out in the public square:

[T]he climate movement is bizarre, admits Schellenberger.

[I]t’s taken control of all these elite institutions. The movement’s ideology is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It’s the official religion of the United Nations. It’s the official religion of the World Economic Forum. Climate activists have made the great reset, which is fundamentally about a transition to renewables for climate change, the dominant ideology of the global elites. . . . [T]he whole mainstream news media and the global elites are basically part of this cult. The idea that the world is coming to an end is mainstream among journalists.

Schellenberger thinks the climate extremists have won… their demands and their discourse are so mainstream.

The Manhattan Contrarian Offers Hope

Hold on, don’t be so sure the extremists will win, urges Mr. Menton.

The extremists may seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but the missing piece is that they have no idea how our energy system works, and they are demanding a replacement that has zero chance of success. It’s only a question of when and how it will fail, and how damaging the consequences of the failure will be.

Central Planners, Part of the Problem

The current cult of the academic, journalistic and governmental elites suffers from the eternal problem of all central planners. They think they are brilliant — and in some ways they might be (high scores on SATs?) — but they have no idea at all how to engineer an energy system that will work. We all eagerly await for their planned utopia to crash and burn.

Not a Lot of People Know …

Mr. Menton posts on his website the hourly data on UK electricity generation from its solar panels in a chart from a website of Paul Homewood. According to Mr. Menton:

The typical electricity usage in the UK at this time of year is given by Homewood as 840 GWh, which would be 35 GWh for each hour of the day. The capacity of the solar generation facilities in the UK is given as 14 GW. That would mean, if the solar facilities produced at full capacity for the 24 hours, they would have produced some 336 GWh, or a full 40% of the UK’s usage for the day. But hey, it’s late November. The days are short, and the UK has lots of clouds. So how much did the solar facilities actually produce today?

Go to the Manhattan Contrarian to view the results.

And take a moment to thank Mr. Menton for his continued tenacity to educate the public on how the climate environmentalists are planning an energy system that realists understand will crash and burn.

Thank you, Francis Menton.