Imagine 100% Renewable Energy
The IEEE Spectrum may be the nation’s, and thus the world’s, most authoritative technology publication. So, when it solemnly hails the possibility of “100% Renewable Energy,” even us “climate deniers” wince and waffle.
Incandescent on the article’s opening page in its May issue is an indigo ocean of solar panels on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, fronted by a gigantic array of shining white Tesla PowerPack2 battery systems. Together they constitute the net-zero renewable power grid of the tiny Pacific Island in the sun.
Hey, “under ideal conditions,” it can supply 13 megawatts! Woo-hoo. Multiply that by a factor of roughly 64 billion and it could fuel all U.S. electrical power. Fulfilling the Green dream of a renewable grid, it would eclipse much of the U.S. land mass and its unsightly agricultural uses.
The good news is that the Kauai power grid survived the collapse last year of its largest oil-fired turbine generator by seamlessly shifting its load to sunbeams and batteries.
The bad news is you get to pay for this green miracle of “energy” production with a cumulative trillions of dollars-worth of taxes and subsidies.
You might imagine that as an elite technology voice, the Spectrum would know the difference between energy and power. Solar panels and windmills and other sources favored by the climate catastrophe set do capture energy from sun and wind. But they do not create power. Power is what runs your iPhone or your automobile or your furnace. It is highly processed and refined energy.
To create power entails an array of other costly technologies described in the article, such as grid-forming or grid-following inverters. These intricate devices take the fitful transient flows of energy from the panels in the luminous hours of the day or windmills by gust and puff and flurry, producing reliable synchronous 60 hertz power for the grid. Even those Tesla batteries entail conversion of their direct current flows into AC for passage across the grid, and then back again to smooth currents for electrical machinery.
In order to backup those 13 optimal net zero megawatts–70% renewable, crows the Spectrum, highest in the world–it is necessary to deploy some 150 megawatt hours of battery power. The “grid forming inverters” like Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), GE (NYSE: GE), Hitachi (OTCMKTS: HTHIY), Siemens (OTCMKTS: SIEGY) et. al. rapidly adapt the direct current flows of the batteries to the synchronous AC requirements of the power lines. That is the source of the power.
By contrast, the current old-fashioned grid uses electricity from synchronous generators based on large rotatory mechanisms that produce AC at specified frequency and voltage –not “energy” but actual power. With rotors that weigh as much as 100 tons, their torque imparts kinetic inertia that keeps the system going whenever the grid falters or fails. These systems naturally tend to sync and enable a grid restart in the face of a failure, a hit of lightning or a fallen tree. With the kinetic energy stored in the rotor mass, the 60-hertz frequency is electromechanically linked to the rotor speed.
The new Kauai green grid substitutes a costly kluge of inverters. Some are grid-following inverters that begin to follow each other parasitically when they proliferate. Others are more expensive grid-forming inverters that simulate in software the natural effect of rotor mass and torque to assure near 60-hertz performance.
This klugey apparatus of solar panels and windmills is essentially just a symbol of social compliance–totem poles and druidical sun henges for worshippers of the secular green religion. They actually make the grid less reliable, more complex and fragile, more vulnerable to sabotage, more dependent on long transmission lines across the countryside and vastly more expensive. Meanwhile, they waste and despoil the one scarce resource of the planet–arable land. Without mandates and subsidies from government, no one would fill vast fields with fragile blue glass rather than “amber waves of grain.” No one would flay the “beautiful for spacious skies” with the racket and rapine of whirling scythes rather than open it up to kites and bird songs.
Except during blackouts and other power outages, this secular religion has mostly unseen victims. Most of the cost comes in more expensive power and a more sluggish and less creative and competitive economy. Although happy to manufacture batteries and solar panels and mine graphite and lithium for our green pols, the Chinese, more engineering savvy and less sanctimonious than us, will have nothing to do with these pretentious vanities in their own country. The Chinese favor coal, nuclear and hydropower. In essence, they deem our sacrifices no different from those Aztec ceremonial rites, dragging slave girls to the altar by the tens of thousands for bloody garottes, in tribute to the prevailing gods.
As investors, you should beware of all such pogroms to the deities of DC.