Utopia, you are standing in it!

Despite overblown promises, offshore wind power is as meaningless as its onshore cousin. Centuries of sailing the high seas provided the clue: when the wind stops blowing, the boat ain’t going.

So, if seafarers had nothing but curses for their days in the doldrums, why would offshore wind power be any different?

Not only is offshore wind power just as fickle as the onshore kind, it is insanely expensive. Not least due to the exponential increase in operations and maintenance costs, thanks to the salt-laden marine environment in which these things operate offshore.

But, as the pitch goes, the insane cost is purportedly offset by “wind that is always blowing out at sea”.

Paul Homewood tackles that grand mistruth below.

How Volatile Is Offshore Wind?
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
17 March 2022

It is commonly claimed that the wind is much more constant and…

Frost fair
Natural climate variation has always been, and still is, a fact of life, regardless of minor changes to trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Extreme weather not just a modern phenomenon as study reveals how British towns experienced drastic climate during ‘Little Ice Age’
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Extreme weather caused by global warming is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, claims the Daily Telegraph.

However, a research project has thrown light on the catastrophic climate shift endured by England just a few centuries ago, which brought snowstorms that lasted weeks, flooding which washed away entire villages and winds that sank flotillas of ships.

From the 1500s to the 1700s, England went through an unusually cold and stormy period, nicknamed the Little Ice Age, which was possibly caused either by reduced activity from the sun, volcanic eruptions or atmospheric changes.

One of the solutions that our Minister of Energy proposes for the energy transition is interconnectivity. In the webinar she gave at the end of 2020 (see previous post) she was pleased that Belgium got connected to the German grid and therefor could start to take advantage of the electricity produced by solar and wind in Germany. I am less optimistic about that. As I found in some previous posts like for example here, here and here, Belgium and Germany are neighbor countries and therefor have similar patterns of solar and wind production.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that no gains could be made by this interconnection. There will be times when Belgium could use the solar/wind overproduction of Germany, but when Germany has a excellent intermittent production, then generally Belgium does too. The same when Germany has only little intermittent production, then Belgium generally experience the same. The…

The climate/RE cult’s latest mantra “net-zero”, apparently means wind and solar connected to batteries or pumped hydro. The notion has it that wind and solar’s hopeless intermittency can be overcome by a few TWh’s worth of giant lithium-ion batteries or, where geography and hydrology permit, pumped hydro systems.

The latter model involves using wind and solar to pump water uphill into turkey’s nest dams so that, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, hydro power will merrily fill the inevitable daily gaps in wind/solar power production and keep the grid up and running.

Well, that’s the story, anyway.

The wind/pumped hydro model is at the heart of the “net-zero” energy generation systems being pumped by politicians and rent seekers, alike.

In a cooking show, ‘here’s one we prepared earlier moment’, a large-scale wind and pumped hydro experiment has been playing out on an island in the Atlantic, El…