No wind beneath the transition's wings

Grid connection and transmission line expansion are tripping the triumph of wind and solar

Emissions from electricity generation are close to a tipping point as the world’s wind and solar power capacity expands. The major news was delivered by the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, earlier this month.

Interestingly, the statement came out a few days after climate think-tank Ember reported that wind and solar last year overtook all other sources of energy in Europe. And you know what? I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more upbeat reports like those in the coming months. Because another kind of news reports are popping up here and there, and they need to be muted.

Remember the falling wind turbines? It seems they are just part of what seems to me like a growing flood of news that undermines the optimistic forecasts for progress on net zero.

Take this report in a local media outlet in Massachusetts. The story is about a solar power system that was mounted on the roof of a local school in 2002 but recently, a few university students from the area discovered, as part of an academic project, that the array has not produced electricity in at least seven years.

"The elementary school has a decently large onsite solar array. However, the inverters that make it so the electricity produced by the solar panels is actually usable, functioning electricity have not been working for at least the past seven years,” the students said.

I don’t know what your first reaction to this news is but mine was to immediately wonder how many other schools there were out there with solar arrays diligently mounted on their roofs and with faulty inverters, which, by the way, I hear are very easy to fail. I understand they are the most sensitive and fragile element in a solar power system. And they are normally monitored for this very reason.

Of course, I may be wrong and this could be an isolated oddity that the company in charge of the system’s maintenance failed to detect for years. And the school failed to realise its roof solar array failed to generate any power. It happens, I guess. But what’s happening with wind and solar grid connections is a whole other insect snack.