The issue from the very beginning of the push for large-scale wind power was whether wind would be reliable enough to provide continuous input, bearing in mind the ABC of intermittent energy.
A. Supply to the grid must continuously match demand.
B. The continuity of wind and solar input is disrupted by nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no grid-scale storage at present using pumped hydro or batteries or any other known technology.
Therefore intermittent inputs from the sun and wind have no place on the grid.
That might have been the end of the story if the meteorologists had ever spread the word about wind droughts, that is, prolonged periods with next to no wind across continental areas. And if the people who planned the wind transition using subsidies and mandates to drive out coal had bothered to consult with the meteorologists to assess the reliability of the wind supply.
There are plenty of references to problems with the wind supply going back to 2015 and 2016 when there were long spells with no wind across much of North America and the meteorologists explained these by reference to high pressure systems.
There was still plenty of conventional power and windless nights caused no problems.
It was different when Dunkelflautes turned up unannounced in Europe in 2021 and proceeded to wreck the power supply in Britain and Germany where the transition to wind was well advanced and coal was on the way out.
And so the spectre of power failure has haunted Britain and Germany ever since. Why the surprise?
Germany and Britain are in the grip of A WIND DROUGHT TRAP and it remains to be seen whether the United States can avoid the same fate because they were possibly only one Democrat administration away from the red zone where windless nights are very dangerous.
We can understand the usual suspects only seeing what they want to see, namely the high points and the average penetration of wind and solar, but I am disappointed with the conservative commentators who detest the climate fraud and the net zero Ponzi but have not picked up the wind drought story and conveyed it to the voting public to generate some electoral pressure which is the only thing that will shift the politicians.
Apparently it was the Australians Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly team who first systematically documented the impact on the electricity supply when high pressure systems linger.
And it was Jo Nova’s blog where the work reached a wider audience, including the recently convened Energy Realists of Australia.
These are the sources for Anton and Paul, and Jo Nova’s blog.
Looking at the Lang and Miskelly links, I see they are impossibly dense and the situation is summed up in the conclusion to Paul's paper. It was published in 2012 and has been almost completely ignored
CONCLUSION
Engineers are required to do more than merely analyse and report on natural phenomena. They are required to create practical solutions to real world problems. In so doing they must test and design systems ensuring that they have addressed the worst case scenarios. As a result, they may not concentrate merely on average values.
With these requirements firmly in mind, to the electrical engineer, a careful scrutiny of the available wind farm operational data shows that, on the eastern Australian grid, it is not possible for wind energy ever to displace dispatchable, reliable generation supplying the base load demand.
In this regard, an examination of the graphscomprising Figure 3 clearly indicates that the proposal by some Australianpolicymakers to replace major coal-fired power stations with a fleet of wind farms isnot technically achievable.
Additionally, the analysis shows that further increased wind penetration, even if spread evenly across the eastern Australian grid, will result in an increasing contribution to grid instability, potentially making wind energy an increasing threat to operational security and reliability.
To continue, a policy strategy to increase wind penetration across the eastern Australian grid, to seek to meet a target of some 20% installed capacity, as has already been achieved in South Australia, (with the presumption that wind may thereby meet 20% of base load requirements), has the potential to be a dangerous strategy.
To address the increased instability due to wind, a fleet of fast-acting OCGT generation plant may well be required to back up wind’s intermittency. The use of a significantly greater proportion of this form of generation, rather than the more thermally-efficient CCGT, in the gas-fired generation plant mix may lead, seemingly paradoxically, to both higher gas consumption and higher GHG emissions from the resulting OCGT/CCGT generation mix than if wind generation was not included in the generation portfolio.
As the eastern Australian grid is:• the world’s most geographically dispersed single interconnected grid,• as the present wind farm fleet is dispersed across it at its widest portion in the east-west direction, that is, in the direction of the prevailing mesoscale atmospheric circulation,• and that this fleet also occupies a significant region in the north-south direction ,these conclusions are significant for grids worldwide.
Don't forget Google, which hired a team of engineers to explore powering their organization with "clean" energy and concluded it could not be done with Wind and Solar ... in 2012.
Which Google promptly ignored, buried, and went right back to pushing wind onto the rest of us.
Now, I don't live in the UK but have visited a number of times. I am trying to figure out why anybody in that nation would think that solar, even during the day, would be an effective power source given the seeming constant cloud cover. Wind is a different story, but its consistency is obviously not what the transitionistas demand. perhaps they will lodge a complaint with God, or Nature or the universe to have things work more to their liking!
Irina, I certainly agree the wind companies are in trouble, but I'm not sure the utilities will make "billions" any time soon.
"can I make a reservation and I’ll pay you for a reservation?" This reminds me of the 1925-6 real estate crash in Florida. Land in Florida was so hot that you had to wait about a month to get a train ticket from NY to Fla. There were lines forming at real estate offices and some people were selling their places in line for as much as $1000, which was a lot of money in 1925. Some who had made millions had the sense to start selling in 1925, but when a hurricane hit in 1926, that did it - the market completely collapsed.
Watching the NY stock market this AM, and Constellation Energy's stock drop of 18% in an hour, presumably because of China's DeepSeek AI startup, makes me wonder if this is the trigger of a tech crash, like that hurricane in '26. If so, the utilities will be affected too.
Excellent point, Al. Yet they could still make some money from regular electricity demand that needs meeting in a timely fashion as guaranteed by baseload generation. Not billions, perhaps, but millions, at least.
Yes, utilities have always been considered a conservative investment, and are one of the least types affected by stock market crashes, and they usually pay a decent dividend. But when a bubble pops, everything goes down; just some more than others. The high flyers, of course, are the riskiest.
I look forward to the whole wind power sector blowing away. Apart from small niche applications, it never made any sense economically, environmentally or from a physics basis, and does nothing for grid stability.
Wind cones and goes - time for the wind turbines to go. Unnecessary and uneconomical. If you look at what it takes to manufacture, install, operate, maintain a wind machine you would never do it except for the free government money. And then the grifters leave the machine before maintenance cycles and before end of life for some poor sap who is left holding the bag of excrement!!
WHY HAS THIS COME AS A SURPRISE?
The issue from the very beginning of the push for large-scale wind power was whether wind would be reliable enough to provide continuous input, bearing in mind the ABC of intermittent energy.
A. Supply to the grid must continuously match demand.
B. The continuity of wind and solar input is disrupted by nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no grid-scale storage at present using pumped hydro or batteries or any other known technology.
Therefore intermittent inputs from the sun and wind have no place on the grid.
That might have been the end of the story if the meteorologists had ever spread the word about wind droughts, that is, prolonged periods with next to no wind across continental areas. And if the people who planned the wind transition using subsidies and mandates to drive out coal had bothered to consult with the meteorologists to assess the reliability of the wind supply.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/climate-change/no-gusts-no-glory/
There are plenty of references to problems with the wind supply going back to 2015 and 2016 when there were long spells with no wind across much of North America and the meteorologists explained these by reference to high pressure systems.
There was still plenty of conventional power and windless nights caused no problems.
It was different when Dunkelflautes turned up unannounced in Europe in 2021 and proceeded to wreck the power supply in Britain and Germany where the transition to wind was well advanced and coal was on the way out.
And so the spectre of power failure has haunted Britain and Germany ever since. Why the surprise?
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
Germany and Britain are in the grip of A WIND DROUGHT TRAP and it remains to be seen whether the United States can avoid the same fate because they were possibly only one Democrat administration away from the red zone where windless nights are very dangerous.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
Well, surprise is what you get when you only see what you want to see and resolutely refuse to acknowledge what you don't want to see, basically.
We can understand the usual suspects only seeing what they want to see, namely the high points and the average penetration of wind and solar, but I am disappointed with the conservative commentators who detest the climate fraud and the net zero Ponzi but have not picked up the wind drought story and conveyed it to the voting public to generate some electoral pressure which is the only thing that will shift the politicians.
Apparently it was the Australians Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly team who first systematically documented the impact on the electricity supply when high pressure systems linger.
And it was Jo Nova’s blog where the work reached a wider audience, including the recently convened Energy Realists of Australia.
These are the sources for Anton and Paul, and Jo Nova’s blog.
https://papundits.wordpress.com/2019/10/01/australian-daily-wind-power-generation-data-introduction-with-permanent-link-to-daily-posts/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/0958-305X.23.8.1233
https://joannenova.com.au/
These are the briefing notes circulated by The Energy Realists.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
And this is the start of a series of pieces in the Australian Spectator.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/the-energy-crisis-how-we-got-here-and-how-to-move-on
Looking at the Lang and Miskelly links, I see they are impossibly dense and the situation is summed up in the conclusion to Paul's paper. It was published in 2012 and has been almost completely ignored
CONCLUSION
Engineers are required to do more than merely analyse and report on natural phenomena. They are required to create practical solutions to real world problems. In so doing they must test and design systems ensuring that they have addressed the worst case scenarios. As a result, they may not concentrate merely on average values.
With these requirements firmly in mind, to the electrical engineer, a careful scrutiny of the available wind farm operational data shows that, on the eastern Australian grid, it is not possible for wind energy ever to displace dispatchable, reliable generation supplying the base load demand.
In this regard, an examination of the graphscomprising Figure 3 clearly indicates that the proposal by some Australianpolicymakers to replace major coal-fired power stations with a fleet of wind farms isnot technically achievable.
Additionally, the analysis shows that further increased wind penetration, even if spread evenly across the eastern Australian grid, will result in an increasing contribution to grid instability, potentially making wind energy an increasing threat to operational security and reliability.
To continue, a policy strategy to increase wind penetration across the eastern Australian grid, to seek to meet a target of some 20% installed capacity, as has already been achieved in South Australia, (with the presumption that wind may thereby meet 20% of base load requirements), has the potential to be a dangerous strategy.
To address the increased instability due to wind, a fleet of fast-acting OCGT generation plant may well be required to back up wind’s intermittency. The use of a significantly greater proportion of this form of generation, rather than the more thermally-efficient CCGT, in the gas-fired generation plant mix may lead, seemingly paradoxically, to both higher gas consumption and higher GHG emissions from the resulting OCGT/CCGT generation mix than if wind generation was not included in the generation portfolio.
As the eastern Australian grid is:• the world’s most geographically dispersed single interconnected grid,• as the present wind farm fleet is dispersed across it at its widest portion in the east-west direction, that is, in the direction of the prevailing mesoscale atmospheric circulation,• and that this fleet also occupies a significant region in the north-south direction ,these conclusions are significant for grids worldwide.
Don't forget Google, which hired a team of engineers to explore powering their organization with "clean" energy and concluded it could not be done with Wind and Solar ... in 2012.
Which Google promptly ignored, buried, and went right back to pushing wind onto the rest of us.
Ah, imagine that. Reality has, as always, prevailed.
And along come the Chinese and the pesky question of how exactly AI makes money to further complicate things.
Yes, they couldn't have picked a worse, or better, moment for this.
You'd almost think they'd come up with a response to Trump's tariff ideas. The timing's probably just a co-incidence though.
It couldn’t have come to a less needed, destabilizing, expensive source of part time energy.
Like has already been alluded to elsewhere in the comments here; so much for the "AI rush": https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/chinas-deepseek-ai-moves-capital-tech-palo-alto-hangzhou The poor Big Tech "Magnificent 7" -- all dressed up and now nowhere to go.
I thoroughly enjoyed that development, I admit.
DeepSeek hammers Siemens Energy to the tune of -20%. Utilities trading like tech stocks until they aren’t. Hopefully the AI bubble is over.
Now, I don't live in the UK but have visited a number of times. I am trying to figure out why anybody in that nation would think that solar, even during the day, would be an effective power source given the seeming constant cloud cover. Wind is a different story, but its consistency is obviously not what the transitionistas demand. perhaps they will lodge a complaint with God, or Nature or the universe to have things work more to their liking!
I know! Solar in the UK is bonkers and yet here we are...
Irina, I certainly agree the wind companies are in trouble, but I'm not sure the utilities will make "billions" any time soon.
"can I make a reservation and I’ll pay you for a reservation?" This reminds me of the 1925-6 real estate crash in Florida. Land in Florida was so hot that you had to wait about a month to get a train ticket from NY to Fla. There were lines forming at real estate offices and some people were selling their places in line for as much as $1000, which was a lot of money in 1925. Some who had made millions had the sense to start selling in 1925, but when a hurricane hit in 1926, that did it - the market completely collapsed.
Watching the NY stock market this AM, and Constellation Energy's stock drop of 18% in an hour, presumably because of China's DeepSeek AI startup, makes me wonder if this is the trigger of a tech crash, like that hurricane in '26. If so, the utilities will be affected too.
Excellent point, Al. Yet they could still make some money from regular electricity demand that needs meeting in a timely fashion as guaranteed by baseload generation. Not billions, perhaps, but millions, at least.
Yes, utilities have always been considered a conservative investment, and are one of the least types affected by stock market crashes, and they usually pay a decent dividend. But when a bubble pops, everything goes down; just some more than others. The high flyers, of course, are the riskiest.
I look forward to the whole wind power sector blowing away. Apart from small niche applications, it never made any sense economically, environmentally or from a physics basis, and does nothing for grid stability.
You and me both. Wind is a massive waste of resources.
Wind cones and goes - time for the wind turbines to go. Unnecessary and uneconomical. If you look at what it takes to manufacture, install, operate, maintain a wind machine you would never do it except for the free government money. And then the grifters leave the machine before maintenance cycles and before end of life for some poor sap who is left holding the bag of excrement!!
That's right. AND they get paid to turn them off when too windy, AND they literally ruin the landscape.