Failure to Launch

John Lees

People naturally assume that I am opposed to "energy transition". I am not, and occasionally find myself having to explain this.
Here for the record, is probably my 100th attempt to clarify where I stand:

"I'm not opposed to energy transition.
But, how about this? How about first making the transition to new technologies as they become economically competitive? Building a resilient grid scale network of such technologies, whilst only moth-balling old-school generating capacity as that capacity is clearly rendered obselete by its replacement.

That, is not what we have done, and certainly not what the Germans have done.

I have been following this topic closely for over two decades.

I am shocked at the blind idiocy of what I have witnessed.
There was at all points a menu of options. We could have optimized both the economic and environmental achievements by choosing those items on the menu that provided the maximum utility at the lowest cost.

But, we followed the Merkel, "feed-in-tariff

" model, where we granted the maximum subsidy support for the most economically inefficient options.

So, at every turn we picked out the most expensive item on the menu.

Combine that with the bizarre commitment by the Europeans to maximize their reliance on Putin's gas - and I was expecting either - crazy high prices, or total disaster.
We may well have ticked off both of those achievements by the end of the year."

Tim adds:

Always those who believe in Green Energy go back to the Manhattan Project, or the Moon landing, and say if we spend enough and make it so it's cheaper than "fossil fuels" than we can transition. But that is a false analogy. The Manhattan Project was an effort to do one very specific thing - create a weapon based on new science. It was limited in scope as to it's mission, and it was based on science that had just come to light.

Green energy is different. It is an attempt to simply improve existing technology which may well be as good as it can get at this point, and it is an attempt to force it into the general economy.

Nuclear weapons were never forced onto the market with the purpose of the general public buying them and using them. They could remain prohibitavely expensive (in fact, that was a blessing as it kept them out of the hands of criminals and terrorists).

Ditto the Moon landing which was based on well established physics and was merely about developing new hardware. It cost massive amounts of money, too, which is why we don't have people vacationing on the Moon today.

Again, it had a very specific goal.

Neither of these projects aimed at fundamentally transforming our national economy or moving people to use the technology. They were single-minded. We already HAVE EV's and the like - the problem is they aren't that safe or effective. Until they reach parity with their gasoline cousins they won't be in high demand.

And considering they really solve nothing in terms of the environment (they are dirty to produce and require generating electricity to charge) and since they put us at the mercy of China and other international competitors of dubious character as we have to get rare earth metals from them, there still is no real market for these things. The market is primarily virtue signaling wealthy people and the artificial market of subsidized pricing.

And as we run up against a wall in terms of the physics of these - their ability to hold charges, to charge quickly, etc. one must ask why the mad rush to promote them at this point. It is clear these are being pushed by the government and for purposes that benefit government. If the demand were there western governments wouldn't have to try to get the price of gasoline up.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:37 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 649 words, total size 4 kb.