Thread by @energybants

The general public has a misunderstanding that somehow, energy experts have found a way around wind and solar coming and going.

It's not true. THREAD.

Here we have Chief Energy Correspondent at Bloomberg News @JavierBlas patiently explaining record prices to a curious follower:

No matter how many tens of billions of £ are spent on wind and solar energy in the UK, it still turns off more or less daily.

It turns off in the UK as it turns off in surrounding countries.

There's no solution except more gas or electricity rationing.

Now gas is expensive.

This problem gets dramatically worse as you get more wind & solar, as these energy types soak up power system revenues when they're on, but must be expensively made up for when not on.

And more wind and solar means weather prediction errors become much more costly for society.

In Feb '21 Texas blackouts, $50 billion of wind turbines, which had in good times absorbed much customer revenue, was barely producing. Even $500 billion of installed wind would've left Texas in severe deficit.

Then the underfunded, unprepared gas system faltered under stress.

The end result in Texas is that there is very little that can be done. Billions of dollars of batteries are rushing into the system, but they'll only last for a tiny portion of the state's needs for little freezes. And they have to be paid for out of total system revenue, also.

Because the power sources that don't produce in times of crisis absorb so much revenue and planning attention in normal times, we're simply not ready for crises.

Increasingly, a "crisis" is just "whenever the weather is really bad for wind and solar."

Fragility spreads.

After a few years of close calls and actual catastrophes, as the public starts asking "what happened to the wind" and the experts respond "it didn't blow, but we didn't expect it to!", the public backlash to pro-wind politicians is likely to be severe.

"It didn't blow," indeed.