When The Wind Doesn’t Blow: Weak Breeze Lowered U.S. Turbine Output In 2023
The abrupt decline in wind production illustrates a vulnerability in weather-dependent power sources embraced by the Biden administration
We can’t wait until after the election to deal with a looming winter electricity crisis. Republicans must make demands on energy production in the continuing budget resolution to promote nuclear and coal power plants, terminate all of the onerous regulations that have stifled their productivity, and turbocharge our natural gas delivery capabilities. Anything short of an immediate deregulation plan will place Americans in the same predicament as Europe, where they are discussing group showers, eating bugs, and drinking sewage, as they face a $2 trillion surge in electricity prices.
Thanks to the controlled demolition of coal and nuclear power, there is record demand on natural gas for electricity. And although our production and exports of natural gas are at record levels, they are not as high as they should be given the regulations and the stifling of pipelines, and they are not sufficient to compensate for the sudden embargo of all Russian gas supplies. This is why inventories in underground storage are operating well below baseline levels of the pre-COVID years.
As such, the Energy Information Administration is predicting a 7.5% increase in electricity rates over 2021, and that is before the next man-made or manipulated global crisis. However, in parts of the Northeast, rates have already more than doubled because of a lack of sufficient pipeline systems in place, with many proposals on the table having been blocked for years. New England gets almost no electricity from coal any more and relies heavily on natural gas. But these same states have banned fracking and gas pipelines as well! So absent robust infrastructure to transport and store natural gas, which the Northeast lacks, the people have failed to reap the benefits of increased natural gas production. Rather than piping the gas in straight from the Marcellus basin, New England was importing gas from Russia!
Our existing level of natural gas production would have been sufficient had our government not purposely set fire to our coal industry for a decade and then decided to engage in a thoughtless war with Russia without a contingency plan. In the U.S., coal once composed roughly half of our electricity source just 15 years ago, but has dropped precipitously because of destructive eco policies. Now it only accounts for 21% of our electricity source, so shocks to the system are going to harm American consumers. Yet thanks to the reduced inventories, we are struggling to even supply a smaller percentage of our grid with affordable rates. The price of thermal coal is now at an all-time high of $439 per metric ton.
Our electricity generation from coal power plants is down by nearly two-thirds since 2008. Thanks to numerous regulations during the Obama administration, 250 coal plants closed between 2010 and 2017, leaving us with just 240, less than a quarter of China’s inventory. Thus, while our recoverable coal assets are enormous – 60% greater than China’s reserves – our coal electric power inventory is running between 85 and 90 million tons, down over 30% since 2020 and more than 50% since 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As you can see, our production is at a record low, as are our inventories:
It would be one thing if our government planned ahead in its destruction of coal by ramping up natural gas pipelines and building more nuclear power plants. After all, if clean energy is the goal, those two are great candidates for clean and effective sources of energy. But clearly that is not the goal. Scarcity is the goal. Thanks to endless regulations by the same people who claim to want clean energy, no new nuclear reactors have come online in decades, while numerous others have been retired. At the end of 2021, there were 93 active reactors, down from 104 a decade ago. Our monthly nuclear utility generation is down 5% compared to 2019.
The only forms of energy that have been increasing, at a painful cost to taxpayers, are solar, wind, and electric vehicles. However, they are impotent during our time of need, and the obsessive push for electric vehicles to reduce gasoline consumption further exacerbates the strain on electricity, which is even scarcer, and further drains the already low utility of green energy that relies on batteries (now in great shortage) to run.
During the California heat wave, one would think Californians would have enough solar energy to power the entire state, given how much they invested in it and how strongly the sun was shining, particularly during those hot days. But as the Washington Post reports, so much of it went to waste because the batteries and transmission lines needed to feed solar power are too expensive, especially with the scarcity of batteries (in itself due to mining regulations as well as the contrived demand for electric cars).
At some point, it becomes clear this is being done on purpose. Government regulators are cutting off all the useful sources of energy and jamming the feeble renewable energy grid with further demand precisely at a time when they are cutting off all Russian energy. To top it off, Biden has drained nearly 40 years of Strategic Petroleum Reserve inventories headed into the winter. This can’t all be an accident. To quote Diederik Samsom, chief of staff for Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s executive vice president, “The two basic needs of life – food and energy – we have paid way too little for in the past 40 years.” In other words, this is being done on purpose.
So where are Republicans in all of this? Why are they not holding up the budget bill in the Senate until the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which raised numerous taxes and royalties on oil and gas exploration, is repealed? One of the provisions institutes a “methane fee,” which some estimate will single-handedly increase consumer natural gas bills by 17%. The tax will not only apply to the production of oil but also the transmission, storage, and exporting of natural gas, which is the worst thing you can do at a time of record high natural gas prices.
Moreover, the bill created all sorts of new incentives to promote electric vehicles, which will not only fail to ease the energy crisis, but will exacerbate it. It’s become clear that the electricity crisis is an even bigger deal than the spike in gasoline prices. Electric vehicles will create a tsunami of new demand on the electric grid at a time of record high prices, after people are already forced to pay a fortune for the vehicles. We are already witnessing this dynamic – of one green fascist policy running into the headwinds of another – playing out in California, where grid operators advised people not to charge their vehicles during the heat wave.
If Democrats are akin to voracious wolves seeking to turn the American sheep into a carcass, the Republicans are the vultures seeking to cash in by feasting on that carcass rather than calling in the lions to battle the wolves and protect the American sheep. Nowhere is this more evident than with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signing on to the green energy “Agenda 2030” plan to replace cars with electric vehicles in supposedly conservative Oklahoma. Except, unlike most other Republicans, he should get points for honesty, providing us with a full understanding of why Republicans will never fight for us on an issue that matters. The reason? The money and “investments” are always on the side of tyranny.
It should now be abundantly obvious to any thinking person that the weather tyranny and green energy agenda aren’t just cute or even annoying; they will quite literally kill millions of people with starvation and lack of access to vital goods and services. They are coming for our food and fuel the same way they came for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic. Thus, any promotion of green energy, with its officious regime of government mandates and subsidies, will necessarily ease the death of energy that actually works. So we are all on the same page as conservatives that green energy must be shunned, right?
Wrong! When Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, said recently that “California is in the lead” on energy and “can show the rest of the nation how it is done,” she could have said the same thing about Oklahoma. During a confab of the Western Governors Association in Oklahoma City, Governor Stitt bragged about installing carbon-neutral green energy into the Oklahoma electricity grid and how “the number of charging stations spread out along highways can serve thousands of electric vehicles and a plan to create a new hydrogen energy hub will help the nation move away from fossil fuels,” according to the Oklahoman.
In an interview with the prominent local paper after the event, Stitt let the cat out of the bag as to why he is all in on green energy, revealing the likely culprit for why Republicans betray us on almost every other important issue. “Most Republican governors would not tackle that, but as a business person ... you're looking at where the investments are heading," said Stitt.
Points for honesty! And Stitt is not wrong. All the money is indeed with the bad guys. The money is with the Great Reset, open borders, pro-criminal policies, corporate welfare, biomedical tyranny, and green energy. Thus, if you ever wondered why Republicans refuse to hold Democrats accountable – even when their policies are so destructive and unpopular – follow the money. Or as Stitt would say, the “investments.”
At a time when we are confronted with an intractable fight for our way of life and need an opposing party to break the paradigm of the federal government working with the ESG “sustainable growth” and “Agenda 2030,” governors like Stitt believe in the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Yet the only reason we can’t beat them is because Stitt and other GOP governors have already decided to join the bad guys.
The Oklahoman explains Stitt’s feelings based on their interview as follows:
For Stitt, the growing electric car market is one he wants Oklahoma to tap into.
“The investments are heading to electric vehicle manufacturing, battery manufacturing technology, alternative (energies),” Stitt said.
Stitt has pushed for the state to spend billions of dollars in tax incentives for the electric vehicle industry, including nearly $700 million the governor got lawmakers to approve this year in hopes that Pansonic would bring an electric vehicle battery plant.
In other words, the very corporate welfare that has allowed government to artificially promote expensive and ineffective energy policies that now leave us with a crisis of our way of life is fully embraced in Oklahoma, just like in California.
Stitt will defend himself by saying that unlike in California, he still supports oil and gas alongside fake energy. But the problem with this “all of the above approach” is that given that Democrats are artificially imposing blocks on oil and gas and spurs on electric cars, wind power, and solar power, any tendentious treatment of green energy by Stitt will only help grease the skids of the “Net Zero” carbon agenda.
Perhaps if Stitt were in charge of the world, the green energy subsidies wouldn’t be as much of a threat to energy that actually works. But given that he is enabling an illusory replacement of fossil fuels, it will allow the globalists to more easily destroy the fossil fuel industry altogether, while making us reliant on wind and solar, which aren’t reliable, and electric cars, which are not only more expensive, but dependent on so many natural resources that have become scarce and expensive as a result of the Great Reset. The shortage of lithium, cobalt, and magnesium will make electric vehicles impractical, and the relative scarcity of copper and aluminum needed for the wind turbines will also make wind an expensive boondoggle for the little energy it produces. Oh, and let’s not forgot all the oil and gas needed to produce the supply chain of most of these “alternative” energy products.
Stitt brags about Oklahoma getting 35% of its electricity from wind, but the free market did not drive that outcome and never would have. Transitioning to green energy will further ease the left’s plan to destroy fossil fuels and leave us with unreliable energy. Would he celebrate a grid built upon 100% wind power? What will that look like when the air is calm, the sun goes down, but the illusion of the transition allowed the left to wipe fossil fuels off the map?
While Stitt brags about wind energy, he refuses to learn the lesson from south of his border when Texas’ grid failed thanks to that transition to “new technology,” as Stitt fondly refers to solar and wind. Rather than spending the money on energy that actually works, “red” Texas invested $66 billion in solar and wind to each compensate for each other’s failures (solar during dead wind and wind during the night). Texas became the leader of green energy long before California. Yet that did nothing for Texans during the Great Texas Blackout of February 2021, which cost billions of dollars and nearly 200 lives. This past summer, according to Bloomberg, the Texas grid had to operate “at a historic pace, often forcing them to put off maintenance to keep cranking out electricity.” Imagine if a fraction of the $66 billion had been invested in energy that actually energizes the world rather than in sources than need help from other energy to produce a fraction of the output at a higher cost.
Thus, boasting about shifting reliance from fossil fuels or nuclear energy to green energy is akin to making someone more reliant on a bike than a car for transportation. Which is exactly what they want to do. The more they use a carrot-and-stick approach to prop up fake energy, the more they box out real energy in a circuitous cycle of failure, dependency, higher prices, and scarcity of product, which feeds on itself in perpetuity.
To add insult to injury, Stitt wants to follow the California example of weakening the grid with ineffective energy sources and then further straining it buy promoting electric vehicles, which drive up the demand for electricity, thereby ensuring that the only cars on the road in his dystopian vision won’t be able to reliably run, even after paying a fortune for the purchase.
There’s a broader lesson not just in the fact that a prominent Republican governor has embraced the green energy Agenda 2030 but in the reason why he has embraced it. Stitt believes that we must “invest” in the strong players on the block. Well, the strong players on the block are not the forces of freedom that respect life, liberty, property, and the continuity of the human species in the way we understand it. The strong players are those who want us without cars, without detached homes, without abundant food and medicine, and completely reliant upon government for basic needs while eating bugs, groveling for rationed food, energy, and medicine, and having our bodies, minds, and souls constantly surveilled, if not downright controlled. This is where the money is. This is the “wave of the future.”
President Joe Biden stumbled multiple times and fell while climbing the stairs onto Air Force One on Friday, but the White House insists he "is doing 100 percent fine" after the fall they attributed to the wind.
Biden, 78, began his climb at a brisk pace while using the hand rail before tripping twice and then falling before pulling himself back up and completing his ascent more carefully.
Biden Falls Three Times Getting on Air Force Onewww.youtube.com
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blamed the president's stumbles on the windy day, telling reporters, "It's pretty windy outside. It's very windy. I almost fell coming up the steps myself."
She added that Biden "is doing 100 percent fine" after the incident.
Kate Bedingfield, White House communications director, reiterated in a tweet that Biden "is just fine and did not even require any attention form the medical team who travels with him." She called the stumbles "nothing more than a misstep on the stairs."
Fox News noted that Biden is just "one of many top American leaders to fall while boarding presidential jets," pointing to previous stair-tripping made by former Vice President Mike Pence, former President Barack Obama, and a fall former President Gerald Ford took in 1975.
But Biden has fallen under extra scrutiny over both his physical and mental capacities, considering he is the oldest U.S. president to assume the office.
The Washington Examiner reminded its readers that Biden fractured his foot in December, before reporting:
White House aides have taken great strides during his two months in office to downplay the 78-year-old president's age. They have limited him to brief speeches that have not required him to stand for long periods and released pictures of him playing with his German Shepherds on the White House's South Lawn.
The president's advanced age was raised as a concern repeatedly both during the Democratic primaries and the general election last year.
In September, Biden mocked Trump after the former president and his campaign suggested that the Democrat had "lost his step." Biden told one outlet in his own defense, "Look at how [Trump] steps and look at how I step. Watch how I run up ramps and how he stumbles down ramps, OK?"
Biden to @abc27News on Trump and his campaign's suggestion he's "lost a step""Look at how [Trump] steps and look… https://t.co/SLyqisbxRZ— Johnny Verhovek (@Johnny Verhovek)1599518175.0
After Biden's fall on Friday, a buzz began on social media asking how mainstream media outlets will cover the current president's literal stumbles versus the hysteria when former President Donald Trump took caution while walking down a ramp after delivering the commencement at West Point. Trump explained later that the ramp was slick.
Commentary writer Drew Holden delivered a thread on Twitter showing several examples of media outlets declaring Trump's ramp walk raised "health questions" along with "grifters" who seized on it — with one declaring the ramp walk showed Trump "is physically and mentally impaired."
Dylan Byers, senior reporter for NBC News and MSNBC, even wondered out loud whether media would be consistent in its coverage of the Biden fall, tweeting, "Going to be an interesting test of the media that ran 'Trump grabs handrail' headlines to see how they handle Biden falling down on the stairs. Every news organization is entitled to its own editorial judgment, but if you set the precedent..."
Warning: Why Natural Gas Rates Surpass Solar & Wind