Some comments from the Insta-peanut gallery:
- One problem is that the writer of the article almost never writes the headline. More, the press knows that many readers read the headline and nothing else. So that's where the propaganda goes.
- They should just get used to doing without electricity. Why put it off until later?
- Sorry. I will continue to blame renewables.
- "It's not the renewables, it's the management of the renewables" versus "It's not the gun, it's the user of the gun." See the parallel?*
- The gun can be used in a way that does not harm anybody. The renewables cannot be managed (on this scale) in a way that does not harm the reliability of the grid. It doesn’t matter who is managing the load; the problem is that the load cannot be managed when it is subject to wild and unpredictable swings.
- The challenge to incorporate large amounts of wind and solar is real. Generation is very correlated, so the fluctuation of power on the grid is very large. The other issue is overload—if you don't have cutouts figured correctly, what happens is that during high generation/low consumption, high grid voltages trigger a mass of disconnects, which then suddenly drops power, and then they blow back on. It's like a hammer. I've been guessing that's what happened due to the timing. They'll never admit what really happened. But hopefully they set up a much more robust system to deal with these issues.
- Renewable energy will work if we all simply rearrange our expectations around the definition of the words "will work." No problem is insurmountable as long as we follow everything the experts say about how to live our lives.
My own take is that the problem of intermittency (the corollary being inconstancy) with wind and solar leads to the grid instability that some of the above commenters are talking about. An unstable grid meant to power thousands of homes and facilities probably can't handle sudden and radical swings in power availability. Since I don't know the technical ins and outs of how a grid really works, though, I'll refrain from commenting further. Me, I'd like to see more gravity batteries. But how efficient are they, and how do they scale up? Google AI has a response.
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*The conservative argument in favor of guns is indeed that guns don't kill people—people kill people. If this commenter's intention is to refute the article's thesis somehow, it's interesting that he would use a pro-conservative argument to do so.
ADDENDUM: thoughts in a humorous vein here.
I don't know... it seems pretty straightforward to me. The clause directly before the highlighted sentence says "reliance on renewables is not to blame." So, without having read the article in question, I'm guessing it's saying that the problem is the management of renewable energy sources rather than the reliance on them. This probably has something to do with how the energy from these sources is stored, connected to the grid, etc.
ReplyDeleteI don't really see any "ridiculous language games" going on here. I just see a problem that is more complex than it may at first seem to be.
I interpret the contradiction as
DeleteHeadline: "Let's not focus on renewables. Implication: it's something else."
Article text: "It's renewables, not something else."
The quoted part of the article does indeed contrast reliance with management. But the headline strongly implies that focusing on renewables is a red herring before then focusing on renewables. My interpretation, anyway. Assuming the article is fine and not contradictory, the editor needs to give the article a better title. The point about trustworthiness still stands.
I interpreted it a little differently. The "something else" here is "not renewable energy sources themselves, but how they interface with the grid." I think the article is probably trying to counter any narrative that renewable energy sources themselves are the problem, with the implication that we should just give up on renewable energy. This is not to say that the problems of incorporating renewable energy into the grid (as noted by one of the comments you quoted) aren't real. They are--so we should probably focus on solving those problems instead of just blasting renewable energy. That was the vibe I was getting.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely headlines out there that are misleading. Headlines have never been about nuanced argument--they've always been about grabbing attention. But this is one case where I think the headline is fairly reasonable (as far as headlines go).
I guess there's nothing more to be said, then! You've got your opinion, and I've got mine. But it's interesting to observe that, if it's true that "the article is probably trying to counter any narrative that renewable energy sources themselves are the problem," the piece should appear so quickly, as if to head off the obvious, Occam's-Razor conclusion, which is to blame the outages on a top-heavy "green" agenda.
DeleteThat said, I think that, if this is in fact the fault of a poorly designed grid that can't handle the seesaw intermittency of alternative energy, that's not an argument against alternative energy. If anything, it's an argument against too quickly scaling up the size of a grid that, by rights, ought to be smaller. Alternative energy is still very much in its infancy, even after all of these decades, but some governments are so irrationally committed to "net zero" efforts that they're willing to inconvenience entire populations in the service of their ideology. Ultimately, as we continue to develop more energy-efficient technology and infrastructure, alternative energy is going to win out. It kind of has to. But for the moment, I think scaling an alt-power grid up to the size of multiple cities or whole countries is a very bad idea.
Reminds me of this: https://johnctaipez.substack.com/p/climate-activists-say-sun-is-running
ReplyDeleteHa! Yes, I saw that. Since I'm subscribed to you, your posts come to me as emailed newsletters. I think the paradox of Substack is that your actual Substack site doesn't get any hits when all we recipients have to do is just open our emails. I imagine that that can artificially lower your stats.
Delete