Haughty Huns Threaten Czechs and Pols: The Energy Wars

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin Energy

Erratic Nature of Wind

Germany is conducting an energy war, using the erratic and unpredictable wind as a covert weapon against its neighbors.

Germany is dumping electricity on its unwilling neighbors and by wintertime the feud should come to a head...

...Central and Eastern European countries are moving to disconnect their power lines from Germany’s during the windiest days. That’s when they get flooded with energy, echoing struggles seen from China to Texas over accommodating the world’s 200,000 windmills.

...Renewable energy around the world is causing problems... At times, the glut can be so great that utilities pay consumers to take the power and get rid of it.

...The problem may intensify with the approaching winter. With an insufficient north-south connection, Germany’s power network came close to a collapse last February when high winds in the Baltic sea flooded it with power and the Czech Republic and Poland threatened to disconnect their grids.

...“The Germans are using our infrastructure in an excessive manner,” CEPS board member Zbynek Boldis said in an interview in Prague. “At this point they’re getting a free lunch.”

...“Electricity follows a path of least resistance in the grid, according to the laws of physics,” Boldis said. “The result is that our transmission system is overloaded, we have security threats.” _Bloomberg

Big wind energy generates large and erratic power irregularities in the grid, on an almost instantaneous basis. These large power shifts cause expensive damage to critical power backup infrastructure, and significantly shorten the useful lifetimes of backup systems worth tens of billions of Euros or more.

Wind advocates claim that the problems of big wind can be solved using geographical averaging, supergrids, and energy storage. But a close analysis demonstrates that such is not the case.

The wind does not generally blow at times when the power grid needs the most power. And it tends to blow the most when the power grid is already well supplied -- forcing the grid to dump excess power at significant cost.

This de facto energy war is actually a religious war -- a crusade. Underlying green philosophies which drive the compulsion to overbuild wind and solar infrastructure, are equivalent to religious dogma, unsupported by science or empirical observations.

Over the past hundred years, Germany has had a tendency to start wars that devastated large areas of the world, leaving most of Europe in tatters for decades. Let us hope that this German-instigated war does not achieve the same dismal result. Preliminary analysis, however, does not provide much hope.