Windmills Don’t Work When the Wind Isn’t Blowing – And It’s Not Blowing

A very succinct overview by Jim Rickards in only 353 words

Jim Rickards says it all - the whole energy picture so concisely that even Hemingway would have been proud. This is an excerpt copied from his Strategic Intelligence today, 6/3/24, no editing or additional commentary needed. All I’ve done is add a stock meme photo to top it off.

“There is a long list of reasons why windmills and solar panels can’t support the power grid and why they won’t replace coal, oil and natural gas as sources of energy anytime soon if ever. Of course, nuclear power is another clean option, but the greeniacs have other problems with nuclear. One reason is simple capacity. Global demand for energy is growing faster than supply; it’s physically impossible to close the growth gap with windmills or solar panels. Oil and gas can do the job provided exploration and drilling are allowed. Greeniacs also ignore the costs of producing windmills and solar panels. These sources of power require enormous amounts of power to build and move in the first place. Windmills are high maintenance and freeze-up in cold weather. They also slaughter birds, including many protected species. Sonar exploration to find suitable ocean sites for new windmills is killing whales, including rare species. Because windmills and solar panels provide intermittent power (not in sync with grid requirements), batteries are needed to store the output so it can be fed to the grid at certain times. Batteries are full of poisonous chemicals and inputs such as lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that are difficult and expensive to mine and that involve huge amounts of water and energy in order to conduct that mining. Believe me, I know. I built the largest non-commercial solar power grid in New England on my farm; the industrial scale batteries from SONY cost about $5,000 each and you need twenty or more to power a large house. The list goes on. Here's a new problem: While we’ve frequently mentioned that wind power is intermittent and cannot provide the minimum baseline power to keep the grid operating, it turns out to be worse than that. What if the wind doesn’t blow at all? It seems the world is facing a “wind drought.” Wind speeds dropped dramatically in 2023, which drastically decreased wind power output despite billions of dollars of new investment in windmills. Nature always has the last word. With the drop in wind speeds, a bad idea just got worse.”