Is the EU driving the first nails into the Green Energy coffin? By Andrea Widburg
One of the most obvious effects of the Green Energy movement is that it is profoundly regressive insofar as it returns those nations that embrace it to a pre-modern era. That would be an era that looks pretty in BBC productions but that was, in reality, filthy, disease-ridden, and both very cold and very dark. A recent European Union vote to classify natural gas and nuclear energy as sustainable (i.e., “green”) energy suggests that, having gotten a glimpse into the abyss, pragmatism is beginning to triumph over the mindless “green” ideology that has governed the left for so long.
Germany, which dominates the EU, is also the nation that has made the greatest strides in implementing the “green” agenda. The results of abandoning reliable fossil fuel and replacing it with renewables have been problematic. For some years now, Germany has been facing rolling blackouts and, in 2021, it decided to teach people how to use flowerpots and candles to provide heat during the winter when the electricity is gone:
It’s not just Germany, although it’s been the first and the worst. In early 2021, when a cold snap caused a huge demand for power across Europe, the entire European electrical network almost collapsed. While that specific power outage wasn’t due to problems with renewables, people paying attention to the push to end coal and go to renewables got very worried:
While this event hasn’t been linked to a surge in renewable power, as Europe replaces big coal and nuclear stations with thousands of smaller wind and solar units — just as sectors electrify to reduce emissions — incidents like this will become more frequent.
“It is not a question about if a blackout in some European regions will happen, it is only a question of when it will happen,” said Stefan Zach, head of communication at Austrian utility EVN AG. “A blackout might happen even in countries with high standards in electricity grid security.”
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Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply which the grid has to be able to cope with. The issue isn’t confined to Europe. Australia has had teething problems in the transition to a cleaner network. Wind power was blamed for a blackout in 2016 that cut supply to 850,000 homes. The nation is looking to storage as a solution and was the first country to install a 100 megawatt megabattery in 2017.
With the Ukraine war, things really changed. Suddenly, Europeans realized that, just as Trump had said, they had made a terrible mistake when they closed down their coal plants and relied on Russia for their energy. The Germans have therefore begun to reactivate the coal plans that they so smugly shut down.
The EU as a whole has decided to be proactive about getting itself back to a fully functional and reliable energy system. Last week, it voted to make sure that both natural gas (which Israel has in abundance) and nuclear power are considered “sustainable sources of energy.” Naturally, environmentalists are outraged but it’s a smart move unless Europe is really committed to returning to that pre-modern era of dirt, disease, darkness, and death.
Of course, this moment of sanity hasn’t affected the elitism that permeates the West in 2022. Last month, while debating a new minimum tax on aviation fuel—to fight “climate change”—the EU let it be known that both cargo flights and private jets would be excluded. Cargo flights might make sense but private jets, which produce a disproportionate amount of emissions? That’s strictly New World Order stuff, with the hoi polloi bearing the costs as the elites fly around unincumbered.
We the People really need to wrestle the entire energy grid back from the selfish and short-sighted elites. These smug know-nothings imagine they’re bringing in a bucolic paradise (at no cost to themselves). However, what they’re really doing is ensuring a Hobbesian world for most of us.
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