Without a doubt, the question currently on everyone’s mind is, When will the Manhattan Contrarian Energy Storage Report be released? After all, he previously promised it in September, then October, and now we’re so close to December that we still haven’t seen it.
That is a fair question. As a blogger, I don’t appreciate the formalities of the publishing process. When blogging, you finish the post, read it back quickly, hit “Publish” and that’s it. With this, it has gone through rounds of peer review, editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc. However, I am now informed that the official release date will be Thursday, December 1st.
Once published, I will have a number of articles explaining parts of the Report, especially those that cover topics that I have yet to complete here on the blog. But for now I want to focus on the most important aspect of this problem: Don’t be discouraged by the idea that climate extremists have “won”. They do not have.
The fact that climate extremists now control all the commanding heights in our culture – the media, academia, most major corporations and the Executive Branch of government is not real. importance. It is important that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work. It’s just a matter of when and how it fails — and how great the political consequences will be when it does. The main Achilles heel of the proposals is a matter of energy storage.
As an example of the frustrated voices out there, I present you with an interview by Michael Schellenberger, the environmentalist turned climate skeptic. today on Spiked website. After a long career in the field of environmental protection, Schellenberger recently realized that the climate alarm movement is a hoax. In 2020 he published the book “Never apocalypse: Why environmental alarmism hurts us all.” But despite offering his own views in a book, in the Spiked interview he remarked that essentially all the voices of reason on the topic of climate, including his own, are being completely submerged in the public square:
[T]His climate movement is uncanny. . . . [I]t took control of all these elite organizations. The ideology of the movement is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It is the official religion of the United Nations. It is the official religion of the World Economic Forum. Climate activists have done a great reset, essentially switching to renewable energy to combat climate change, the dominant ideology of the global elite. . . . [T]The entire mainstream media and global elite are basically part of this cult. The idea that the world is coming to an end is mainstream among journalists.
As the voices of climate extremism increasingly dominate the public square, Schellenberger notes that their demands are becoming more and more confusing:
We are seeing more extremist rhetoric and a lot of people engaging in extremely disruptive civil disobedience. That’s the new point of Just Stop Oil. Its accusation is, why are people upset about attacking works of art, rather than upset about the planet? . . . There is definitely a cult aspect. You see that in everything they claim.
Schellenberger’s conclusion: climate extremists “won”:
[T]The climate extremists have won. Their needs and their discourse are dominant. . . .
My answer to Schellenberger is, don’t be too sure. The extremists seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but what’s missing is that they don’t know how our energy system works and they’re asking for an alternative where the chances of success are low. equal zero. It’s just a matter of when and how it will fail, and how damaging the consequences of the failure will be.
Take it as a counterweight to Schellenberger a post today from a British guy named Paul Homewood on his website Not a lot of people know it, with the title “Why solar energy is useless in winter.” Homewood went and got hourly data on UK electricity production from solar panels from This site. For context, typical UK electricity usage at this time of year is given by Homewood as 840 GWh, which is 35 GWh for every hour of the day. The capacity of solar power generation facilities in the UK is given at 14 GW. That means, if the solar facilities were at full capacity in 24 hours, they would produce around 336 GWh, or 40% of the UK’s usage for the day. But hey, it’s late November. The days are short and the UK is very cloudy. So how much do solar facilities actually produce today? Here is the chart:
Around noon, the solar panels reached their peak capacity for the day at 1.33 GW — less than 4% of average usage. For the whole day, the output from the solar panels was 5.46 GWh, or 0.65% of usage. Peak time for electricity demand is early morning and evening. At the time, UK solar panels produced absolutely nothing. In fact, they produce nothing from midnight to 8am, and then from 4pm onwards.
So how can the UK (or anywhere else) get a significant amount of electricity in winter from solar panels? Well, considering only today, they may have built some 154 times as many solar panels as they currently have. With that, they were able to capture the exact amount of electricity they actually consume today. However, it still mostly comes in the middle of the day when it’s not needed and nothing during the peak periods between 6-8am and 5-8pm. To cover those, you’ll need some kind of energy storage. Worth hundreds of gigawatt hours, just for today. Or you can try saving energy from the summer when there is more sunshine. But to do that, to cover the winter, in the UK alone, you would need a few tens of thousands of gigawatt hours of storage, in a form that can store energy for six months or more and then discharge for many months. . Such a thing has yet to be invented, and it is not clear whether it can be invented.
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