It’s negative 24 degrees and the wind isn’t blowing. This is why we need fossil fuels and nuclear power, not renewables

Good morning, everyone! I hope you’re staying warm. If you are, it’s because of natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear power, or even wood, because the wind isn’t blowing right now.

The screenshot below is from Electricity Map. It’s a fun app that tells you how your electricity is being generated at any given moment in time.  Turns out wind is  producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part.

While that’s not good, what’s worse is wind is only utilizing 24 percent of it’s installed capacity, and who knows how this will fluctuate throughout the course of the day.

Coal, on the other hand, is churning out 45 percent of our power, nuclear is providing 13 percent, and natural gas is providing 26 percent of our electricity

This is exactly why the renewable energy lobby’s dream of shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and “replacing” them with wind and solar is a fairy tale. It simply cannot happen, because we never know if and when the wind will blow or the sun will shine when we need it most.

“But the wind is always blowing somewhere” ~ a renewable energy lobbyist

Renewable energy apologists often argue that although the wind may not be blowing in your neighborhood, it’s blowing, somewhere. All we have to do, they argue, is build wind turbines and transmission lines all over the country so we can have renewable energy everywhere. It turns out this old chestnut is also completely wrong.

For example, the wind isn’t blowing in North Dakota or South Dakota, where more than 1,800 MW (a massive amount) of wind projects are operating or planned, at massive cost, by Minnesota electric companies.

In fact, the wind isn’t blowing in  anywhere.

Just look at California, the state that is consistently the most self-congratulating about how “green” they are. Wind is operating a 3 percent of installed capacity, solar is operating at 12 percent, natural gas is running wide open, and California is importing a whopping 27 percent of its electricity from Nevada and Arizona.

Today has the potential to be one of the deadliest days in recent history, but thanks to reliable forms of energy like beautiful, clean coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, it won’t be.

Days like today perfectly illustrate why intermittent, unreliable sources of energy like wind and solar would have no place in our energy system if not they were not mandated by politicians, showered with federal subsidies, and lining the pockets of regulated utilities that are guaranteed to profit off of wind and solar farms whether they are generating electricity, or not.