How close Europe came to a real-life, no bs disaster

Here's the link for the post.

And here's an article at Yahoo Finance:
A reliance on net zero energy left Spain and Portugal vulnerable to the mass blackouts engulfing the region, experts said last night.

In what is believed to be Europe’s largest power cut, tens of millions of people were left without electricity, while flights were grounded, trains halted and whole cities were left without power, internet access or other vital services.

The cause of the initial fault in the region’s electricity grid is still being investigated, and the EU has insisted that there were no indications that it was a cyberattack.

However, energy experts have blamed a heavy reliance on solar and wind farms in Spain for leaving the region’s power grid vulnerable to such a crisis.

A state of emergency was declared in Spain, while in Portugal, water company EPAL said supplies could also be disrupted.

Queues formed at shops of people seeking to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.

Energy operators are fighting to restore power in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, and residents are being urged to avoid travel and use mobile phones sparingly.
More at the link.

Must be making a bunch of the Net Zero  morons in Britain and Canada upset that all the peasants are getting information on this.

"It's to save Nature!"

A 2020 survey counted 4,700 trees on the project site. Since then, however, the size of the project has been reduced.

Hundreds of Joshua trees appeared to have been destroyed in the last week, but on some portions of the site the trees still stand, residents said. Neither the company nor government agencies would say how many trees have been cut down. Avantus, the developer, said fewer trees will be destroyed than the government approved.

Heavy equipment has not yet started leveling the land where the trees were felled to prepare for the solar panel installation.

Residents fear the earth-moving work will increase the threat of valley fever — a fungal respiratory infection that is transmitted in dust. A local group found the fungus that causes valley fever in samples of topsoil from the five parcels surrounding the towns where the solar panels will be built.
And, if you ignore the trees, how many critters are being killed, burrows- and the land for- trashed, and so on?

But GREEN!

One last thing: they'll have to decide if they want to play Green, or

 if they want the power to run their businesses.  Because, barring a bunch of new nuke plants, they're not going to get both.

Short version: there ain't enough power NOW, and

it's going to get worse.  Some mention of 'clean energy goals', and almost nothing of how much of the problem involves trying to depend on bird cuisinarts and solar.  

These people really want to destroy the country

The Gateway Pundit reported last week that Joe Biden issued the most radical environmental rules in American history to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles and force customers to drive ineffective electric cars. Now, a new report has revealed the effort to finish off the gas-powered car is well-underway in eight states.
They're probably the ones you'd expect to go along with this crap.

Let's see: there's not enough electricity production NOW.  Multiple states have noted that if we have(make that 'when') we have another extreme cold/heat event, the grid could very well fail due to overreliance on bird cuisinarts and solar panels.  Now throw in that electricity demands are forecast to grow exponentially, not counting charging battery cars damn few people actually want.

And the clowns in charge want to force everyone to use electricity- increasing the demand- while they have little or no plans for power production that has a chance of meeting the greater demand.  Because Globular Warmening/Cooling/Changery.

Now throw in the EUnichs and WEF figuring on ordering people to use less when things are failing.  Because they want that control over us.

I think I understated the title: they want to destroy advanced western society.  Except for the party they'll control, because the Superiors must live well while they're controlling all the serfs.

Isn't it wonderful how Pres. Gropey can screw us

and our allies, and help Russia, at the same time?
The administration’s second line of defense for the “pause” is examining whether U.S. LNG exports are impacting domestic prices. The data demonstrates that exports are not impacting domestic prices. The price of natural gas in the U.S. is nearly at an all-time low, currently under $2/MMBtu. The reason? LNG exports are spurring upstream production and creating jobs along the way. This is a good thing for our domestic prices and the economy. The biggest threat to domestic prices is the lack of pipeline infrastructure in the United States, a problem that the same people behind this bad LNG policy have caused.

Halting LNG permitting not only undermines the security of countries depending on these future shipments, but it also would likely send LNG prices soaring, leading to windfall profits for the Kremlin’s war chest. Such a move could force allies to revert to Russian gas or less eco-friendly energy sources like Chinese coal, adversely affecting global decarbonization efforts. Intensified pressure in the coal market could also significantly impact the prices of solar, wind, and batteries, as their supply chains heavily rely on it.

Why, it's as if people not freezing to death this winter is more important than

playing games with bird cuisinarts and solar panels.

It's both cute and depressing that idiots are still playing "Maybe we can prevent a recession",

when we've been in the damn thing for, oh, close to two years?

Oh, and not having enough energy is a product of idiots screwing our ability to make it.  Same idiots who put us in this recession.


My, isn't this interesting?

The flag shown includes the black stripe for pedophiles('minor-attracted persons').  Hey, remember what helped get the Taliban support in its early days?  "We're going to end this thing of warlords using children for sex toys."  But the 'progressives' thought all that was in the muslim past as long as said 'progressives' aided them.
As someone put it, "Is that how they think this works? Hey we paid you lip service, now please abandon your social and religious beliefs for us."

What did the leftists and enviroweenies use for power before coal?

Clean nuclear-generated electricity.

In the name of Green, we must kill birds

and bats and insects, destroy habitat, destroy archeological sites, and still have unreliable and expensive electricity!  It's for the CHILDREN!!"  Etc.
Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.
...
But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.
...
Kevin Emmerich worked for the National Park Service for over 20 years before setting up Basin & Range Watch in 2008, a non-profit that campaigns to conserve desert life. He says solar plants create myriad environmental problems, including habitat destruction and “lethal death traps” for birds, which dive at the panels, mistaking them for water.

He says one project bulldozed 600 acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, while populations of Mojave fringe-toed lizards and bighorn sheep have also been afflicted. “We’re trying to solve one environmental problem by creating so many others.”
And on, and on.  But it's all good, because Green Energy!  Unreliable, and damaging, but Green!

There's nothing to replace the power they want to shut off(because Climate Change!),

but they're just certain the Magical Underpants Gnome will show up in the nick of time and save it all.

Or they just want to trash the grid and don't actually care what happens to the country.  Or the world, for that matter.

Just how stupid are a lot of 'renewable energy' types?

"Let's cut down trees and turn them into pellets to burn instead of using coal! Because we can grow more trees, and pay other countries to cut down THEIR trees and sell them to us!"
On December 15, Australia became the first major economy worldwide to reverse itself on its renewable classification for woody biomass burned to make energy. Under the nation’s new policy, wood harvested from native forests and burned to produce energy cannot be classified as a renewable energy source.

That decision comes as the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe, Vietnam and other forest nations continue gearing up to harvest their woodlands to make massive amounts of wood pellets, in order to supply biomass-fired power plants in the UK, EU, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.
Yes, burning wood is SO much nicer than using that nasty natural gas, or oil, or icky nuclear plants to produce energy!

And why might the do such stupid things?  I suspect money.
Australia, by its decision, is taking a very different course than the European Union, where woody biomass — despite growing public opposition — remains defined as a renewable energy source, is heavily government subsidized as a result, and makes up 60% of the EU’s renewable energy mix...

But don't get too excited: they're still fixed on the 'zero emissions' idea while having fits at the idea of nuclear, so I suspect this idiocy is just being replaced by other enviroweenie idiocy.

About that fusion breakthrough, (updated)

it's a big step.  And has the usual BUT:
A word of caution – there is a long way to go, between a lab demonstration of energy production, and a viable commercial nuclear fusion reactor. The break even claim only applies to the amount of energy pumped into the fusion target, vs the amount emitted, not the total energy expended to perform the experiment. Vastly greater amounts of energy were used to generate the final 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy which struck the target, to produce 3.15MJ of fusion energy. And that 3.15MJ of fusion energy was only enough to keep a 2KW plug in home heater running for 25 minutes.

To turn this into a fusion generator, the energy emitted by the target would need to be vastly scaled up, and the process would have to fire multiple times per minute, likely multiple times per second, rather than a single shot after hours or days of preparation.

Nevertheless this milestone is critically important – it provides a focal point of motivation, to solve the remaining problems.

It is very important.  And I'll make a couple of wagers:
The enviroweenies who crap themselves at the words 'nuclear' and 'radiation' will try to delay this as much as possible, because a lot of them- besides the ignorant fears- do NOT want people to have cheap, abundant energy.  Remember what a couple of their idols had to say:
… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”

Second, this will have a bunch of them now saying "See, we don't need new refineries and drilling, because we have FUSION POWER!"  Not caring that this being an actual thing is A, probably at least a decade- likely more- away, and
B, there's a LOT of things we need oil and gas and coal for.

Update: From Science News:
But this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment. It took about 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to get a hundredth of the energy back in fusion.

“The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”
So a looong way to go.  Which brings me to C on 'what the enviroweenies/anti-humans will say:

"We don't need to build any nuclear reactors, because we'll have FUSION POWER!  In just a few years/decades/next century..."

Lawdog has a post on the Nordstream mess,

and it's pretty good.

The other day we saw the geniuses in Californicated ordering

no new gas or diesel cars licensed or registered by 2035.

Today we have this:
California — under the illustrious leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom — has asked its residents to avoid their air conditioners in the midst of a heat wave to prevent rolling blackouts, again.
...
The manager of California’s power grid has implemented another “flex alert” and for those of you who haven’t lived in the overpriced hellhole of California, that’s when the government asks residents not to use energy between 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. to prevent rolling blackouts.

Not only should residents avoid the AC, you should also avoid appliances such as the dishwasher or washing machine — really any heavy appliance is off limits though Gavin will almost certainly still be using his hair dryer before a night out at the French Laundry.
I checked: no, you're not supposed to charge your electric car either.

So, they can't keep up with demand now in stressful conditions(like it's hot), they have zero plans I know of to build new powerplants, but they want to push everyone onto electric EVERYTHING...

Amazingly, depending on windmills and solar isn't saving Europe

from the problems of also depending on Russian natural gas.  

This is my shocked face.

When the French point out to President Gropey that he's screwed the pooch,

and he's about to take everyone else down with him...
Biden was counting on Arab nations to produce more oil but a few hours ago French President Macron was overheard telling Biden that the United Arab Emirates is at max capacity & the Saudis can’t produce much more. It appears to be a direct appeal to Biden to produce more oil. pic.twitter.com/vRWJVpn3El

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) June 27, 2022
This is a game-changing revelation since Biden was counting on Saudi Arabia & UAE. They were the only two OPEC nations perceived to have spare capacity.

Macron’s revelation means that it’s up to the U.S. to produce more oil, and soon, or the energy crisis will get much worse.

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) June 27, 2022

Which means changing things NOW, because it'll take time to get things restarted.  And you get they'll require some kind of guarantees that they're not going to get half done and then Biden shoot them in the knees.

It's so much faster for idiots to screw things up than to repair the damage.

Us being poor and low on energy is their damned plan,

I refuse to even consider that this shit could be non-intentional.

Let's see, an administration that wants to destroy the oil & gas industry,

now that it's biting them in the ass, wants some refineries restarted.  
"Just ignore the fact that we're only going to take our foot partly off your neck, and put full weight back on once the yelling quiets down, would you do this for us?"
Oh yeah, that's going to work.

Note that this article is pushing 'The Russian invasion pushed futures up' crap, ignoring what all the Biden clowns had done before.

Behind some of the Roe screaming is a huge desire to distract from the results of Biden & Handlers:

In its latest Commodity Markets Outlook report, the World Bank projected commodity prices will remain higher for years to come. Perhaps most alarming is that the multilateral bank projects energy prices will soar 50.5 percent this year—after nearly doubling in 2021. The rise in energy prices, the Wall Street Journal reports, has been “the most significant since the early 1970s.”

Food prices, meanwhile, which rose 31 percent last year, are projected to increase 23 percent this year. Needless to say, these price increases come at considerable cost, particularly to the most vulnerable in society.
And no, most people aren't buying "It's all because of Putin!  And Biden can't really do anything about gas prices!"  They know this all started up before Putin getting froggy, and there's been enough video of Biden clowns laughing about it, and talking about 'this opportunity to get rid of fossil fuels' and such to reinforce it.

I know the left is going to cheat in the election in every way possible, but they're still in trouble.  And they know it.