Climate Changed: Calm, Gloomy Weather Killing Europe’s Grand Wind & Solar ‘Transition’
January 9, 2023
In the mother of all ironies, Europe’s wind and sun cult are complaining about uncooperative weather. The Germans have even coined a word for it: ‘dunkelflaute’ – meaning a period of gloomy, windless weather. Which, in reality, means little or nothing by way of output from their more than 30,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels.
The unimaginative Brit hasn’t coined a precise equivalent, yet, but they too are plagued by the same phenomenon, so expect another addition to the English weather dictionary soon enough.
For now, the closest is “wind drought”, which tends to suggest malevolence on the part of the wind Gods, apparently conspiring against our ‘inevitable grand transition’ by withholding the wind resource we’ve been supposedly ‘blessed’ with.
Or, here’s a thought, it could simply be the very nature of Nature itself.
In dozens of posts over the last decade, STT has documented the dozens of occasions each year when the combined output of every wind turbine connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid amounts to less than 5% of their combined notional capacity; including lengthy occasions when total output amounts to less than 2%, as in this post: Dead Calm: Australia’s Wind ‘Industry’ Suffering From Prolonged Wind ‘Drought’
Notwithstanding the well-documented renewables disasters playing out in Germany and Britain, and despite reams of Australian data to the contrary, Australia’s Federal Energy Minister, Labor’s hapless Chris Bowen, reckons that by spending trillions on mythical mega-batteries and extra transmission lines, he’ll soon have us all running on nothing but sunshine and breezes.Bowen’s plan is, of course, utterly delusional, as The Australian’s Cater explains below.Renewable dream yet to weather the storm of reality
The Australian