By Jo Nova
The Renewable Age of Waste has arrived
How do you make a solar plant perform best at breakfast and dinner time — when humans need it most? Just build three times as much generation as you *need* and throw away most of what it produces in the middle of the day….
Solar panels peak at midday but demand for electricity is highest when everyone goes home and turns on the oven, the dryer and plugs in a Cybertruck. But that’s no problem when you have billions of taxpayer dollars to waste — just burn the money building generators that spend most of the day working at minimal efficiency. Then call that waste “Economic Curtailment” — supposedly because it not economically worth operating the equipment. This happens when wholesale prices have gone negative and solar plants are *choosing* to blow away the megawatts most of the day.
Profligate waste is not just a rare event but our national energy policy.
Looking at the graph below, “Availability” is what they could have produced on the left. But what they actually contributed to the country is shown on the right.
“Keeping up with the curtailment”
By Dan Lee at WattClarity
Rising levels of curtailment are increasingly shaping development decisions for both greenfield and brownfield projects across the solar and wind fleet…
Welcome to the ““The National Program of Electrified Futility.””
Dan Lee points out we are throwing away 1.5 Terrawatt-hours in Network curtailment and about 5.7 Terrawatt-hours in Economic curtailment. He argues that 1 Terrawatt-hours is roughly what a turbine at Gladstone Coal fired Power Station made in 2025. In other words — we’re throwing away the output of a full power station.
Ominously the rate that curtailment is rising at is faster than production is growing. It was inevitable that renewable energy would reach this point. Gradually, because intermittent generators often work and fail “together”, every extra unit of intermittent generation is slightly more useless than the one before.
And in the AEMO latest Quarterly report we see that the rate of economic curtailment has suddenly grown.
AEMO Economic Curtailment Q2, 2025
Welcome to the The National Program of Electrified Futility.
Waste is no longer an exception — it is the operating model.
Photo by Prashanthns
