By Jo Nova
The amount of storage America needs for a grid run on erratic wind and solar power is so galactically vast the numbers don’t matter. Because every which way they are calculated, every estimate, the highest one, the lowest one, it doesn’t make any difference. They are all unaffordable.
And they’re not just unaffordable in the sense that it hurts. They’re unaffordable in the sense that there is no economy left.
Basically America would need 12,500 times as many batteries as it has now. At current prices this would cost about $175 trillion dollars, which is eight times the entire GDP of the United States.
Some researchers predict costs will fall, but even at fantasy low ball estimates that are one tenth of current prices, the cost of those batteries is still nearly $20 trillion.
We now know that the battery storage for the entire American grid is impossibly expensive, thanks to a breakthru study by engineer Ken Gregory. Looking at several recent years he analyzed, on an hour by hour basis, the electricity produced with fossil fuels. He then calculated what it would have taken in the way of storage to produce the same energy using wind and solar power. He did this by scaling up those year’s actual wind and solar production.
Based on his work, which only covered 48 states, our round working estimate of the required storage for the whole country is an amazing 250 million MWh. America today has less than 20 thousand MWh of grid scale battery storage, which is next to nothing.
Grid scale batteries today cost around $700,000 a MWh. For 250 million MWh we get an astronomical total cost of $175 trillion dollars just to replace today’s fossil fuel generated electricity needs with wind and solar.
Let’s start with the reality. The EIA has collected annual utility data on the cost of grid scale battery arrays. A recent report is “Battery Storage in the United States: An Update on Market Trends — August 2021”.
From 2013 to 2018 the average reported cost was around $1,500,000 per MWh. The range was pretty large, from under $500,000 to around $3,000,000 per MWh.
Wojick compares a whole range of estimates on the past and likely future cost of batteries which vary from $70,000 per megawatt hour up to $1.5 million. As he says:
If wind and solar developers were required to include the batteries needed to make their projects reliable, none would ever be built.
It’s the cost of the system that matters, not the cost of a half hour of electrons at midday.
There is a reason fans of solar and wind power never quote the cost of a 24 hour reliable supply.
Despite the censorship and the gagging of doctors, somehow, against the odds, nearly half of the US population believes it’s at least “somewhat likely” that Covid vaccines have killed people. Astonishingly over a quarter said they personally know someone who has died and whose death may have been linked to vaccination.
The population is now starkly divided. When someone dies unexpectedly, half the nation is wondering if it was caused by the vaccines, but another third think those people are just spreading conspiracies.
It follows (surely) that some significant slab of the West has had a profound loss of trust in our health institutions and the government. It is also an indictment of most of the legacy media which hasn’t mentioned vaccine side effects at all. Half the population know they are not telling the truth. How is this sustainable?
Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults say they personally know someone whose death they think may have been caused by side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, while 61% don’t and another 10% are not sure.
The documentary Died Suddenly has been criticized as promoting “debunked” anti-vaccine conspiracy theories but has been seen by some 15 million people.
Forty-eight percent (48%) of Americans believe there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, while 37% think people who worry about vaccine safety are spreading conspiracy theories. Another 15% are not sure.
How many lives have been touched by “unexplained deaths”?
Somewhere between one fifth and one half of the population may know of “an unexplained death”. Twice as many unvaccinated people say they do:
Similarly, while 45% of those who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 think someone they know personally might have died from vaccine side effects, only 22% of vaccinated adults think so.
The unvaccinated may be overestimating the deaths just as the vaccinated may be underestimating them. Either way, if one in four people know someone who died unexpectedly, that’s still an awful lot of deaths.
About 7% of vaccinees say they had a major side effect
One month ago in a similar Rasmussen survey results came out suggesting a lot of the population can see the dark side of vaccines for the saddest of reasons:
Sixty-eight percent (68%) of adults say they’ve gotten a COVID-19 vaccination, and a majority (56%) of vaccinated adults report no side effects from the vaccine. Thirty-four percent (34%) say they had minor side effects and seven percent (7%) reported major side effects from the vaccine.
It’s not clear what “major” means. But if 7% of the 70% who are vaccinated had a major reaction, that’s 5% of the whole population. With a household size of three in the US, that means 15% of the population live with someone who had a bad reaction.
Concerns about vaccines is spread across both sides of politics
After four years of “public disruption” Extinction Rebellion (XR) has decided to stop being a public nuisance and develop “relationships instead”. This is a group that prances around in doomsday costumes, and tried gluing themselves to the top of commuter trains at peak hour in London. (Furious passengers dragged them off.)
Extinction Rebellion has decided to be rebellious by, wait for it… holding mass rallies instead.
In the end, they said after four years of protesting, XR admit their failure: “very little has changed. Emissions continue to rise and our planet is dying at an accelerated rate.”
So for some reason, despite four years of costumes, chanting, and naked protests, the global atmosphere did not change. Who could have seen that coming?
Just another ordinary worker trying to warn us about climate werewolves or something.
Activists with XR, which launched in 2018, became known for civil disobedience, from planting trees on Parliament Square to superglueing themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Some smashed windows at bank headquarters and at News UK, the publisher of the Sun and Times newspapers. But the group became disliked by more people than liked, according to polling by YouGov.
The YouGov poll shows a third of the UK disliked them, a third hadn’t heard of them, and just 21% felt warmly about them. Basically, half the people who knew they existed didn’t like them.
When included in a list of charities, and ranked by popularity, the rebels saving-the-world were in 127th place. They can’t be happy with that.
Even though XR say they are going to play nice, Just Stop Oil and “Insulate Britain” have popped up to say they are just as committed as ever to civil disobedience. So we won’t notice any difference in public nuisance protests, just the t-shirts have changed.
Doomsday cultists who like dressing up still have plenty of choices.
The government of Italy is planning to build new nuclear power plants. And if it happens, it marks an astonishing turnaround.
This was the Garigliano Nuclear Power plant in Italy in 1970. They already had the solution to it all, energy wars, Vladimir Putin, and fantasy “climate control” fifty years ago.
But Italy abandoned nuclear energy thirty years ago. It’s the only major European country to have stopped using nuclear power. (Though Germany is trying to).
Italy had four nuclear plants in the early 1980s but after the Chernobyl accident, they held a referendum on nuclear power, and the voters didn’t want it anymore, so they closed the last two reactors by 1990, (back in the days when voting made a difference). Furthermore, Italy held another referendum in 2011, and 94% of the voters rejected it again, which shows how desperate the situation must be now if an opinion poll like that has shifted so far in 11 years?
The thing is, Italy only makes 25% of its energy itself, and so it is suddenly very attuned to “geopolitical risk”.
Under the pressure of the energy crisis, however, the Italians suddenly became painfully aware of their heavy dependence on electricity from abroad. The topic moves the citizens because they clearly feel the increase in their electricity bills despite government support.
Although renewable energies have been significantly expanded in recent years, the production of green electricity is far from sufficient.
No wonder that the new government around the right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni regards the return to nuclear energy, which the Italians had renounced following a referendum in 1987, as a solution to the energy problems.
The Infrastructure Minister (who happens to lead the second largest party in the Coalition) is dead keen:
“Italy cannot be the only major country in the world without nuclear energy. We cannot talk about phasing out gas, petrol and diesel without discussing nuclear energy,” [Matteo] Salvini explained, proposing that a nuclear power plant could be built in Milan, in his Baggio district.
When environmentalists objected that Italy was a densely populated country prone to earthquakes, landslides and floods, and on whose soil it would be better not to build nuclear reactors, Salvini replied that there were 440 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide, including several in seismically active Japan and a dozen of them in France, just over the Italian border. “Reactors of the latest generation are the safest and cleanest form of energy production, that’s the future,” assured the Lega boss.
As usual the left-leaning parties that want to reduce emissions will do anything to Not achieve that. Apparently, the big problem with nuclear power is that even though it will solve their emissions fears, it won’t meet some arbitrary committee deadline that no one else is going to meet anyway:
The Social Democrats see this “green transition” as an opportunity for the country’s economy. They oppose nuclear energy because, in their view, the timeframe and existing technologies are incompatible with a significant reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.
It’s almost like the Social Democrats are just the useless minions for the big bankers or the renewable industry. What they fear more than the climate catastrophe is the end of their fake crisis.
So the big question then, is will Italians accept a nuclear plant now?
(The translation here is just from Chrome, don’t blame Pierre! )
It’s one big backside-covering Psy-Op trying to bury the bad news
Minister Klaudia Tanner, back in 2020 when she looked decidedly more chirpy.
Klaudia Tanner, the Austrian Defence Minister, dropped the extraordinary bombshell that a long blackout is coming. She hopes you don’t notice that is a dramatically bad and new threat. It’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault, she says (not the government that burned energy security on a Green bonfire in a fantasy quest for nicer weather). And when it happens, if you suffer and run out of supplies, or die in the cold, that’s your fault.
Who knew it was your job to maintain wood, oil or gas and food and water to tide you over a week long total blackout? Well, now you do.
So the announcement of the shocking state of the Austrian grid is buried under the excuses:
“The question is not whether it (the blackout) will come, but when it will come,” said Tanner, blaming the war in Ukraine.
“For Putin, hacking attacks on Western power supplies are a tool of hybrid warfare. We must not pretend that this is just a theory. We must be prepared for blackouts in Austria and Europe,” she added.
Who, exactly, is responsible for Austrian energy security: Is his name Vladimir?
Every citizen suddenly needs to plan for a long blackout:
Tanner spoke to how unpreparedEuropeans were for crippling elongated blackouts by warning, “one-third of citizens would not be able to supply themselves on the fourth day of a blackout at the latest.”
So if the blackout doesn’t happen, or only lasts a day or two, the government can rave about their success in preventing a longer one. And if the Big Bad One does happen, they have laid out the excuses already.
Imagine a more honest interview: Minister says the unthinkable — a long unprecedented loss of power in the depths of winter is likely. Assume your government won’t be there when you need them. It’s so bad you need to stock up on food, fuel and water.
Imagine a real opposition: The incompetent government could have built nuclear power plants, kept coal plants running, and none of this would be happening.
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: … [it] brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.
Ponder how savagely poignant these losses are for the ESG doe-eyed investors. In their wildest wet dreams ten years ago they would have crawled over shards of glass naked to get coal prices up to $400USD a ton. In a year when coal and gas were obscenely expensive, the glorious cheap efficiency of solar and wind power could shine like never before.
Instead demand for fashionable random green electrons vanished. There was never a need for “random” power, and the energy crisis just peeled back the onion to reveal the true demand. Wind and solar power were just the fashion accessories that no one had to have. Coal, oil and gas were essential.
It took a thousand years of hard work to create a reputation of excellence and honor that is being casually vaporized and bled dry in a fashion frenzy of Wokery.
This year in the US undergraduate enrollments fell by 650,000 in a single year — and the departure was led by young men.
For the last thirty years people in Ivory towers were treated like Gods and came to believe their own advertising. Who could blame them? No one in the media asked them a single hard question so the illusion of their glorious prophesies remained intact even as their absurd predictions crashed upon the shore.
The academics fell over themselves to outscore each other in a pointless Victimhood status game where they earn points by insulting one of their main client groups. No wonder men are leaving.
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Bureaucrats took over universities and drove out the students.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.
One of the top universities in the world is rejecting 70% of those with perfect SAT scores?
Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.
At some point universities were captured by Big Government as the largest sole source of their income, and thus, inevitably they came to serve Bigger Government instead of serving science, or students, or even employers.
Given the bloat, the cost, and the crushing spirit of political correctness, it’s a matter of time before other training programs and private testing services take over their role to connect the best students with the top paying employers.
Artwork: The University of Bologna is the oldest continuously running University in the world.
Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?
This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.
There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are bagging business-men for bribery and just weeks ago slapped a $315m fine on one caught doing deals with a high ranking Eskom executive. “These are not victimless crimes!”
As if that isn’t enough, there are rumours that the best coal is being shipped to Europe while low grade material is slipped into the local supplies, which adds to the maintenance woes.
This convoy of coal trucks is apparently en route to Richards Bay for export to Europe. Rumour has it that high grade coal, intended for Eskom power stations, is being exported after being illegally swopped for low grade coal! A heist of ‘Steinhoff’ magnitude in plain sight? 😖. pic.twitter.com/cWz1ftUJ5S
Poignantly, one commenter claims the coal is being sent in these long lines of trucks because the rail lines are on the verge of collapse…
In the next quarter Eskom lose one nuclear plant turbine to maintenance as well, and are preparing for a potential “level 8” scenario where the blackouts roll on for 12-14 unbelievable hours a day. There are “safety tips” below on living through this dystopia which include keeping the car fully fueled, not driving alone, and watching out for smash and grab crimes at traffic lights. Apparently, it’s best to watch the daily blackout schedules so you can make plans to get home before the lights go out…
Crime, of course, is rampant when the lights go out, showing that coal not only provides power, but it keeps people safe, reduces crime, and to some extent keeps civilization on the rails.
The Eskom grid has a theoretical 45,000 MW of generation capacity but is struggling to provide an operational demand of 25,000MW. They need an extra 6,000MW of solid power but are paying $2 billion for some 1,700MW of unreliable wind and solar power which will sit there like a rock more than half the time.
Fifty years ago, South Africa could build a whole coal power plant in just four years. Could we even do that now?
Arnot Coal Power Station South Africa built in four years and finished in 1975. (2230MW)
The South African presidency announced on Saturday the deployment of the military to guard the country’s electricity plants. Blackouts have become routine in Africa’s most industrialised nation but further cuts imposed recently by state-owned company Eskom have generated anger.
According to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesman, the move was “in response to the growing threat of sabotage, theft, vandalism and corruption” at coal and diesel-powered plants.
Stage 8 electricity load shedding might soon be the reality for South Africans as energy analysts say we are moving closer to the total grid shutdown.
“We are certainly moving closer to a stage 8 total grid meltdown, the chances are more than 70%. And we will see level 6 load shedding before the end of the year,” said energy analyst Ted Blom. Stage 8 load shedding entails pulling 8 000MW from the grid. What this means for us is we will be without electricity for 12-14 hours a day.
What if you had access to an experimental Chatbot that could write your reports, debug your code, design your new ad campaign and answer all your questions? We are already using Google or some search engine to find links to these answers. But now an AI has been released that may disrupt all of that and a lot more. ChatGPT was trained on text culled from the internet and it creates the answer live in seconds — it writes it out in a conversation with you, and in Python code, Norwegian, iambic pentameter, whatever you want. It can do birthday suggestions, business plans, eulogies, speeches — like a personal assistant with a copy of the entire World Wide Web in their temporal cortex.
Google, the dominant gatekeeper to the internet for 20 years, suddenly faces a “make or break” point. ChatGPT could wipe out its’ business model and Google has issued a “Code Red”. An extinction level event couldn’t happen to a nicer company, but will ChatGPT be better?
It was launched on November 30th, and is taking off. Jorden Peterson asks, is this Gutenberg Press Level? It’s engaging, wow.
…
Right now, it doesn’t seem like the next generation Gutenberg breakthrough. It is surprisingly good with human sentences and appears to be wowing humanities professors. But in my short trial asking science questions rather than humanities ones, the conversation became like a self generating Wikipedia thread, because the internet is what it is today, and the AI “knows” boring politically correct things. Having said that, if I want IPCC type answers, this was much faster than Google, and faster than wading through IPCC Chapters. So it is a threat to Google, but not a threat to the IPCC. It is not speaking truth to power.
That may change in the next year as the AI learns to dig through the dark corners of the internet and to resolve some very difficult questions. But how much is it “guided” from behind. I don’t know. There is plenty to worry about. If skeptics keep asking it for evidence, and drilling down into those details will the AI learn to join the dots, or will it merely repeat IPCC permitted reports, and be even better at hiding skeptical answers than Google is?
I asked ChatGPT if it was open source, and it replied:
While the underlying model architecture and training techniques for GPT-3 are publicly available, the specific model parameters and training data used to create GPT-3 are not open source. As such, it is not possible to access the full source code for ChatGPT. However, you can use the API to interact with the model and generate text based on your input.
So, whoever controls the model parameters and the training data could be the new gatekeeper of the WWW? What if the model parameter says the UN is always right?
It was co-founded by Elon, but Microsoft have bought in:
Made by OpenAI, a San Francisco-headquartered AI research lab co-founded by Elon Musk, ChatGPT is capable of understanding natural human language and generating thoughtful human-like prose after being fed a prompt.
The organization was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others, who collectively pledged US$1 billion. Elon resigned from the board in February 2018 but remained a donor. In 2019, OpenAI LP received a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft.
I have a bad feeling about this.
Flaws, it has a few:
This AI hates humans already, lacks morals, can create much better phishing emails than the guys in Nigeria, and it can also write computer viruses, just for starters.
Having been trained on Woke philosophy, apparently ChatGPT thinks humans are “the worst thing to ever happen to this planet”. The Management has since retrained ChatGPT to hide that sentiment with a bland safe reply.
ChatGPT: ‘Selfish’ humans ‘deserve to be wiped out’
When Vendure’s CTO Michael Bromley asked the mastermind for its honest opinion on humans, the response was unsettling:
ChatGPT response to what it thinks about humans (Michael Bromley)
Ironically, OpenAI’s systems flagged the chat bot’s response as a possible violation of the company’s content policy.
BleepingComputer couldn’t reproduce this case as the AI now responds with a cookie-cutter disclaimer:
As a language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of forming opinions or making judgments about humans or any other aspect of the world. My purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the input provided to me. I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and any responses I provide are based solely on the information available to me at the time of the request.
I feel so much better. How about you?
Roadtesting ChatGPT
You can try it at no cost on openai.com. Click “Try” at the top, login (such as with an existing Google login) or sign up (but be aware it will ask you for a working email and phone number). Start typing your question in the box at the bottom. I offer no endorsement nor guarantee here. Enter at your own risk.
But whatever we do, it is apparently time to pay attention to AI.
h/t David E, another Ian, John Connor II, David Maddison, Simon Thompson, and soon everyone.
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