It has been obvious now for many years to the numerate that the fantasy future powered by wind and sun is not going to happen.  Sooner or later, reality will inevitably intrude.  And yet, the fantasy has gone on for far longer than I ever would have thought possible.  Hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse have been a big part of the reason, going not just to green energy developers but also to academic charlatans and environmental NGOs to fan the flames of climate alarm.

It was three years ago, in December 2021, that I asked the question, “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Green Energy Wall?”   The “green energy wall” would occur when addition of wind and solar generators to the grid could no longer continue, either due to regular blackouts or soaring costs or both.  Candidates for first to hit the wall considered in that post included California, New York, Germany and the UK.  I wrote then:

All these places, despite their wealth and seeming sophistication, are embarking on their ambitious plans without ever having conducted any kind of detailed engineering study of how their new proposed energy systems will work or how much they will cost. . . .  As these jurisdictions ramp up their wind and solar generation, and gradually eliminate the coal and natural gas, sooner or later one or another of them is highly likely to hit a “wall” — that is, a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof, or both, forcing a drastic alteration or even abandonment of the whole scheme.

Three years on, it looks like Germany is winning the race to the wall.  After a couple of decades of “Energiewende,” Germany has closed all of its nuclear plants and much of its fossil fuel capacity, with a huge build-out of wind and solar generation.  How’s that going?  The German site NoTricksZone posts today an English translation of a piece yesterday by Fritz Vahrenholt at the site Klimanachrichten (Climate News).  The translated headline is “Two brief periods of wind doldrums and Germany’s power supply reaches its limits.”  Excerpt: