Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By "Renewables"

In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food.  Do you want to double grain production?  Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage!  The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world.  Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history.  Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.

At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun.  Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture.  How is this one working out?

In the arena of the energy transition, various entire countries, and U.S. states, have offered up their whole populations as guinea pigs for this grand experiment conducted by people who have no idea what they are doing.  Germany, the UK, California and New York are prominent examples.  And then at the other end of the scale, we have a small island named El Hierro off the coast of Spain.  El Hierro only has about 11,000 people, but in 2008 it set out to show the world how to do a full transition to an electric system powered only by wind turbines backed up by a hydro-electric energy storage system.

I have reported on the progress of the El Hierro system multiple times, for example here in 2022, here in 2023, and here in 2024.  But it has been more than two years since my last update.  So let’s check in.