20 thoughts on “Autumn Night in Germany”

  1. If you’ll believe that man can give birth, believing that the sun will always shine and the wind will always blow, just enough and not too much, is an easier sell. Every power outage will be fresh evidence of global warming, not blatant stupidity.

  2. Good old coal! A quarter millennium after the Industrial Revolution, and coal is still King.

    On the other hand, it is many millennia after man discovered fire, and Germans are still depending on burning biomass.

    Could reality finally be getting ready to enter from stage left?

  3. Just my personal opinion, but I think rather than having to admit that they cannot wave a politically-correct magic wand and have power appear outside of the laws of physics that the Left in Europe and especially Germany will insist that people starve and freeze first. And they then will blame those people for the failure of the PC magic.

    Subotai Bahadur

  4. The image in the post comes from an interesting site called Electricity Maps.

    https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?utm_source=electricitymaps.com&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner

    Looking specifically at Germany, one can see that wind does produce quite a bit of energy.

    https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE?utm_source=electricitymaps.com&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner

    …it’s just that the times when it’s produced and the times when it’s needed don’t necessarily line up very well.

    For whatever reason, it seems to be hard for a lot of people to understand the importance of this time factor.

  5. A cold autumn, and an even colder winter, if all the signs that I read are accurate.
    Well, people, you were warned. Bed, made, sleep.

    I do hope that I live to see Greta T., the world’s most annoying teenager, have rotten vegetables and worse thrown at her, the next time that she appears in a public forum to lecture us all about the peril of global warming.

    Seems that Germany could use a little of that, in the coming months.

  6. Here’s a chart of European Nat Gas prices:
    https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas
    Click on ALL in the lower left to see just how bad it is.

    Check out agri commodities while you’re there. Prices quite healthy if you’re a farmer, less so if you’re China with a deliberately crippled economy and a dependence on food imports. In fact, China imports just about everything.

  7. The globalist left has a problem with reality. I suspect that some of it has to do with success. Many of these people had succeeded amazingly in our financialized economy and that of Europe. I like sailboats and the biggest and most expensive ones in the world are in Europe. Tom Perkins built an amazing huge sailing yacht called “Maltese Falcon.” Now there are much larger and more expensive yachts in Europe. Anyway, someone who can spend $ 25 million on a yacht may think that reality has no influence on his life. It’s the old illusion that food comes shrink wrapped in a market or is delivered by servants. A few of them, perhaps George Soros, may actually be able to isolate themselves pretty well. Still, civilization is fragile. The threat to it is real and growing. I’m not sure the globalist left understands that.

  8. The globalist Left IS the threat to civilization.

    The Saxon Plain in 2019 was dotted with ugly wind turbines–the most I’ve ever seen in one place (but I haven’t been out West).

  9. More on the absence of reality in the “Green Revolution.”

    But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.

    So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.

    Actually, and incredibly, no.

    However, we do have a demonstration of the results of the war on farmers and fertilizers.

    Sri Lanka.

    A recent assessment by the World Food Programme Sri Lanka found that nearly 30 percent of the country’s 22 million population were now food insecure, with one in every four people regularly skipping meals to be able to afford to eat. This is the plight of many poor and ‘newly poor’ Sri Lankans who have been battered by high inflation rates, shortages, and job and income losses.

    They banned chemical fertilizers and disaster struck. Food production dropped severely.

  10. MCS: “In fact, China imports just about everything.”

    It is true that China imports a lot of food & fuel. It then exports the items it manufactures using those resources, and thus more than pays for its imports.

    It is true that the USA exports a lot of food & fuel, along with IOUs. It then imports low tech items (eg nuts & bolts) and high tech items (eg electronics, medications) that it does not have the capability to manufacture for itself.

    Please remind me — what is the definition of an advanced economy?

  11. If you can’t tell the difference between not being able to buy your next IPhone and your next meal, I hope you won’t have to find out. It’s a lot less likely you’ll have your ignorance disabused if you stay far from China.

  12. MCS…but how many Chinese imports are involved in US production of food?…if you look at a John Deere tractor, for example, even if final assembly is in the US, I expect there are a fair number of components that come from China.

  13. Mike K…your first link doesn’t work, but it seems to go here:

    https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-2-without-a-demonstration-project-or-feasibility-study

    …interesting post, especially the description of the wind+storage system on the island of El Hierro. (I give credit to the people running this project for providing detailed statistical information on the actual results, even though those results aren’t what they were hoping for)

    Note the pretty decent % of electricity from wind in certain months…77% in May, for example…and very poor in other months…viz 21% in April. Unlike US politicians, the El Hierro people were at least smart enough to retain their diesel generator until they got some operating experience.

  14. “but how many Chinese imports are involved in US production of food?”
    Well, I suppose we’re about to find out. I believe the big heavy metal parts are not from China, their metallurgy is notoriously unreliable and quality control sketchy at best. For the electronic parts, I’m much less sanguine. While Chinese semiconductors are decades behind state of the art, we have allowed the packaging of the chips produced elsewhere to become over concentrated in China. I haven’t seen anything from Texas Instruments that wasn’t on indefinite back order for months.

    The good news is that it won’t be this year, harvest seems to be proceeding normally if expensively.

  15. “While Chinese semiconductors are decades behind state of the art, we have allowed the packaging of the chips produced elsewhere to become over concentrated in China.”

    Yes, and although I haven’t read the Chips bill in detail, I believe it allows subsidies for US-based semiconductor manufacturers even if the final packaging to be done elsewhere, including China.

    My impression is that it’s not a technically hard manufacturing problem, it’s just labor-intensive so be incentive to do it somewhere with very low labor costs. Lots of places with lower labor rates than China these days, though.

  16. Packaging chips is the exact opposite of labor intensive, absolutely every part of the operation is done by machine and only by machine. The only reason to produce them in China or anyplace with low wages is because that was where they did it when there was more labor involved and now from some combination of stupidity, cupidity (they may save $0.005 per chip for something that costs $x00 each.) and pure laziness.

    The same goes for all the steps: Dicing, sawing the individual chips from the wafers. Test, which happens at several places along the line. The only time they will be touched by hand is if they’re bought by some small timer like me that uses them one at a time.

    China used to be the place where you could take an idea and find some smart feller that would would quote you a price for a million over the phone. There are a lot of sad stories but it did work fairly often sort of. The Chinese were hungry and eager to please, they knew that once they got that contract or, often enough, just a purchase order, they had a lot of leverage, going somewhere else would involve a lot of delay. So they usually, eventually, produced something usable. What I hear is that is no longer the case, containers full of bricks or other junk and other pure scams to milk the last few dollars from the gullible and desperate.

    The big players with their “own” factories are dealing with never ending lock downs and many are in the process of finding out that what they thought was an investment was actually a contribution.

  17. The Saxon Plain in 2019 was dotted with ugly wind turbines–the most I’ve ever seen in one place (but I haven’t been out West).

    Drive through West Texas from Wichita Falls to Abilene to San Angelo to Midland to Big Spring and back to Abilene. The landscape is completely littered with the wind turbines

  18. I flew out to Des Moines Iowa on Tuesday to buy a new Ford F-450 pick up truck. Drove south a ways to Braddyville IA to hook up my brand new 26′ gooseneck trailer, then yesterday punched in my home address to the NAV app and headed home. The display map lacked state identifiers,but somewhere in the route back to AZ, I travelled through the Oklahoma/Texas Panhandle. I just can’t remember if it was before or after the Gawdawful stench of the cattle feedlots that plague that region, but I observed an enormous number of Windmills, all of which had a pair of flashing red lights high up going on (this was in the wee hours last night). Not a single one displayed a moving blade. Does the wind stop blowing at night in Texas/Oklahoma? How stupid are our betters? Don’t answer that!

    I have a plan! The solar farms shut down when the sun sets. The windfarms shut down at night too. OK, here is my plan:

    Starlight/moonlight farms! When the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, we will always have starlight and moonlight. It can’t miss! While I hire a lobbyist and author my grant application, you good folks at chicagoboys.net have a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Don’t delay, act today! Mother Earth will thank you.

  19. I happened to be driving up I35 in eastern Kansas and passed a wind farm where three of the turbines were leaking oil to the extent that the tops of the towers were completely covered. The gear boxes and pitch controls use a lot of oil, when bearings fail, they do so catastrophically, often either causing a fire or shedding blades. There are a lot of videos of them throwing blades before the imbalance causes the whole tower to collapse. There’s a vary famous picture of two mechanics standing on top of a burning nacelle with no way down.
    https://gineersnow.com/industries/renewables/two-mechanics-died-wind-turbine-fire-helped-wind-industry

    https://nypost.com/2022/08/10/oklahoma-wind-turbine-bent-in-half-on-fire-in-wild-video/

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