Perhaps the most stunning revelation in the host’s interview yesterday with Republican California gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton was that California apparently has a plan to farm wind – 100 miles off shore. Hilton carried on about how deep the water is out there and the fact that the plan was to float the towers. That is, admittedly nonsensical, perhaps crossing the line between wind turbine and sail, but that is not the obstacle that crossed my mind. One hundred miles off shore is international waters – that’s gonna get legally complex. But from Germany comes word of an even greater complexity.
An offshore wind auction in Germany ended without a single bid, showing that zero-subsidy contracts aren’t in demand with investors.
The Federal Network Agency didn’t receive any bids for two areas in the North Sea, the German offshore wind group BWO said in a statement Wednesday.
“The result is a clear signal: the German offshore wind market is currently not interesting for investors,” said Stefan Thimm, managing director of BWO. “The current auction design forces developers to bear risks beyond their control without any protection.”
There you have it folks. If the government ain’t paying for it, business is not having it.
I recall a flight I took a couple of years ago from Atlanta to LA. I ended up talking to a couple of engineers out of Knoxville, TN that were headed to LA to bid on a solar project. I started asking questions about the market for solar and they admitted it was all government driven, but they were going to make money while the sun shined. Which, by the way, means they had to greatly overcharge for the project to make sure they recouped all their costs in the project proper and did not leave anything on the table based on projections of future earnings.
Now, imagine a world that was no longer playing with wind and solar but, based on government regulation, was instead dependent upon it. And forget for a minute the unreliability of such generation and assume it to be reliable. Also forget the associated environment complication like the vast swathes of land and sea consumed by the generating facilities. Just focus on the business.
What we have just learned here is that there is no money in generating power this way unless the government underwrites it. So, in the wind and solar dependent world either taxes are going to have to go through the roof to keep the subsidies rolling or the price of electricity is going to have to go through the roof exponentially.
Candidate Hilton pointed out in yesterday’s interview that the differential in the price of gasoline between California and the rest of the country amounts to around $100 per month out-of-pocket for teh average Californian. The differential is in taxes. Now, start multiplying as the cost of electrical production increases based on what we just described and the demand for electricity increases as we all start driving EVs. That extra $100/month is going to balloon into thousands. Then ask yourself, how we gonna pay for food?
Can you say inflation? If it weren’t for electronic banking; we’d be carrying cash in wheelbarrows.
A couple of days ago, Rachel Maddow carried on rather idiotically about how Trump had ushered in an authoritarian age. It was maximum TDS. But think about how I concluded that last paragraph. Does anybody recall the conditions that lead to the National Socialists taking power in Germany? Yes, it was inflation in Weimar Germany being so bad people were carrying cash in wheelbarrows.
As if mandating how power is generated and used were not authoritarian enough – doing so creates conditions that can lead to even grosser forms of authoritarianism. Let’s not kid ourselves, The green agenda is a power grab. If the need were real the market would solve the issue. But as we have seen there is no market, which indicates there is no serious problem.
