A Saturday Short
To Dream the Impossible Dream
Highway 93 between the Hoover Dam and Kingman, Arizona, is a crumbling and decaying roadway that seems to get very little attention. This is rather astonishing since the highway is a component of the primary thoroughfare between Phoenix and Las Vegas. There are proposals to turn this roadway, and its extension east of Kingman, Arizona to Wickenburg, Arizona, into Interstate 11 which is currently just a short 15-mile stretch from south Henderson, Nevada, to the Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which spans the Colorado River just south of the Hoover Dam. It is also the border between Nevada and Arizona.
Just south of Boulder City, Nevada, on Interstate 11 is Nevada Solar One’s Boulder Solar project consisting of 288,000 tracker-mounted solar panels. Tracker-mounted solar panels automatically adjust the angle of the panels to follow the sun throughout the day.
Once inside Arizona and traveling south 35 miles on Highway 93, one views the Mohave County Wind Farm Project currently consisting of 126 turbines.
This is simply an extremely undersized sample of green energy projects throughout the country. Since 2021, the US taxpayer has infused these projects to the tune of $1.2 trillion ($1,200,000,000,000) all under the authority and auspices of unverified climate change. While this unscrupulous and unjust expenditure of taxpayer dollars is on temporary hold, the issue could revert and reverse from election to election.
Naturally, because this type of energy is sporadic or intermittent, requiring the full participation of Mother Nature, it necessitates battery storage. As I write in my article “A Saturday Short - Energy Storage - Mission Impossible” that details a research paper entitled, “The Energy Storage Conundrum”, the cost is not only absolutely catastrophic, but essentially economically absurd or determinedly unfeasible. As the Global Warming Policy Foundation writes, “The cost of providing lithium-ion batteries for a grid could be more than ten times that of GDP (Gross Domestic Product).” In an additional “NET ZERO” report, it claims the vast majority of all the unused land in the USA would be required if reliance on green energy is achieved.
These two issues alone make all construction of wind and solar impractical and unattainable.
One of the greenest countries in Europe, Spain, along with Portugal and other nearby regions in Western Europe, recently suffered a disastrous power outage as detailed in the Daily Mail article, “Blackout Chaos”. While Spain's state electricity network operator Red Electrica is investigating the cause is obvious. Reuters in the linked article say the renewable energies are not to blame, but rather the management of renewables, yet they write, “One growing source of concern related to the management of renewables has been the increase in so-called ‘dunkelflaute’ events across northwest Europe this winter. This refers to extended periods in which levels of both wind and sun decline significantly, limiting the power that can be generated by either.” I wonder how they propose humans can manage, control, or change the wind and the sun – absurd!
If people want to be energy reliant on Mother Nature, Father Time will have the last and chaotic say.
