Here's an interesting report of the electric "disturbance" that just took place in France at the beginning of 2021.

In our short span attention society, there are still decisions with long term consequences, one of which concerns energy.

Carbon may or may not be a long term risk for mankind (I believe the case is not as clear-cut as usually presented.) but the consequences of misleaded decisions will be with us for decades to come. 

The wind and solar paranoia currently running amok in the West is one of them. For technical reasons, you simply cannot run a modern electrical grid on wind and solar alone since the base load cannot be guarantied at night and especially in winter as will be demonstrated in the coming years.

One of the main factors differentiating developed and developing countries over the last 50 years has been a stable electric supply as you cannot run a modern economy on an unreliable electric network. 

The fact that in the US and now in Europe, electricity blackouts are becoming more common is to my opinion an ominous sign of things to come.

What we are facing currently, more than anything, is an energy crisis for which there is no simple solutions. Diminishing returns on investment in the energy sector guaranty that the coming decades will be harsh, short of a very unlikely technical breakthrough in fusion at ITER. This will be compounded by wasteful decisions to over-invest in expensive and unreliable energy sources for which there is no turning back as the trillions of dollars currently wasted on fanciful projects will not be available when needed.

Stay tuned... and prepare!

Near electricity blackout over Europe was triggered in France due to "Polar Cold Wave"

P Gosselin
No Tricks Zone
Tue, 12 Jan 2021

 

A further analysis of last Friday's European near power blackout shows that the problem had begun already one day earlier in France, due to cold weather, says a German expert.

At wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft Bayern, Jörn Künzle provides background on what was behind Europe's near blackout last Friday, January 8, 2021.

Disturbance began in France

Quoting energy expert Dr. Michael Schneeberger, "The disturbance in the European grid was triggered in France. Already on January 7, France's RTE (Le Réseau de Transport de l'Électricité) was forced to take essential parts of the electricity-intensive industry off the power grid. The RED alert level was ordered for the entire network of France."

Polar wave

The following reasons were decisive, according to Michael Schneeberger's research:

1) The polar cold wave occurred earlier than meteorologically expected, with low temperatures for France.

2) Due to delays for new rules by the corona management, 13 nuclear power plants are currently not on the grid.

3) Despite fierce EDF warnings, the Macron government (German influence, Merkel/Greens) shut down the 2 Fessenheim units (both fully operational, i.e. almost 2 GW thus additionally missing).

4) CONSEQUENCE: Therefore, beginning Thursday, power had to be imported massively at very high prices,
a) with continental high pressure situation, there is no wind (and this in whole Europe),
b) with an installed capacity of 57 GW wind energy, the available capacity was less than 1000 MW (as is well known, there is little sun even in January / ignored by politics).

5) So on January 8, the RTE called on the French population to switch off electrical devices, heaters and charging units, but that, however, was not continuously adhered to.

6) Therefore the only remaining possibility was to intervene using area-wide shutdowns or by lowering the mains voltage by approx. 5% (there has been no comparable situation in France in 60 years).

7) Germany was unable to offer any assistance, that was the trigger for a separation of the European grids by ENTSO for stability reasons.

8) It then took a good hour to stabilize the frequency again.

9) Southern Germany. Bavaria and Austria could be kept stable, thanks to the Czech Republic grid (the Temelin and Dukovany nuclear power plants were in full operation).

Note:

1) February 2021 is still to come, with even lower temperatures.
2) Also interesting is that Poland has requested Germany to restart the nuclear power plants immediately , otherwise electricity power supply would be massively at risk.

A similar incident occurred in November, 2006 when ten million households in Western Europe had to be disconnected from the power grid.

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NTZ Note:

On Saturday we posted on how wind and solar energies have been mostly AWOL over the past weeks in Germany. For the period from January 6 to 9, we see that Germany's massive 110 GW of installed wind and solar capacity were delivering near nothing, thus straining the grid in these times of cold weather.