How the Dutch electricity grid is going to fail

So, some good news was announced today: The Netherlands now produces 53% of its electricity from renewable sources! Here you can see the breakdown:

And here you can see the different types of renewable energy:

And more wind energy is going to be deployed in the years ahead.

So what’s the problem then? Why am I saying the grid is going to fail?

To explain this, let’s first look at consumption over a typical day. Consumption is low during the night, for obvious reasons. It peaks during the evening, when everyone comes home and has to make food and entertain themselves. This is going to get more intense in the future, because people who come home will need to charge their electric vehicles. right now 4% of our fleet is electric and the power companies are already asking people to stop charging between 4 PM and 9PM.

But now have a look at electricity generated from renewable sources. We have this website for this.

Yesterday we peaked at 19.4 GW of renewable energy:

We dropped down in the evening, to 5.5 GW.

The day before yesterday, we dropped down to just 1.34 GW, during peak consumption:

The day before that we dropped to 4.3 GW during the peak.

And now the real nightmare, monday:

We drop down to 1.3 GW and that’s where we stay stuck, for the entire evening! Note how ugly that graph looks: Wind on sea, wind on land and the sun, all peak simultaneously!

In other words, we don’t have renewable energy when we need it: During the evening. In all three of these graphs, you’ll see that wind declines around 6 PM, when demand begins to ramp up. And when we do have it, we have all of it simultaneously, so what are we going to do with it then?

Well, the answer tends to be “exporting it”. But that’s what they’re telling themselves in Belgium and Germany too of course.

Ask yourself this: How are you going to base the grid, on energy sources that vary from 19.4 GW when they’re available, to 1.3 GW when they’re not? It’s not going to work!

The worst part, is that the problem is insidious: Let’s say you want to build nuclear reactors. Well in practice, nuclear energy is already pretty expensive. But now imagine a nuclear reactor that is only necessary to deliver us energy, during perhaps 10% of the year. How are you going to make that financially viable?

We have already reached the point, where we generate electricity that nobody is going to use. Have a look at this:

What are we supposed to do, with 26 GW of electricity, during the middle of the day? Note how the wind happily rises and falls together with the sun.

The solar panels everyone has, are going to prove to be entirely useless. If something is only available during parts of the day, you can load-shift. People can decide to cook their food at 5PM instead of 7PM. But the thing with the solar panels, is that they’re only available during parts of the day, during parts of the year.

Note also by the way, that the periods without sun and wind are clustered together. For example, here’s a three day consecutive period, of practically no wind and sun:

On wednesday the wind disappears.

On thursday, still nothing.

Friday, still no wind.

Saturday, still no wind.

Sunday, the wind returns:

So imagine this: The local municipality decides not to pump away the water today. “We can turn on the pumps tomorrow.” The next day, there’s still no wind. But now they have to pump more water away. If people try to adjust by load-shifting to a situation like this, which they will learn to do, then it just makes the problem worse, when you have these days of consecutive deficits.

It’s honestly pretty simple. The world should have started with the solar panels in places where the sun is available year-round: Jakarta, Indonesia. That’s a city where you would expect all the roofs to have solar panels. But they don’t.

If Jakarta can’t make it work, if Singapore can’t make it work, if Brazil can’t make it work, why would we be able to make it work? They would only need to store the electricity for the next day, we need to store it for winter.

When we install renewable energy, we’re also supposed to simultaneously install some sort of storage system. But if you do that, you would immediately see the problem: Storage is expensive. And we don’t even have the minerals we need for the batteries. You could theoretically design some sort of pumped storage system, but that’s not easy in a flat country like the Netherlands.

None of this is ground-breaking information, this link goes to a post made by a physicist in 2011. We could have figured this out when we started, but now the train has already been set in motion and you can’t shut it down. People already bought the solar panels, more wind turbines are still being built.

You’re now stuck, with this intermittent infrastructure. People think that nuclear energy is an alternative, but it takes a very long time to build and these reactors often shut down in summer when the water gets too warm.

There are other options. Tidal energy should be more predictable, but it’s ugly. You can grow seaweed in the ocean and burn it in the coal plants. Geothermal works in parts of the world, people can migrate to places like Iceland and Norway where you have abundant energy from geothermal and rivers.

And of course, there is the big taboo, governments can just ration electricity.

All of this would have been solvable, if we started dealing with the problem earlier. We have known for a very long time, that using fossil fuels changes our atmosphere. Unfortunately, that’s not what the elderly wanted. The Americans in particular, always have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the energy transition, the Republican presidents constantly sabotaged the climate change conferences.

And of course, we made some very stupid decisions: We grew our population through immigration. We’re the densest populated country in Europe, with 18 million people! Now we’re going to face the consequences of ignoring the limits to growth.

19 Comments

  1. Electricity is not a problem. Tens of Millions of Boomers go out of industry anyway and many companies are on the brink of collapse. (Not that is overall a bright thing to expect!)
    But this means power consumption will flatten out. The problem is heat. We need a lot more heat in Europe when the age average is around 50. And this is where stored soil heat can be a solution. Pump surplus solar electricty from the grid into the ground and reverse it into a local steam grid in winter. we have a pilot project trying to do this, many cities already have a steam grid. There is so much wood around to burn for the next 20 years. After that, 1/4th of the population is gone.
    Ofc if they import a lot more brown ppl during those 20 years, they will have to go Brown Lifeboat Scenario.

  2. Listen to Deep Green Resistance coming to terms with bright green lies that we’re still being told by alleged environmentalists.
    ………
    Jefferson’s paradox, etc.

    OK, I’m never allowed to post a link here for some reason.

  3. Bill McKibben says we must INSIST on biomass plants burning billions of trees because global warming.
    Some environmentalist he is.

    The global warming tards have RUINED the environmental movement.

    • There is a Native American lady in my church (it is an ecumenical sort of church) and she was in tears the other day because they are clear cutting huge swathes of old growth trees in her area on the East Coast in order to put in a solar panel farm. Even my moron neighbor here in CA who owns a SUV but demands that I “believe” in global warming, knows that the solar farms are evil.

    • Yeah it seems to be something like this.

      The virus and vaccine seem to function like a kind of slow lobotomy of the population.

      The first “mild” infection robs you of three IQ points, the second of two points.

      Climate change/resource depletion is like the disease and the virus/vaccine functions like some sort of anesthesia.

      Most people have an IgG4 antibody response to the virus, so they don’t even really notice anything’s wrong, their anti-inflammatory antibodies won’t let them notice what’s happening to their brains.

      Their neurons and blood vessels are just slowly covered in amyloid and they basically just undergo accelerated aging. If they pay attention, they should be able to notice their sense of smell has gotten worse, but most people just ignore all of this as it happens to them and blame their “allergies”.

      If you take cannabis (expunges amyloid from neurons) or better yet, psilocybe mushrooms (massage the blood vessels in your brain), you immediately notice what’s going on. I remember how mushrooms made my brain feel when I was 20, I notice how they make it feel these days.

      You can feel the mushrooms get hard at work repairing your blood vessels, because this virus is damaging them.

      If you eat natto, you also tend to notice it, you notice the drop in blood pressure and the amyloid plaques in the front of your brain being destabilized.

      I think the only real solution is to just exercise regularly and to arm your body with the tools that it needs to deal with a virus of this nature. A mask like an N95 is designed to keep out 95% of viral particles, that’s not going to be enough to keep the virus from ending up in the brain.

      • > A mask like an N95 is designed to keep out 95% of viral particles, that’s not going to be enough to keep the virus from ending up in the brain.

        According to Steve Kirsch, only P100-grade respirators (and above) will protect you from COVID:

        https://kirschsubstack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about?utm_source=publication-search

        > “The best mask I’m aware of is the MIRA CM-6M Tactical Gas Mask with Particle Max P3 Virus Filters. Made from ULPA filtration technology, a step above HEPA Rated to stop 99.9995%+ of viral and bio particulates. Only $240 for the mask and $150 for a set of 6 P3 filters.”

        > “Of course you may get strange looks at the grocery store.”

        > “The optional NBC-77 SOF CBRN Gas Mask Filter will protect against CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) agents.”

        And you’d need to wear the version that covers the eyes as well, because the vaccine-induced IgG antibodies select for more neurovirulent variants.

        Note: These respirators don’t filter the exhaust port, so only the wearer is protected, not those in the vicinity of the wearer. So EVERYONE would have to wear them in order to prevent further viral immune escape. And the mask has to have a perfect seal to the face, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

        I tip my hat to the #ZeroCovid wokies who would be willing to wear something like that in public, personally I would really struggle with that, my social anxiety would be spiking like crazy because everyone would be staring at me.

        That Fast Eddy guy has previously written comments on this website, and he’s a regular commenter on other Substacks. But I notice that his predictions are all over the place. In that linked article, he predicts that everyone will die from future COVID variants (including unvaxxed), but then in other comments he’s written, he claims that only the vaccinated are in trouble. He also holds strong feelings of schadenfreude towards the vaccinated.

        > What are we supposed to do, with 26 GW of electricity, during the middle of the day?

        Because I’m a low IQ LSWM, I used to read loads of articles from Bitcoin maximalists who claimed that “Bitcoin fixes this”, because using excess stranded energy to run ASICS miners would somehow “stabilise” the grid (according to them). And I saw on Twitter recently that the government of Bhutan is now using excess hydroelectric power to mine Bitcoin (similar to how El Salvador is using geothermal for that purpose). But even that’s not 100% environmentally friendly because every few years you have to replace the ASIC machines with new ones due to Moore’s Law.

        • >Because I’m a low IQ LSWM, I used to read loads of articles from Bitcoin maximalists who claimed that “Bitcoin fixes this”

          Yeah, it doesn’t.

          Nobody is going to run a Bitcoin mining farm that produces Bitcoin for 3 hours a day during the peak sunlight hours when electricity prices are negative and idles during the other 21 hours.

          Bitcoin farms are the typical example of an activity that uses baseline electricity available 24/7. It’s entirely incompatible with intermittent sources of electricity like wind and solar.

          >According to Steve Kirsch, only P100-grade respirators (and above) will protect you from COVID:

          >https://kirschsubstack.com/p/everything-you-need-to-know-about?utm_source=publication-search

          Yeah it’s a bit like a condom. If you wear a condom you reduce chances of pregnancy by about 90%. But after ten years of sex with a condom, you’ll have roughly the same number of babies, because pregnancy is the main limiting factor to the number of babies.

          Similarly, masks will reduce infections in the short term, but in the long term, immunity is the main limiting factor to the number of infections.

          I wouldn’t mind cleaning the air in places like hospitals and nursing homes. But the mask experiment has been tried and it achieved effectively nothing.

          • “it’s a bit like a condom. If you wear a condom you reduce chances of pregnancy by about 90%. But after ten years of sex with a condom, you’ll have roughly the same number of babies, because pregnancy is the main limiting factor to the number of babies.”

            Such a great analogy! And LOL!

            Truly, it will be immunity and not any mask which will keep one healthy in the long term (+ years).

            Honestly, I wish I had better advice for the vaxxed.

            High on the list is becoming a Catholic and taking the Lord Jesus Christ into your physical body through the Holy Eucharist.

            Also high on the list is liberal use of Ivermectin.

        • Last year I grew a big Merv Hughes moustache. It wasn’t quite as good as Merv’s, but it looked good. But it caused folk to stare at me, so it had to go.
          Your IQ seems not too bad to me.
          It was you who mentioned Aaron Clarey at some point, yes? If it was you, then thanks. He is reasonably honest and not a bad geezer.

          • Yeah that might have been me, I’m pretty sure that I’ve mentioned Aaron on here before. I have a few of his books on my Kindle, he has lots of good YouTube videos.

            > Your IQ seems not too bad to me.

            Thanks, that was my attempt at self-deprecating humour lol, I’ve never been tested but if I had to guess, I’d say maybe between 110 and 115. In my final year high school exams I graduated around #20 out of approx. 160 students in my year, so above average but nothing special. I was decent at maths and science but when I went on to study engineering in college I struggled a lot with the advanced calculus and thermodynamics.

            I googled Merv Hughes, I grew up playing cricket until I was around 17, Eoin Morgan is from a town pretty close to where I live, I remember watching that World Cup final in 2019 at Lord’s, that last Over was absolutely crazy when the ball was deflected off Ben Stokes’ bat and went out for a boundary:

            https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dtCS0WGZH4k?&t=60

            Sad what happened to Shane Warne and Phillip Hughes, they both died too young.

  4. Apocalyptic times.

    What should I talk about here? Europe seems to be sliding into darkness literally and figuratively. Blackouts will become more frequent all over the world as resources get scarcer, perhaps bits of Europe will last longer, perhaps not.

    The capitalists fled the west, taking their money with them for the biggest growing markets and cheap labour. The factories went with them. Then the IP. What does Europe actually offer the rest of the world?

    Services?

    I suspect Europe/the west are net takers. Taking takes strength. What strength does Europe/the west have? Doesn’t look like a whole lot.

    Not after Ukraine at any rate, which is seeming like a failed gamble to regain lost strength, but in failing it has demonstrated the wests/Europe’s weakness.

    Too weak to take on China.

    But is there another gamble to take?

    The Middle East?

    Certainly seems like it’s heating up there.

    Strange apocalyptic times.

    I have not detected reality breaking down though. I don’t even detect reality bending. I just detect overshoot and ever more of the predictable lowest common demoninator thinking that is dragging us all inexorably towards war.

    • Whether you believe in the spiritual dimension (which I seem to happen to do), or just in the material, it looks like we’re headed towards the same result.

      That is the reality. I don’t see that bending, or glitching. What do others mean though when they say reality is glitching?

      • Let’s workshop how this will go. . .

        The west will try for one last big push to gain control over the remaining oil resources.

        China and Russia will resist by feeding weapons to proxies, so it won’t be a cake walk.

        If Ukraine is anything to go by, the west will lose.

        Unless it goes nuclear, and then everyone could lose.

        This does feel like a “I told you so” moment to a LSWM like me, who could never come to terms with the betrayal of the industrial working class, and the accompanying de-industrialization etc. by neoliberal capitalism. And that’s before we get to the rest of my whines about capitalism with its evil money etc.

        The depths of the betrayal are just starting to be felt though aren’t they?

        Kinda hard to win a war of machines, and all modern wars are wars of machines, when you can’t make enough machines with the right kind of qualities to keep up.

        Kinda hard to keep the lights on without the wages of sin to pay the bills that those machines bring in.

        I admit to being a bit torn. Part of me wants that better world, to just become a good Christian pacifist, but part of me can see the lesson of history in big bold letters. From the introduction of my copy of the Iliad:

        “The whole poem has been moving towards this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome. The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who stands for the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will go down to defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a private quarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in a private quarrel thinks only of revenge, though that revenge, as he well knows, is the immediate prelude to his own death. And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. The images of that night assault – the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector’s baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery – all of this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history (and the rest of us in ours – Wombat), immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer’s representation of war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.”

        Is that a fair representation though of how our fellow men are likely to behave? Well, sadly, going off history, that would seem to be the case.

  5. I do believe it was LSWM who brought up Aaron Clarey a while back. It was his recommendation that got me to subscribe to Cappy’s channel.

    I like him. Seems pretty practical with his head screwed on straight.

    But he occasionally makes comments that would anger Radagast (or myself) when he has this almost-Boomer mentality of “life’s tough, don’t be a pussy, if you have to work 3 jobs while living in a trailer, putting up with corporate bullshit, well then, that’s just what a Real Man(tm) does! Suck it up, snowflake” etc

Leave a Reply

Comments should be automatically approved again. People who misbehave will be banned.

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.