Let’s Celebrate Least Light Day With Lots of Renewable Energy!! Ha-Ha

It is the winter solstice.  In Minnesota we get less than 8 hours of daylight this time of year, and at a low angle with low intensity.  And we have lots of snow, which falls everywhere, including on solar panel farms.  It is cold too, which degrades the equipment.  As an extra bonus, we have less wind in the winter and the cold isn’t good for wind turbines either.  Guess what, if we had any battery storage, that would be impaired by cold as well.  The state of Minnesota intentionally won’t tell Minnesotans how little of their energy actually comes from “renewables”, partly because it is working hard to sell Little Timmy Walz’ delusion of phasing out fossil fuels and nuclear power.  They don’t want you to know that means Minnesota would have constant blackouts.  But the whacko progressives who support Walz actually want everyone living back in the Stone Age, supposedly to save the planet.

Dave Dixon comes through again with an update on power generation in the Upper Midwest grid that Minnesota is part of.  The feds haven’t figured out that they need to hide this data yet.  Look at the charts.  Tells you all you need to know.  And as Dave says, it is worse than this in Minnesota alone, because the data for this region includes states like Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri, which have longer hours of daylight and higher intensity sun and less snow. The entire population better wake up to this scam or we will all be like Ukrainians are this winter.

Dave’s notes:

• To mark the winter solstice we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at electrical generation by source for the past week in Minnesota. Since hourly data is not available for just Minnesota we are presenting data here for the Midwest Region.
• Electricity in the Midwest Region is managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and covers Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and parts of several other states. Data is downloaded from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-MIDW. The data covers the period from midnight on the morning of 12/14/22 to midnight the morning of 12/21/22, and is hourly generation in MWh. We then calculated the proportions of each source of the overall total. Transfers of electricity in or out of the Midwest Region are not included in this analysis.
• Fig.1, Midwest Region Hourly Electric Utility Generation by Source: The highest proportion of solar power seen during this week was 1.3% of the overall total for a 3-hour time period on 12/18/22. Wind did much better, exceeding 20% for several days from 12/15/22 to 12/18/22, and peaking at 26.4% on 12/14/22. However, wind also fell below 10% for 35 hours on 12/18/22 and 12/19/22. As usual, coal and natural gas made up for the decrease in wind power.
• Fig. 2, Midwest Region Hourly Electric Utility Generation, Renewables and Non-Renewables:  Here we have the same data used in Fig. 1, but we have defined wind and solar as ‘Renewable’, and everything else as ‘Non-Renewable’. We grouped hydro and nuclear into the Non-Renewable group because the environmentalists tend to be very hostile to these energy sources even though they are essentially carbon free once constructed (ignoring carbon released while mining uranium). Despite wind and solar providing a substantial amount of power at various times during the week, the drop-off from 25.9% on 12/17/22 to 5.2% on 12/18/22 illustrates the danger in relying on wind and solar energy to run our economy if we don’t have 100% on-demand backup power available. The longer periods of time where wind power is seriously decreased also exposes the problem with batteries as a backup power source. Even in one random week we have long periods of time where wind power is decreased by more than 50% from its peak.