When the Spanish electricity grid collapsed one ordinary Monday in late April, the dreams of renewable energy and the green transition team died with it.
On these pages, Ryan McMaken was quick to point out that, under European Green Deal-type political convictions, affordability and reliability are not important virtues of the European electricity grid. Shoving too much odious excrement onto a single electricity grid is bound to break.
While the story is still unfolding and Spanish officials have denied that renewables were the cause of the loss in frequency that shut down all electricity for some 60 million people in Spain and Portugal, several commentators and experts have now publicly come out and confess that the overwhelming reliance on solar at the time of the blackout was to blame.
The literal gaslighting by the increasingly irrelevant mainstream/corporate media was mostly sad. Amusingly, the author of the propaganda piece in Reuters tried to diffuse blame away from the green deities by saying that it wasn’t the renewable energy’s fault, but the “renewables in the modern grid.” Oh-kay.
Let’s back up. Have you heard anything about ESG—environmental, social, and governance—recently? Me neither. There was a remarkable turnaround in the corporate use of “ESG” in just a few short years. From being all-encompassing, uttered by every CEO, and shoved down the throats of every employee by every HR department at every sufficiently large enough company, it all just vanished.
Almost overnight, nobody cared anymore. One recent survey suggested that only 7 percent of those who were hired a couple of years ago to work on corporate ESG are still employed to do that today. Poof, gone.
And it all happened quietly. Matt Levine, of Bloomberg “Money Stuff” fame, has repeatedly hypothesized that ESG—like so much else—was a low-interest rate phenomenon. Once rates and inflation started biting, people were quick to abandon virtue-signaling environment/social justice efforts.
Here’s a prediction in light of the Spanish disaster: The “Green wave”—or the ominous energy transition—that shoves solar panels on every roof and blankets the landscape with wind turbines, will suffer a similar fate.
Why? Besides ruining grids and showing up in the political and social discourse, it isn’t doing very much. The green “transition” has achieved the sum total of almost nothing in the 30-odd years in which it has ruled the minds of intellectuals and politicians. Don’t believe me? Pull up a graph of the globe’s primary energy consumption by source and see for yourself.
In 1991, the year in which I was born—to take a year at random from the 1990s when the climate change crowd really got going—77.5 percent of energy consumption came from oil, gas, and coal. In 2023, after trillions spent in electrifying grids and putting up solar plants and subsidizing this or that green effort; after insane social and political efforts to fly less and eat sustainable and recycle plastic and on and on, that same number stands at 76.55 percent. Three decades of force, money, and propaganda and you haven’t even moved the needle.
Turns out, people want their energy, their cars, their stuff, their trips, and to survive for that matter. Whatever you do to thwart that from on high has nothing but marginal effects around the edges.
What you have done is destabilized a lot of electricity grids around the world. Solar and wind have displaced some biomass and some nuclear by single-digit percentages and already the grids are falling apart—i.e., Spain. And it’s not like we (“we”) didn’t know that. Buried in research reports and briefing papers from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, the conclusions are clear: more unreliables, less inertia, more risk for frequency collapses that trigger a complete shutdown.
The massive changes, historically speaking, of replacing biofuel with coal and then coal with natural gas were already largely completed by the late-’70s. The lesson when we look at the historical record of humanity and its relationship with the natural world is that we get more and better (cheaper, faster, safer, more stable); not worse or more expensive or less reliable. “Every energy transition we’ve had,” I wrote last year, “have been additive.” We don’t, as a civilization, “replace” or “phase out” energy sources; we just add to them with better ones. And, as the Spanish electricity disaster indicates, unreliables like wind and solar aren’t better.
Like ESG quietly disappearing from the focus of almost everyone, the obsession of everyone with all things green will hopefully just disappear.
The law of climate policy—for which Roger Pielke Jr. lent his name—states that “whenever environmental and economic objectives are placed in opposition to each other, economics always wins.”
That’s the lesson of the last three decades as of green policy-making/propaganda, as well as the more recent ESG phenomenon. When financial and economic factors bite, dreams (nightmares, really) of climate “crises” and their urgent policy proposals go away. Now that most electricity grids in the West have been saturated by wind and solar, causing prices to skyrocket and blackouts popping up more frequently, the green dreams will just end.
In time, the full extent of the “green transition” will pass into historical curiosity of interest to nobody but sociologists and political historians. Good riddance.
