~*~Mining and Metals Du Jour~*~

[ConferredDiligence]

Since PM's are being slammed once again and nothing good worth noting is happening in the PM mining sector, I thought I would fill the void and post something current in regards to the coal mining sector's ongoing destruction and the unintended (or intended) consequences from the virtue signaling woke crowd.

So You Want Green Energy Eh?

You're nuts.

The Bidens and AOCs of the world are literally going to kill you.

You're seeing it right here and now across the nation, including in Texas.

Texas, like so many other areas, has put up windmills and solar "farms" for the last 20 years, shutting down older coal-fired plants and not modernizing and improving their "fossil fuel" energy production infrastructure. At the same time on a national basis the natural gas pipeline operators, in service to the woke green mob, have replaced fuel-fired pumps (that run on the gas in the pipe, therefore are failsafe so long as the pipe has something in it and is intact) with electrically powered booster pumps.

I remind you that natural gas does not freeze at other than cryogenic temperatures and as such the problem is not the gas freezing and as for machinery you have plenty of heat source in the pipe.

Winter in the south is when nuclear plants are typically taken down for maintenance as well -- since it's the middle of summer when the A/C is blasting away. But those NatGas peaking plants and coal-fired base load infrastructure, well.... it's not green enough, so let's turn that stuff off and rely on the windmills and solar panels -- and hope it doesn't get destabilized.

Of course the "Globull Warming" screamfest folks always and forever have prognosticated that it will forever get warmer, that wind levels will rise forever and thus both solar panels and wind will forevermore continue to yield more and more useful energy.

All of that got blown up this week.

Texas is seeing wind chills in negative (Fahrenheit) numbers along with single digit or below temperatures. That plus moisture = ice, and windmill blades are wings and not only suffer the same problem an airplane wing does when it gets loaded in addition they go out of balance and thus the windmill has to be shut down lest it destroy itself. At the same time ice and snow cover solar panels and reduce their output to an effective zero.

The problem with the power grid is that in the event you demand more of it than can be delivered it becomes unstable due to a number of factors including, in the case of A/C transmission, phase sag. If expected resources are not available -- such as when your wind turbines ice up -- then you have no alternative but to shed load (turn off people's power intentionally) because if you don't you will get an uncontrolled collapse and possible severe equipment damage. Further most nuclear plants cannot quickly load-follow -- if you need more power quickly you better have something else, and if a bunch of load drops off rapidly you better have some other generation source you can shut down. Go outside the operating parameters and a nuke plant will "trip" and if they do most of them cannot immediately restart due to a phenomena called "xenon poisoning"; if the fuel has some age on it you must wait until that bleeds off because the core does not have enough reactivity to go critical until it does, which can take a couple of days or even more.

That's exactly what happened.

So now we have literal third-world conditions in Texas -- rolling blackouts and shutdowns of indeterminate duration in the middle of a winter storm with life-threatening temperatures that preclude people from keeping their homes and business warm which brings into play not only severe property damage (e.g. frozen pipes, etc) but also the potential for death.

Germany is getting hammered with this too but unlike our nation they kept their coal-fired plants in place even though they were not operating. Their "renewables" are also worthless in the snow and ice but because they have the other infrastructure they still have it and are using it. Unfortunately the price of this is that their power cost is the highest in the EU and triple that of many areas of the United States and other EU nations; their residential power price has doubled since going "green" because they are paying to keep maintained, available and ready to produce generating capacity that is intentionally turned off. I suppose that beats "lights out and you die" in times of cold weather but in the US it would not matter because a huge percentage of our population could not afford the bill at double or triple today's cost and thus would freeze to death in the winter anyway.

Beware America. I've warned of this for over a decade; so-called "green energy" is not reliable and cannot be counted on for base load nor reliable load-following and as such you have two options if you go down that road -- (1) accept that when you need it you may not have it or (2) pay for the redundancy whether you use it or not, which means being able to cover the entirety of the shortfall which will always come at the worst possible time and at the highest possible level of demand. Texas did not provide for that capacity to be available and thus could not cover the shortfall.

The second choice -- making sure that redundant supply is there -- doubles your power bill and the first choice kills people and renders your region a third-world nation under adverse circumstances you can neither predict or control.

There are solutions but they require getting that damned "Green" garbage out of your head and paying attention to physics. We had a path forward on this in the 1960s and deliberately shelved it because it was not useful to the military. We could bring that back and finish the engineering work on it -- but not in a year, three or ten. If we start now we might be able to begin coming online with it in 10 years, and be permanently independent of outside resource in 20 or 30.

Maybe.

But if we instead go down the alleged "green" path what we will have is repeated and annual instances of what Texas and other parts of the nation are experiencing right now and it will kill people in large numbers along with doing critical economic damage and devastating those who are in the lower income brackets.

THAT, my friends is Joe Biden's vision for America.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241603