The Costly (And Foolish) Plans To Close Coal Plants

Coal provides on-demand power when needed, but wind cannot. Building more wind and solar doesn’t solve the when-the-wind-blows or sun shines part-time problem.

Electric grids need to meet demand with supply at all times or we have blackouts; often when it is really cold or really hot. Batteries are wildly expensive and can’t store electricity for the months needed for a 100 percent renewable grid.

Nor is there a supply chain for millions of EVs and industrial at-scale batteries made with metals mined with child labor in Africa, refined with slave labor in China, and with devastating environmental costs.

This renewable transition is not green.

These 5,600 wind towers aren’t going to appear anytime soon. It takes years to site, build, and connect wind towers and solar panels. And it will cost about $15 billion or more, not including transmission wires and batteries.

There aren’t that many windy places left in Michigan. Local wind conditions make a huge difference in energy generation and many places just don’t have enough wind to make a 70-story wind tower financially viable.

Closing any coal plant before replacement power is online is stupid. Our experts have failed us by putting us in the blackout danger zone by allowing reliable, affordable, clean coal plants to be closed, leaving us short of electricity.

The solar transition is even worse. Solar only produces power 18 percent of the time in Michigan. It takes more solar panels than you think to replace full-time coal plants.

By the way, 180 days of coal can be stored onsite at a reasonable cost. Batteries can only store solar for short periods of time.

It will take about 180 square miles of solar panels, about 50 million panels just to replace Michigan’s coal. This isn’t happening anytime soon. What about all the orchards, farmland and forests cut down for panels?

The easiest, low-cost places to put solar panels are in flat open farm fields. We are on the verge of hundreds of millions of starving people and we’re going to cover good farmland with solar panels? This isn’t wise. And it will drive up food costs for everyone.

Solar panels warm the air above them by 20° to 30°. 180 square miles will make a lot of heat. We will warm the earth, to cool the earth, in order to save the Earth from warming.

That’s more upside-down progressive thinking, all to arguably stop disasters that may or may not happen 50 or 100 years from now.

Disaster trends are non-existent for floods and droughts and trend down for tornadoes and hurricanes. In addition, CO2 is necessary plant food that is greening the world, including deserts. Greenhouses add CO2 to make plants grow bigger and faster.

In the whole country, we are installing about 3,500 wind towers a year. Jamming 5,600 in Michigan or 200,000 new wind towers across the country will be an unpopular move. Building thousands of square miles of solar panels will be unpopular and unwise.

Michigan and Biden’s energy transition is going to be slow, painful, and expensive.

We need some reality, not fantasy.

We need real-world cost and feasibility studies. There is not a single place in the United States that has a 100 percent renewable electric grid.

No government has put a pen to paper and offered a plan or provided the real cost. It will be shocking.

Sensible people need to slow this all down and learn lessons from Europe and China.

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