whatyareckon

Power grids are finally balanced affairs that were never designed for the haphazard occasional delivery of wind and solar. Maintaining voltage and frequency within critical defined tolerances is a cinch with conventional generators, like nuclear, gas and coal-fired plants, which deliver the goods, around-the-clock and irrespective of the weather.

Around 20 years ago, deranged zealots hijacked energy policy and they have no appreciation of any of the simple facts above.

Rather, as with any cult, they simply cling to their founding myth, ignoring any unhelpful fact, deriding those who might point to reality as dangerous heretics.

But, as Robert Louis Stevenson pointed out, sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences. Reality bites, often with a vengeance.

And so it is in the USA, where its Environment Protection Agency has set out to destroy every last coal-fired power plant in the country, despite the obvious and…