33 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Giant Frosted Mirrors”

    1. You all completely misunderstand the point of renewable energy, it is not about the kilowatts produced but smug produced. Smug is the vital component, the juice, the raison détre for all those yappy virtue signallers out there.

      Without smug, without that ability to feel superior to others their life would have no joy.

      Is their sense of smug justified, well we all know that the answer to that is a resounding “NO”

      However, we are rational creatures with the ability to care while the smug consumers are purely emotional ones, logic is oppressive to them. So forget your facts, they deal only in emotion and as long as we keep forgetting that then nothing we say matters to them.

        1. For sure, south park tends has a tendency to distill all the topical events into a 22 minute cartoon. The smug one was particularly prescient.

      1. Smug, and Smoke.

        Don’t forget that the magic elexir that keeps all electrical and electronic infrastructure running is – smoke.

        Once you let the smoke out, it stops working.

        1. I like that, ‘let the smoke out and it stops working.’

          I think I’ll incorporate into my next design documents, I am sure I heard it before, but it is always nice to be reminded of these things.

        2. There’s a reason why certain electrical components are referred to as “smoke generators”. And, yeah, I’ve smoked my share of devices and circuit boards. (“Let’s see, black to positive, red to negative, right?” Poof! “Huh?”)

    2. Last February when it was -30 every night for a month wind and solar output was zero. If Albertan’s had to rely on w&S to heat their homes they would be dead.

  1. They’ll likely get zero to very little power off it until July August next year. Then the output will be lower unless someone gets out there with a squeegee and Windex to polish them all clean.

    1. Great, just what we need, government unionized window washers. This Communism thing is AWESOME. Government jobs for EVERYONE, just like Cuba, or the Former Soviet Union. This thing is going to work out great, Juthtin is in charge of everything. /sarc
      I had to add the sarc tag to this post, just on the off-chance there are some Morontonians reading this.

      1. When they said the solar industry would provide more jobs than the oil & gas industry they weren’t kidding.

      2. I remember visiting severalEast Berlin museums in the early 90s and in each gallery and room there was someone sitting at a desk not paying attention to visitors. They wouldn’t talk to you and I suspect most couldn’t speak English. I was later told that this was just their guaranteed government job and that they had no other responsibilities. A socialist job=a way to keep food on the table and nothing more.

        1. In recent weeks, the Science podcast, produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has run ads by Macdonalds in which the company is bragging about its use of renewable energy.

  2. Subsidy farms and swindlemills. And, of course, the bureaucracy to administer it all. No one in government can REALLY belive this stuff makes sense, surely.

  3. In 13 years I worked at 3 coal fired power plants. You know how often the weather shut down a power plant? Once – a deluge of rain, like water poured out of a pail, caused a failure in equipment outside the station that tripped a safety control but it was up and running again in a few hours.

    You know how often the weather effects wind and solar? Pretty much every single day. They can’t handle any serious weather conditions. Solar is completely useless after tornados or hail. Reliable power is kinda important after extreme weather. Good thing Saskatchewan never has wild weather, right?

    Battery storage or no battery storage, wind and solar can never be a replacement for 24/7 baseload power. Coal, hydro, gas or nuclear. Those are your choices.

    1. EXACTLY LC

      And…
      Coal is a no no…Being shat upon planet wide – regardless of Scrubbers etc.
      Gas about to go the same way – “no new homes with Nat Gas” in many locales.
      Hydro is pretty much tapped out World wide – theres only so many rivers.

      So I guess if we are going to have a fleet of what say ~500 Million EV’s in Norh America….its gonna be Nuclear eh..?? ha ha ha … As if.
      I dont see WWF or Green Peace or any other Eco-Imbecile outfit giving a nod to that.

      1. If a person understands power generation, transmission and distribution, grid control, baseload power, etc then reads what *progressive academics, *politicians and *journalists are proposing…it’s like watching a catastrophe play out in slow motion.

        This Great Leap Forward in energy production is going to be as successful as the Great Leap Forward in food production.

        *never forget that these groups are the same ones who believe, for example, that a male can change their gender and biological sex by saying the magic words “I am now a woman”. These groups are extremely susceptible to group think and peer pressure. They either cannot think for themselves or are too scared to go against the grain.

        Rational people and provinces need to make backup/escape plans. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

  4. Fool! Doesn’t she realize the frost traps the sunlight which then reflects back into the solar panel thereby producing a limitless supply of subsidy revenue!?!? Because . . . science.

  5. For Ontario
    https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html

    Wind is 2.1% and solar is 0% but the greenest(?), Nuclear – which ecoMarxists fear & hate – is over 64%.
    Every smart-mouthed, lecturing pubescent puke should be made to look at the electrical energy grid (at least in Ontario) everyday and then STFU.

    1. I’d be a bit careful taking those numbers as it appears that some sites are currently generating “solar” power above their capacity.

      for example, Nanticoke which was formerly 8 x 500MW coal fired plant, but was shut down and converted into a 44 MW solar plant, is somehow producing 49MW on a partly cloudy day.

  6. Remembrance Day weekend we drove out to Calgary to visit our daughter and family.
    Drove past(Thursday), maybe 80ac of solar panels on the eastern side of Medicine Hat north of the TransCanada, all were covered in 3-4 inches of snow. Return home past tem on Tuesday, and they looked exactly the same. Not sure how many days prior to Thursday they were covered, and not sure how many days after Tuesday, that they remained covered.
    Can’t imagine they were producing any power at all.

    1. Those out at Medicine Hat were shut down. No measurable power produced and too expensive to maintain. Just wasted real estate and destroyed wildlife habitat.
      Now the Purple Princess wants to out do MH and build one on the southeast edge of Calgary. A politician is not happy unless money is being flushed down the toilet.

  7. This is a car dealership in Calgary. The solar panel roof does provide protection from hail damage and the dealership got a big credit on their insurance. Note the panels sloped away from the sun on the left of the picture.
    https://www.audiroyaloak.com/2018/11/30/calgarys-largest-privately-owned-solar-installation/
    Also there is live info on panel efficiency which is at 5% of rated capacity when posting this … typical of what solar panels can do with snow on them.
    https://www.audiroyaloak.com/solar-panel-live-feed/
    I really doubt that this installation is anywhere close to being cost effective unless you use greentard math to do the economics 😉

    Oh it just hit 8%

  8. There’s probably more than a 1000 acres of solar farm recently installed in my area. Last winter, the snow started piling up fast in mid January. We also had a a brutal cold set up home and claim squatters rights.
    I was a little surprised to see zero maintenance applied to any of these solar installations. Every last panel was covered in snow until early April…. so during a cold snap that was pushing both the electrical and natural gas grids to the limit, our millions of dollars green energy contributed virtually zero aid.
    But I’m sure the warm fuzzy feeling inside more than made up for the frozen pipes and frost bite.

  9. Meanwhile in the “City” of Airdrie – the grinning overpaid buffoon mayor was all excited about plastering the huge Rec Center with solar panels.
    No information has been released on the “savings” they have produced. However, ask any Airdronian what he/she thinks of the expenditure of these solar panels and you get – crickets! Everyone is braindead or asleep or both!

  10. Meanwhile the datacenters serving up online info/ content operate 24x7x365 on reliable base grid power with 100% diesel backup power ( not sure why, if all the customers suffer outage).

    1. Places like that, where they have to run the AC in the middle of winter to dissipate all the heat, have both batteries and generators. The batteries give them smoothed, uninterrupted power, and enough time for the generators to kick in when there is an outage.

      Satellite stations, data centers, all have basically the same setup.

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