Renewable Energy – WIND WORKS

Last Friday extreme heat forced early closure of Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. Fortunately, the fair was sparsely attended. As some wags put it, tens of people had to be evacuated from the National Mall. Even so, 44 people received health assistance and 11 were taken to hospitals due to the heat.

OK, shutting down Trump’s shabby, dreary exercise in self-aggrandizement was no great loss. Yet the disruption of Trump’s festivities is a harbinger of many disruptions to come. The brutal heat wave in the northeastern US — an event that would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change — followed an even more brutal heat wave in Europe.

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Morris explained that the main benefit he sees with plug-in solar is that consumers are taking greater control of their energy costs and becoming participants in the transition to clean energy. He views this as part of creating and maintaining a political consensus that supports the transition, which is good for everyone.

He also sees land-use benefits, with plug-in solar occupying otherwise unused spaces in yards and on roofs and balconies. His organization has calculated that widespread adoption of plug-in solar would meet about 2 percent of Germany’s electricity demand, which would reduce the need to build new power plants on undeveloped land.

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The IEA projects $2.2 trillion will flow into clean energy this year versus $1.2 trillion into fossil fuels, a nearly 2-to-1 split of total global energy spending.
Conflicts disrupting oil and gas supply chains, from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the latest U.S. and Israeli military action, are pushing governments toward power sources that can’t be embargoed.

The whole world now knows that relying on imported fossil fuels is a major economic and security risk. By contrast, the sun will shine and the wind blow whatever may be happening overseas. Renewables were already rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Now it’s clear that they are also far safer. Thus Donald Trump has in practice become the world’s green energy champion.

France has announced a national electrification push that is directionally correct in a way that a lot of energy policy still is not. It is not treating electrification as a side dish to climate policy, a consumer rebate program, or a decorative set of EV chargers beside the real business of burning imported molecules. It is treating electrification as energy security, industrial policy, household cost protection, and a way to stop other people’s fossil fuel problems from showing up in French bills.

The analysis shows that the cost of firm renewable electricity has declined rapidly across all major technologies and markets. In high-quality solar and wind resource regions, co-located hybrid systems can already deliver round-the-clock electricity at costs competitive with – and in many cases below – those of new fossil-fuel generation. China currently defines the global cost floor, while costs in Brazil, India, South Africa, Australia, and the Gulf region are declining rapidly towards fossil-fuel cost parity.

The UK has avoided the need for gas imports worth £1.7bn since the start of the Iran war, as a result of record electricity generation from wind and solar, reveals Carbon Brief analysis.

The surge in wind and solar output is cutting the need for gas-fired generation, which has been nearly a third lower than last year and fell to record lows in both March and April 2026.

Coal was not the global winner of the Hormuz shock. It was a regional emergency beneficiary in a few LNG-exposed markets. Renewables alone did not replace LNG everywhere either. But renewables plus batteries, backed by hydro, nuclear, interconnection, and demand flexibility where available, already replaced enough of LNG’s daily balancing role in several major markets to overturn the old assumption that a gas shock naturally belongs to coal. The real strategic winner was not a single fuel. It was the clean flexibility stack, and the countries building it fastest are the ones rewriting what energy security means.

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Let’s not make a secret of this. The world is hurtling at breakneck speed towards the worst-ever energy crisis. This will be worse than the oil crises of the 1970s. It could be worse even than the oil crisis of 2007-2012, the latter which triggered the global financial meltdown of 2008. Maybe it is small comfort to those billions of people around the world facing hardship in this developing crisis. However, out of the ruins we shall see a market and state-driven renewed drive towards installation of wind, solar, batteries and Electric Vehicles.

Krugman notes that while the price of oil has increased, the price of gasoline has gone up much more quickly. Are oil companies taking advantage of the situation to extract additional profits? What do you think?

The so-called US president — in his lucid moments — rails against renewable energy, probably because the fossil fuel industry has so generously supported his lunacy for their own private benefit. But Krugman suggested the UK and other European nations must be wishing they were getting an even larger share of their energy from renewables rather than natural gas, which would free them both from the idiocy of Trump’s delusions and the Middle East war.