The Rawhide Generating Station in Northern Colorado is scheduled to shut down by 2030, and be replaced by “green energy.”
I used to ride my bicycle up there regularly when I lived in Fort Collins, and it was surrounded by miles of prairie and Pronghorns. That prairie has been destroyed and replaced by solar panels. This what the area looked like this morning – massive arrays of solar panels covered in snow at -10F. The coal fired plant was putting out a small amount of water vapor under spectacular blue skies.
There has been no wind here for days, so the residents of Northern Colorado have been completely dependent on coal power to stay alive during the record cold. Just across the border in Cheyenne, we had our coldest Valentines Day on record and coldest afternoon ever this late in winter.
Three days ago, the Biden administration was bragging about wind power in Texas.
Wind power produced up to two thirds of Texas’s energy output in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. In total, the Lone Star State generated about 29,407 MWs of wind power, installing 2,197 MWs in 2020 – meaning that if Texas were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for wind power capacity, some estimates say.
Today they have millions of people without power because of reliance on wind .
“Nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation capacity has been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.”
I took these pictures over the Midwest on January 7, 2018 during the coldest start to a year on record. The wind turbines were motionless, and the steam from the power plants was rising vertically due to dead calm winds.
Washington DC got down to -17C and was frozen solid.
Wind power also fails during the hottest times in summer.
Britain Has Gone Nine Days Without Wind Power – Bloomberg
Green energy is not reliable and is also very destructive.
U.S. to give 30-year wind farm permits; thousands of eagle deaths seen – Reuters
Center For Biological Diversity
I went to a talk at an Audubon bird rescue facility in Phoenix on January 13, 2019, and pressed them about wind farms killing thousands of eagles. They acknowledged it was true and provided some details, but said it was a tough trade off between “clean energy” and dead birds.
I then asked why hunters go to jail for killing eagles, and wind farm operators don’t – and they of course blamed President Trump for choosing jobs over the environment. So I responded with “are you saying President Trump is promoting wind farms?” They quickly changed the subject.
Here are some of the birds they rescued.
Coal fired power plants used to generate a lot of pollution in the US, but we resolved that problem 50 years ago.
Solar and wind are not reliable. And there is one more piece to the green energy equation – hydroelectric.
Sixty years ago, hydroelectric power was the number one target of environmentalists. The building of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River destroyed one of America’s most spectacular locations.
The building of Glen Canyon Dam inspired Edward Abbey to write “The Monkey Wrench Gang” – a fictional story about a band of eco-warriors who target industrial development in the southwest, and Glen Canyon Dam in particular.
Wind farms, solar farms and hydroelectric dams would all have been considered unacceptable by environmentalists 60 years ago – but a campaign of fearmongering about CO2 hijacked the environmental movement and turned them against all their core values. Environmentalists used to fight against actual air pollution, but now they campaign against harmless water vapor and invisible CO2.
