Posted on 10/26/2026 4:50:05 AM PDT by MtnClimber
In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.
At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?
In the arena of the energy transition, various entire countries, and U.S. states, have offered up their whole populations as guinea pigs for this grand experiment conducted by people who have no idea what they are doing. Germany, the UK, California and New York are prominent examples. And then at the other end of the scale, we have a small island named El Hierro off the coast of Spain. El Hierro only has about 11,000 people, but in 2008 it set out to show the world how to do a full transition to an electric system powered only by wind turbines backed up by a hydro-electric energy storage system.
I have reported on the progress of the El Hierro system multiple times, for example here in 2022, here in 2023, and here in 2024. But it has been more than two years since my last update. So let’s check in.
What makes El Hierro significant is that the promoters actually thought they were going to make a full-time grid based just on the wind turbines and storage. We know that because they have said so repeatedly. But somehow, in their quasi-religious devotion to the cause, they never took time to do the straightforward arithmetic calculations that would have revealed what makes this unworkable.
The El Hierro wind/storage electricity system has the name Gorona del Viento. The system started operating in 2013. The Gorona del Viento entity has a website with large portions in English where you can go to see their claims, and measure those against the actual performance in real life. From the opening page:
An island 100% renewable energy. . . . Gorona del Viento El Hierro, S.A.´s Wind-Pumped Hydro Power Station is designed to supply the Meridian Island with electrical energy derived from clean, renewable energy sources such as water and wind. The Wind Farm has capacity to fully meet El Hierro´s demand for electricity. The surplus wind energy which is not consumed by the Island´s population is used to pump water from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir. This water is stored in the upper reservoir and used to produce electricity by means of a hidraulic jump at times when the wind power is inadequate.
(Emphasis added.). They explicitly brag that the island will have “100% renewable energy,” and that the wind farm “has the capacity” to fully meet the demand for electricity. The wind farm actually has well more than that “capacity” — if nameplate “capacity” were the relevant factor in determining if a generation system can supply demand as it appears. Read on in the website, and you find out that the wind farm has a nameplate capacity of 11.5 MW, whereas average electricity demand on the island is less than 5 MW. So there is well more than a 2x “overbuild.” With a big elevated pumped reservoir to store energy for when the wind isn’t blowing, surely that should be sufficient to meet the goal.
After the first few years of operation, in 2018 Gorona del Viento started putting out some detailed statistics on the performance of the system. This link goes to a page containing further links to individual pages with the statistics for 2018 and succeeding years. In the first year reported, 2018, the wind/storage system provided 56% of the electricity for the island, with the remainder provided by a diesel generator that they had (thankfully) kept as backup. But then it never really got better. In 2019 it was 54%; in 2020, 42%; in 2021, 48%; in 2022, 48%; and in 2023, only 35%; for 2024 45%; and for 2025, 44%. Here is their bar chart for 2023:
“Llanos Blancos” refers to the backup diesel system.
So the headline page brags about “100% renewable energy,” but in actual performance the best they have ever achieved over a full year is barely over 50%, and the last time they broke 50% was in 2019.
Why can’t they get more than that from this seemingly overbuilt system? Because there are long stretches where the wind does not blow. During those stretches the storage reservoir gets emptied and can’t be refilled. My 2022 post mentioned above linked to a calculation by a guy named Roger Andrews at the Energy Matters website showing that, to reach self-sufficiency with just a wind/storage system, El Hierro would need about double the wind turbine capacity and some 40 times the storage capacity (to deal with worst-case wind droughts). Even if they could afford such a reservoir, they have no place on the island to put it.
Meanwhile, in the face of the experience of El Hierro, places like New York, California, Germany and the UK continue to plow forward as if wind/solar/storage electricity systems can work. It’s as if it’s not possible to learn from experience.
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Manhattan Contrarian ping
Thank you for this perfect example of how communism is low IQ.
And how communism is nothing but one big fat lie.
China.
china
China
“I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.”
—
Except that’s not why they starved to death. They starved because Mao wanted to prove to the USSR that he was a real communist and sold the entire harvests, leaving the farmers with no food.
I’m just a high school graduate, but much older now. Somewhere along the line, I learned there is no renewable green energy & if I could do that with only a high school education, others should be able to understand with much MORE education, plus practical experience.
We live in a series of hierarchies. More frequently than we’d like, an idiot gets to the top of that pyramid. I was working for a company that was doing very well. But the guy at the top thought he could upend the system we worked in and make our company the absolute top dog of the industry. He embarked on a program that the rest of us warned would lead to ruin. And it did and they laid off about 80% of the workforce.
Angela Merkel in Germany decided to hitch the German economy to Russian gas. Talk about belief in unicorns and fairy dust. Every person with a brain warned it would end in disaster. Then she doubled down and destroyed (I think) seventeen nuclear power plants in the name of Greenness. Total idiocy.
I don’t know how we can avoid the occasional idiot getting into the seat of power. One of the guys running the first billion-dollar hedge fund said, “invest in companies an idiot could run, because eventually one will.”
As far as our politics, I voted the moment early voting was possible as did a large number of my neighbors. I panic at the idiots we have running who are desperate to scrap the America I knew and start us on a new road only they can see.
Even those of us who have decentralized solar for our homes have to admit that the grid must be dependable. Therefore, what the grid depends on must be dependable. It's simple, really.
The only situation that I'm cool with solar or wind for the grid is if it's in conjunction with hydrocarbon fueled power as well, and if the solar or wind in the end reduces cost. Perhaps on an island for which it's expensive to transport the LPG or coal or diesel to run the hydrocarbon power plant, having solar farms might reduce how much you have to run the hydrocarbon plant. But solar or wind as the only source for power on a grid is unrealistic.
Ideology trumps experience.
If Leftist could learn from experience they wouldn't be Leftist.
We are going to keep trying Communism until it works or we die!
Over 200 million dead in the 20th century didn't convince them that it doesn't work.
Ideologues Of any sort Are dangerous fools.
I was just doing some research On why I can’t have a large V8 sedan any longer And probably never will again. It is because Obama’s EPA Made the requirements for the height length and width versus fuel economy Impossible to attain. The result Is that the industry switched to the SUV. The box that fits in the box For the mileage requirement. Industry found That not only do they fit they’re cheaper to build. So they load them up with useless gadgets And seldom to us As a replacement for what used to be my living room on wheels. My Buick in my mercury That floated down the highway At 80 miles an hour effortlessly quiet And even efficiently But not efficient enough For the ideaologue tree huggers.
The same applies for the idealists In the data center AI business. Texas will not soon add 500% to their current generating and grid capacity For all the new AI and data centers That are expected. It is just a plan
I’m just as foolish as they are I shouldn’t waste my time to even comment
Ideologues Of any sort Are dangerous fools.
I was just doing some research On why I can’t have a large V8 sedan any longer And probably never will again. It is because Obama’s EPA Made the requirements for the height length and width versus fuel economy Impossible to attain. The result Is that the industry switched to the SUV. The box that fits in the box For the mileage requirement. Industry found That not only do they fit they’re cheaper to build. So they load them up with useless gadgets And seldom to us As a replacement for what used to be my living room on wheels. My Buick in my mercury That floated down the highway At 80 miles an hour effortlessly quiet And even efficiently But not efficient enough For the ideaologue tree huggers.
The same applies for the idealists In the data center AI business. Texas will not soon add 500% to their current generating and grid capacity For all the new AI and data centers That are expected. It is just a plan
I’m just as foolish as they are I shouldn’t waste my time to even comment
The article reminds me of a story I read years ago about the Pol Pot regime. Those lucky enough not to be executed were rounded up, given basic farming hand tools and sent into the jungle to grow rice. Of course the Cambodians starved. The regime ignored centuries of successful rice farming in flooded rice paddy’s.
But there is a bright side to this story, the Cambodians did get free tools. /s/
In communism, all the supposed free stuff is eventually paid for with ones life.
Mao called it The Great Leap Forward. It was a manmade disaster.
I saw a YouTube video how they had brought large batteries made by Tesla to the solar farms in the Mohave Desert. The ones with all the mirrors that fry the birds.
The issue now in Southern California is that they have so much solar electric production they do not need he KHW during the middle of the day. The grid is too full to take in any more wattage from 11am to 3pm. However, at 7 pm when everyone gets home from work. Turns down the AC, makes dinner and turns on all the appliances then demand spikes.
Yet, solar production goes down. Especially, AFTER SUNSET.
So, the big TESLA battery packs built into semi truck size containers store the juice that they generate in the middle of the day and sell it back to the grid when it is actually needed.
The video went on to say that Tesla is building a big battery factory in Nevada. Not too far from largest LITHIUM deposits in the USA in northern Nevada. Right near the OR, ID, NV border.
For the most part, we are governed by idiots, and/or crooks.
“So, the big TESLA battery packs built into semi truck size containers store the juice that they generate in the middle of the day and sell it back to the grid when it is actually needed.”
...and they JUST LOVE putting those battery farms into residential areas because they can use up the extra substation capacity without having to pay much. The fact that developers (and thus home buyers) are forced to then upgrade those same substations 20 years earlier doesn’t both them...nor do the occasional blow-ups and toxic clouds, as their execs never place them near where they live.
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