The image below comes from NASA in 2012. It shows Africa at its peak, before the great electrical grid collapse of the dark continent.
The African Power Grid is Collapsing, Starting in South Africa; Why?
In recent years South Africa’s power generation has become so inadequate that the continent’s most developed economy must cope with rolling power blackouts of eight to 10 hours per day.
These nations are experiencing unrest, particularly among people who claim that they have continued to pay their utility bills but have no electricity for most of the day. The AP spoke to a couple of residents in Zimbabwe who are food merchants that rely on refrigeration for their products. With no power during the day, the food spoils and they are at risk of losing their livelihoods.
The problems aren’t limited to just these three countries, by the way. 590 million of the 600 million African people who regularly lack access to electricity live in the sub-Saharan region of the country. But even fresh injections of foreign aid have failed to stabilize the situation.
So what do Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa all have in common? A couple of years ago, Zimbabwe agreed to a UN plan to mandate more renewable energy and move away from coal and natural gas. At roughly the same time, Nigeria signed on to the UN Clean Energy Demand Initiative and John Kerry showed up in person when Nigeria’s president signed the mandate. And as we’ve discussed here before, South Africa started its “transition” to renewable energy years ago, dumping $8.5 billion into the plan in a move the New York Times described as a “Breakthrough for the World.” A few years later, people are sitting in the dark with no heat over wide regions of each country. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, right?
Source
Wind Energy is a Total Failure
Over 20 years ago, I was active in helping to install small off-grid wind and solar systems for people who located in remote and wilderness areas. For those who locate far from the power grid, this type of energy generation makes sense. Back then I assumed that scaling up wind & solar for grid scale power would also make sense. But that was before I started looking more closely at the problem (and got more training in electric power engineering). Sometime around 15 years ago I discovered my mistake, and made an immediate about-face in my blog postings and personal conversations about the electric power grid. Here is the viewpoint of an “eminent Oxford scientist” on the issue:
Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes. “Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.
Professor Allison’s dire warnings are contained in a short paper recently published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He notes that the energy provided by the Sun is “extremely weak”, which is why it was unable to provide the energy to sustain even a small global population before the Industrial Revolution with an acceptable standard of living. A similar point was made recently in more dramatic fashion by the nuclear physicist Dr. Wallace Manheimer. He argued that the infrastructure around wind and solar will not only fail, “but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment and be entirely unnecessary”.
In his paper, Allison concentrates on working out the numbers that lie behind the natural fluctuations in the wind. The full workings out are not complicated and can be assessed from the link above. He shows that at a wind speed of 20mph, the power produced by a wind turbine is 600 watts per square metre at full efficiency. To deliver the same power as the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant – 3,200 million watts – it would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area.
More at Source
The loud voices of government, media, academia, big corporations, and other social institutions are all promoting “renewable energy” out of a loud and abject fear of apocalyptic climate change. But if the technology does not solve the problem — in fact makes it worse! — why promote the lie that it helps? That is one of many questions which our self-confident “elite” overlords should eventually be forced to answer.
Sig Sauer expands into advanced weapons systems:
SIG Sauer announced late last week it has acquired General Robotics, one of the world’s premier manufacturers of lightweight remote weapon stations and tactical robotics for manned and unmanned platforms as well as anti-drone applications. The companies have been working in concert for some time, a fact made obvious at January’s SHOT Show when they debuted a Polaris ATV equipped with a General Robotics PitBull remote weapons station that aimed and fired the vehicle-mounted SIG MG 338 belt-fed machine gun remotely.
“This acquisition will greatly enhance SIG Sauer’s growing portfolio of advanced weapon systems,” said Ron Cohen, president and CEO of SIG Sauer. The team at General Robotics is leading the way in the development of intuitive, lightweight remote weapon stations with their battle-proven solution.”
Self Defense is Getting More Complicated Every Day
Over a year ago, Russia bulled its way into a war with its next-door neighbor, a generally peaceful country populated by people that look and talk a lot like Russians. Since that time, ordinary tactics of warfare have been expanding in many ways. A lot more surveillance and attack drones are being used by small army units — even by civilian insurgents. We can expect a lot of these new methods of war to expand out of Ukraine into wider use elsewhere — perhaps your hometown.
Population decline interview with Nicholas Eberstadt, by John Anderson:
Bonus: A recent video from Adam Rozencwajg on the very serious problems involved with the ongoing energy transition away from fossil fuels. Our critical infrastructure is addicted to rich and concentrated sources of reliable and affordable energy. Transitioning to unreliable and exorbitantly expensive resource-gobbling intermittent energy is going to break a lot of economies and societies.
When You Predict the End of the World, It Helps to Get The Timing Right!
Back in the early 2000s, “peak oil” was a popular bandwagon and conversational topic for people who considered themselves trendy, but didn’t want to dig too deeply into the topic. “The Earth is finite, and so the supply of oil in the Earth is finite! Eventually we will run out.” Starting with that truism, the bulk of the people riding the bandwagon decided that global oil production would peak in 2005 when the Saudi oil field Ghawar would begin to deplete rapidly.
Like all apocalyptic prophets since Noah, they got the timing wrong! Why do these prophets of doom always get the timing wrong?
Consider another common truism used by those of the apocalyptic bent: “Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Ever since humans began industrializing on a large scale, Earth’s atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been going up. Therefore, unless humans stop industrial scale production of CO2, the Earth will be destroyed by apocalyptic climate change!”
It is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But Earth’s atmosphere has in the past had much higher levels of CO2 than it has currently, without experiencing any tipping point style climate apocalypse. It is not even clear whether the atmospheric trends in CO2 incline are due to recent ocean warming leading to CO2 outgassing, or whether the slow rise in CO2 is contributing to atmospheric and ocean warming. Further, the human contribution of CO2 as opposed to natural releases of CO2 cannot be quantified. Climate models are being fed flawed data leading to a GIGO error.
In fact the entire climate change issue is far too complex to be entrusted to the corrupt political cabal which currently oversees climate and energy policy.
These corrupt and sloppy doom purveyors are well connected politically and media-wise, and it is typically their propaganda which the masses are immersed in 24/7.
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