Great work Steve! To get to people with short attention spans it may help to explain that wind and solar will not work due to the combination of wind droughts (especially windless nights) and the lack of grid-scale storage.
Its really as simple as the ABC of intermittent energy. ABC is not an acronym; it's just three things that everyone needs to know.
A: The grid has to receive a continuous input that is adequate to meet the demand, second by second.
B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken at night when there is little or no wind.
C: Storage at the scale required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable with current technology.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
It is disconcerting to see the disastrous consequences of failing to check the supply chain for the most important input to the wind power industry.
Insert “for want of checking the wind supply” in this unhappy story.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
And then the rider, the message, the battle and the kingdom.
Now the once-proud industrial kingdoms of Britain and Germany are virtually lost, and Australia is circling the drain.
Trillions of dollars spent worldwide on wind and solar have delivered more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic damage to forests and farmlands.
That could have been averted if the net zero enthusiasts had taken account of the implications of wind droughts.
Why did nobody take any notice of the Dunkelflautes observed for 60 years on the North Sea oil and gas rigs? And Britain and Germany bet the farm on wind, especially offshore wind!
THERE IS A GREAT DEAL MORE TO BE SAID. PEOPLE HAVE NOT JOINED THE DOTS
Remember that the WMO was a founding founding member of the climate alarm club in the UN, and official meteorologists around the world daily beat up climate alarm and tamper with the records.
.
The first IPCC Assessment Report had a recommendation to assess the windpower resources of the world, and their supreme achievement has been to hide the existence of wind droughts, while every other extreme weather event is spun to discredit airborne plant food.
This enabled the worst peacetime public policy on record, countless trillions spent on net zero programmes to get in return: more expensive electricity ; blackouts looming in Germany, Britain and Australia; incalculable damage to the environment through the production chain from mining in the third world to disposal of an impending tsunami of toxic waste.
The wind industry must be the only enterprise that ever survived without caring about the reliability of the supply chain for the major input.
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions. See Texas in February 2021!
Fluctuations in solar and wind input pose the same threat in the daytime where grids lack inertia, see the pain in Spain, 2025.
Thanks a million Steve, be sure to say I admire his work, and TallBloke as well!
We have people like Jennifer Marohasy and Abbott and colleagues doing some of the sme thing with the met stations, if necessary, I will provide details.
I shall have a read thanks Rafe. However, the problem as usual is that in general we are mainly preaching to the converted. How do we get the message across to people on the other side of this argument? Perhaps it will all collapse naturally triggered by the US withdrawing funding for green institutions and the IPCC.
There is an answer to that Steve! I thought it would work well but we have no support from journalists and commentators, amazingly not even those on our side in the climate and energy debate in Australia. Overseas, Paul Homewood refuses to take on the meteorologists on wind droughts, likewise TallBloke.
This is our story. The thing is to get people interested in these matters and the Energy Realists of Australia emerged out of a climate realists group, pivoting from the climate debate to focus on rising prices and the risk of blackouts which were starting to be come a concern in the public.
The point is to speak to people's pains and that does not include climate science:)
We found that wind droughts are the failure point in the net zero program, especially windless nights, and they can be observed in the continuous record of wind power generation in every grid in the developed world.
Teach people to go to the dashboard of their local grid and look twice a day at breakfast and dinner time, to see if they will get a hot meal when there is little or no coal power (in Australia). Peak demand coincides with little or no solar, depending on the time of year and the latitude.
So far we have had little success in this venture, partly because the power crisis in Australia has been deferred by deindustrialization and partly because we have not got any influencers on board.
Maybe when the President finds out what the meteorologists have been up to!
I know Paul well and your description of him doesn’t stand up to what I know of him. He has had many battles with the MetOffice as has TallBloke. In fact TallBlokes blog with the writing of Roy Sanders (I think without checking) was instrumental in making the public aware of dodgy weather stations. I can’t imagine any of them would avoid a wind drought battle. Paul writes regularly for the Global Warming Policy Foundation but I guess you know that?
Thanks Steve, I admire their brilliant and indefatigable campaign to discredit the official meteorologists and I would expect them to welcome another stick to expose the unprofessionalism and sheer dishonesty of the mets. I prodded Paul a couple of times and I tried to get to TallBloke on the Suggestions thread. They may have missed the messages, everyone gets too much mail to handle.
When more influential people take up the wind drought story I can get back to my real vocation to revive the reputations of Karl Popper and Jacques Barzun.
Incidentally I helped to write a book on climate and energy matters and I have a large website.
If my take on the importance of wind droughts is true, it needs to go viral and if it is not, I want to know so I can get on with Popper and Barzun!
I think the situation is desperate. Look at the disastrous consequences of failing to check the supply chain for the most important input to the wind power industry.
Insert “for want of checking the wind supply” in this unhappy story.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
And then the rider, the message, the battle and the kingdom.
Now the once-proud industrial kingdoms of Britain and Germany are virtually lost, and Australia is circling the drain.
Excellent technical breakdown on the rotor inertia problem. The cascading failure scenario really ilustrates why replacing synchronous generators with inverter-based sources creates systemic vulnerabilities, not just capacity gaps. The part about reactive power supporting electomagnetic fields is something most policy discussions completly skip. Ive seen similar low-inertia issues in smaller industrial grids where RoCoF protection trips everything before controls can even respond.
Thank you. It's odd how no one in power wants to acknowledge this. Almost as though it is deliberate! I can understand politicians and special interest groups turning a blind eye (or lying through their teeth) - but what about the engineers running the grid?
Paul Dawson has an equally chilling warning to Kathryn Porter and he nails the wind drought problem, and others!
https://substack.com/home/post/p-180089713
Great work Steve! To get to people with short attention spans it may help to explain that wind and solar will not work due to the combination of wind droughts (especially windless nights) and the lack of grid-scale storage.
Its really as simple as the ABC of intermittent energy. ABC is not an acronym; it's just three things that everyone needs to know.
A: The grid has to receive a continuous input that is adequate to meet the demand, second by second.
B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken at night when there is little or no wind.
C: Storage at the scale required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable with current technology.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the meteorologists never issued wind drought warnings and the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
It is disconcerting to see the disastrous consequences of failing to check the supply chain for the most important input to the wind power industry.
Insert “for want of checking the wind supply” in this unhappy story.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
And then the rider, the message, the battle and the kingdom.
Now the once-proud industrial kingdoms of Britain and Germany are virtually lost, and Australia is circling the drain.
Trillions of dollars spent worldwide on wind and solar have delivered more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic damage to forests and farmlands.
That could have been averted if the net zero enthusiasts had taken account of the implications of wind droughts.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-sinister-threat-of-wind-droughts
Why did nobody take any notice of the Dunkelflautes observed for 60 years on the North Sea oil and gas rigs? And Britain and Germany bet the farm on wind, especially offshore wind!
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-curious-tale-of-the-north-sea-winds/
The Australian pioneer wind watchers sounded an alarm but not even the Australian authorities and journalists took any notice.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/watching-the-wind-watchers
Thanks Rafe. I know people have been talking about dunkleflautes for some time but i wasn’t ware of this detailed history.
THERE IS A GREAT DEAL MORE TO BE SAID. PEOPLE HAVE NOT JOINED THE DOTS
Remember that the WMO was a founding founding member of the climate alarm club in the UN, and official meteorologists around the world daily beat up climate alarm and tamper with the records.
.
The first IPCC Assessment Report had a recommendation to assess the windpower resources of the world, and their supreme achievement has been to hide the existence of wind droughts, while every other extreme weather event is spun to discredit airborne plant food.
This enabled the worst peacetime public policy on record, countless trillions spent on net zero programmes to get in return: more expensive electricity ; blackouts looming in Germany, Britain and Australia; incalculable damage to the environment through the production chain from mining in the third world to disposal of an impending tsunami of toxic waste.
The wind industry must be the only enterprise that ever survived without caring about the reliability of the supply chain for the major input.
MY WORK, INSPIRED BY PAUL MISKELLY AND ANTON LANG
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/rafe-champions-work-on-wind-droughts-3b8
PAUL MISKELLY
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/paul-miskelly-the-wind-drought-challenge
ANTON LANG
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/anton-langs-work-on-australian-power
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions. See Texas in February 2021!
Fluctuations in solar and wind input pose the same threat in the daytime where grids lack inertia, see the pain in Spain, 2025.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/defusing-the-wind-drought-trap
I’ll get in touch with Paul and see what he thinks he can do with the Daily Sceptic and the GWPF.
Thanks a million Steve, be sure to say I admire his work, and TallBloke as well!
We have people like Jennifer Marohasy and Abbott and colleagues doing some of the sme thing with the met stations, if necessary, I will provide details.
I shall have a read thanks Rafe. However, the problem as usual is that in general we are mainly preaching to the converted. How do we get the message across to people on the other side of this argument? Perhaps it will all collapse naturally triggered by the US withdrawing funding for green institutions and the IPCC.
There is an answer to that Steve! I thought it would work well but we have no support from journalists and commentators, amazingly not even those on our side in the climate and energy debate in Australia. Overseas, Paul Homewood refuses to take on the meteorologists on wind droughts, likewise TallBloke.
This is our story. The thing is to get people interested in these matters and the Energy Realists of Australia emerged out of a climate realists group, pivoting from the climate debate to focus on rising prices and the risk of blackouts which were starting to be come a concern in the public.
The point is to speak to people's pains and that does not include climate science:)
We found that wind droughts are the failure point in the net zero program, especially windless nights, and they can be observed in the continuous record of wind power generation in every grid in the developed world.
Teach people to go to the dashboard of their local grid and look twice a day at breakfast and dinner time, to see if they will get a hot meal when there is little or no coal power (in Australia). Peak demand coincides with little or no solar, depending on the time of year and the latitude.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/will-windpower-heat-your-breakfast
So far we have had little success in this venture, partly because the power crisis in Australia has been deferred by deindustrialization and partly because we have not got any influencers on board.
Maybe when the President finds out what the meteorologists have been up to!
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/defusing-the-wind-drought-trap
I know Paul well and your description of him doesn’t stand up to what I know of him. He has had many battles with the MetOffice as has TallBloke. In fact TallBlokes blog with the writing of Roy Sanders (I think without checking) was instrumental in making the public aware of dodgy weather stations. I can’t imagine any of them would avoid a wind drought battle. Paul writes regularly for the Global Warming Policy Foundation but I guess you know that?
Thanks Steve, I admire their brilliant and indefatigable campaign to discredit the official meteorologists and I would expect them to welcome another stick to expose the unprofessionalism and sheer dishonesty of the mets. I prodded Paul a couple of times and I tried to get to TallBloke on the Suggestions thread. They may have missed the messages, everyone gets too much mail to handle.
BTW my email is rafe.champion@gmail.com in case you want to communicate off the site.
When more influential people take up the wind drought story I can get back to my real vocation to revive the reputations of Karl Popper and Jacques Barzun.
Incidentally I helped to write a book on climate and energy matters and I have a large website.
https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=Rafe+Champion&i=stripbooks&crid=GZ66NWUYZ193&sprefix=rafe+champion%2Cstripbooks%2C262&ref=nb_sb_noss
http://www.the-rathouse.com/index.html
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/karl-popper-patroller-of-the-stratosphere
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/jacques-barzuns-monumental-contribution
If my take on the importance of wind droughts is true, it needs to go viral and if it is not, I want to know so I can get on with Popper and Barzun!
I think the situation is desperate. Look at the disastrous consequences of failing to check the supply chain for the most important input to the wind power industry.
Insert “for want of checking the wind supply” in this unhappy story.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
And then the rider, the message, the battle and the kingdom.
Now the once-proud industrial kingdoms of Britain and Germany are virtually lost, and Australia is circling the drain.
Excellent technical breakdown on the rotor inertia problem. The cascading failure scenario really ilustrates why replacing synchronous generators with inverter-based sources creates systemic vulnerabilities, not just capacity gaps. The part about reactive power supporting electomagnetic fields is something most policy discussions completly skip. Ive seen similar low-inertia issues in smaller industrial grids where RoCoF protection trips everything before controls can even respond.
Thank you. It's odd how no one in power wants to acknowledge this. Almost as though it is deliberate! I can understand politicians and special interest groups turning a blind eye (or lying through their teeth) - but what about the engineers running the grid?