Over in Europe, things are looking bad for the economy, largely driven by a rapid increase in household and business energy bills.

In the UK, average household energy bills have recently risen to about triple where they were just a year ago; and Bloomberg reports that “tens of thousands” of UK businesses are at risk of closure due to soaring energy costs. In Germany, KAKE reports on October 7 that energy costs are “savaging German industry,” with natural gas prices in particular up 400% from January to September 2022.

So how did they get into this mess?

You might think, that’s easy to understand. Obviously, they pursued “Net Zero” carbon emissions programs, building weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels that produce nothing most of the time, while closing reliable coal power plants, banning fracking, and otherwise suppressing fossil fuels, with the sole exception of imports of natural gas. When the gas market spiked, they had no other backup for the wind and sun, and their energy prices soared.

Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.

But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.

So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.