Advocates of generating electricity mostly with intermittent wind and sun, when challenged on how they would deal with a calm night, are always ready with the obvious answer: energy storage. Just get some batteries, store up excess power from the windy mid-days, discharge as needed, and everything will work out.

Unfortunately, the advocates never acknowledge that the problem of making an electrical grid work 24/7/365 with mostly wind and solar generation is much more difficult than just storing power from the day to discharge that night.

Both wind and sun are subject to regular “droughts,” just like rain. There can be many consecutive days, or even weeks, of combined low wind and sun; let alone the entire winter has a lack of sun, and both summer and winter have less wind than spring and fall. Calculating how much energy storage will suffice to get through even a year of average wind/sun variability is a straightforward exercise, yielding an answer of as much as 1000 hours of average consumption.

Meanwhile, naive politicians (those in New York being Exhibit A) regularly get duped into buying a few hours or tens of hours worth of batteries for grid backup, spending billions of dollars on amounts of storage that will be almost useless for backing up a primarily wind/sun grid.

I have often noted that the climate scam and the associated forced energy transition would of necessity go away at some point because the proposals being advocated to “save the planet” could never possibly work.

But the open question has always been, when that happens, what will it look like? Would all the big enviro groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club all go on national TV one night and admit that the whole thing was a fake scare from the beginning? In the real world, that’s not how these things happen. People who have staked out absurd positions somehow need to save face. So there would have to be some sort of gradual process of backing down.

And thus we come to the key role of the New York Times for the Left, which is to mold and convey the official talking points to the team’s candidates and influencers. How about sharing some instruction on how to quietly back away from the Green New Deal?