Green Energy = Overcapacity

I thought about setting up a solar power system for my home several years ago, so I did a small scale hands on project to learn the ins and outs. I tried to run a WiFi access point outside 24/7 all year 'round. I scaled the battery so it could go three days without any sun. That really wasn't enough to get through the dark winter months here, though.

The access point draws only around 12 Watts, but I ended up with a 72 pound lead acid battery and 100 Watt panel. What would be large enough? Maybe 4x that. So I'd need more lead acid batteries in a large enclosure and probably 200+ Watts of panels to make it through most winters. I decided not to get solar panels for my house. I'd actually like to be off the grid, but you really don't get "off grid" with solar you get on-battery.

On a state electrical utility level, the energy storage problem is a real killer. It's probably not feasible to build battery storage that's large enough for an entire state, and that's probably also a high ongoing expense. People talk about using electric cars for this purpose, but that seems pretty stupid too. What happens when it's overcast for a week and all the batteries on all the cars are depleted? What happens when it's overcast a week and all the batteries on the cars automatically unplug so the owner can drive? It seems overly complicated and prone to failure. It'll decrease the life of the batteries of the cars, too.

It seems like serious overcapacity is necessary for intermittent power sources like solar and wind, which brings me back to a point I made in an older post.

We're currently living a 10 kW lifestyle in the USA. To go "green", we need to live like a 15 kW lifestyle to build out all the infrastructure at least, and my intuition is that the "green" power lifestyle is really more energy intensive. Combining inane government mandates with that fact will lead to a sort of implosion.

Ideally, we would live a way that requires less than 10 kW for every man woman and child. That involves across the board changes. For example, the largest consumer of energy in the world is the US military, so the useless imperial activities would need to be drastically scaled back and the MIC would need to be as well. An across the board reduction in power use is equivalent to reduced industrial output too. I don't think it's really feasible to do an orderly reduction in power consumption with a massively interconnected economy though, so a general collapse would happen at the same time.

I think the killer paradox with "green" energy is it's the product of a highly advanced, very energy intensive economy. There's no transition to the "green" world where everyone is driving an electric car. The Amish are the real "green" people. That's what green world looks like. So the academics with a job as a professional parasite working at a University to promote "green" this or that have no place in that green world.

I am pretty sure the white liberal establishment "leadership" of the western world is not crafty, or wise. They're corrupt and incompetent people. It's absurd that they're in any position of authority.