Cortes burned his ships to ensure there would be no turning back. How'd that work out for the Aztecs?
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and make no mistake: we’re the Aztecs
No new refineries, no new power plants, and no new pipelines.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth does not expect another oil refinery to be built in the United States ever again, due to federal government policies. The last significant refinery built in the United States was in 1976. (A small refinery came online in 2020 in North Dakota). Over the last two years, due to reduced demand from the pandemic and President Biden’s stated policy to reduce the demand for petroleum products, U.S. refineries have been shut down or repurposed to become biofuel refineries.
In a business where investments have a payout period of a decade or more, it is unlikely for investment to be spent on policies where the demand is to be reduced. Wirth stated rhetorically, “How do you go to your board, how do you go to your shareholders and say ‘we’re going to spend billions of dollars on new capacity in a market that is, you know, the policy is taking you in the other direction.”
Related: Germany to restart coal plants as Russian gas supply is choked off. Note, though, that Germany still has coal plants to restart. Britain’s Greens got laws passed that required their coal plants to be razed upon decommissioning, precisely so that Britain couldn’t return to coal.
And none of this is unexpected. For instance …
Renewables Threaten German Economy & Energy Supply, McKinsey Warns In New Report
… McKinsey issues its strongest warning when it comes to Germany's increasingly insecure energy supply due to its heavy reliance on intermittent solar and wind. For three days in June 2019, the electricity grid came close to black-outs.
"Only short-term imports from neighboring countries were able to stabilize the grid," the consultancy notes.
"It can be assumed that security of supply will continue to worsen in the future," says McKinsey.
Renewables are causing similarly high price shocks in other parts of the world including Texas, Australia, and California.
And Britain and Australia have faced similar energy supply problems in recent years as they have attempted to transition to intermittent renewables.
“Wind generation, solar and interconnectors are different to the conventional electricity generation sources,” Britain's National Grid said in a report after lightning knocked a wind farm and natural gas plant off the grid in August, causing a black-out in London.
Australia electricity regulators in August sued four wind farm operators for contributing to a huge blackout in 2016.
Bloomberg News, which strongly advocates renewable energy, last week called the supply problems a "warning short to the rest of the world."
“We have to have systems in place to make sure we still have enough generation on the grid -- or else, in the best case, we have a blackout, and in the worst case, we have some kind of grid collapse,” Severin Borenstein, a University of California energy economist toldBloomberg.
California's increasingly perilous electricity grid may put pressure on California Governor Gavin Newsom to keep the state's last nuclear plant running.
German utilities too are warning of insecure supply. “By 2023 at the latest, we will be running with eyes wide open into a shortfall in secure capacity,” a managing director for the Germany energy industry association BDEW said.
"The ongoing phase-out of nuclear power by the end of 2022 and the planned coal withdrawal will successively shut down further secured capacity," explained McKinsey. "In particular, the industrial regions in western and southern Germany are affected, in which many capacities go off the grid and at the same time, one can not expect high rates of development of renewables."
In June, Germany imported more electricity than it exported, and by 2023, Germany will become a net electricity importer, McKinsey predicted.
The growing insecurity of German energy supply is made worse by the fact that its neighbors Belgium and Netherlands may shut down baseload capacity: coal plants in the Netherlands and nuclear plants in Belgium.
As such, McKinsey worries that Germany may not be able to meet demand with imports. "In the medium term, there is a risk that there will not be enough supply capacity in the entire European network."
Much, much more on the Internet, with articles going back at least a decade, if you’re curious, all predicting exactly what’s happening now.
