How is it “mysterious”? A cursery inspection of the collapse site should reveal the likely point of failure.
This article is tripping over itself to try to avoid stating that such turbines are an inherently flawed and dangerous product. Because that’d mean manufacturing should be halted indefinitely.
Come to think about it, maybe that’s the goal. What better reason to retain traditional enegery sources without pissing off the green nuts.
Fool or knave? The odds are with fool.
Some funny comments and at the end a pitch for Glencore, the commodity trading firm, which trades as GLEN.LO or GLNCY otc in the US. No position.
3. Follow the money
The so-called fight against climate change has already sucked in resources amounting to about USD 5tr. No one has a precise figure, but it’s in the trillions in any case.
What is being bandied about as the energy transition supposedly cost between USD 10- 100tr, depending on who you ask. In any case, that’s more money than anyone can even begin to imagine. In comparison, the US government’s annual budget is USD 6.2tr, and that of Germany is USD 1.6tr. One study put the current size of the climate change industry at USD 1.5tr per year, which would make it the world’s 13th biggest economy and roughly on par with the GDPs of South Korea, Australia or Canada.
What’s more, you are supposed to give these unprecedented amounts to entities that have a history of not even being able to reliably achieve basic measures of good governance, such as balancing their budgets (the US government last balanced its budget 22 years ago). However, you are not supposed to question the need to hand over these resources to them because… “climate change!”.
Shamed be he who thinks evil of it.
The article also has three investment ideas in energy
Fossil fuels- he thinks they still have a way to run, despite the huge increase in the last year, compared to the fall in the broad indexes like total market.
Green energy innovation, but doesn’t give any specific examples.
Emerging markets, but most of them inexplicably put China and Taiwan in the category.
Of the three, I like the investment in fossil fuel companies. Buy the dips as they say. Maybe in country specific emerging markets.
An evenhanded article. Long but worth reading
See the latter half of the linked article, on how many various metals, rare and otherwise, will be needed in a transition to an electric powered economy. Case made for both fossil fuels to power the transition as well as commodities being in increasing demand.
Lots of nice charts here
http://www.chrisleithner.com/global-energy-transition-fact-or-fiction/
Interesting article but I agree with one of the commenters:
I agree with the thrust of the article. I am cautious about basing my investment decisions on your analysis because governments appear hell-bent on financing this stupidity.
The money on the government spending will most likely be made by the insiders and grifters. Not much chance for little guys to participate.
I continue to buy VDE on the dips.
Overall a good article. I applaud research to develop ways to reduce the actual cost of “green” energy.
+1 for using the right physical units. Energy is measured in power times time. That is, megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
-1 for not putting the capacity of the battery storage in perspective.
The total electrical energy generated for use in California and delivered by the grid is 277,000 Gigawatt-hours.
That is about 2.8x10^14 watt-hours in a year. There are about 3x10^7 seconds in a year. So the CA grid delivers about 10^7 watt-hours in a second.
The battery capacity of the system in the article is 2.5x10^7 watt-hours.
That is enough for about 2.5 seconds. More than I expected. Looking at the size of the installation in the picture gives you an idea of the magnitude of the effort required to replace the power delivered by the grid for periods such as cloudy no wind days.
-1 for using the wrong physical units. It’s Watt-seconds, if you’re wondering. 
But you also didn’t put it in perspective. It’s 2.5 (2.8 actually) seconds to power the entire state, but again assuming that power generation and draw is constant, which it isn’t. It might be enough to power some small nearby community for the whole night.
The physical unit of energy is the joule J. The watt is a derived unit of power equivalent to 1 J per second.
We can simplify the calculation by looking at the CALISO website. It says the CA power grid is now delivering about 39 GW.
The California population is 39 million people so the grid is delivering 1 kiloWatt per person.
There are 86,400 seconds in a day so the grid delivers about 10^8 J per day per person.
The battery of the article stores 25 Megawatt hours. With 3600 seconds in an hour that is about 10^11 J.
The bottom line is that the battery in the article can store the energy required by 10^11/10^8=1000 people for one day.
I suppose you can call that a small town.
Energy requirements are lower at night than during the day, also a lot of the energy is used for industrial purposes. My house uses < 0.3kW at night (< 2.4kWh over 8 hours), so I was guesstimating a small town of 10000 homes like mine.
Also may be important to note that it’s every day, not just “one day”.
Dude, that’s a city.
It’s just one day, unless they’re recharged. Those batteries cannot keep providing that amount of electricity day after day indefinitely.
According to the photos they were placed next to a huge solar panel installation, presumably to be recharged while the sun shines. 25 MWh is not the annual output, it’s the storage capacity.
That’d require also presuming the power being produced by solar panels is excess and isnt already being used during the day. Is there any indication that solar panel installation was built to recharge batteries, and wasnt already there before the batteries, powering the grid?
The point is that a fully charged battery can only provide it’s max output once. Beyond that, it’s only redistributing the existing power supply.
It would be pretty stupid to install all these batteries if they couldn’t be regularly recharged. I’m just giving this company the benefit of the doubt.
Well…yeah? This is about the batteries having enough juice to power a town every day. That simply cannot happen for more than one day, without those batteries first drawing one day’s worth of power away from that town to recharge. You arent giving the benefit of the doubt, you are assuming there is a day’s worth of excess power kicking around on the grid every day.
To follow that logic, it can power the entire moon for a millennium.
It makes no difference to me. I stand by my moon projection.
I always said 'er thought 'er might have thought you were very generous. 
Vanguard is no longer drinking the Climate Koolaid.
“We cannot state that [environmental, social and governance] investing is better performance wise than broad index-based investing,” said Buckley. “Ourresearch indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.”
