Energy Unplugged
Don’t plug those electric cars in! In Texas they’re taking over your smart thermostats to lower the temperature in your house and in California they’re begging you to stop charging your electronic vehicles during peak energy hour. Earlier this week all the talk was about how Texas energy companies took over everyone’s smart thermostats and turn down their air conditioners. Now they are going after electric cars which according to the Biden administration, is essential if we’re going to save the planet. The great energy transition and dreams of an electronic future are getting hit with a dose of reality as the nations energy and infrastructure is going to have to be transformed to be able to handle the increase in demand. The demand increase that’s going to be created by electronic vehicles and the green energy grid that is being rushed by the Biden administration.
The goal of getting more people to drive electric cars and eventually replace the internal combustion engine is going to face significant challenges not only with the power grid but the ability to produce all the batteries that are going to be needed and the rare earth minerals that are going to be needed to build these cars. They also have to account for the strip-mining of a lot of land to come up with all the lithium cobalt in other rare earth minerals that are going to be needed to create millions of electronic vehicles.
The power grid is going to be under a lot of pressure because of the increase in electricity usage. The Biden administration wants the power grid to be powered by renewable resources such as wind and solar. But if you look at what’s happening in Texas and if you look at what’s happening in California, what we see during times of peak demand, alternative sources of energy fail. These sources of energy fail the number of solar farms that you’re going to have to build to power the grid and to power electronic vehicles. This will take so much land that is probably going to impact our ability to produce food. Instead of amber waves of grain, we will see reflections of solar panels from sea to shining sea.
We also have to deal with the fact that there is a lot of solar panels that are going to have to be replaced as they have used up useful life faster than people thought about. We’re already starting to see a recycling issue with old solar panels and we have to remember that there are a lot of dangerous chemicals that go into the production of solar panels. We have already talked about the inability to recycle all the wind turbine blades that are ending up in landfills so the new energy transition is not only going to provide us with a world where the supplies of energy are gonna be a lot less reliable but we’re also going to live in the world where energy is going to be ridiculously expensive.
I think we’re going to have a great fossil-fuel reactor re-awakening. That re-awakening may come sooner rather than later especially if you look at the price increases we are seeing in the crude oil market. Crude oil is up .50 after a very bullish American Petroleum Institute supply report as well as the fact that we’re seeing the impact of massive underinvestment on the oil and gas side. That is mainly due to the re-opening of the economy is coming back a lot faster than most people think and it is also one of the reasons why the Federal Reserve underestimated inflation.