Electricity Rationing Coming to Europe and the UK

The Netherlands is up against rationing of electricity already, with Britain not far behind. Netherlands RATIONS electricity as country struggles to cope with turning away from gas as part of green policies - as expert warns Britain is also 'in trouble'

The Netherlands is rationing electricity as its overloaded power grid buckles under the pressure of rapid electrification and ambitious climate goals.

More than 11,900 businesses are stuck in a queue for access to the network, alongside public buildings including hospitals, schools and fire stations.

Thousands of new homes are also waiting to be connected, with some areas warned they may have to wait until the 2030s.

Belgium, France, and Germany will not escape much longer. European energy rationing is a dire warning for net zero Britain

Likewise, shortages are emerging in Belgium and France, and Germany may not be far behind. We should not kid ourselves that this is an issue restricted to the Netherlands or to continental Europe.

This is the MGUY Australia video Electricity RATIONING is coming to a town near YOU! MGUY Australia gets the whole

Electricity rationing is the inevitable, and completely predictable, consequence of extreme climate policies and the net zero by 2050 agenda. By imposing artificial and unachievable deadlines to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, before the market or the technology has evolved to cope with it, governments around the world are not only crippling their electricity infrastructure, they're crippling their economies.

The video is 8 minutes long.

The Environmental Devastation Caused by the Production of Electric Vehicles

The West has mostly outsourced rare-earth mining, to China. They get all of the toxic waste associated with that. China Has Paid a High Price for Its Dominance in Rare Earths - The New York Times.

If you're not clear on how Rare Earths figure in our technology, there is an explanation below the embedded video.

Of course the fact that China doesn't give a damn about the environmental devastation visited upon people far from the country's capital, means that the production of rare earth metals is much cheaper in China than can be managed in civilized countries.

For decades in northern China, toxic sludge from rare earth processing has been dumped into a four-square-mile artificial lake. In south-central China, rare earth mines have poisoned dozens of once-green valleys and left hillsides stripped to barren red clay.

Achieving dominance in rare earths came with a heavy cost for China, which largely tolerated severe environmental damage for many years.

The article, which was originally in the New York Times, used past tense in that last sentence. I'm not really sure that the attitude of the Chinese government toward the environmental impacts has changed.

An artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holds the waste left over after metals are extracted from mined ore. During the winter and spring, the sludge dries out. The dust that then blows off the lake is contaminated with lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, including traces of radioactive thorium, according to technical papers by Chinese scholars.

During the summer rainy season, the sludge becomes coated with a layer of water that mixes with poisons and thorium. This dangerous mix seeps into the groundwater underneath the lake.

This is the MGUY Australia video Quickie: China's environmental DEVASTATION from rare earth mining. The video is about 4 minutes long.

Here is a bit from CNN about What are rare earths used for?

Rare earths are ubiquitous in the technologies we rely on every day, from smartphones to wind turbines to LED lights and flat-screen TVs. They’re also crucial for batteries in electric vehicles as well as MRI scanners and cancer treatments.

Rare earths are also essential for the US military. They’re used in F-35 fighter jets, submarines, lasers, satellites, Tomahawk missiles and more, according to a 2025 research note from CSIS.

Can You Charge an EV in 5 Minutes?

If you are only charging 1 EV in a laboratory, probably. But if you want to charge 1000s of vehicles in 5 minutes across a city, you need a significant upgrade to the way we generate and deliver electricity.

And there may be some hurdles that we don't know how to clear.

When politicians and journalists, who haven't taken a science class since high school, and thought that it was stupid back then, start talking to you, or passing laws, about topics that touch on engineering, just remember to take what they say with a very large grain of salt.

This is the MGUY Australia video Pure HYPE: Not enough ELECTRICITY for 5 minute EV charging. The Chinese company BYD has announced a battery that can be charged in 5 minutes. Can it?

BYD's 5-minute-charge claim is based on supplying over a megawatt of power to the car. Now most journalists and EV activists don't have a clue what a megawatt is, or a joule or, any kind of engineering or electrical understanding, so they don't really understand what a megawatt is. It's essentially 500 [electric] kettles all boiling at once and the kettle is probably the most power- hungry device in your entire house and it takes 500 of those all going at once to represent 1 megawatt of power.

In the US not many of us electric kettles, but you're probably familiar. Instead, lets think about generating that power with solar panels. Depending on location, you would need 5 to 10 acres of solar panels to generate 1 Megawatt. So what are we using to charge these cars?

The video is just over 5 minutes.

Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Versus Physics - Part 1

What happens when you try to scale up an EV passenger car battery to be able to power a commercial vehicle. Nothing good. UK commercial vehicle electrification stalled by grid connection delays: SMMT

When politicians make pronouncements, and laws, about technology and infrastructure with no knowledge of physics or engineering, things are bound to go wrong. You can't change the physics of how batteries charge, you can't change the physics around power generation and distribution, and you can't solve intractable engineering problems by passing a law.

The UK has stated that no fossil-fuel powered commercial vehicles will be sold after a given date. Two dates were given, depending on the size of the vehicle. The problem is that you can't plug them in and charge them in a reasonable time.

The main issue, however, is securing grid connections, with some operators facing delays of up to 15 years.

This delay is seen as too long to meet the 2035 and 2040 deadlines for ZEV-only vehicle sales.

And given that all the operators are going to want to plug those vehicles in at the end of the day, engineering a grid that can handle that kind of load is going to be an "interesting challenge."

I love it when politicians pretend they are engineers, well, not when I'm impacted by the insanity that follows. But it is interesting to watch from a suitable distance.

This is the MGUY Australia video Gridlock: FIFTEEN YEAR wait for TRUCK charging points

Find Part 2 at this link: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Versus Physics - Part 2

Do You Really Think Journalists Understand the Physics of Electric Vehicles?

A typical journalist hasn't taken a science course since high school, probably didn't do too well, and thought it was stupid. "When am I going to use this?" The only difference for math, is that they may have been required to take a math course in college, though even that is doubtful today.

Well, since they only pretend to be experts in stuff they report on, they haven't thought about science, even when writing about science and engineering.

Leith van Onselen at Macrobusiness has an article that points that out. EV battery hype fails basic physics

The latest greatest announcement that someone has developed a battery that can be charged in 5 minutes, or whatever. But what they haven't announced is the electricity grid that can provide that power.

Australia cannot achieve these types of charging times in practice; they are purely theoretical.

Why? Because of the inextricable link between the power of a charger and the duration required to charge an EV battery.

Existing Australian infrastructure also cannot achieve the necessary electricity throughput to charge an EV battery in five minutes. To do so at scale would require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in new poles, high-capacity wires, transformers, substations, etc, which is cost-prohibitive.

That doesn't even cover the issue of load balancing on the grid, which is something grid operators are already struggling with given the problems introduced by solar and wind.

The article does mention the problems of cold-weather charging that EV batteries face, and notes that the latest breakthrough does achieve charging at -10 degrees Celsius. Which is cold by some standards, but not Midwestern standards. -10 degrees Celsius is +14 degrees Fahrenheit. As far as I can tell they still haven't addressed temperatures in the -20 degrees Fahrenheit range.

This the MGUY Australia video Fast Charging: The SIMPLE fact EV zealots ALWAYS forget.

A Story of a Bridge That Didn't Collapse

Infrastructure is still interesting. Well, it is interesting to me anyway.

The Washington Bridge in Rhode Island crosses Seekonk River from Providence to East Providence. It carries Interstate-195. Due to the problems uncovered in an inspection, the westbound span of the bridge was closed on December 11, 2023. (That is not a typo; the bridge has been closed more than a year.) There is a "rush" effort to demolish the impacted portions and get a contract to replace the bridge.

As Grady points out in the first video, this is basically a win. Sure, it would have been nice to replace the bridge without it being under emergency conditions, but the bridge did not fall down. No one was injured or killed. Usually when I write about bridges, it is because something has failed catastrophically.

This first video is from Practical Engineering. This Bridge’s Bizarre Design Nearly Caused It To Collapse. This video goes into the design of the bridge (it was a 1950s bridge built to coexist with a historic bridge.) How the design decisions made inspections difficult, and what eventually happened. It is a 20 minute video.

This is a video from YouTube channel Casey Jones - Professional Engineer titled Broken for Years! - Washington Bridge in Rhode Island. Casey Jones has some issues with the folks in charge of bridge safety in Rhode Island. This is a video that covers some statements by RIDOT, as well as analysis of vibration and movement patterns in the bridge. Is RIDOT lying to people? You judge. It is a 19 minute video.

The UK is Discovering that You Need Electricity

If you want to maintain a modern society, that is.

If you know anything about modern technology, you would think that this would be apparent. But the folks running Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest, didn't realize that, and had no contingency plan. Well, they did have a contingency plan; it just wasn't worth the paper it was written on. London’s Heathrow slowly resumes flights after a fire cut power to Europe’s busiest airport

A fire at an electrical substation knocked out power to Heathrow Airport for most of Friday, forcing Europe’s busiest hub to shut down for roughly 18 hours, causing widespread cancellations and rerouting headaches, and stranding roughly 200,000 passengers.

The blaze started just before midnight on Thursday at a substation about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the airport and took firefighters around seven hours to bring under control. Authorities said they found no evidence that it was suspicious, and the London Fire Brigade said its investigation would focus on the electrical distribution equipment at the substation.

The fire was not suspicious. Would they tell us if it was? This is the UK, where they denied, and then covered up the existance of rape gangs for a couple of decades, for fear of not being PC, or being called raaaaacist.

No one does proper systems design anymore. Heathrow Airport blackout exposes weak spot in its power supplies.

The public blowback to the outage was swift, with Willie Walsh, the former chief executive officer of British Airways parent IAG SA and now IATA director, saying it’s “yet another case of Heathrow letting down both travelers and airlines.”

Walsh said it’s a “clear planning failure by the airport” if critical national infrastructure relies on one energy source without an alternative.

Whenever a system is designed, especially a critical infrastructure system, you need to look at things like points of failure, and modes of failure, mean-time-to-failure, and mean-time-to-repair. If you lose electric power in an airport, you lose radar, radio communications, air traffic control systems, ground traffic control systems, refrigeration, elevators, escalators, intercom systems, the internet, and more. Depending on where the cell towers are located, and how they are powered you may also lose cellphone communication. You should figure out what you can live with, what can't live without, and then make damn sure you know how to get more than one source of electrical power to that system.

This is the MGUY Australia video Was NET ZERO to blame for #Heathrow CHAOS? (Very likely).

But such is the fragility of the UK's electricity grid, that just one outage of a substation is enough to disable the UK's major airport for 24 hours. Where was the backup? Where was the redundancy?

There are reports that diesel generators, that were previously used for such purposes, had been decommissioned and replaced with a biomass generator, which could only power certain functions

The video is nine minutes long.

The Worst Idea in Green Power? Maybe Not the Worst

This sums it up quite nicely. From The Political Hat: Bird Slaughtering Death Ray To Be Shut Down

A powerful weapon of avian devastation, which for years now had slaughtered innocent birds, is likely going to be finally shut down.

Concentrating solar power with mirrors into intense heat to generate power. What could possibly go wrong? And yes, it does kill birds.

It can't compete economically with regular solar power, which doesn't incinerate birds.

However, there are still others like it, that fry birds in mid-air.

Click thru.

The Green Movement's Adoption of Lithium-Ion Batteries

The problems of strip mining and processing lithium in South America are not important. The problems of child labor in cobalt mines are not important. The problems of environmental devastation caused by Indonesian mines are not important. The only thing that is important is what the Green movement says is important. In this case, they say that it is important to use lots of lithium-ion batteries.

First lets' look at the Moss Landing battery plant fire. From the AP: Smoke from fire at California lithium battery plant raises concerns about air quality

A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant in Northern California smoldered Friday after sending plumes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, leading to the evacuation of up to 1,500 people. The blaze also shook up the young battery storage industry.

The fire is one problem, but the toxic smoke is the real problem. Who thinks this is good for the environment.

Kelsey Scanlon, director of Monterey County’s Department of Emergency Management, told reporters that the release of hydrogen fluoride into the atmosphere from the blaze is a cause for concern.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says hydrogen fluoride gas can irritate the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs and nose, and that too much exposure to the gas can be deadly.

Here is an 8 minute video on the subject. There's only ONE reason we need these DANGEROUS batteries... | MGUY Australia

Of course the fire in northern California is not the only problem. There are a lot of EVs in and around Los Angeles. The fire in Pacific Palisades has created a problem with fires, since these cars can ignite, or reignite, days or weeks after they are damaged. EV batteries complicate debris removal after California fires

“It’s a little different world now today, with batteries — not just car batteries, but battery packs, people with solar, those Tesla wall batteries and the like,” [Gavin Newsom] said during an interview with CNN that aired on Jan. 13. “The hazmat side of this is made a little bit more complicated, which is fine. We’ll work through that.”

Who is this "we" Newsom? You won't be dealing directly with the risk. You barely admit there is a risk.

While fires in combustion engine vehicles are much more common, EVs have unique qualities that make their fires difficult to extinguish.

In the meantime the NHTSA is collecting and analyzing data, and the EPA is working on a proposal for how to handle all this stuff. Maybe they should have done that before mandating all these batteries.

Do You Want to Build a High Power Rocket?

Xyla Foxlin is one of my favorite YouTube creators. Her videos are completely off-topic for this blog, but I don't care in this case.

If you want to pursue model rocketry, and you want to progress beyond Estes models, you need to do certification flights, to get the license you need to be able to purchase the stronger rocket motors. L1 and L2 rocket motors are pretty serious business. She has created a kit that includes everything to build the rocket, and fiberglass the airframe suitable for doing an L2 certification, which implies that if could also do an L1 flight. This video covers building that kit to do those flights.

This is Xyla Foxlin's video How to Build a High Power Rocket! (Tutorial) It is an hour long video, so plan accordingly.

NASA Admits Starliner Can't Fly

Whether Boeing will learn the lesson that DEI is not working for them, remains to be seen. NASA Finally Cuts the Cord: Starliner Grounded Until Boeing Learns DEI Won't Fly to Space - Flopping Aces

The news was that, despite having invested $5 billion in the project, NASA reluctantly deleted Boeing’s troubled Starliner from all upcoming scheduled space missions through at least 2026. The change leaves SpaceX’s Dragon as the agency’s lone domestic provider. (NASA also demurely confirmed it will continue seat-swapping with the Russians on certain space station missions).

Adding insult to injury, NASA’s decision comes as two of its astronauts remain stranded on the International Space Station, where they will be literally hanging out until February.

Of course NASA and Boeing have a cozy relationship, or they did, until this little thing came up.

Ironically, NASA originally considered dividing its multi-billion dollar budget between blue-blooded Boeing and scrappy SpaceX, but ultimately decided to award nearly all the money to Boeing. SpaceX was largely forced to self-finance, while Boeing built its now sidelined spaceship using taxpayer dollars.

As for DEI and the difference between how the two companies approached it, click thru. You won't be surprised.

If a Truck Full of "Green Technology" Overturns, Catches Fire, and Emits Toxins, Is It Still Green?

Asking for a friend. Sunday's Energy Absurdity: California Fire Shows How 'Green' Energy Really Isn't Green at All

An 18-wheeler overturned on I-15 South Friday afternoon, causing a 75,000 lb load of lithium-ion batteries to spontaneously combust (because of course it did). Emergency first responders were forced to shut down the freeway, which serves as basically the only efficient ground artery between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The New York Times reports that Emergency responders were concerned about the fire causing the release of a number of deadly toxic chemicals, including hydrogen cyanide, chlorine and sulfur dioxide. A spokesman for San Bernardino County said, “These chemicals pose significant health risks at elevated levels, with hydrogen cyanide and chlorine being particularly dangerous even at low concentrations.”

Click thru for the details, the chemicals, the traffic insanity, and the observation that this green tech isn't very green. (Hat tip to Doug Ross.)

Why Hydrogen as Energy Storage is Dumb

Hydrogen as "The Answer" to how to fix the problems with wind and solar is not the answer you think it is. Germany, the US, and the UK are all investing in the hydrogen, but there is a small problem.

The Hydrogen economy is basically an expensive way to apologize for the continued use of fossil fuels.

If you build a hydrogen power generating plant, that just happens to run on natural gas until you get your hydrogen supply sorted out, you can claim you doing Green Energy™.

This is the Sabine Hossenfelder's video “The most dumb thing" for energy storage: Hydrogen. The video is about 8 minutes long.

I'm Shocked That People Hawking "Net Zero" Would Lie About the Cost

OK, so I'm not that shocked. I am shocked that they haven't been continually called on their lies. Energy Bills Set to Soar as Report Finds Almost All Major Studies on Net Zero Grossly Underestimate Cost

This is a report from the place where Great Britain used to be, but it applies more generally.

The report, which presents a new model of the 2050 electricity system that corrects these errors, shows that official studies have suppressed the apparent cost of Net Zero still further by using extreme speculations about the costs and efficiencies of all the equipment required in the 2050 grid.

The assumption is that costs will be cut in half, and efficiencies of all the tech will soar. Based on what? Wishful thinking. If you use known costs and efficiencies, you get a very different picture.

The report warns that with current technology, the cost of a Net Zero grid would approach £8,000 per household per year.

£8,000 is just over $10,000 for energy every year. Per household, every year.

The Wind Blows, But There Is No Wind Power

How can this be? Most of Alberta’s wind fleet slowly shut down Thursday night, but not for lack of wind

Science is hard, and politicians suck at being engineers.

One of the first lessons any new engineering student learns in their materials class is “cold brittle behaviour” of materials. When it gets really cold, like -30 C or colder, many materials lose much of their strength and are prone to shattering. This applies to wind turbines as much as it applies to car bumpers.

And as a result, most wind turbines are shut down when the ambient temperatures reaches around -30 C, lest their continued operation cause them to shatter. And such shutdowns were plainly evident the evening of Jan. 11, on both the Alberta Electric System Operator website and on Dispatcho.app. That’s a website that logs the minute-by-minute data published by the AESO regarding the Alberta electrical grid.

While under the same wind conditions, wind power had been supplying a fair amount of power hours before, things were shut down as the temperatures fell. Minus 30 degrees Celsius is minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. So not an unusual occurrence in north-central North America.

How do they plan to handle this? Alberta is building a natural-gas powered generating plant to take up the load.

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals: Wind blows, but wind generation sucks.

… when it’s cold,

Another Sinking that Was Caused by Getting the Math Wrong

Well, by getting the math and the engineering wrong.

A ship built by a king - a wealthy guy - to basically show off how wealthy he was. Where have I heard that before? From MEEP we get the following cautionary tale. Sunday at Sea: the Vasa, the Far Side of the World, and Alexander in a Bathysphere

This sinking took place in 1628, about 20 minutes after the ship set sail.

“The warship survived the first blast of wind it encountered on its maiden voyage in Stockholm Harbor,” writes Lucas Laursen for Archaeology. “But the second gust did it in. The sinking of Vasa took place nowhere near an enemy. In fact, it sank in full view of a horrified public, assembled to see off their navy’s–and Europe’s–most ambitious warship to date.” Engineering problems sank the ship–but this PR disaster for the Swedish navy has become a boon for archaeologists. Here’s how it happened and how Vasa's influence is felt today.

It is worth noting that dozens of people were trapped below decks and drowned.

The management world has a name for human problems of communication and management that cause projects to founder and fail–Vasa syndrome. The events of August 10, 1628 had such a big impact that the sinking is a case study business experts still read about.

“An organization’s goals must be appropriately matched to its capabilities,” write Kessler, Bierly and Gopalakrishnan. In the case of the Vasa, “there was an overemphasis on the ship’s elegance and firepower and reduced importance on its seaworthiness and stability,” they write, “which are more critical issues.” Although it was originally designed to carry 36 guns, it was sent to sea with twice that number. At the same time, the beautiful ornamentation contributed to its heaviness and instability, they write. These and a host of other factors contributed to Vasa’s sinking and provide a cautionary tale for those designing and testing new technologies.

Proving that there is nothing new under the sun.

Mary Pat has a whole other part of her post, as you can tell by the title to her post, but this is the part I was interested in. And I suppose that it is worth nothing, how she came to write about this topic.

I was reminded about this particular disaster due to my recent visit to the Museum of Failure.

The Universe Doesn't Care How Much Money You Have

It also doesn't care about how many Social Justice points you've collected. You get the math, the physics, and the engineering right, or people die. Titan sub CEO dismissed safety warnings as 'baseless cries', emails show - BBC News

Warnings over the safety of OceanGate's Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show.

In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been certified by an independent agency.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush saw concerns about safety as a means for "the industry" to stop innovation. Just because you have a new idea, doesn't mean it will work. Not even if you are crazy rich. Or just crazy.

"We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often," [Stockton Rush] wrote. "I take this as a serious personal insult."

Safety warnings are a personal insult because in his mind he could simply NOT be wrong. He was STOCKTON RUSH! How dare you contradict him! [In your best Gretta T. voice] "How dare you!"

And I'll repeat myself...

As Pixy Misa (or Mixy Pisa) has noted, the universe doesn't care about how many diversity boxes you have checked.

When you build a bridge, it doesn't matter if you respect people's pronouns and their lived experience. It doesn't matter if you hate "fascists" and cheer "progress" and drink only sustainable organic fair-trade soy lattes.

You get the fucking math right or it falls down.

It also doesn't matter if you're rich, and convinced you are right. And it applies to more than just bridges.