While the US is pumping record amounts of oil and is producing unbelievable levels of natural gas, Europe has chosen the intermittent and unreliable energy path. And the continent will pay dearly for its mistake.

Europe’s energy policies are worse than stupid.

The elixir of carbon-free growth turns out to be snake oil 2017 was the year when Germany’s much vaunted Energiewende — a blueprint for America’s energy future if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election — demonstrably failed. Despite fearsome energy-saving policies, energy consumption rose (economic growth, immigration, and cold weather were blamed), greenhouse-gas emissions were flat, and retail electricity prices were projected to rise above 30 euro cents (36.6 U.S. cents) for the first time (the average U.S. residential rate is around 13 U.S. cents). The perverse effects of wind and solar were evidenced by increased volatility in wholesale electricity prices, with a record 146 hours with negative electricity prices — indicating that during these hours, electricity is less than worthless, as there’s insufficient demand to mop up unwanted wind and solar power. The extent to which the German public has been cowed by relentless renewables propaganda can be seen from an opinion survey that showed 75 percent agreeing that the Energiewende was a collective responsibility that everyone should help make succeed. But the same survey found that 68 percent of people were “very dissatisfied” or “somewhat dissatisfied” with the way it had been implemented, only 15 percent were “somewhat satisfied,” and only 1 percent were “very satisfied.” [Europe Wants to Export this Disaster to Africa] …. Europeans will reward [Africans] with some solar power, which doesn’t keep the lights on after dark or keep refrigerators cool through the night. In effect, the French president’s message to Africans was: You can’t have a Marshall Plan for Africa until your women have fewer babies. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455628/europe-bogus-clean-energy-schemes-european-union-coal

Unreliable, intermittent energy sources such as big wind and big solar, are highly corrupt ways of rewarding ultra-rich developers of wind farms and solar arrays who happen to be well connected politically. Taxpayers, consumers, and rate payers are the ones who lose, bigtime.

If Hillary Clinton cheated her way to the US Presidency, she would have shoved the US down the same slippery chute to ruin as Angela Merkel and the German greens have chosen. Idiotic policies are quite common at the upper levels of corruption. The US dodged a poisoned bullet in November 2016.

Meanwhile, with demographic and financial doom looming, Europe is walking straight toward energy starvation. She is losing her reliable nuclear and combustion power sources, and is embracing the deadly hazard of unreliable, intermittent energy.

Wind and solar are great for small to intermediate off-grid projects for tropical islands and many other geographically isolated areas — until safer and more reliable small nukes can be perfected and approved. But today’s huge grid-scale wind and solar is just a corrupt political game with ultimate life or death repercussions for modern high-tech societies. If grid failures become more common and widespread, people will die as a result. If electricity costs continue to skyrocket in Germany and other over-leveraged-in-green European nations, both energy-poverty and poverty in general will become far worse problems.

German industries are beginning to relocate away from the ideologically driven state, moving to locations where energy is cheaper, more reliable, and more abundant. Expect that costly exodus to spread to other nations who have gone all-in for the unreliables.