How is any of this even necessary?
Were we not assured that wind and solar had already solved their obvious problem of intermittency? We were told that interconnection, smart grids, network effects, and a sufficiently vast web of transmission lines would effortlessly smooth out the peaks and valleys. The imbalance, we were promised, would simply balance itself.
Reality, as ever, appears to have missed the briefing.
Now we are discovering that entire hydroelectric facilities must increasingly be built, expanded, or operated not because demand has changed, but because intermittent generation needs a permanent babysitter standing by with its coat on.
I am sure, of course, that the wind and solar industries will gladly pay the full cost of constructing, maintaining, and operating those hydroelectric stations.
Or perhaps not.
After all, they are the ones creating the problem.
They are the only generators that require this balancing service on such a scale. Remove wind and solar from the equation and the requirement largely disappears. Thermal power stations do not demand an entire backup infrastructure to compensate for their own unpredictability. Conventional hydroelectric plants certainly do not. Nuclear reactors generate electricity when people need it, not when the weather happens to cooperate.
Electricity systems were once designed around demand.
Now we increasingly ask consumers to adapt themselves to the moods of the atmosphere.
This is presented as progress.
The justification, naturally, is Net Zero.
Yet the scientific certainty once advertised with near-religious confidence has steadily eroded under the weight of failed predictions, contested assumptions, inconvenient observations, and an ever-growing list of exceptions that require increasingly elaborate explanations. The confidence remains. The certainty does not.
And yet the performance continues.
Billions continue to be spent.
Entire industries continue to flourish.
Consultants continue to produce reports.
Politicians continue to announce targets.
The public continues to pay.
It has become an extraordinarily expensive game of pretend, sustained less by engineering than by political momentum and institutional inertia.
The longer the performance lasts, the more expensive it becomes to admit that some of its central assumptions may have been flawed from the beginning.
Which raises a rather uncomfortable question.
How much longer can countries like the United Kingdom continue financing this experiment before the economic strain becomes political strain?
Because history has a habit of reminding governments that physics can be negotiated only for so long.
Voters, eventually, become just as unforgiving.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/30/net-zero-power-station-to-be-built-on-loch-ness/