When I was a kid, we lived in a small village about sixty kilometers north of Vienna, tucked into what was proudly called the wine quarter of Lower Austria—a place blessed with endlessly fertile black soil and the smug self-confidence that only vineyards can provide. But it wasn’t just the vines. The roads themselves were framed by fruit trees, as if nature had decided to build edible corridors for anyone foolish enough to romanticize rural life. During fruit season the whole region turned sticky. Fruit fell faster than anyone could possibly harvest it, and within days the streets were lined with splattered sweetness, buzzing with insects and smelling faintly of fermentation and decay. Owners, unable to keep up, often just surrendered and declared entire clusters of trees free for the taking. Take what you want, please, just help make the mess go away.
And here’s the thing: those very same fruits fetched excellent prices in Vienna’s markets. There, they were objects of value. Here, they were a burden—rotting wealth no one could absorb, transforming “value” into a nuisance that had to be dealt with, sometimes at real cost. Renewable electricity works in much the same charmingly perverse way. When it arrives at the wrong time, when no one wants it and no one can use it, it doesn’t become a blessing. It becomes a problem. A sticky, expensive, logistical problem that costs money to handle and money to get rid of. Think of that when your electricity bill looks like it’s been inflated with a bicycle pump by someone grinning about “green progress.” Abundance without timing isn’t prosperity. It’s just rot with better PR.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/11/the-problem-with-the-primary-energy-fallacy/