Denmark invested heavily in wind power, on the assumption that they could generate enough electricity from their vast wind farms on the North Sea coast to replace other forms of generation. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, it’s not adding up the way the Danes hoped it would:
Denmark spent decades building nearly 5,000 wind turbines
Together, they produced 21.6 TWh in the last 12 months
One nuclear plant in Sweden made 23.3 TWh
Oh, and nuclear runs 24/7 — wind doesn’t
There’s one big reason Denmark has some of the most expensive electricity in the world
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/actual/perUnit
https://api.energidataservice.dk/dataset/ProductionConsumptionSettlement
https://eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01
Krzysztof Szczawinski explains the mistake is the same one that Soviet bureaucrats made repeatedly:
Counting terawatt-hours is the classic communist mistake: measuring quantity instead of value.
The Soviet Union produced record tonnes of steel nobody needed and millions of left shoes. There’s an old Soviet joke: when the nail factory’s quota was set by weight, it produced one giant nail. When it was set by number, it produced millions of tiny useless ones.
What matters in electricity is not how much – it is when. Electricity when it is needed has value. Electricity when nobody needs it has none. Wind turbines often produce exactly then – on a windy night, when demand is low. The price turns negative: the system is literally paying someone to take it, and the surplus only strains the grid. And when the wind stops, someone else has to keep the lights on.
A price is a message: this is needed, now. A negative price says: please, stop. A system that keeps producing anyway isn’t green. It’s deaf.
That’s mental communism applied to energy: the wish before reality.
Regimes that entertain such delusions end up going broke – and then they collapse.
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Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » TURNS OUT THE WATERMELONS AREN’T ANY BETTER AT ECONOMICS THAN WHEN THEY WERE (OPENLY) RED: The cl — October 26, 2026 @ 00:35
Many years ago, as I pondered how so many city-required recycling programs for all sorts of reasons end up finding it more economically reasonable to send all that stuff to the landfill … and how I could save aluminum cans, and if I get enough, I could take them to a recycle center and get paid enough to go get a pack of soda or two … I realized that “price” is a good rule-of-thumb indicator on how much recycling helps the environment and is worth the effort.
If you get paid to recycle it? Chances are, it’s more energy efficient and green to do so! If you have to be forced to do it? Chances are, we’re better off sending that stuff to a landfill.
The only sortof exception I could think of is for toxic things, like NiCd batteries — it may cost six more times to recycle than to make new, but it may still be worth it to avoid the toxic waste fees!
Comment by Alpheus — October 26, 2026 @ 01:50
Actually it is both. To use the power example, if you need 20 TWh all the time, but only produce that amount of electricity 1 hour a day, that doesn’t work. However, if you have a power plant that produces 1 TWh all the time, that doesn’t work either. You need plants that produce 20 TWh all the time.
Comment by Richard Swan — October 26, 2026 @ 08:12
I recall the time it was reported that, in the USSR, where they were fond of the “one big factory” for economic purposes, they had been making sunglasses for over a year that were so dark, you couldn’t see through them. Retail outlets got their regular allotments of sunglasses because, of course, in a centrally planned economy, there’s no feedback mechanism for issues like this. Retailers don’t order stock, they’re delivered stock at government mandated intervals and quantities. Sunglasses just kept piling up at retailers because nobody would buy them (one glance through them showed they were useless). Apparently, there was no normal way for word of the issue to be sent from the retailers to the factory. They did eventually figure it out, but I don’t recall how.
Comment by yeah — October 26, 2026 @ 22:09