It’s spring in the Great Plains of this nation.

While flowers are a sign of the season, so are thunderstorms (as well as tornadoes). And with thunderstorms, there is sometimes hail. In 2021, a Texas hailstone measured 5.9 inches in diameter.

What happens when a predictable weather event meets a solution offered by those pushing the theoretical “climate crisis?” Disaster:

Thousands of panels on a solar farm southwest of Houston, Texas, were damaged by a powerful hailstorm on March 15.

Aerial footage showed rows of cracked photovoltaic cells at the Fighting Jays Solar Farm near Needville in Fort Bend County, local news channel KTRK reported on Saturday. Baseball-sized hail stones were observed falling in the area overnight, as per the Houston Chronicle.

The solar project, which began producing power for Texas’s energy grid in 2022, generates 350 megawatts across 3,300 acres of land and is expected to power 62,000 homes.

It is one of many renewable energy installations across the state which has championed clean energy projects in recent years while benefiting the most from federal tax credits and incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act.

It looks like the solar farm works as well as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. But, I digress.

Residents are expressing their concerns about chemical leaks from the damaged panels.

An onslaught of hail in southeastern Texas that destroyed large portions of a massive solar farm is highlighting the perils of trading traditional power sources for vulnerable “green” alternatives and sparking concern about the potential for chemical leaks from the broken panels.

…”My concern is the hail damage that came through and busted these panels – we now have some highly toxic chemicals that could be potentially leaking into our water tables,” Needville resident Nick Kaminski told Fox affiliate KRIV-TV. “I have a family — two children and a wife. My neighbors have kids and a lot of other residents in the area who are on well water are concerned that the chemicals are now leaking into our water tables.”



Signs abound that Green Energy is beginning to enter a winter of discontent…here and around the world.

In Canada, Drake Landing, in the Calgary area, once led the solar heating community in North America. Now it might have to rely on fossil fuels as the aging system is breaking down and may be too expensive or impossible to fix.

ATCO’s Tim Corboy is a spokesperson for the Drake Landing Company, which runs the community and is an equal partnership of ATCO, the Town of Okotoks, homebuilder Sterling Homes and property developer Anthem United.

He declined an interview request but responded via email to a number of questions.

Corboy said the company has been working hard over the past year and a half to find “affordable and reliable solutions to the growing system performance issues.” He said this includes trying to find parts and experts to service the 20-year-old technology.

He said a number of components have reached their end of life, including the air handler unit, the solar collectors, custom-made fittings that connect the entire system together and other unnamed replacement parts.

European countries face warnings that the green energy facilities built with green promises of cheap, renewable, and reliable power cannot effectively be connected to the grid.

European power grids are largely underprepared for the expected surge in renewable energy capacities, both in terms of national targets for 2030 and in relation to market projections. As new clean energy capacities are already facing connection delays, curtailment, and higher prices for end consumers, this lack of ambition may seriously hamper the energy transition, clean-energy think-tank Ember warns in a new report. There is no transition without transmission, its energy and climate data analyst Elisabeth Cremona said.

In its survey of development plans for national grids, Ember found that 11 out of 26 are based on lower wind and solar deployment compared to national targets. This lack of alignment risks resulting in insufficient preparation to integrate wind and solar. Solar capacity is underestimated by a total of 60 GW across the 11 countries, and wind by 27 GW.

Finally, “green energy” is not the current hot commodity. Artificial Intelligence is.

A new report that indicates green energy cannot sustain AI power demands might be the tech-twister to sweep through eco-activist mandates related to power.

AI facilities may have to rely on….fossil fuels!

A March International Energy Agency forecast estimates input-hungry AI models and cryptocurrency mining combined could cause data centers worldwide to double their energy use in just two years. Recent reports suggest tech leaders interested in staying relevant in the booming AI race may consider turning to old-fashioned, carbon-emitting energy sources to help meet that demand.

Though precise figures measuring AI’s energy consumption remain a matter of debate, it’s increasingly clear complex data centers required to train and power those systems are energy-intensive. A recently released peer reviewed data analysis, energy demands from AI servers in 2027 could be on par with those of Argentina, the Netherlands, or Sweden combined. Production of new data centers isn’t slowing down either.

Just last week, Washington Square Journal reports, Amazon Web Service Vice President of Engineering Bill Vass told an audience at an energy industry event in Texas he believes a new data center is being built every three days. Other energy industry leaders speaking at the event, like Former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, argued renewable energy production may fall short of what is needed to power this projected data center growth.

The “Iron Law of Electricity,” states that people, businesses, and countries will do whatever they must to get the electricity they need, for the win…again.

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