“We got something in common,” Dale Ross told Al Gore last summer, joking. “You invented the internet. And I invented green energy.”
Georgetown, Texas – population 75,000 – was to be the new poster child of the green movement says Chuck DeVore, writing for Fox News. The mayor called going to renewable energy in this oil/gas rich city, a “no-brainer.”
Georgetown made a big push to generate all its electricity from wind and solar. The situation couldn’t have been more ideal. The town and mayor are [superficially] Republican, Georgetown is rich with oil and gas, and it’s in deep red Texas.
Perfect for virtue-signalling.
The global warming luminaries, including Al Gore, celebrated Mayor Ross. He became the face of renewable energy conventions. A Dutch film crew interviewed him, he spoke at the Earth Optimism Summit in Washington, sponsored by the Smithsonian Conservation Commons. He was called an “unlikely hero,” which turned out to be foretelling.
Last October, the city applied for a $1 million grant from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nonprofit, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and won it.
The grant was to be used for energy storage innovation in batteries, and all they had to do in return was serve as a public relations platform to abandon fossil fuels for the virtuous and costly renewable energy.
The politicians promised cheaper renewable energy and that is a promise that could never be met.
As the expensive wind and solar replaced cheaper natural gas in Georgetown, politicians could be found under their desks.
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The rose blooms for such a short time.
The embarrassed city Council members now have to figure out how to get out of the renewable mess they and their predecessors got them into.
With their municipal utility facing a $7 million shortfall – money that has to be made up by the city residents through higher electricity costs – the City Council voted 5-1 in July to instruct the staff to figure out how to wriggle out of the Bloomberg PR deal.
On Aug. 13 the Council voted 5-0 to officially kill the deal. The city is also raising property taxes.
The city will now concentrate on the city’s utility deficit and not ‘experiments.’
Not one city in the contiguous 48 states runs solely on wind and solar power. The reason is simple: electricity gets to cities via a grid, and that grid draws its energy from a variety of sources – mostly natural gas, according to DeVore.
DeVore says, in Georgetown’s case, for it to truly go 100 percent renewable energy as promised using today’s state-of-the-art mass-produced batteries from Tesla’s Gigafactory, the city would need a $400 million battery farm weighing some 20,000 tons to avoid a blackout on a quiet winter night. And, after spending $15,600 for each household to build such a battery farm, its backup power would be drained in 12 hours, with a second windless winter night leaving residents shivering in the dark.
And no one bothered to find this out beforehand.
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