Via Instapundit:

I WAS GOING TO FLY MY LEARJET TO NOVA SCOTIA: Europe braces for ‘unprecedented’ power issues from solar eclipse.

Europe’s power operators are bracing for potential disruption from the solar eclipse expected Friday, which will knock out almost all solar-generated electricity in an “unprecedented” test for the network.

“The risk of an incident cannot be completely ruled out,” the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (Entso-e) said recently, as 100 times more power is generated from the sun now than during the last eclipse in 1999.

“Solar eclipses have happened before but with the increase of installed photovoltaic energy generation, the risk of an incident could be serious without appropriate countermeasures,” the group said.

“For the first time this is expected to have a relevant impact on the secure operation of the European power system,” warned Entso-e.

Well, goody. See, the problem with wind and solar is that since they’re intermittent, you basically need as much backup power as you’d need generating capacity without wind and solar, or else you risk shortfalls.

This afternoon Mr. Big Food was part of a Roundtable Discussion following a presentation by Alex Epstein on The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. It was quite interesting– Epstein talked about the intermittency of wind and solar. Also on the panel was a geoscientist who got a grant for $1,000,000,000 to research how to better expose Mississippi high schools students to climate science.

You can read the first chapter of the book for free at Epstein’s site.