Last week the Net Zero universe was alive with the sounds of jubilation as the penetration of unreliable energy into the grid established a new record almost every day. The high point now stands over 74 per cent after a sunny and windy weekend.

These are looking at the world through the wrong end of the telescope. They ignore the low points of wind and solar penetration that show whether or not we are making progress towards a coal-free grid. Consider fences, dams, flood levees, and the links in a chain. Their effectiveness depends on the low parts of the barriers and the weakest link in the chain.

Everyone understands the way it works with fences, dams, and chains, so why is it so hard to explain in the context of the wind and solar power supply? This is the picture that tells the real story.

The tallest bars in the chart show the ever-increasing total amount of capacity of the windmills. Below that are green bars that represent the maximum delivery for each month. The zigzagging red line across the chart is the average capacity factor each for month and it is in the vicinity of 30 per cent.

The bottom line indicates the lowest point for the month. All of the increases recorded above this line have barely moved the line at the bottom.

The official meteorologists didn’t say anything about wind drought and it was left to independent Australian wind-watchers, Anton Lang and the Paul Miskelly team, to find them in the continuous record of wind power generation kept by the Market Operator (AEMO). Jo Nova’s blog provided a platform for their findings but not enough people noticed to effectively raise an alarm.

Then in 2021, Europe metaphorically tripped over the Dunkelflautes (still and dark periods) when the British wind-fleet delivered virtually no power in the month of June. That spiked the price of power well before the war in Ukraine.

At that moment wind droughts emerged as an existential threat to the continuous flow of electricity which is the lifeblood of modern civilisation.

The politicians and their advisers compounded the negligence of the meteorologists when they didn’t check the supply of wind before they set in train policies which will cost trillions of dollars to make electricity more expensive and less reliable.

The vagaries of the wind supply are now getting some press coverage, and this is an advance, but ask a roomful of people if they have heard about wind droughts and see the number of blank faces and raised eyebrows! Did they get a mention at CPAC?

On the dark side, they expect wind droughts to be handled by big batteries and synchronous condensers. On the good side there is a lot of analysis, but the power and the beauty of the work on wind droughts by Miskelly and Lang has been lost in technical details instead of being used to explain why wind power should never have been allowed to corrupt and destabilise the grid.

Use the Aneroid Energy site, established by Andrew Miskelly, to follow in their pioneering footsteps and look at the continuous record of wind power generation from 2009! Look at the frequency and duration of severe droughts across the whole NEM and calculate the amount of storage required to cover the worst cases in June 2017 (four days), June 2020 (three days), August 2023 (two days), and May 2024 (two days.)

Several teams on the dark side have used extremely sophisticated methods and gigantic data sets covering that period to discover, to their satisfaction, that we can probably get rid of coal in a decade or two at a modest cost. These academic studies have so far eluded public deconstruction; the notorious CSIRO GenCost study and the infamous Integrated System Plan from AEMO have not been so lucky.

The Energy Realists of Australia have done the job in a simpler way on the back of an envelope. Consider a long winter night of 16 hours with no useful solar input to serve the base load of 20G. Eliminate coal (imagine this is 2050) and gas as well (too expensive outside the peaks at dinnertime and breakfast), two or three GW of hydro (can’t ramp up further for fear of draining the dams) and one GW of wind because the Capacity Factor than night was 7.5 per cent (of 11GW installed capacity).

That calls for more than 250 GWh of storage for a single night and four times as much for the worst case where the drought persisted for four days and nights. Cost that at half a billion per GWh for battery storage, or maybe a billion per GWh to allow for additional wiring and installation costs. Repeat after ten years and consider that the demand for power is expected to double by 2050. Do the arithmetic and run it past Treasury for comment.

Refine the calculation by all means, but how much more needs to be done to demonstrate that the road to Net Zero based on wind power is a dead end?