From Heartland Daily News

By Jason Isaac

When the wind blows too much, natural gas plants are forced to shut down because they can’t underbid wind producers that can bid zero or negative. But when the wind doesn’t blow when it is needed, wind generators can afford the loss of revenue because they earn so much from tax subsidies.

It’s been all quiet on the electric grid front for a few months — but don’t get your hopes up. Over the last month, electricity prices came near the $5000/MWh regulatory cap three separate times because the wind wasn’t blowing enough when the sun went down.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not wrong.

You may hear from the drive-by media that the problem is unseasonably warm temperatures, or that there are a lot of power plants down for maintenance. But high 80s in April and low 90s in May are not unusual, and the Texas grid used to manage these weather changes with no problems. From 2014 to 2016, real-time prices only went over $1000/MWh twice, but it’s happened three times already this year.

If the grid is already on shaky ground, with many weeks to go before blistering triple-digit temperatures shoot electric demand through the roof, all signs are pointing to an unpleasant summer. 

The problem with the Texas grid is so simple it’s infuriating: Relying too heavily on unpredictable wind and solar, without enough reliable reserve capacity, means higher volatility — leading to higher prices and increasing need for expensive interventions by ERCOT to avoid outages. This is why your electric bill is going up and up even though wind and solar are supposed to be cheap.

While Texas certainly has a lot of sun, peak solar output almost never aligns with peak electric usage. The Lone Star State also has plenty of wind, but wind generation is wildly unpredictable —  by nature. It’s not unusual for a wind generator’s output to swing 60 percentage points or more in a single week.

Take last month, for example. On Tuesday, April 16, electricity prices reached their cap because ERCOT’s day-ahead wind forecast was off by 50%. Five gigawatts of wind we were counting on to power Texas as the sun went down didn’t show up. That was the equivalent of simultaneously shutting down 10 large natural gas units, or all of the state’s nuclear capacity. If the latter occurred, the news media would be up in arms (and rightfully so). But because the culprit was the political darling of both the left and the right, no one heard about it.

ERCOT hasn’t been the best at predicting wind output, and the problem isn’t entirely its fault. Wind veers so wildly between extremes it’s nearly impossible to plan a sustainable grid around its fickleness — yet wind makes up 26% of our generating capacity.

It’s all because lucrative tax breaks and subsidies at the state and federal level, combined with flaws in ERCOT’s market design, make it almost impossible for wind to lose money — and harder than ever for natural gas to compete, even though it’s far more reliable and affordable. When the wind blows too much, natural gas plants are forced to shut down because they can’t underbid wind producers that can bid zero or negative. But when the wind doesn’t blow when it is needed, wind generators can afford the loss of revenue because they earn so much from tax subsidies.

Imagine trying to open a restaurant when your competitor next door is paying its customers to eat there. It’s no wonder natural gas capacity in ERCOT has barely grown over the past decade, and not enough to make up for losses of coal plants, while demand has been steadily increasing.

All those subsidies are hurting our most reliable, affordable energy producers and putting our economy at risk — leaving you and me, the taxpayers on the hook.

While most political issues are far more complex and nuanced than brazen attack ads and headlines would lead you to believe, in this case, it really does boil down to one simple problem.

And it would be easy to solve — if lawmakers are willing to go against the grain of political correctness and set a clear reliability standard for the wind and solar generators that want to connect to our grid.

Unfortunately, that’s a gargantuan “if.”

As a former lawmaker, I understand the pressures our legislators are under to toe the line on alternative energy. Major utilities embracing World Economic Forum- and United Nations-aligned “energy transition” policies that seek to redefine what’s “clean” and what’s “pollution” are making matters worse. And the incessant misinformation from their well-funded lobby that promise rural “economic development” and “cheap energy” sound too good to be true, because they are.

Elected officials don’t serve the lobby. They serve Texans — or, at least, they should.

And Texans want a reliable, affordable grid. They want to not have to worry about losing power in the heat of the summer or the dead of winter. The Legislature must put a stop to these market-distorting subsidies and make reliability, not popularity, the priority for our electric grid.

Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter on July 6, 2021 to members of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) directing them to “take immediate action to improve electric reliability across the state.” The second directive was to “Allocate reliability costs to generation resources that cannot guarantee their own availability, such as wind or solar power.” Unfortunately, the PUC hasn’t acted on this directive or even studied it. The costs of scarcity on the grid are estimated to have exceeded $12B in 2023, which is equal to two-thirds of the property tax relief passed in the 88^th Legislature, all paid for by ratepayers.

“Unfortunately for Texans, the ERCOT grid is moving from a single grid with gas and coal power plants running efficiently all day to two grids: one for wind and solar and one for expensive backup power that fills in the gaps when there is not enough wind and sun,” says Dr. Brent Bennett, policy director for Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Every time these scarcity events occur, whether due to real scarcity or artificial scarcity created by ERCOT’s operating policies, ratepayers are shelling out tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for backup power. It is the most expensive way to operate a grid, and Texans will feel the bite as these costs are absorbed over time.”

The Californication of our grid is unfolding before our eyes. If the Legislature and the PUC don’t act fast, the Texas miracle won’t last.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Dr. Wahome Ngare pointed out that there is a history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that the country is not overpopulated, saying, ‘The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources.’

A Kenyan doctor declared last week that the globalist World Health Organization (WHO)’s proposed “Pandemic Accord” treaty aims to pave the way for a new lethal man-made virus and vaccine, as well as establish a global government by undermining national sovereignty.

Dr. Wahome Ngare explained before the Second African Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values & Sovereignty that the real purpose of the pending treaty, which would achieve unprecedented medical control of the WHO over all of its member nations, is depopulation.

He pointed out that there is a substantial history of population reduction efforts in Africa despite the fact that it is demonstrably not overpopulated. To drive this home, he explained that the land mass of Africa can fit that of the U.S., China, India, and Japan but contains only about a fourth of the population of all of those countries combined.

“The problem with Africa is not its growing population, (which) is actually an asset. The problem is greedy global corporate owners who are interested in appropriating our natural resources,” Dr. Ngare said.

The doctor maintains that there are ongoing efforts to reduce the population on the continent through war, famine, disease, and even genetically modified organisms (GMOs), explaining, “The biggest problem with GMO is that the seed is patented — it is owned by someone. And once you use it long enough and your natural seed has disappeared, they can withdraw their seed and kill you through hunger.” In fact, Bill Gates-backed initiatives in Africa have pushed GMO crops for years, under the pretext that it will “end starvation in Africa.”

Dr. Ngare went on to make the case that the COVID-19 outbreak was deliberately used to depopulate the world, including Africa, and that this was only a prelude to what is planned to follow this next WHO Pandemic Accord.

During COVID-19, he noted, people were told that a “frightening” number would die from the virus, and that the disease was untreatable, and that “natural immunity cannot protect us and save us.”

“We were told not to shake hands, we were told not to social distance, we were told to stay at home … If you were given this psychological torture for six months and then you were told there was a vaccine, what would you do? You would run for the vaccine!” Dr. Ngare said.

Vaccination then “became mandatory through coercion,” because evidence of vaccination was needed in order to access goods and services, said Dr. Ngare, suggesting that this showed that “The end game of the whole covid fiasco was to vaccinate everybody … That is what COVID was about.”

The problem with these vaccines, explained the doctor, is that they were so dangerous as to constitute “a national security risk.” Why?

For one, only the manufacturers knew what exactly was in the vaccines, and only the laboratories involved in creating them were permitted to test and examine these vaccines.

The supposed basis of their usefulness was also based on an erroneous foundation, Dr. Ngare declared, because the spike protein created by the vaccine was modeled after the very same protein that caused disease in COVID-19.

The shot was also pushed along with the assertion that natural immunity is not protective — and yet, the very vaccine was based on the body’s ability to “mount an immune response to the pathogen!”

Worse, data from the jab trials released by a court order in the U.S. revealed a disturbing amount of death and injury caused at least by the Pfizer shot. According to Dr. Ngare, 61 people died from strokes and five people died from liver damage during the trials, while 80% of pregnant mothers lost their babies during the first three months of pregnancy after being injected with the COVID shots. Moreover, harm was inflicted on both men and women’s reproductive systems by the shots, which harmed sperm count and motility, ovaries, menstrual cycles and placentas.

“This was known during the time of registration of the vaccines, but was not known by doctors,” Dr. Ngare said.

He went on to tell how in Africa there has long been a precedent of imposing unnecessary vaccines, as well as even pushing vaccines that harmed fertility, particularly through the tetanus shot.

According to Dr. Ngare, during the campaign to eradicate tetanus in Africa, females from age 14 to 49 were vaccinated every six months for tetanus, with shots that were in fact contraceptives, unbeknown to the women. This shot was intentionally designed and developed by the U.N, W.H.O., and World Bank to reduce fertility, he added.

The doctor asserted that a paper has been published demonstrating the contraceptive nature of these tetanus vaccines, which has been read over 300,000 times.

Dr. Ngare suggested that these efforts to depopulate Africa and the world through vaccines are precedents for an upcoming depopulation campaign to be initiated through the Pandemic Accord treaty.

The amendments to the international health regulations (IHR) that are part and parcel of the treaty will determine how the WHO would manage pandemics, or diseases that cross country borders, according to Dr. Ngare.

“The WHO is seeking to increase its powers so that the Director General can unilaterally declare that there is a pandemic, whether real or imagined,” Dr. Ngare said. “The minute he pronounces that, the new regulations would allow him to take charge of pandemic management in every country that is a signatory to WHO.”

“It is director Tedros who will say when you will lock down, whether you can ever go to work, which vaccines you’ll be given,” he explained.

“If the WHO causes so much damage with its current power, can you imagine what it would do if you actually gave it more power?” he continued.

“My conclusion is (that) the WHO is no longer a health-promoting body. It has become an imperialism arm of global corporate interests,” he said, adding that the proposed pandemic treaty and IHRs “aim to give the WHO the legal mandate to facilitate the creation of new pandemic … using new man-made viruses, and (the) use of vaccinations as a counter-measure, both designed to reduce the world population through reducing fertility, maiming and killing.”

“It will also give the WHO the mandate to use the pandemics to establish a one-world government by totally obliterating the sovereignty of member states and countries and eroding the citizens’ individual liberties,” he warned.

He urged African nations to avoid this immense harm by first writing “formally to the WHO” to reject the amendments and IHRs, and then to “consider exiting the WHO by 2024, which is when the pandemic treaty is supposed to come into force.”

The doctor also called on African countries to “collectively call for an end to gain-of-function research,” which described as both absurd and extremely dangerous.

“African countries should take a step and say, it is criminal for anybody to train viruses and bacteria to attack human beings as a way of creating a vaccine just in case that virus escapes,” he said. “That is witchcraft. It is not medicine.”

He also advised African countries to “collectively treat all vaccination programs as a national security risk,” stating, “If you cannot determine what is in the vaccine that is being given to your people, you may be opening a door to destroy the African population.”

Finally, Dr. Ngare urged African nations to “reject any linking of individual health records, including vaccination records, to the digital ID that is now being forced” on them.

“Honorable members, do not allow the government to access private health information as a means to determine who will get health services or not. It is medically unethical and it is against basic human rights,” he said.