There is no doubt that there is money in the renewable-energy business. Few businesses have the general public so much in their favour, few have so much positive propaganda over their competition.

The business model is so beautiful, at least in South Africa – they can generate and sell energy whenever they want to, without any contract penalty for nonsupply. If it is cloudy or windless, they do not sell much energy but have no contractual penalty. State-owned electricity utility Eskom is obligated to buy from them all the energy they can produce. If they do not produce suddenly (for instance, when a weather front passes over), then Eskom has to replace the energy they produce, very often with gas turbine generation, the additional cost of which is not ‘covered in the tariff’ but which Eskom has to absorb. Renewable-energy business can borrow money to build their wind farm or solar farm or CSP plant – and the loan is guaranteed by the South African government. Roses all the way.

Now, so what? The purpose of business is to make money. To promote the business and oneself. This is very common in business. If you speak to olive oil producers, they will tell how terrible other oils are; canola oil producers explain that your heart will fail, horribly, when using sunflower oil. Sunflower oil producers object to both oils on health grounds. But all this is puffery, which, by definition, is: “An advertising or sales presentation relying on exaggerations, opinions, and superlatives, with little or no credible evidence to support its vague claims. Puffery may be tolerated to an extent, so long as it does not amount to misrepresentation (false claim of possessing certain positive attributes or of not possessing certain negative attributes)” (from Business Dictionary, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/puffery.html). But here is where the renewables are starting to wave the flag, not to just attract attention but to signal victory.

How about the headline ‘Renewables cover about 100% of German power use for first time ever’ (from Clean Energy Wire) with the text: “Germany crossed a symbolic milestone in its energy transition by briefly covering around 100% of electricity use with renewables for the first time ever on January 1”? This sounds wonderful renewables news. But, in fact, all that happened on January 1 is that no industries were running, people were sleeping off the New Year and there was a high wind.

We move further (from Business Chief https://europe.businesschief.com/): ‘UK to use more renewable than coal power for the first time’, with the text: “The UK is set to use more energy sourced from renewable projects than coal in 2019, marking the first year this has happened.” Again, wonderful news. The article goes on: “According to data recently released by the National Grid, coal- and gas-fired power contributed to 46.7% of the nation’s electricity between January and May this year. Renewable sources – such as wind, solar, nuclear, and hydropower – provided 47.9% of the UK’s energy.” But hist! Did we see the ‘N’ word? Has nuclear power, also known as death, the destroyer of worlds, the ultimate destruction of humanity, the hand tool of the evil one, the capitalist mushroom cloud of evil, now become a renewable resource? We can see from the UK Gridwatch a record that nuclear power was doing about 15% of the renewables energy in January to May 2019. So, that’s a healthy alteration to the headline, innit?

Moving on. There are similar headlines for the US: ‘For the first time, the United States produced more energy from renewable sources than from coal’ (The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/). This time, it is nuclear and natural gas which have displaced coal rather than the rise of renewables. And so it goes. I do wonder where this is going. All those who know the answers, I envy you. There is a technology which will involve zero pollution hydrogen coal gasification and we will all sit back and say, “Wow! My goodness! Wow!”