Monday musings – In Ukraine – Russia uses hypersonic weapons to take out the F-16’s donated by the Dutch and (all?) its highly trained pilots - nuclear war or nuclear energy – plus server power

From this ten-minute video here:

Douglas Macgregor Exposes: Russia's Hypersonic Strike Obliterates F16s—Shocking Losses in Ukraine! (youtube.com)

“338,388 views Sep 28, 2024 #DouglasMacgregor #UkraineCrisis #MilitaryAnalysis

In a shocking turn of events, Colonel Douglas Macgregor breaks down the latest developments in Ukraine as Russia unleashes a massive hypersonic Kinzhal missile strike on Ukrainian airbases. This precision assault reportedly obliterated four F16 fighter jets, fresh from Western deliveries, before they could even take flight.

The destruction of these critical assets, alongside highly expensive Storm Shadow missiles, marks a significant blow to Ukraine's Defense capabilities.

Macgregor explains why this Russian operation, costing $40 million, demonstrates the unstoppable power of Kinzhal missiles and what it means for NATO and Ukraine moving forward. #DouglasMacgregor #RussiaUkraineWar #HypersonicMissiles #KinzhalStrike #UkraineCrisis #F16Destruction #NATOVSRussia #MilitaryAnalysis #WarZoneEcho #MilitaryAnalysis #GlobalConflicts #StrategicInsights #WarZoneEchoChannel

The video looks like it could have been crafted by the Russians!

It talks about 4 x hypersonic missiles costing 10 million bucks each, taking out 4 x F16’s costing 75 million bucks each AND 11 fully trained pilots. It also talks about hits on British Storm Shadow missiles (the ones that could strike deep into Russia) and the more tech-heavy drones.

The method for the strikes on the F-16 air base followed a similar strategy as that used by Iran in Israel – lots of drones to confuse defences, concealing the path of the hypersonic missiles onto the target.

There is also reference to the much-circulated Russian warning on the devastation that would be caused to London from a nuclear strike in its centre. Hundreds of thousands dead immediately and the slow deaths of hundreds of thousands more from radiation.

Meanwhile, Zelensky got 8 billion more in weapons from Biden/Harris and the war is going badly. Note the text in the video claims 10,000 Ukrainians are being killed every week, rather than the 1,000 that the narrator of the video stated.

A war being fought on a 700-mile front line is likely to be causing the deaths of a 1,000 a day, let alone a week – on each side.

Two years seven months of the war may have resulted in a million dead on each side, plus double that in wounded.

Ukraine continues to ask for help, for the simple reason that most (80%?) of the munitions sent to Ukraine have been destroyed. The munitions of NATO countries have been depleted by the amount sent to aid the ex-country of Ukraine.

It appears that Russia is not only on a war footing, but a nuclear war footing with nuclear missiles capable of taking out every European capital and military base AND most of those in the US like Washington, LA, NYC and so on – with no defence against the incoming. How many “Iron Domes” are operating in NATO countries?

From Wikipedia:

It would only take an exchange of a few hundred of these to render the earth uninhabitable and more than achieve the dastardly scheme of the eugenicists to reduce the human population to below 500 million from 8 billion – India, China, Africa and South America are unaligned in this conflict (BRIC’s v NATO?) – more or less – and so might not participate in, or esca[ate the devastation. NATO and Russia? Not so much – which kind of invalidates the entire population reduction argument, since the victims would be amongst a billion Russian/NATO countries, not the most populous!

Well, as I said, the video has “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” – or propaganda.

But there is more than an element of truth in it.

Mutually assured destruction of NATO and Russia.

For Ukraine, winter is rapidly approaching, a winter with no electricity because Russia has destroyed almost the entire national electric grid. Same goes for the Russians who are unlikely to have fully powered the eastern third of the ex-country of Ukraine.

Whatever happens, Ukraine - as was, no longer is.

The price of NATO virtue signalling over a war caused, sponsored and perpetuated with the actions of the US CIA covering up dual purpose biolabs and the extensive Biden family corruption in Ukraine has, so far, cost a few million dead, 4 million wounded, the partition of a once fertile country and rapidly approaching a trillion dollars in taxpayers money. And it’s gone.

All at a time when NATO countries are paying more trillions of bucks for the human trafficking and invasion of people into its heartlands – who do not speak the language and who are hostile to the indigenous culture – AND more trillions on “Net Zero” energy transition policies that around 40-60% of the world can and are totally ignoring.

The cynic would wonder why that nuclear energy was not being used to power homes and industry, rather than destroying it. Is Moloch laughing at the stupidity of “leaders” who don’t bother to ask the question of those they lead “do you agree that we should risk nuclear war over Ukraine?”

Remember that the governments of the UK, France and Germany do NOT have the support of the majority of their countries – in the UK, the Labour Party won a landslide with just 30% of a 60% voter turnout – less than one in five of the electorate. The French government kept Le Pen out with second round voting shenanigans and Germany is slowly returning to the centre from the looney left establishment of shiny trousered fascists via AfD.

And now, we have the largest tech companies – those tech companies that earn profit margins of between 35% and 60% via price gouging – having to lock in electricity supplies that cannot be met with the expensive, ugly, intermittent, wind and solar that the rest of us are being foisted with.

Nuclear power stations owned or leased by big tech make good sense AND they do not impinge the availability of hydrocarbon (fossil) fuels. Wind and solar simply are inadequate in all respects.

China will put on a billion tons a year of coal production in the next five years – it will continue to import coal from Australia, whilst Australia will continue to import the expensive and already obsolete wind and solar raw materials that will be used by European companies to create solar panel plantations and wind turbine forests in order to produce the useless and expensive wind and solar - (How’s the rolling blackouts going in the sunshine state of Queensland? Just a myth or actually happening?).

China is racing ahead with its tech and the power-hungry needs of reliable and cheap electricity for the server farms. The US, the EU and the UK? Sorry chaps, no cheap power for you, give it to China and pay up for the already obsolete wind and solar energy production.

For the US and globally, Brave has this to say:

·        In the US market alone, demand (measured by power consumption) is expected to reach 35 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 17 GW in 2022, according to McKinsey analysis.

·        Longer-term power demand from IT equipment in US data centers is expected to reach more than 50 GW by 2030, up from 21 GW in 2023, according to McKinsey’s latest estimates.

·        Globally, power use from data centers is expected to triple from less than 15 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2023 to 46 TWh this year, according to Morgan Stanley research.

·        The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that total data center energy demand globally could reach 1,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2026.

·        A more conservative estimate from Schneider Electric suggests global data center energy demand could reach around 800 TWh by 2028.

·        Bitcoin, a prominent example of proof-of-work blockchain, consumed an estimated 110 TWh in 2022, 20-times more than in 2016, highlighting the growing demand for data centers driven by emerging digital technologies.

The demand for electricity is leaping to power AI. This power cannot be supplied by renewables. Hence Microsoft’s purchase of 20 years of supply from three-mile island. Good for them!

But what about the rest of us? In a free, capitalist system, you can own assets that can produce electricity. You will be subject to regulations, not laws, that control how you exploit those assets.

So, if you own a forest, or an oil or gas field, you can do what you like with it, subject to regulations.

You could sell the energy component of those assets to the highest bidder and then do something else with your windfall. You would be competing with a bunch of others to sell your “energy” to the highest bidder, thus participating in a market clearing system - subject to regulations.

What about Federal land and its resources? Ask Biden/Harris how many exploration licenses have been issued on Federal land in the last year (hint, it’s not greater than zero).

Instead, Biden//Harris have been spending hundreds of billions on the “energy transition” that requires “fossil fuel” back-up for every kWh potentially generated – because the wind might only blow for a few hours a day. Lots of work required on the minimum base load required from fossil fuel generators to be always on stand-by to make up for the inadequacies of intermittent wind and solar!

Remember, offshore wind with its hundreds of feet of above sea and the same below sea level, cost around 5 billion bucks for 1.2 MWh, compared to 600 million bucks for gas-fired electricity generation (not the natural gas in your home, the electricity generated from gas fired steam turbines in a gas power plant). The output is “carded” as 1.2 MWh for the wind turbine farm, but you will be lucky to get 20% of that, whereas the gas fired power stations produce around 30-50% ALL the time!).

(100) Using Brave browser to check the cost of electricity produced from natural gas and offshore wind turbines – which one do you think costs thousands of times more with a thousand times the "footprint" (substack.com)

(100) Still chasing down the potential “Natural gas rip-off” – natural gas futures prices fractions of a cent per kWh – US household electricity average charge 15 bucks per kWh (substack.com)

How much energy does the US consume every year?

From Brave:

“The EIA’s reported figure of 93.59 quads is likely the most accurate representation of total energy consumption in the US for 2023”.

(Still no answer to my question to the EIA about 10,000 MMBTU being priced at 3 bucks on the CME and being equal to 3,000 MWh (3 million kWh for three bucks) of electricity – compared to US household electricity prices of around 16 bucks per kWh).

What the hell is a quad, I hear you say?

From Brave: “A quad is a unit of energy equal to 1 quadrillion (10^15) British thermal units (BTUs).”

A natural gas futures contract is 10,000 MMBTU, so that’s 10^9 BTU, meaning it would take 100,000 natural gas futures contracts to supply a quads’ worth of electricity.

According to this site, https://www.convertunits.com/from/quad/to/kWh  

One quad = around 293.billion Kilo Wh = 293 million Mega Wh = 293,000 Giga Wh = 293 Tera Wh.

So, total US energy consumption of around 94 quads = around 27,500 Tera Wh or 27,500,000 Giga Wh.

Ok, let’s flip back to the Brave answer for demand from servers in the US:

·        In the US market alone, demand (measured by power consumption) is expected to reach 35 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 17 GW in 2022, according to McKinsey analysis.

·        Longer-term power demand from IT equipment in US data centers is expected to reach more than 50 GW by 2030, up from 21 GW in 2023, according to McKinsey’s latest estimates.

So many units! On the face of it, 21 Giga W in 2023 is a tiny fraction of the 27,500,000 Giga Wh’s consumed every year in the US.

I suspect that the energy consumed by servers is a lot – an awful lot – higher than the numbers that Brave has pulled from the EIA.

We are left with a few questions. The first is the perennial one “how much extra is being paid by consumers because of regulations, for what benefit?” and an emerging one “will the regulators permit access to “fossil fuel” natural resources so that the price paid by households is the same or similar to the price paid by the (big tech) owners or lessees of the resources?”.

We need a futures exchange for electricity prices sourced from wind, solar, natural gas, coal. pil and chicken pellets!

Anyway, it looks like demand for energy from servers is set to double every 2-3 years. In a decade the ethical question on household v big tech will become a source of huge friction!

Wind and solar are useless for the answer to this question as they are expensive, unreliable and UGLY!

Onwards!!!

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