According to legend, the Greek hero Theseus went deep into the heart of the labyrinth to kill the dreaded Minotaur, taking a ball of thread given to him by Ariadne to unwind as he went in so he could find his way out. He killed the beast and sailed into the sunset with Ariadne.

By incredible good fortune, Adriane’s thread is still in place, unnoticed until some intrepid Australians found the entrance to the labyrinth in its modern form. Wind droughts are the point of entry that Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly found in the record of wind power generated by the SE Australian wind fleet.

Let’s follow the thread from wind droughts towards the heart of the modern labyrinth, the complex of organisations within the UN Environment Program along with meteorological groups around the world.

Who knew about wind droughts? They are the all-important fail-point of disaster that threatens energy security as intermittent wind and solar power displace coal power from the grid. But search the internet for wind droughts and see how little turns up. There are a few recent items and scattered observations, but no systematic investigation and no sign of awareness by policymakers of their implications.

Astonishingly, there is no Wikipedia page for wind droughts! Paraphrasing Descartes, to be in Wikipedia is to exist. Dunkelflautes, long-duration, low-wind periods in Europe, made it into Wikipedia late in 2020 when periods of low-wind drove the price of gas through the roof. That was a year before the war between Russia and Ukraine, an event which usually gets the blame for energy price rises from politicians deflecting attention away from wind droughts in Britain and Germany. They bet the farm on windmills and now the price tag is hurting.

People who have followed this series of stories will understand that wind droughts are a profound threat to Western Civilisation, or at least to our quality of life that is based on reliable and affordable power. The threat is as simple as ABC.

A: Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.

B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken when there is little or no wind overnight.

C: At present, there is no feasible or affordable large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.

Consequently, it is crazy to depend on wind and solar power unless the peak demand can be met by conventional power that is kept online, or power can be sourced from some other grid.

How did it happen that the professional weather-watchers, the meteorologists of the world, never warned us about wind droughts? They could have saved us from connecting subsidised and mandated intermittent energy to the grid, which is emerging as the biggest policy blunder in peacetime history.

Follow the thread to find what the meteorologists have actually been doing. Some groups have been open about their practice of homogenising temperature records. This has had the effect of exaggerating warming curves when compared to original data sets.

Follow the thread to comparative costings where regulators appear to have produced incoherent figures based on engineering absurdities. It is little wonder the cost realities fail to line up with political promises.

Follow the thread deeper into the labyrinth and you find the peak body of the international official wind-watchers complaining about weather-related hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction instead of wind droughts.

They are especially concerned about the way all the hazards are becoming more alarming as a result of global warming and the spectre of climate change hovers over impressive websites.

All of those concerns are faithfully reproduced by our domestic weather tracking sites. The focus is on tropical cyclones, floods, and other dramatic events.

Apparently this does not include those quiet days when wind droughts threaten the power supply.

Overseas, the warning signs are becoming hard to avoid, especially in Britain and Germany. Subscribe to Net Zero Watch to read a week-by-week account of the implosion of the green energy transition in Europe.

Regardless of their lack of disaster PR, wind droughts are far from boring. But a word of warning, wind-watching can be time-consuming and habit-forming. So watch responsibly!