It’s happening again. Great Britain’s state-owned grid operator, Neso, is out here issuing its second massive coping notice of the week because the weather got a little warm. With a heatwave sweeping across the UK and Europe, Neso is frantically begging electricity generators to fire up everything they’ve got for Friday evening. Millions of people are turning on basic electric fans and air conditioning, and the entire system is apparently on the verge of a meltdown.

Neso’s official forecasts showed "tight margins on the electricity system" for Friday evening. Naturally, the bureaucrats are claiming that a blackout isn't imminent and the grid isn't at risk, but if they have to issue formal emergency warnings twice in four days, you know the coping is real. The system is operating on a razor's edge because the green energy grid simply cannot handle a standard summer peak.

The absolute comedy of this situation peaked earlier this week. On Tuesday night, Neso issued its first warning because a high-pressure "heat dome" rolled into Europe and did the unthinkable: it stopped the wind from blowing. Yes, the massive, expensive wind turbines that were supposed to power our green utopia went completely AFK just when everyone actually needed them. When the wind stops, the whole illusion of a reliable renewable grid vanishes instantly.

So, what did Neso do? They had to crawl back to reliable, old-school natural gas power plants and pay them absolute bank to save the day. The operator paid out an estimated £10 million on Wednesday evening alone for just a few hours of emergency juice. And who pays for this massive corporate payout? You do. It gets tacked straight onto your household energy bills, because nothing says "saving the planet" like paying premium prices for gas because your wind turbines are useless when it's sunny.

They are expecting another massive payout on Friday night to keep the lights on. Meanwhile, the actual physical infrastructure of the grid is struggling in the heat. Several gas plants in the UK had to cut their output because they aren't optimized for high temperatures. This is what happens when you spend years neglecting system resilience in favor of virtue-signaling climate targets.

To make matters worse, we’ve been relying on France to bail us out with imported power, but their system is also in absolute shambles. Four of France's state-run nuclear plants suffered unplanned outages because the local river water got too warm to cool down the reactors. It turns out that relying on international interconnectors is a brilliant strategy until the country next door also runs out of power.