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Renewable energy: Biden: Worse than Jimmy Carter. U.S. energy costs spiked prior to the Ukraine conflict, aggravated by Biden's anti-oil rhetoric and reckless spending follies. Yet the Times admits the push toward renewable energy is still dependent on finite resources, and on fossil fuels themselves — that is how "strategic materials" are mined, processed, and transported. All so-called renewable energy is completely dependent on availability of oil or other energy sources for its manufacture. The creation of enough solar panels (manufactured from coal and oil) to power the electric grid would devour more natural resources than the world possesses. It is a bootstrapping scheme, more akin to a perpetual motion machination than sound environmental policy. And yet this fantasy of energy "independent" from the energy used to create renewable alternatives persists: [...] This is an impossible fantasy, plunging the nation into mind-boggling debt, dependency on foreign powers, and an avoidance of effective environmental stewardship. Manufacturing EVs and solar panels pollutes the planet: the same old industrial toxins are packaged into shiny virtue-signaling cars that eventually join combustion engines in landfills. American Towns Don't Want To Be Big Cities' 'Green Energy' Graveyards. While the coronavirus recession has sapped demand for energy and put fracking companies on the ropes — with hundreds of bankruptcies declared so far — the renewables that would replace oil and coal are facing a growing challenge that will last long after the pandemic: The resistance of rural communities to mammoth solar or wind farms that can power cities. From New York to California, local opposition is thwarting wind and solar projects seen as essential to transitioning from fossil fuels. Many opponents support renewable energy in theory and express concern about climate change. And many landowners have partnered with environmental groups to block or delay natural gas pipelines designed to run through their property. Renewables: the more you have, the more you pay for backups. Cold, still weather in the UK this week triggered high demand for electricity at a time when wind turbines were idling. That forced National Grid to use a back-up coal(opens a new window)-generation plant for the first time this winter. Depending on Mother Nature for electricity means accepting her inconsistencies. Back-up is required, and keeping it available has a cost. In the US, electricity demand is on average 15 percent higher during July than January according to the US Energy Information Agency. In the much cooler UK, a government study during 2012-2013 revealed that demand rose 36 percent in the winter. The Economic Case for Net Zero Is Zero. Implementing net zero will depress the global economy more than the atmospheric warming that the campaign against carbon dioxide emissions is supposed to prevent, according to a comparison of research by recognized experts. In other words, abandoning efforts to eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels likely would make virtually everybody richer. [...] According to the data, the cost of implementing net zero would range from seven to 10 percent of GDP by 2050, while the cost of abandoning net zero would be but a fraction of that — 0.5 to four percent of GDP from a temperature increase of 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The difference is measured in many trillions of dollars. Moreover, the higher cost of net zero is compounded by being incurred 50 years earlier than the predicted effect of warming. "When we step back and look at predictions for warming and GDP growth (gross domestic product), we must consider that the more wealth we create, the better people can withstand severe weather or whatever climate impacts there might be," says Dr. Schernikau. Neither McKinsey nor Wood Mackenzie acknowledges in its report that it would be more harmful to the global economy to implement net zero than to allow the projected warming to occur. Challenging "Net Zero" with Science. Governments around the globe are taking actions to implement fossil fuel-free or "Net Zero" energy systems without a thorough examination of the scientific basis for doing so. This paper undertakes that examination by reviewing the scientific support (or lack thereof) that has been used to justify this transition to Net Zero. No atempt is made to address the significant economic, societal or environmental consequences of a near-total reliance on renewable energy and the required batery-backup that is necessary to transition to a fossil fuel free future. Two of the paper's authors — Drs. William Happer and Richard Lindzen, professors emeriti at Princeton University and Massachusets Institute of Technology, respectively — have spent decades studying and writing about the physics of Earth's atmosphere. The third, Gregory Wrightstone, a geologist of more than 40 years, has spent much of the last decade writing and speaking about the interplay of geology, history and climate. The authors find that Net Zero — the global movement to eliminate fossil fuels and its emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases — to be scientifically invalid and a threat to the lives of billions of people. Guess which state is a national leader in green energy. I can't say that I realized this before today and maybe you didn't either but it turns out Texas is one of the nation's leaders in both solar and wind energy production. This is from a NY Times opinion piece titled "Clean Energy Is Suddenly Less Polarizing Than You Think" which is about where some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act will be going. ["]Between the signing of the I.R.A. and Jan. 31, announcements of the largest clean-energy investments have been in Georgia and Idaho, followed by Tennessee, then Michigan, then South Carolina and Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, Nevada and Arizona. Between now and 2027, Texas is expected to add almost twice as much solar capacity as California. In expected development, Ohio, Nevada, Indiana and Florida rank third, fourth, fifth and sixth.["] America's $100 billion climate change flop. For at least the last 20 years, politicians in Washington, at the behest of green energy groups, have spent some $100 billion of taxpayer money to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [...] We are the furthest thing from being climate change alarmists, but when you spend $100 billion of taxpayer money and achieve absolutely nothing, President Joe Biden and his green allies should be arrested for criminal fraud. Where did all the money go? Tens of billions of dollars have lined the pockets of left-wing environmental and social justice groups that have been emitting a lot of hot air but no results. Green energy companies have milked taxpayers of tens of billions more, even as wind and solar only produce about 12% of our energy. Is this the greatest ripoff of U.S. taxpayers in history? Germans double down on cold and dark. German chancellor Olaf Scholz sure fits the stereotypical stubborn Deutschlander. In the face of everything and all the pain Germany's forced transition to renewables has cost his country, he is bound and determined to bullrush into an even more expensive and unstable future. These starry-eyed globalists are also willing to talk a Green game out of one side of their mouths while saying something entirely different from the other side at the same time. For instance, I can see the environmental brownie point accrual in shutting down your nuclear reactors — activists hate the things. Yay! You make Greta happy in her heart! Maybe she takes a picture with you and no scowl. But, when you don't have enough reliable power on hand already, it's prohibitively expensive for your citizens to use, but ghastly to live without? Maybe you should take a pause, ja? Ireland Suffers Man-made Electricity Emergency. Ireland's growing electricity demand and the planned shutting down of aging gas-fired power stations have led to the need for backup generators to help keep the lights on across the Emerald Isle for at least the next few winters. The Telegraph reported that "mobile turbines, described as 'effectively jet engines', are set to be installed in areas including Dublin and nearby County Meath." The generators were ordered by Environment Minister Eamon Ryan last year as a "last resort" due to the expected energy shortfall. That energy shortfall intensified as the war in Ukraine led to fuel supply issues, and as domestic fossil-fuel energy generation is being sunset to achieve clean-energy goals, the island has become more reliant on gas imports. In October, Minister of State Ossian Smyth called the situation "an electricity emergency," while Darren O'Rourke, an Assembly delegate, called it "a national scandal." O'Rourke is right, as government-instituted and -enforced climate-change policies are scandalous, designed to bring us all under one-government rule, as outlined in the United Nations Agenda 2030. 'Clean energy' projection — 86 million pounds of turbine blades to enter landfills each year. Of all the ridiculous notions pushed by the left, demands for "green" energy remain one of the most irritating, for several reasons: First off, there is the reality that the "green" agenda is just communism by another name, even though the useful idiots really do believe it's about conserving and preserving the environment. Funny enough, I recently read an interview piece over at The Guardian, titled, "A greener Marx? Kohei Saito on connecting communism with the climate crisis". Saito, a "degrowth communist" and an academic, believes Karl Marx's lesser-known ideas on the environment are the answer to the current climate "crisis." The man whose ideas helped to inspire 20th century governments to kill more than 100 million people? Um, no thanks! Just Call it What it Is. Every American taxpayer is now a shareholder in the destruction of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries to make way for inefficient renewable sources. The utopian goals of net zero carbon emissions and an all-electric society are absurd when one considers the means by which electricity, a secondary source of energy, is produced. Madcap policy measures to decarbonize American-made electricity don't amount to a hill of beans for eighty-five percent of the industrialized world soiling a planet that will nevertheless continue to warm for hundreds of years. Trillion-dollar climate bills adding to inflation and taxation will do little more than break the backs of American consumers, forcing many into lifelong dependency on socialist subsidies. How Biden's 'Green Energy Economy' is Benefiting Left-Wing Billionaires. President Joe Biden's taxpayer-funded push to build a "clean energy economy" is benefiting the left's most prominent billionaire megadonors, including Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found. Biden's Energy Department has in the last two months announced nearly $3 billion in loans to two electric battery companies, Redwood Materials and Ioneer, which are backed by seed funding from Gates, Jobs, and other left-wing billionaires. Now those billionaires, who have poured millions into the effort to win Democrats power in Washington, are likely set to see a handsome profit from their initial investment. Ioneer, for example, won a $700 million loan from Biden and saw its stock price increase by 33 percent after the announcement. Biden's Energy Department is funding Redwood and Ioneer through its Loan Programs Office, which is no stranger to controversy. Under former president Barack Obama, the office approved a $529 million loan to electric car manufacturer Fisker, which declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was subsequently sold to China. The Great Green Energy Transition Is Impossible. First, my background: I have degrees in computer science, applied mathematics, and system engineering. I retired from the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, after 53 years, in 2020. [...] Several months ago, I asked California State Senator Anthony Portantino's office — and California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman's office, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Lynn Barger's office, and Congressman Adam Schiff's office, and Senator Dianne Feinstein's office, and Senator Alex Padilla's office, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm's office — for a report of a comprehensive quantitative system-engineering life-cycle analysis of an all-renewable energy system. Nobody sent a report. I suspect it doesn't exist. But nobody was polite enough to reply "Sorry, we don't have such a report." What I mean by comprehensive life-cycle analysis is one that includes minerals, metals, concrete, other materials, transportation, construction, operation, maintenance, safety, decommissioning, destruction, recycling, disposal, energy return on energy invested, energy payback period, financial payback period, and overall environmental effects. Operation requires methods for generators to synchronize voltage, frequency, and phase with the grid, and storage for when the weather doesn't cooperate with demand. Because I received no such report I started doing some research. I haven't put together a comprehensive analysis of my own, but I have found or developed a few pieces. Why the intermittency problem can't be solved. That problem is that, with wind dominating the grid, for anyone looking to make money in the lulls, the economics look grim. There are two major kinds of lull that need to be filled. The first is a dunkelflaute, a lull in the winter, when solar is generating little or nothing. We get a dunkelflaute most years, and sometimes more than one. They can last from 1-3 weeks. The second is the long summer lull, with low wind generation right through the summer month, although perhaps with occasional windy interruptions. This happens every year of course, and a large amount of energy needs to be stored to cover the gap: perhaps as much as 50 days' demand. Adequate Storage for Renewable Energy is Not Possible. In Grid-Scale Storage of Renewable Energy: The Impossible Dream, Energy Matters (November 20, 2017), Euan Mearns used a full year of data from England and Scotland, with one hour resolution, to calculate that to have firm power, it would be necessary to have 390 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand. In Is 100 Percent Renewable Energy Possible? (May 25, 2018), Norman Rogers performed a similar calculation for Texas and concluded that 400 watt hours would be necessary. [...] Activists insist that an all-electric United States energy economy would have average demand of about 1.7 TWe. Assume California average generating conditions from 2015 through 2022 apply to the entire nation, and therefore 2876 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand is adequate (this is optimistic). The total cost for Tesla PowerWall 2 storage units, not including installation, with 2876 x 1.7 terawatts = 4.89 quadrillion watt hours' capacity would be 4.89 quadrillion x $0.543 = $2.66 quadrillion, or about 133 times total US 2018 GDP (about $20 trillion). Assuming batteries last ten years (the Tesla warranty period), the cost per year would be 13.3 times total US 2018 GDP. The cost for each of America's 128 million households would be about $2,075,000 per month. This analysis assumes 100% battery charge and discharge efficiency. They're closer to 90% (81% round-trip), so the necessary capacity and cost would be about 25% more. Grids Can't Handle All the Solar and Wind Dems Want to Hook Up. Our electric grids were shaky to begin with. They cover vast distances and are not being properly maintained. But then the Democrats come in with the brilliant idea of spending hundreds of billions on erratic and unreliable wind and solar which then delivers power erratically and puts a further strain on the grids. As the money gets shoveled out the door, unworkable and unfeasible green energy projects go out the door. And the grids can't handle them. Soaring Energy Costs Lead to Rationing of Vegetables in U.K.. While it is prudent to remind everyone how fortunate we are to have Florida, California and Mexico for North American vegetable supplies, i.e., no dramatic supply shortages, the energy price pressure being applied by Biden policy will lead to even higher consumer prices for all row crops. 18 months ago (Oct 2021), CTH first strongly recommended restarting victory gardens at home. The same recommendation only strengthens. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari Admits Goal is to Shrink Economy to Meet Decreased Energy Supplies. Apparently, the interview took place a few weeks ago (it's new to me), but the admissions within it are quite remarkable. The CNBC discussion surrounds inflation and the federal reserve raising interest rates. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari is talking about the jobs report, inflation and the intention of the federal reserve to continue raising interest rates until they achieve 2% inflation, regardless of consequence. Kashkari doesn't hedge on the latter issue of consequence; he affirms with absolute guarantee the fed will keep raising rates until the economy shrinks enough such that 2% inflation is achieved. However, watch what happens when Joe Kernan takes that outlook and overlays "supply side" energy policy. [Video clip] The Left Is Willing to Bankrupt America for Climate Change. American socialists are eager to prove Churchill right. Their preferred stalking horse in their pursuit of egalitarian misery is the specter of a climate apocalypse. Since the apocalypse, in their telling, is gonna be, well, apocalyptic, that means the defense against it must be just as all-embracing. And just as the defense against the real Nazi apocalypse bankrupted the British Empire, so, too, they are content to bankrupt America in the pursuit of a cause they believe has equal urgency. But there is no confidence among climate fanatics that the battle can ever be won without the surrender of abundance. The further down the road we get to electrification, the more apparent it is that it will not solve the problem of how to get enough energy without harming the planet. Everything that needs electricity is made with oil. The few wealthy countries pursuing the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years. Renewables may be able to generate intermittent electricity form breezes and sunshine, but they cannot replace what is manufactured from fossil fuels, that are demanded by lifestyles and economies around the world. Efforts to cease the use of crude oil will be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change, and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages like we had in the decarbonized world in the 1800's without fossil fuel products. This pursuit of renewables without fossil fuels can only lead us back to shorter life spans, diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths resulting from the elimination of the products from fossil fuels that are now benefiting society. The Final Nail in The Coffin Of "Renewable" Energy. Industries large and small are going to the wall at a record rate, wrecked by the endless hikes in electricity prices whose root cause is the enforced and pointless shuttering of long-amortized and perfectly viable coal-fired power stations that used to produce electricity at only $30 per MWh, and their replacement with wind and solar subsidy farms producing intermittent and unreliable electrical power at anything up to $11,500 per MWh. What is more, this disastrous industrial and economic collapse has been deliberately precipitated by a once-Conservative "government" that has long abandoned the no-nonsense economic realism and free-market ideals of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Curiously, though, the crazed infliction of pig-ugly, wildlife-wrecking, landscape-lacerating windmills on the British people is not reducing our electricity-driven CO2 emissions. More and more windmills and solar panels are industrializing and destroying our formerly green and pleasant land. New geological study proves that the green energy movement is impossible to achieve. The renewable energy fantasy goal is achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Carpet-bombing propaganda has convinced the public to accept the extravagant claim that technology currently exists to reach net zero carbon emissions. Like carnival barkers, the net-zero fanatics say renewable energy is affordable, sustainable, scalable, and not an economy wrecker. The goal is to create a first-generation green power grid relying on wind turbine farms, solar array farms, and power storage battery banks replacing fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. In addition, the new power grid would power a global fleet of electric vehicles that would replace the internal combustion engine. Western society has taken one hundred fifty years of progress to achieve a fantastically complex energy system using the dense source of cheap hydrocarbon energy, the master resource. Yet, the net-zero devotees believe the complex energy system can be dismantled with minimal disruption and replaced with a low-density renewable energy grid that is intermittent and nonscalable, in less than thirty years. Wind Farms Don't Just Hurt The Environment And Boost China, They're Ugly As Sin. Hoosier Daniel Lee recently noted the policy choice to limit natural gas and coal, combined with mandates for low-energy wind and solar, is making the Midwest energy grid significantly more expensive and unreliable. [...] It's a pattern happening across the United States. In early 2022, New York's power grid operator predicted increasing blackouts as environmentalist regulations cut supply and the state shuts down power plants. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned the West and Midwest should expect to see the same thing for the same reasons. In fall 2022, New England's power grid operator told customers to expect blackouts if cold weather became severe, because of natural gas shortages. [...] In short, the United States is following California and Europe into disastrous energy policies that lead to frequent blackouts and brownouts, and people cutting down forests to warm themselves in frigid winters. Apparently, it needs to be noted that people regularly die when the power goes out, especially the sick, young, and elderly. Hospitals, nursing homes, and emergency services depend on reliable power. How long will 'climate change' trump other green and progressive causes? The Wall Street Journal reviewed a heartbreaking account of children and adults in the Congo exploited to work in the cobalt mines of Congo, in a book titled Cobalt Red, by Siddharth Kara. [...] The euphemism artisanal mining — "that is, human digging and toting by manual, brute force rather than using trucks and backhoes" — is used to describe the primitive technology employed at these Congo mines. [...] Child labor under horrible conditions? Sorry, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and besides, they'd die from climate change faster than us because they're such a hot country already. So, relax, they're getting a good deal. The wholesale slaughter of birds by windmills? Sorry about that, especially those eagles. But my cause is more important than yours. You see, we're all going to die if I don't get my way. What about the whales washing up on the beaches of New Jersey and New York coincidentally exposed to offshore wind power developments? The list goes on and on. Lots of toxic substances are needed for the hardware replacing hydrocarbon-based oil, coal and gas, or as I like to call it, organic energy. Jiggery-Pokery Wokery. The woke love to destroy whatever they touch — culture, infrastructure, social cohesion, rational thought. To be woke is to embrace chaos and injury as a philosophy. From an anthropological perspective, wokeism is fascinating because its practitioners believe they are creative freethinkers while they act as lobotomized sheep. Whatever the woke wizards posing as priests tell their needy followers, the woke herds accept as truth. [...] Hydrocarbon energies are bad for the environment, but mining for the rare earth elements needed for electric vehicle batteries, covering endless hectares of land with solar panels, and dotting the skyline with giant fan blades that routinely kill flocks of birds are all environmentally friendly. Fair wages are essential, yet African and Chinese slave labor should be ignored. Using coal and natural gas is dastardly, yet recharging electric vehicles with power generated from coal and natural gas is ingenious. Extreme cold kills far more people than extreme heat, yet we must obsess over global warming. The cycles of the sun, the rotation of Earth's magnetic core, ocean currents, geothermal activity, and the shifting magnetosphere all directly alter the Earth's climate, but man alone must be held responsible for changes in the weather. Al Jazeera: We are "greening" ourselves to extinction. Greens are waking up that many of their corporate and political friends are greedy unscrupulous profiteers, who have no intention of genuinely attempting to reduce CO2 emissions. Relying on wind power means Britons must get used to cutting energy use, says National Grid. Households will be paid to cut their electricity use at certain times more often in future as Britain relies on wind power as part of the push to net zero, National Grid has signalled. Craig Dyke, head of national control at the electricity system operator, said it "strongly believes" in consumers becoming more flexible about when they use electricity as the energy system is overhauled. It comes as households are paid to reduce electricity usage between 5pm and 6pm tonight as National Grid deploys its new scheme to help avert blackouts for the first time outside of testing. Asked if similar schemes could become a "feature of British life" and be used regularly, Mr Dyke told the BBC: It's something we strongly believe in. As we take that step whereby people are far more engaged in the energy they use, and as we drive towards that net zero position with people moving to electric vehicles and taking up heat pumps, for example, consumer engagement around this is key. The Dangerous Fantasy of Scotland's Net Zero Energy Transition. Suppose that Scotland's CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero, i.e., that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist. Then according to the "Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change" (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth's temperature in 2100 would be... undetectable. Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this goal, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy — its "Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan". This article reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it. Future Grid: Really? Wind and solar generation operate intermittently, and their output fluctuates continuously when they are operating. The grid is currently required to accept this intermittent, fluctuating output on a priority basis and to smooth the output and dispatch alternative sources of generation when the intermittent generator output declines or ceases as the result of time of day or weather conditions. This requirement imposes predictable but uncontrollable costs on the grid and on the conventional generation capacity which supplies the grid during periods of low/no intermittent generation. As the grid expands in line with the Administration's "all-electric everything" goal and the capacity of fossil-fueled conventional generation declines as the result of federal mandates and the unfavorable economics of reduced operating hours, there will be a growing need for increased electricity storage capacity and for "Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources" (DEFR). Unfortunately, the long-duration storage which would be required to support the grid through multi-day renewable energy "droughts" is not currently available and the DEFR remain undefined. Wind and solar energy 'flatlines' in frigid state at worst time. A new report from the Independence Institute has revealed how fossil fuels saved Colorado's grid. "Coloradans might want to begin brushing up on their German. At least enough to be familiar with the word Dunkelflaute, which roughly translates to 'dark doldrums.' The term describes a weather pattern of low wind and limited sunlight that makes generating electricity from renewables nearly impossible," the report said. The event is common in Europe during the winter — "hence the German name." And just recently it created a "devastating spike in gas prices in the U.K. while forcing Germany to supply nearly half of its electricity needs from coal," the institute reported. Speed Is No Issue Unless It's About How Fast Our Liberty Is Being Lost. Government, unfortunately, rarely admits to or learns from its mistakes and often seems determined to repeat them in updated form. Sometimes, it descends into the bizarre, as when New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that "buildings are the largest source of emissions in our state" and that's why she's "proposing a plan to end the sale of any new fossil-fuel-powered heating equipment by 2030." It's probably safe to extrapolate that the bulk of the heating equipment required under her scheme would be powered by electricity and that the electricity will be generated by solar, wind and/or hydro. Keep that point in mind. Governor Hochul's push for increased use of electricity comes not long after she "called for major regulatory action that will require all new passenger cars, pick-up trucks and SUVs sold in New York State to be zero-emission by 2035. Governor Hochul has also proposed that all school buses be zero-emission by that the same year," according to a press release from her office. Those "zero-emissions" vehicles obviously would be powered by electricity from the same sources and over the same distribution system as would her proposed heating equipment. Pakistan suffers major power outage after grid failure. Millions of people were without electricity as Pakistan experienced a nationwide power outage on Monday due to a "reduced frequency" in the national grid, according to a statement from the energy ministry. The power cuts affected all major cities, including Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. It may take up to 12 hours to fully restore power, Pakistan's power minister said. The Editor says... JPMorgan Chase CEO Warns Against Halt to Gas Use on CNBC; Musk Agrees. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon dealt leftists a dose of energy infrastructure reality on CNBC's Squawk Box Thursday [1/19/2023]. While leftists are busy calling for Americans to chuck their gas stoves off a cliff in the name of climate change, Dimon quipped, "We need oil and gas," when Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernen asked him whether stakeholders will increase pressure on companies to pursue Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies. Dimon said it would take "50 years" to transition away from oil and gas completely. "It's a hundred million barrels a day that are used to heat, fuel, [and] feed people." Dimon's comments are simply common sense. Anyone with a watt of common sense realizes that an entire nation cannot merely switch its method of energy production and consumption overnight. We will destroy the earth
in the name of "Green Energy". [Threat reader] MiningWatch Canada is estimating that "[Three] billion
tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition" — a "massive" increase
especially for six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals[.] [...] Mining
requires the extraction of solid ores, often after removing vast amounts of overlying rock. Then the ore must be
processed, creating an enormous quantity of waste — about 100 billion tonnes a year, more than any other
human-made waste stream. Purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic meters of
water, which then becomes polluted with acids and heavy metals. On top of that, imagine the destruction and energy
required to obtain these essential metals:
Environmentalism will be the ruin of Germany. To add insult to injury, in 2022, even Germany's much-vaunted environmental goals have been missed. If Germany's green zealots thought that sacrificing industry would be good for the planet, they were wrong. Coal, one of the most polluting energy sources of all, provided a vital lifeline in 2022, with Germany's coal power output increasing by 20 percent on the previous year. Nevertheless, it seems there are no limits to German madness. Despite Germany's reliance on coal this year, economy minister Robert Habeck has recently announced that Germany will now give up coal entirely by 2030 — eight years earlier than originally planned. This move comes just as Germany's elites are pushing for more heat pumps to replace gas boilers for home heating and for electric vehicles to replace petrol cars. Both of these will require even more electricity to be produced, yet the German government seems determined to produce less. All of this is a recipe for economic disaster — in Europe's most important economy. Could a hostile power have designed a policy more devastating to the fundamentals of the German economy than that of the current government? Probably not. In the short term, the only way the government's proposals make any sense is if Germany is planning to go back to using Russian gas. That might explain the German government's reluctance to more effectively support Ukraine. 'No scientific basis': MIT-trained physicist slams climate alarmism in new paper. [An] indictment of the Net Zero political project has been made by one of the world's leading nuclear physicists. In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said it would be the end of modern civilization. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic "when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary." The stakes, he added, "are enormous." Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is "certainly no scientific basis" for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilization cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power. There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps — all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences. Big solar goes Big Bust: Largest solar plant in the world dies before it can be built. But it's a win for the rare Typhonium plant, and possibly also for millions of crabs around Indonesia who might have been hypnotized by undersea cables like the ones near the UK are. And who knows what that cable would have done electromagnetically for turtles, dugongs, whales and dolphins? Where are the Greens when giant experimental industrial parks span 5,000 km of wilderness? Today the massive Sun Cable project collapsed into voluntary administration four years after promising to build the world's largest solar power plant in the Northern Territory. Sun Cable was a $35 billion project supposedly to collect those sacred green electrons on a 12,000 hectare "farm" in Australia (120 square kilometers) and send them to Singapore via an 800 km land cable and then a 4,200 km undersea cable. It was theoretically going to be nine times bigger than the largest solar plant in the world, and use a cable 6 times longer than the longest one ever built. So this was ambition-on-steroids, and had economies of scale up the kazoo, and possibly as much sunlight as any place on Earth, but it was still obscenely uneconomic and expensive. The Editor says... The "electrification" of our economy is a scam. Climate change communists keep talking about electrifying our economy because it is the only way to conceivably get to zero or near zero carbon emissions. [...] Now I have no problem, in principle, with reducing the carbon footprint of the economy, as long as it can be done with inexpensive, abundant, and reliable power sources that perform the job as well or better than fossil fuels. And that is the promise that is made by the advocates of electrifying our economy. Perhaps someday that dream can be achieved, but that day is way way off in the future. In the here and now a fossil fuel-free future isn't even a pipe dream. It's a nightmare. Welcome to New Yorkifornia. [Scroll down] Haven't there been enough rolling disasters for years already in California for them to take a time out? Europe's crisis means nothing? The fact that the Carolinas had their first winter blackouts EVER this year, because why? North Carolina's state-mandated clean energy plan, and the huge population shift combined with the electrification of home heating. That not one soul planned in advance to add capacity to the grid for. They are making the exact same mistake here. Nowhere in the mumbo jumbo about justice and diversity is a peep about expanded capacity to handle the tremendous additional demands all this new beneficial electrification is going to gobble up. Especially when solar panels are covered in 4 feet of snow and the wind isn't blowing. Here goes New York, plunging merrily into the heat pump abyss — in a state where it gets cold, and they get snow measured in feet. All winter long. Nuclear Power, Not Wind & Solar, Keeps The Lights and Heat On In France. European countries are facing acute energy shortages this winter after curtailing their own fossil fuel resources and going all-in on wind and solar power. European countries are putting together their playbooks on how shortages will be controlled. In France, up to 40 percent of its people will not be impacted by power outages due to the fact that they might be connected to a priority line. [...] The rolling blackouts could impact up to 60 percent of the French population as sensitive sites, such as hospitals, police stations, gendarmeries, and fire stations will not have their power turned off as well as some industrial sites. An area already hit will not be hit twice in a row and none of the more-than 3,800 high-risk patients who depend on at-home medical equipment will be impacted. France, however, banned short domestic flights, but the government is allowing elites to use their private jets. Wind & Solar Are Making Us All Worse Off. Deprive a well-fed Westerner of energy for more than a few hours and you'll get their attention. The reliable and affordable power supplies that we've taken for granted were built up over a century. A raft of suicidal energy policies introduced in the last 20 years will have them destroyed before this decade is out. Blind ignorance is just one of the reasons that rent-seekers and their political enablers have been able to pull this off, profiteering handsomely along the way. Green energy failed to meet power demand when it was most needed. Renewable energy was unable to generate sufficient power to meet elevated energy demand during Christmas Eve snowstorms that pummeled the northeastern U.S. and Texas. Although wind turbines, solar panels and other forms of green energy have been consistently touted by the Biden administration as reliable alternatives to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, renewables accounted for a small percentage of grids' power output after snowstorms and a "bomb cyclone" nearly caused power outages in New England and Texas. Grid operators in both areas were forced to burn oil, a fuel that is significantly less efficient than natural gas, to avoid power outages as renewable energy sources were stymied by the harsh weather. Brace yourself for mountains of pain and misery under Gov. Hochul's zero-emissions fantasy plan. With the start of the new year, New Yorkers are set to have their worlds turned upside down — and all for a fanciful green-dream plan that comes with sky-high costs and mountains of other pain yet is almost certain to fail, and won't even do much good if successful. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers triggered the nightmare back in 2019 with their delusional Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, setting wholly unrealistic "mandatory" milestones to force the state off fossil-fuel energy and dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions. Gov. Kathy Hochul eagerly picked up the ball, and in December, a panel stacked with rubber-stampers pushed through a plan they preposterously claim will enable the state to meet those goals. Hochul's agencies will now spit out specific rules and regulations based on the plan. It's pure delusion. Environmentalists Are Killing People. Cold weather is hazardous to your health. In modern times, citizens of developed countries have neutralized the dangers of winter with affordable heating. But those days may be coming to an end. [...] Expensive energy equals more sickness and death. And this is totally avoidable. Responsibility lies with the anti-human environmental movement. Big Growth in Electric Heat Set Stage For Blackouts in US South. The states hit hardest by blackouts in last week's winter storm have significantly increased reliance on heating homes with electricity over the last decade, putting more strain on the power grid when temperatures plummet. The number of households using electric heat in Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina increased by about 20% from 2009 to 2020, according to government data that survey a sample of households. The generating capacity of power plants in the region, meanwhile, has remained relativity flat and increasingly dependent on natural gas. The Editor says... The New-Normaling of Blackouts. On Christmas Eve, 2022, in North Carolina, something happened that had never happened before in living memory. People across the state were alerted by their power company, Duke Energy, that there would be rolling blackouts in the aftermath of a severe (but "not exceedingly rare") winter wind storm. At least 12 other states received similar and previously unheard-of warnings. Before, rolling blackouts were a California problem, then they also became a Texas problem. Blackouts are spreading faster than even Imperial College London modelers would find believable. Duke was still warning North Carolina customers of potential blackouts two days later on Monday the 26th, when people would be returning to work. At this point there was nothing unusual at all in the weather, except that it was colder than normal. The only thing unusual was Duke's warning, in combination with its thanking customers for conserving enough energy to avoid blackouts on Christmas Day. It already seems as if people are being conditioned to expect talk of rolling blackouts whenever the weather outside seems frightful. After [the] Christmas cold spell, [it is] time for red states to wake up from [the] green energy scam. What's the modus operandi of our dystopian government? Creating a needless deadly crisis, blocking the effective way for dealing with it thereafter, and foisting upon the world instead a dangerous and ineffective way of dealing with it. That might sound a lot like COVID, but it's largely what officials have been planning for a long time with energy, and now that the population is primed for lockdowns, disruptions, and total authoritarian control as a result of COVID, that is what they plan to do with our energy grid. All for a lie. This was the coldest Christmas in a half-century in much of the U.S., with many localities setting records, including those not accustomed to the cold like Tallahassee, Florida. Many of us are disgusted at those limiting our natural energy in favor of novel, ineffective energy, thereby causing a doubling or even tripling of home heating bills. But we must also realize that if they had their way, we'd have no heating in our homes at all. Just like the supposed source of COVID and how to deal with it were lies, our energy crisis is wholly contrived and built upon the lie of global warming. Typically, you would have to make sure we are 100% correct about the "science" behind such irrevocable economic and societal changes before committing civilization suicide by destroying the only reliable sources of energy we have. But in a post-"Great Reset" world, this is par for the course. In fact, the science behind global warming is just as flimsy as the science behind lockdowns, masks, and mRNA shots. It
is Time to Talk About "Capacity Factors". In electricity generation, capacity factor, utilization, and
load factor are not the same. A lot of confusion exists in the press and certainly in politics, and even
amongst "energy experts", about using the term "capacity factor". It may be excused, since the distinction made in
this article became only relevant with the penetration of variable "renewable" energy, such as wind and solar, in our
energy systems.
To All The Green Energy Screamers.
The facts are:
Guess What: Electricity Isn't Free. One of my favorite indicators of ignorance are the people who buy personalized license plates, or affix stickers, for their electric cars that say "Emission Free." Even if you ignore the enormous environmental impacts associated with manufacturing an electric car (which are significantly higher than a gasoline-powered car), if you live in a state that generates a lot of its electricity from coal, you are essentially driving a coal-powered car. The next most ignorant view is that at least you don't have to buy expensive gasoline! People seem to forget that electricity isn't free, from whatever source. Fossil Fuels Keep Us Warm and Secure During Winter Months. As a historic bomb cyclone ravages much of the country, this extreme weather event has killed at least 20 people and put travel at a standstill. And it doesn't help those in distress — or without power — feel secure when many in the media fear monger about climate change correlating with winter weather. More reassuringly, however, conditions aren't worse. Why? Continued reliance on fossil fuels keeps us warm and provides energy security. Much to the Biden administration's dismay, net zero policies will make extreme winter events difficult to weather. Climate Alarmism Behind Christmas Energy Shortages. This Christmas eve, the 65 million Americans who live in between Illinois and New Jersey may be wishing that Santa puts a lump or two of coal in their stockings. That's because the operators of the PJM electricity grid have declared a rare, system-wide emergency, urging customers to reduce their use of electricity. "PJM is asking consumers to reduce their use of electricity, if health permits, between the hours of 4 a.m. on December 24, 2022 and 10 a.m. on December 25, 2022," it wrote in a statement. Say goodbye to your Christmas lights. "Electricity customers can take simple electricity conservation steps such as... Turning off non-essential electric lights." Nearly 7,000 customers in Pennsylvania "have no choice but to follow PJM Interconnection's request to use less electricity," reports a local newspaper. Rollin', rollin', rollin' blackouts in...Tennessee?! Isn't the TVA supposed to be one of the 8 Wonders of the World? Or at least delivering reliable electrical power as if it were. And they DID promise they'd be ready. [Tweet] [...] The second thing to consider is, again, the fact that the TVA is owned by the federal government. It puts them under extraordinary pressure to go along with whatever the latest "thing" is as far as the clean/renewable energy push goes, and it seems this is where it's starting to trip them up. They're shooting for "net zero" emissions by 2050. Be it 7° or 107°, that should chill every customer's heart. Climate Follies in the Developing World. Growth requires energy, and rapid growth requires abundant energy. But Namibia's per capita energy consumption rate is about 30 million kilojoules per person per year, roughly one-tenth of that in the U.S. Domestic energy production — about 90 percent of it from hydroelectric dams on the rivers bordering the country — can meet only about one-fourth of present demand. The rest must be imported, which costs money, hinders economic development, and holds the country hostage to political turmoil in South Africa and Zimbabwe, its largest energy suppliers. Namibia can expand its domestic energy sector. Fossil fuels account for only 6 percent of Namibia's total energy consumption, all of which must be imported. Off Namibia's southern coast, however, lie enough reserves of natural gas to power its economy for roughly two centuries at the present energy-consumption rate. Exploration in the eastern part of the country has identified promising oil deposits. Accounting for fracking would probably increase estimates of proven reserves. Such economic development is unlikely, however, as long as the country follows green imperatives. Namibia is a signatory to both the Kyoto Accords and the Paris Agreements, which oblige participants to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. Renewable Power's Big Mistake Was a Promise to Always Get Cheaper. Renewable-energy producers have long touted the promise of cheap electricity, an assurance that's helped them eat into the dominance of fossil fuels. But the pledge has gone too far, according to the world's biggest wind-turbine maker. Manufacturers such as Vestas Wind Systems A/S are seeing losses pile up as orders collapse at a time when they should be capitalizing on the turmoil in natural-gas markets. To blame — at least in part — is the industry's insistence that clean electricity can only get cheaper, according to Henrik Andersen, chief executive officer of the Danish wind giant. The coming crash of the Climate Cult. The Queensland premier has a $62-billion green plan to close all coal power stations, cover the countryside with wind/solar clutter, plan whole cities of battery charging stations, build the "world's biggest" pumped-hydro batteries (net consumers of electricity), and become a world leader in "green hydrogen" (huge consumers of electricity and water). Soon after the last coal power plant is demolished, in a snap of still, cold, cloudy weather, the lights will go out, electric trains will stop, and battery-powered food deliveries to the cities will falter. There will be uproar in Parliaments, and all Green/Teal/ALP governments will fall. The media will blame "climate change." Energy Realists will take over. They will immediately place orders for dozens of modular nuclear power plants. Destroyed ecosystems, drug payments, and child slavery are the legacies of the 'renewable' energy industry. Data comparing wildlife deaths between the "clean" energy industry and the "dirty" energy industry found that "greenies have a lot of bird blood on their hands" — windmills and solar panels kill significantly more birds (many of them endangered) than oil spills. A few days back, I came across a report detailing a peer-reviewed study which found that offshore wind farms can have a "substantial" impact" on the coastal systems in which they're built. But now, there's a new and more troubling secret festering within the industry, one of forced labor, child slavery, and payments of alcohol and drugs. Evidence grows of forced labour and slavery in production of solar panels, wind turbines. The Australian clean energy industry has warned of growing evidence linking renewable energy supply chains to modern slavery, and urged companies and governments to act to eliminate it. A report by the Clean Energy Council, representing renewable energy companies and solar installers, has called for more local renewable energy production and manufacturing and a "certificate of origin" scheme to counter concerns about slave labour in mineral extraction and manufacturing in China, Africa and South America. Released on Tuesday, the paper said slavery in all supply chains was a global problem. But Australia is on a trajectory towards generating the vast majority of its electricity from solar, wind, hydro and batteries by 2030 and needs to play an active role in addressing it in renewable energy industries. The Swiss Prepare to Spend the Winter Bored, Cold, and Trapped at Home. The Swiss government announced its plan to deal with expected energy shortfalls this winter, and it sounds like a lot of fun — provided you're a shut-in who likes reading by candlelight under multiple blankets. The alpine country — one of the wealthiest in the world — will severely restrict electric vehicles from its roads, according to a Daily Mail report. If the country runs out of power, EVs won't be allowed out for anything but "essential" travel. But the restrictions don't end there. The contingency plan calls for three levels of energy rationing. Under the least extreme, most buildings would be limited to 20[°]C (68[°]F) and "people will be asked to limit their washing machines to a maximum of 40[°]C [104[°]F]." Under the mid-tier, retail stores could find their hours reduced by two each shopping day, many buildings would have their heat limited to 19[°]C (66[°]F), and nightclubs wouldn't be allowed any heat at all — although given the other restrictions, that point might be moot. Sports stadiums? Closed. Movie theaters, too. Costs of Wind and Solar Energy Are Skyrocketing. Advocates of wind and solar energy have argued that the cost of those energy sources would decline over time as they are more widely adopted. That never made any sense, and it has not proved true. In fact, the cost of both wind and solar energy is destined to continue rising sharply as the massive quantities of materials they require become more expensive as a result of increasing demand, driven by ill-advised (the politest adjective I can think of) government mandates and subsidies. In fact, the cost of electricity generated by wind and solar is already skyrocketing. My colleague Isaac Orr reproduced this chart at American Experiment. It shows the average cost of wind and solar energy as contracted for in Power Purchase Agreements with utilities from 2019 through early 2022. It should be noted that these are subsidized prices, not the full cost if you include the portion that is paid by taxpayers. The Disastrous Economics of Trying to Power an Electrical Grid With 100% Intermittent Renewables. The effort to increase the percentage of electricity generated by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar inevitably brings about large increases in the actual price of electricity that must be paid by consumers. The price increases grow and accelerate as the percentage of electricity generated from the intermittent renewables increases toward 100 percent. These statements may seem counterintuitive, given that the cost of fuel for wind and solar generation is zero. However, simple modeling shows the reason for the seemingly counterintuitive outcome: the need for large and increasing amounts of costly backup and storage — things that are not needed at all in conventional fossil-fuel-based systems. And it is not only from modeling that we know that such cost increases would be inevitable. We also have actual and growing experience from those few jurisdictions that have attempted to generate more and more of their electricity from these renewables. Renewable Energy: Intermittency Has Consequences. A major problem with solar and wind-powered energy is intermittency. The sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. This is a problem that could be largely resolved by storage technology efficient and scalable enough to cope with intermittency (although I suspect that some backup will always be required, which is why nuclear power will have to be a part of our energy mix for a very, very long time). Unfortunately, that storage technology does not yet appear to exist, not that that has bothered the central planners who continue to plough billions into solar and wind without, seemingly, being too worried that these energy sources are not yet ready for the role that has been assigned to them. That some of these billions might be better spent elsewhere does not seem to worry our planners overmuch either. The EPA vs. the grid. A reliable grid is foundational to our quality of life. Our lives depend on ultra-reliable electricity for the refrigerators that preserve our food, the water treatment plants that keep our water drinkable, the air conditioning that keeps us cool, the factories that produce our goods, etc. Ominously, America's grid is in its most fragile state in decades. Not only have we witnessed ruinous blackouts in California and Texas, electricity shortages are now routine throughout the US. The root cause of the reliability crisis is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind. Since at any given time solar and wind can go near zero, using them as replacements for reliable power plants doesn't work. For example, Texas' February 2021 disaster was caused by solar/wind disappearing and inadequate investment in reliable power plants and their weatherization. Brits are paying the highest electricity bills in the entire world. New research reveals that the UK has the highest electricity bills. Brits pay more for their power than anywhere else on the planet. A new study looked at Government data on electricity and gas prices from the past five years to analyse the impact of the worsening cost of living crisis and discover which countries have had the biggest year-on-year increase in energy prices. The data, compiled by BOXT, was shared with City A.M. today[.] The UK's energy price cap was recently raised from 28p to 34p per kWh. Germany [is] Preparing For Emergency Cash Deliveries, Bank Runs And "Aggressive Discontent" Ahead Of Winter Power Cuts. While Europe has been keeping a generally optimistic facade ahead of the coming cold winter, signaling that it has more than enough gas in storage to make up for loss of Russian supply even in a "coldest-case" scenario, behind the scenes Europe's largest economy is quietly preparing for a worst case scenario which include angry mobs and bankruns should blackouts prevent the population from accessing cash. As Reuters reports citing four sources, German authorities have stepped up preparations for emergency cash deliveries in case of a blackout (or rather blackouts) to keep the economy running, as the nation braces for possible power cuts arising from the war in Ukraine. Why green energy is not green at all. All green energy degrades its environment. Take wind power. Wind turbines steal energy from the atmosphere and must affect local weather. Turbines are always placed on the highest ground and along ridges to catch more wind. Natural hills already affect local weather by causing more rain along the ridge and a rain shadow farther downwind. Wind turbines enhance this rain shadow effect by robbing the wind of its ability to take moisture and rain into the drier interior. Promoting more inland desertification is not green. Climatists also plan to defend Australia with offshore wind turbines — using bird-slicers to protect Australia from hang gliders, cruising pelicans, seagulls, eagles, and the occasional albatross. Solar "farms" prefer large areas of flattish ground. They steal solar energy from all plant life in their solar shadow. This deprives wild and domestic herbivores of sustenance. Neither kangaroos, cattle, emus, parrots, nor sheep thrive in solar energy deserts. $3.8 Trillion of Investment in Renewables Moved Fossil Fuels from 82% to 81% of Overall Energy Consumption in 10 Years. Economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division): "Here's a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you're talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what's happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82. ... The net of it is clearly we haven't made any progress." Reliability is Key to a Successful Energy Transition. Today's reliable energy system includes large electric generation units of many different fuel types, which are coordinated to balance the amount of electricity used by consumers. Replacing existing electric generation with new and sometimes intermittent resources, such as solar and wind energy, requires utilities to carefully manage the pace of the transition and coordination of resource capabilities to make sure things like your lights, heat, air conditioning and refrigerator are always on. If utilities retire existing generation before new electric resource capabilities can be adequately coordinated to meet consumer needs, we will experience a less reliable and less affordable electric system than we have today. Some of these undesirable and costly situations are currently playing out in other states, such as California and Texas. What has all that investment in renewables actually bought us? For decades now we have been inundated with propaganda that insists we move away from fossil fuels to renewable alternatives. The hysteria has been escalating ever since Al Gore rebranded himself the Global Warming Ambassador at Large with the release of An Inconvenient Truth. What had been a constant but relatively muted refrain from the Left became a unstoppable roar that has only increased in volume. We have been treated to lectures about biofuels from switchgrass (remember that — never happened), the new hydrogen future (never happened), solar, wind, and unicorn farts all powering the future. We are called to save the sinking islands (they are fine), save the polar bears (they are plentiful), and stop the hurricanes from killing us all (deaths from weather events have been declining for decades). We are warned of the apocalypse, inconvenienced and enraged by activists who pour out milk, throw soup at art, glue themselves to every available surface, and scream constantly about "science" as if having tantrums is how science is done. Blackouts: another dark consequence of Net Zero. The way he announced it spoke volumes. On Monday, John Pettigrew, head of the National Grid, warned that Britain could face blackouts when the weather turns 'really, really cold' this winter. If energy supply fails to meet household demand, blackouts would have to be imposed between 4pm and 7pm on the 'deepest, darkest evenings' of January and February, he said. So we may be reaching for our candles on winter evenings next year. This would be a bleak midwinter indeed. Tellingly, Pettigrew casually let slip this bombshell at the 'Energy Transition Summit', a plush business event hosted by the Financial Times. The summit, as its name suggests, aims to help usher in a transition to an apparent idyll of renewable electricity and emissions-free energy. In our brave new Net Zero world, this is exactly the kind of announcement we will have to start getting used to. After all, the immediate trigger for the National Grid's blackout warnings may be the current global energy crisis. But the grid has form in wanting to impose energy rationing on the masses. Indeed, rationing is a feature, not a bug of the Net Zero policy. The Green Energy Profiteering Scam. Sure, going "green" has been lucrative for some, but can that lucre last? That is the magical thing about hydrocarbon regulations and carbon credit requirements. Should the government's preferred "green" vendors need more wealth, then politicians can simply ratchet up the energy pain for everyone else. The fewer hydrocarbons that companies and citizens are "allowed" to consume, the more money they will be willing to pay for "credits." Through self-dealing mandates, governments create artificially appreciating "green" assets. The sky is the limit! Or rather, is it not the total confiscation of one's wealth and the fruits of one's labor that is the inevitable end point here? Should ordinary people not be able to abandon their consumption of hydrocarbons as easily as government agents demand, they will simply have to go without automobiles, modern technologies, ordinary comforts, air conditioning, or even heat. New England facing natural gas shortages, rolling blackouts this winter. Winter is on the way here in the northeast, as I was reminded when the local weatherman told me that it might snow here this week. In the middle of October. But the annoyance of potentially having to break out the snow shovels before Halloween has arrived is small potatoes compared to what may be coming in a couple of months. Power grid operator ISO New England issued a warning to consumers this week about the effects that a particularly cold winter (as is being projected) could have on heating and electrical power consumption limits. The northeast relies heavily on natural gas for home and business heating needs. But many of the power plants in the region also run on natural gas. The Editor says... Left-wing environmentalists in Germany now pray for warm winter amid coming energy shortage, skyrocketing prices. The one thing you can count on when it comes to the left is hypocrisy and boatloads of it. For years, Western environmentalists have screamed about 'warming winters' signaling the end of the planet, thanks to 'human-caused climate change' — which, by the way, and regardless of what 'official agencies' say, is only a theory, and an unproven theory at that. Nowhere have their shouts of warm winter doom and gloom been so shrill than in Germany, where lunatic leftism appears to be a citizenship requirement these days. For the past decade especially, 'green energy' pushes have led the country to begin shuttering coal and natural gas plants and even zero-emission nuclear power stations in favor of highly unreliable "renewable" energy like wind and solar. Not only are these technologies overrated, the ability for Germany to produce energy from wind and solar is severely limited like it is everywhere else on the planet. Plus, in addition to being unreliable (no wind and no sun equals little-to-no electricity production), natural gas and other fossil fuels are far cheaper and, with today's technology, burn much cleaner than they did at the turn of the current century. Energy Inflation Isn't An Accident, It's A Planned Demolition. The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America's support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses — the unprecedented post-World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran's Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It's no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs. This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany's disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain's self-regarding and self-destructive policy of "powering past coal" and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in a recent powerful essay, President Biden's war on the American oil and gas industry. Energy Inflation Was by Design. Like Obama before him, Biden promised that the public would readily embrace his Green New Deal and that it would reduce energy prices, create millions of new high-paying jobs, boost economic growth, enhance energy security, stabilize the electric grid, reduce energy dependency, and help save the planet. Rather than achieving any of its stated goals, Obama's plan was characterized by high prices, Solyndra-style megaflops, increasing grid instability, rent-seeking, soaring public debt, destabilizing subsidies, further offshoring of green energy components, substandard economic growth rates, growing social division, and precious little in the way of green energy job creation. The same will happen for Biden. Electric Mania. [Scroll down] This distinction between renewable and nonrenewable is a fallacy as surely as it was a fallacy that electrical currents could bring a dead person back to life. How do we capture wind or solar energy? We must produce other things, like wind turbines and solar panels. Are these clean? No. The dirty secret of wind energy and solar production is that the actual wind energy rotors and the solar panels are made of material that, at the end of its useful life, is literally ground up and put into a landfill. I'm going to talk mainly about wind turbines, but keep in mind that everything I say is also applicable to solar panels. By 2030, the United States is expected to see as much as one million total tons of solar panel waste. By 2050, the United States is expected to have the second largest number of end-of-life panels in the world, with as many as an estimated 10 million total tons of panels. What is going to happen to all that waste, much of it toxic? Wind turbines typically contain more than 8,000 different components. One such component are magnets made from neodymium and dysprosium; rare earth minerals mined almost exclusively in China. Extracting REs is an energy intensive and heavily polluting process, which makes a mockery of "clean energy" all by itself. The Coming Green Electricity Nightmare. [Scroll down] To cite just one example, just those 2,500 wind turbines for New York electricity (30,000 megawatts) would require nearly 110,000 tons of copper — which would require mining, crushing, processing and refining 25 million tons of copper ore ... after removing some 40 million tons of overlying rock to reach the ore bodies. Multiply that times 50 states — and the entire world — plus transmission lines. How many processing plants and factories would be needed? How much fossil fuel power to run those massive operations? How many thousands of square miles of toxic waste pits all over world under zero to minimal environmental standards, workplace safety standards, child and slave labor rules? How many dead birds, bats, and endangered and other species would be killed off all across the USA and world — from mineral extraction activities, wind turbine blades, solar panels blanketing thousands of square miles of wildlife habitats, and transmission lines impacting still more land? How many will survive hurricanes like Ian or Andrew? Where will we dump the green energy trash? Not only do the luminaries and activists ignore these issues and refuse to address them. They actively suppress, cancel, censor and deplatform any questions and discussions about them. The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization. [Scroll down] Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal. What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival. The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels. When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared. The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity. Global warming pseudoscience is poised to wreck the US economy. In 2021, 60% of the electricity produced in the U.S. came from fossil fuel-powered plants, 20% from nuclear plants, and 20% from renewable energy sources. Wind and solar energy production in 2021 accounted for 13% of the total electrical energy output. [...] It is not possible to replace the 60% of electric power production in the U.S. by 2030 with alternative energy sources. Such a mandate would require a rapid increase in wind and solar plant construction and operation, and fossil fuel generation would still be required to serve as a back-up when renewable energy sources fail. Those fossil fuel plants that remained in operation would be required to purchase carbon credits to offset emissions to achieve 100% carbon-free operations. But CO2 emissions will not be reduced by buying carbon credits. [...] It is the height of naïvité to think our economic competitors in the world like China and India will wreck their economies based on a fraudulent global warming hypothesis. Lesotho's $15-billion energy pipedream. A $15-billion wind farm project that would have given Lesotho bragging rights to Africa's largest renewable energy project, slashed electricity prices and created thousands of jobs has vanished from the country's planned projects, leaving behind unanswered questions and politicians who don't remember the details. The project was designed to increase the local energy production from 73 MW to 6[,]073 MW, and would have meant the southern African country could stop importing expensive electricity from South Africa and Mozambique. All traces of the project, which was conceived by the South African firm Harrison & White Investments and intended to be constructed in Mokhotlong district, have vanished. Politicians do not seem to have any explanation for this, or any knowledge that the government had a stake in the company earmarked for its construction. California is learning that solar doesn't work without battery storage. California got through the biggest heat wave of the year without having to order any blackout but only just barely. Gov. Newsom is praising the state's shift to renewable energy as if avoiding the blackouts is proof that the shift to renewables is working. [...] We actually did have blackouts in some places on the hottest days but those were ordered by the power companies not the state. I wonder to what extent those outages helped the state's independent regulator avoid ordering rolling blackouts. In any case, everyone agrees we came really close. Wednesday the Washington Post published a story arguing that the real lesson Newsom and others should have learned from barely avoiding blackouts this summer is that solar without battery storage really doesn't work very well. Running the World into the Ground. [Scroll down] On the economic front, European leaders have, like Biden in the U.S., succumbed to the delusional World Economic Forum. In a mad rush to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels, European economies are going into the winter without adequate energy supplies. The poor citizens of the continent are being told to anticipate blackouts and food shortages. They are about to discover that without fossil fuels, their way of life is going to hell. What recourse do we voters have against the irresponsibility of political leaders who are obsessed with the lure of power? Is it too late to stop them? Tesla Battery Catches Fire in California Causing Shelter-In-Place Advisory Due to Toxic Smoke. A Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at PG&E's Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. A shelter-in-place advisory was in place for 12 hours due to fears of toxic smoke from the fire caused by Elon Musk's battery system, with county officials announcing that even though the fire was "fully controlled" by 7:00 p.m. PT, "smoke may still occur in the area for several days." KSBW Action News 8 reports that a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at the local utility company PG&E's Elkhorn Battery Storage facility in Monterey County, California. The fire reported started at around 1:30 a.m. on September 20 according to the comm manager for PG&E, Jeff Smith. No injuries were reported at the time. Green Energy Transition Hits the Wall. I think that we fossil-fuel fans can see light at the end of the tunnel as the global government green energy transition experiences a head-on collision with reality. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but really, it's the only way to tell the climatatistas that their God is Dead. Facts and logic won't do it. Instead, the believers must experience decadence and nihilism and dead bodies floating down the Rhine and know, in their eternal recurrence, that their climate god isn't going to save them. It's Not Funny, but the prospect of a cold winter without Russian gas in Europe seems to be the one thing that the Klausi babies and the Greta Thunbergs and the gubmint-funded scientists didn't think about in planning their glorious Great Leap Forward to the green energy transition. The multi-layered insanity of Europe's ongoing energy crisis. This thread is definitely worth reading in its entirety to help us understand where we are — and where we're going to be very soon: [Multiple tweets] Germany is committing national suicide. The German government decided last week to temporarily halt the phasing-out of two nuclear power plants. This is an attempt to secure Germany's energy supplies after Russia effectively turned off its gas exports to Germany. But there is much more the German government could do if it was serious about shoring up its energy security. It could, for example, overturn its 2017 ban on fracking. As a 2016 government report shows, Germany sits on shale-gas deposits of more than two trillion cubic metres — 20 times its annual gas consumption. Fracking could realistically cover 10 percent of Germany's gas needs per year. Even more encouragingly, the report shows that fracking in Germany could be done without harming public health or the environment. Fracking could therefore help to provide a long-term solution to the deepening energy crisis. Germany is staring into the abyss thanks to the energy crisis. German heavy industry may even have to cut back on production in order to cope with soaring energy costs. Steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal has already announced it is to shut down blast furnaces in some of its plants. Europe's Energy Crisis. Europe is facing a growing energy crisis. Individuals and industries are being battered by rising energy costs. On August 31, Russia shut down the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany for initially what was supposed to be 72 hours, but followed by an announcement of "technical difficulties" that would prevent a resumption. [...] The reality, however, is that this situation did not develop overnight and will not be fixed overnight. Despite European politicians blaming all this on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the root causes go deeper. The EU made a commitment to sustainability and so-called green energy years ago. Germany, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands are now reportedly going back to coal-fired plants to save on natural gas usage. Experts in Germany say the coalition government is "trying to buy time with coal so that it can come up with a more sustainable long-term solution." In January, Germany closed half of its six remaining nuclear power plants despite rising energy costs. Germany's lofty sustainable climate goals did not include plans on how to replace the energy that was being provided by its safe, clean and reliable nuclear power plants. Instead, to achieve its climate utopia, Germany decided that it would become more dependent on Russian gas, that consumers willingly would pay higher prices, and that it could turn to power from far less reliable wind and solar energy. This fantasy became the model across the EU, and the EU has no one else to blame for the results. You Won't Believe Who's Giving Up on Green Energy. Green energy is the pipe-dream of coastal elitists, billion-dollar grifters, Big Government idolizers, idle urbanites, and just plain malinformed people who think electricity comes out of the wall. But one of those coastal elites has finally had enough, saying now that "U.S. energy policy today has to be the arsenal of democracy" and the "engine of economic growth" that will some day make possible a "transition to a low-carbon economy." It only took seven months of brutal warfare financed by Russian oil profits made possible by Presidentish Joe Biden's war on domestic energy production, but Thomas Friedman has joined Donald Trump and Sarah Palin in the "Drill, Baby, Drill!" fan club. A Mostly Wind- and Solar-Powered U.S. Economy Is a Dangerous Fantasy. When President Biden and other advocates of wind and solar generation speak, they appear to believe that the challenge posed is just a matter of currently having too much fossil fuel generation and not enough wind and solar; and therefore, accomplishing the transition to "net zero" will be a simple matter of building sufficient wind and solar facilities and having those facilities replace the current ones that use the fossil fuels. They are completely wrong about that. The proposed transition to "net zero" via wind and solar power is not only not easy, but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition... will crash and burn. [I]t doesn't matter whether you build a million wind turbines and solar panels, or a billion, or a trillion. On a calm night, they will still produce nothing, and will require full back-up from some other source. WSJ: Why the Renewable Energy Transition will Fail. Wall Street Journal trashing claims the renewable energy transition will bring down prices, or is even possible. Exposing the Fantasy of Wind and Solar Power to Fuel America's Economy. Simply stated, all evidence so far indicates that the increase in CO2 and the increase in temperature are not harmful for us or for nature, making the climate hysteria surrounding the topic totally unjustified. Furthermore, the cure — getting rid of fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar before they are ready for prime time — will be far worse than the disease itself, climate change. End Of Renewables Craze Is Near. The global energy crisis appears to have strengthened the resolve of Western political leaders to not just continue but accelerate the transition toward green energy. Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed legislation that aims to spend $370 billion on wind, solar, electric cars and other forms of green tech. California legislators and regulators recently decided to spend $54 billion on clean tech, restrict oil and gas drilling, and ban the sale of internal combustion cars by 2035. And the President of the European Commission affirmed yesterday the European Union's "massive investments in renewables" because "they are cheap, they are home-grown, they make us independent." But appearances can be deceiving. In truth, the energy crisis is rapidly exposing the limits of renewables and the need for fossil fuels. Recognizing the political threat of high gasoline prices, Biden has released so much petroleum from the public's Strategic Petroleum Reserves that they are at their lowest level in nearly 30 years. Six days after California regulators banned the sale of internal combustion engines, the state's grid operator urged residents to not charge their electric vehicles from 4 pm to 9 pm for fear of blackouts. And European governments will spend over $50 billion this winter on new and refurbished coal and natural gas supplies and equipment. Electricity Emergency. A reliable grid is a foundation of our quality of life. Our lives depend on ultra-reliable electricity for the refrigerators that preserve our food, the water treatment plants that keep our water drinkable, the air conditioning that keeps us cool, the factories that produce our goods, etc. Ominously, our grid is in an increasingly fragile state. Not only have we recently had statewide blackouts in California (2020) and Texas (2021), this summer shortages are occurring all around the US. [...] The root cause of our grid's reliability problems is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind. Since at any given time solar and wind can go near zero, using them as replacements for reliable power plants doesn't work. Why the Energy Transition Will Fail. Even if you're never hit by a 7-ton blade falling from the night sky, alternative energy will fail you. Regardless of facts or feelings about the climate, there are reasons why wind and solar power are not replacing fossil fuels. Wind and solar are also no substitute for nuclear power. [Tweet] The government of California can issue as many proclamations and prohibitions as it wants against gasoline-powered vehicles. No doubt the Biden administration will enjoy spending the ocean of tax dollars now earmarked for low-intensity energy sources. But reality will stubbornly remain. In a new report due out next week from the Manhattan Institute, Mark Mills takes on the "dangerous delusion" of a global energy transition that eliminates the use of fossil fuels. Surveying energy markets and public policy around the world, Mr. Mills asks readers to "consider that years of hypertrophied rhetoric and trillions of dollars of spending and subsidies on a transition have not significantly changed the energy landscape." "The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe". Simply put: Europe's self-inflicted energy crisis is a lot worse than it looks. European nations are scrambling to backstop consumers from having to pay electricity rates that could increase tenfold or more — if the electricity is available in sufficient quantity at all. What this means is massive government bailouts for energy suppliers. Britain's new prime minister Liz Truss plans to freeze consumer energy costs for two years, at a likely cost to the government of perhaps $200 billion, because utilities face bankruptcy if they can't pass along higher fuel costs. The bill for continental Europe, and especially Germany, which may have to shutter even more of its heavy industry, is sure to be much higher — perhaps reaching $2 trillion over the coming year. An energy-triggered financial crisis could begin even before the leaves turn and drop from the trees this fall. California's Net-Zero Energy Model Is Already A Disaster — So Why Should The Rest Of The U.S. Copy It? Americans are now being told that California's crazy energy policies would be a good model for the rest of the nation. Have these people seen what's going on there? California's plan to ban all gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 and replace them with electric vehicles "could be" a model for the rest of the nation, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently said. She didn't mean that as a warning, but you should know: It is one. "I think California really is leaning in. And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric," Granholm added. Get that? She's saying the federal government, already trying to destroy the auto industry and ruin the oil industry through insane regulations and restrictions that have pushed energy costs to prohibitive levels, hasn't gone far enough. How to solve our electricity crisis. [Threat reader] America's grid is in decline and about to get far worse due to policies that 1) reward unreliable electricity, 2) prematurely shut down coal plants, 3) criminalize nuclear, and 4) force EV use. Here's what's happening and how to fix it. [...] The root cause of our grid's reliability problems is simple: America is shutting down too many reliable power plants — plants that can be controlled to produce electricity when needed in the exact quantity needed. And it is attempting to replace them with unreliable solar and wind. Since at any given time solar and wind can go near zero, using them as replacements for reliable power plants doesn't work. For example, TX's February 2021 disaster was caused by solar/wind disappearing and inadequate investment in reliable power plants and their weatherization. Return of the Ice Age. To Europe, anyway. Years of horrible decisions by European leaders have come home to roost, as Europeans now worry about how to heat their homes this winter. Reliance on a geopolitical enemy for much of their energy turned out to be a mistake, as Russia has now shut off gas supplies. Who could have predicted it? Other than anyone with a modicum of common sense? Which Europe's governing class has lacked for many years. The continent's leaders are panicking and preparing to ration energy: [...] European countries are voluntarily turning themselves into third-world nations. Will any politicians pay the price for this disaster? Don't bet on it. The U.S. also needs a sane policy for immigration, law enforcement, energy production, and election security. The "Green Revolution" Is Impossible. Liberals tell us that we are in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. The reality is that no such transition is taking place, nor will it. This video by Professor Simon Michaux, who doesn't take issue with global warming hype, explains one of several reasons why this is true: the mineral requirements of a wind- and solar-based energy system can't possibly be met. [...] Another point that is often overlooked is that mining companies exploit the lowest-cost minerals first — those that are most plentiful and easiest to extract. If demand increases exponentially, then much more expensive sources will be brought into play. This means that the cost of basic minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt and so on will skyrocket as demand increases, perhaps by orders of magnitude. I don't think anyone has even attempted to assess the full cost of a "green" energy system when those price increases are taken into account. Not Even Keeping 1 Nuclear Plant Can Save California From Its Green Energy Nightmare. California has waged a decades-long war against sanity — and the laws of physics — in the name of saving the planet by dumping tons of intermittent renewables onto the grid. Well, after years of wrecking the grid and raising energy costs, sanity seems to have prevailed. California lawmakers last week approved legislation, backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, to extend the operational life of its last remaining nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. The $1.4 billion decision may seem costly, but it's a steal compared to rolling blackouts. Energy Crisis: One in Four Britons Will Not Turn On Heating Over Winter Months — Poll. Just under one in four Britons will leave their heating off over the winter as the price of energy surges, polling has suggested. Polling released on Monday has suggested that just under one in four Britons will not turn on their heating due to the rising price of energy. It is the latest statistic showing how much Britain's population is struggling under the myriad economic crises facing them, with one union boss recently hinting at the possibility of street riots over how dire things are for many in the country. Brits brace for record, crippling energy prices. Americans are already far too familiar with spiraling energy costs and rolling blackouts in areas where the energy grid is being pushed to the brink. Now the people of Great Britain are bracing for their own negative and potentially deadly experiences of a similar nature. Because of the socialist bent of their government, energy companies must adhere to government caps on the price of utilities, but those caps are about to be raised significantly. And the coming increase won't be the last one, either, since another increase is scheduled to follow on the heels of this one in January. [...] Translated into American currency, British residents are currently paying on average $2,320 per year. That's a 54% increase since January of 2022. After the new cap kicks in, the rate will go up to $4,247 in October. By February the price will reach $4,718 annually. These are not insignificant increases. They represent a huge change in the average household's budget. Germany's painful lesson for US climate warriors on the dangers of going green. [German leaders] last week said they now plan to keep the country's last three nuclear plants running, at least temporarily, to avoid having to divert natural gas for electricity. That pauses a years-long march away from nuclear power that's backed by much of the German public (even though nuclear-energy production emits virtually no greenhouse gases). The government's also looking to restart 16 mothballed coal-burning power plants. That's right: coal — one of the dirtiest fossil fuels and largest sources of carbon emissions. So much for leading on clean energy. Germany had little choice: After Russia cut its gas exports by 80% and threatened to end them altogether — punishment for Berlin's support for Ukraine — Germany (along with much of the rest of the continent) faces the prospect of a truly bitter winter, with inadequate supplies of gas and other fuels to see it through. Its energy regulator says gas consumption must fall 20% to avoid shortfalls, and the government's already begun imposing limits. The Editor says... Wind Turbines Are Destroying the Planet. New York, along with other states, is moving forward with massive wind turbine projects. The push for "9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy" comes at a high price, not only for families who are left dependent on expensive and unreliable energy, but for the planet. Wind turbines require massive amounts of rare earths for their generators and motors. A single wind turbine eats up tons of rare earth metals. Rare earth mining carried out in China is horrifyingly destructive to people and the environment. One story described radioactive lakes, high cancer rates and villagers whose "teeth began to fall out" and "hair turned white at unusually young ages". "Children were born with soft bones and cancer rates rocketed." Renewable Energy Is the Corporatist Rat Hole Where Your Taxes Go! The Federal government has already spent well over $100 billion on renewable credits for electricity production since their enactment three decades ago, and the "Inflation Reduction Act" will cost taxpayers another $98 billion. The proposed bill is full of incentives for renewable energy technologies, chief among an extension of wind and solar tax credits significantly increasing subsidies for them, provided additional criteria are met during construction. It also offers new tax credits for domestic manufacturing of solar panels and wind turbine parts as well as energy storage projects sited separately from renewable generation facilities. Wind and solar projects would effectively get an extension on tax credits for production and investment, as would stand-alone energy storage projects. If Senator Joe Manchin wanted to handicap natural gas and coal generators and force more retirements, this is certainly a way to do it. The United States would be forcing renewable energy in the same fashion as Europe has been doing. Africa Needs Conventional Fuels, Not Windmills and Solar Panels. The energy and climate goals that Western governments, the United Nations, and other organizations are pushing on Africa constitute a crippling blow to its economies. As the least developed region, Africa should unequivocally prioritize economic development. One would think that amid energy poverty in Africa, Western governments and "development" institutions would prioritize energy security for African countries over energy transition. African countries must have reliable, abundant, and cheap energy (e.g., fossil fuels) to accelerate economic development. Fossil fuels power economies and people's lives. To deny these countries the possibility of developing with fossil fuels by imposing climate goals that the Western world itself fails to achieve is hypocritical. And malicious. A Democrat President Again Wastes Taxpayer Money On Useless Renewables. [Scroll down] Peter Schweizer, head of the Government Accountability Institute, reported that 80% of the money spent in Obama's 2009 Recovery Act on green energy companies went to companies with individual owners who sat on Obama's finance committee for his 2008 presidential campaign. Given the number of influential donors in Biden's 2020 presidential campaign who have considerable financial stakes in green energy companies, Schweizer predicts Biden's "Build Back Better" green energy program amounts to nothing more than "a wealth transfer to Biden's biggest bundlers." By 2015, the Obama administration had used taxpayer funds to subside solar and other renewable energy in the United States at an average of $39 billion per year over five years, for a total of nearly $200 billion. This massive investment in renewable energy resulted in less than 1% of additional electrical generation. Myanmar bears cost of green energy. The birds no longer sing, and the herbs no longer grow. The fish no longer swim in rivers that have turned a murky brown. The animals do not roam, and the cows are sometimes found dead. The people in this northern Myanmar forest have lost a way of life that goes back generations. But if they complain, they, too, face the threat of death. This forest is the source of several key metallic elements known as rare earths, often called the vitamins of the modern world. Rare earths now reach into the lives of almost everyone on the planet, turning up in everything from hard drives and cellphones to elevators and trains. They are especially vital to the fast-growing field of green energy, feeding wind turbines and electric car engines. And they end up in the supply chains of some of the most prominent companies in the world, including General Motors, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Tesla and Apple. Coal plants are being kept online to prevent blackouts as green transition falters. Coal-fired power plants in several states are delaying planned shutdowns in order to avoid blackouts and energy shortages as the delayed development of renewable energy sources is leaving gaps in states' power grids amid high energy demand. At least six coal plants in New Mexico and three other states are temporarily halting their retirement as utility providers say import tariffs and other supply disruptions on solar panels imposed by the U.S. Commerce Department are making it difficult to meet high demand, according to Reuters. Fossil fuels like coal plants and natural gas are preventing blackouts by filling the gaps in the grid that are being created by the push to implement green energy nationwide amid President Joe Biden's aggressive energy transformation plan. Lights out, cold showers in Europe. We still see news coverage coming out of Europe issuing "warnings" about a possible energy crisis, spurred in part by the removal of Russian oil and natural gas from the European market. Concerns are being raised in the United States that the same thing "might" happen here. But this story is much bigger than just the Biden energy crisis. And these aren't hypothetical discussions about power grid issues that are complex and difficult to explain. The reality is that it's already upon us. It's happening right now. In several European countries, the lights are already being dimmed if not extinguished in places. People are being asked to take cold showers or, in some places, not having any choice because there is no hot water. And it's all being done in an effort to squirrel away any amount of energy they can before winter arrives. The President of the European Commission warned people this week that the time to start conserving and building stockpiles of oil and natural gas was yesterday. And it's not just going to be Germany and Italy that are suffering. It will be the entire continent. Green Fail: Germany to Reconnect First Coal Power Plant to Energy Grid. In a demonstration of the failure of Germany's pursuit of so-called "green energy" and its policy of relying on Russian gas in the meantime, a coal-fired power plant will be reconnected to the nation's electricity grid. While the economic powerhouse of Europe — so called — scrambles to secure energy sources before the winter months, the previously shuttered Mehrum coal power plant in Lower Saxony will become the first to once again be connected to Germany's grid. Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class. For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid "transition" to "green" energy was the world's preordained future — regardless of the costs. Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to "renewable energy." Most citizens were afraid to object that in cloudy, cold Germany solar panels were not viable methods of electrical generation — especially in comparison to the country's vast coal deposits and its large, model nuclear power industry. As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood — the dirtiest of modern fuels — to endure the cold. And there is further talk of "warm rooms," where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive. Why Pretend Green Pork Will Stop Climate Change? Take the Joe Manchin-sponsored climate compromise coming together in the U.S. Senate. Despite panegyrics in the press, this euphoric proposal amounts to exactly the sort of subsidy regime the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, after a similar splurge, judged to be a "poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives." One analysis pinpointed in the fewest possible words why: "Alternative energy is not replacement energy." Such packages are sold on the public's faulty intuition that an erg of green energy consumed is an erg of fossil energy that stays in the ground. But it does not follow. The most widely celebrated paper in recent years on the economics of climate change concludes that green-energy subsidies mostly just increase total energy consumption rather than displace fossil fuels. The impact on CO2 and temperatures is "minuscule," according to Princeton's José Luis Cruz Álvarez and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. "Green" Is Unsustainable. The administration's "green" energy proposals, like those that have been adopted in Europe, are leading this country toward an economic, social and strategic disaster. It is hard to think of any set of policies, adopted by any government at any moment in history, that rival our "green" mania for sheer destructiveness. Although, that said, Sri Lanka's brief commitment to "sustainability" comes to mind. [...] Blackouts are coming soon, likely to a neighborhood near you. I would say that the certainty that voters will rebel against blackouts is not a "danger," but rather the salvation of our civilization. If the Democrats continue with their mad "green" dreams, the inevitable result is that the day will come when we flip our light switches and nothing happens. Understand: if the Left gets its way on energy, the question is not "whether." The question is "when." World Economic Forum attacks idea of private property, natural rights. The World Economic Forum is pushing for a global transition away from private ownership of vehicles and other "idle equipment" as part of a "clean energy revolution," itself part of the Great Reset. In a recently released report, the Swiss-based international lobbying group stated that "transition from fossil fuels to renewables will need large supplies of critical metals such as cobalt, lithium, nickel." But the report noted that shortages of these critical metals are likely to make renewable fuel technologies prohibitively expensive. Germany darkens cities, turn down thermostats and considers shutting down breweries to deal with energy shortage. Today Russia announced a bunch of new problems it was allegedly having with the Germany-made machines that pump natural gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. Siemens Energy, the company that built the turbines said it had not received any reports of damage from Gazprom, the Russian gas company. In other words, Russia is once again lying as an excuse to keep the gas supply turned nearly off. As I've mentioned before, Germany uses most of its natural gas in the winter for heating. During the summer the country fills massive underground tanks to prepare for the cold weather but this year Russia's decision to cut the supply of gas (first by 60% and now by 80% overall) means those tanks are only about 2/3 full. Americans Want Oil. The Biden administration tells us that we are in the midst of a rapid transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy, and Pete Buttigieg says he can't understand why so many Americans haven't gotten on the bandwagon. This author reminds us of what the Biden administration seems to have forgotten, but many Americans understand: ["][W]ithout fossil fuel, nothing separates us from the pre-modern era. For 99% of the world's population, that era was not a pretty Jane Austen movie. Life was short, painful, diseased, filthy dirty, hungry, and either too hot or too cold. Most people didn't live past 40 and half of children died before hitting 5. There were only four energy sources: Human labor, animal labor, and primitive wind and water energy. (Five sources, I guess if you consider the sun drying laundry on the line.)["] I think we can add that, beginning in the 18th century, there was also steam power fueled by wood. Steam remains important, of course, but now we boil water using coal, natural gas, or a nuclear reaction, not wood. Let's talk about the weather. There is nothing you eat, use, look at, wear, live in, travel with, or anything else that isn't completely dependent on fossil fuels. Remove those fossil fuels (without a nuclear substitute) and you are suddenly returned to life in a wood or dirt shelter, with only the most limited food and clothing, and really nothing else. Of course, in the transition from our world to that world, expect 80% of the earth's population to die very quickly from starvation, disease, and violence. Democrats Are Now Begging Biden To Act Like A Dictator. Democrats are using the latest heat wave to push Biden to declare a climate "emergency" so he can bypass the legislative branch. Biden is reportedly considering doing just that. The left is freaking out because Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., won't sign onto a bill that includes carbon emission mandates at a time when gasoline prices are way up, inflation is rampant, and the economy is almost certainly in a recession. Plus, the Supreme Court just tossed an attempt by the EPA to control the nation's power grid in the name of fighting "climate change." On Monday, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, told reporters "There is probably nothing more important for our nation and our world than for the United States to drive a bold, energetic transition in its energy economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy." Merkley said time is of the essence because it's not clear when Democrats will be able to pass a climate bill. Wind, Solar And Pipelines All Fail Germany. Short-term German power prices more than doubled as calm weather and the expected halt of gas flows on the Nord Stream pipeline crimped supplies. Power for Monday surged to the highest since early March with wind generation forecast to remain at very low levels for the next few days. There will also be less gas available for power plants with Nord Stream scheduled to halt on Monday. The surge in prices is yet another blow for millions of homes and factories in Europe's biggest economy. Like everywhere else in Europe, they are suffering from soaring inflation as costs for everything from energy and petrol to food are jumping. Germany is working to fill up its gas storage sites even as the main pipeline from Russia halts for maintenance. But there are fears that flows may not fully return, prompting the government to pass legislation last week to allow retired coal plants to be reactivated and for gas-fired generation to be reduced to conserve fuel. Germany's Energy Catastrophe. Germany may be the only nation that has based its energy policy on absolution. Germans call it Energiewende ("energy transition"), and they aim to decarbonize their economy and lead the world by replacing their fossil fuel and nuclear plants with renewable energy. [...] Nord Stream 1 will be out of commission for 10 days due to scheduled maintenance starting July 11. Putin used maintenance issues as the pretense for the initial drawdown in Nord Stream gas flows, sparking fears from German leaders that Russia will simply refuse to reopen the pipeline after the maintenance. If Russia permanently cuts off natural gas exports to Germany, it will likely send the country, the world's fourth-largest economy, into a severe recession. In response to these pressures, German leaders have considered reopening shuttered coal plants to shore up their economy and national security. Coal is the dirtiest source of electricity, releasing more greenhouse gas emissions and deadly air pollution than any other energy. Green Energy Threatens Reliability of Texas, US Electric Grids. Texans might be forgiven for thinking they have it better than the Brits when it comes to keeping the lights on. After all, they live in the energy capital of the world. However, the destructive nature of renewable energy like that used in Great Britain knows no borders, especially when American politicians push subsidies and mandates to force us off fossil fuels, threatening not just Texas but the entire U.S. electric grid. Just a few days after the British were warned they might have to lower their thermostats and delay their dinners this winter to avoid blackouts, Texans were advised last Monday and Wednesday to conserve energy as summer temperatures peaked. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid manager for most of Texas, issued a conservation appeal to Texans and Texas businesses as last week's temperatures were expected to top 105 degrees. Deutsche Bank is forecasting that Germans will have to chop wood to stay warm this winter. Last night, Eric Heymann, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank, released a note discussing options for Germany to manage its current energy crisis. The three scenarios involve the Russian oil sold and sent to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. In his last scenario, Heymann discusses what might happen if Russia turns off the pipeline completely, a real possibility given Germany's support of Ukraine. Tucker Carlson's latest on 'green' energy is mandatory viewing. We now have a situation in which Biden has unchallenged and outsized executive powers and the EPA has unlimited regulatory power (both of which, I can assure you, were never meant to control America's entire energy supply). The result is that the Democrats are relentlessly clamping down on our available energy supplies. In a premodern era, energy came from four sources: primitive wind- and water-power, animal abuse, and slavery (the last of which was not, although I'm sure leftists will deny it, a uniquely American phenomenon. In the modern era, fossil fuel has allowed humans to break free from these limited and abusive energy systems. Farms produce a surplus, water is cleaned, medical care is readily available, homes are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and so much more. Rather than listing everything that undergirds our world thanks to fossil fuel, I challenge you to list a single thing in your life that does not rely on fossil fuel for its functionality, manufacture, or transport. When Governments Do Truly STUPID Things. Germany is facing an existential crisis of its own making as well. Deciding to go "green/woke" for energy they foolishly shut down both coal and nuclear generation, relying on Russian gas for that which they couldn't manage to produce reliably from renewable sources. Renewable sources such as wind and solar are not reliable and never will be; the only means to prevent shortages is to either back them up with fossil plants (which means you pay twice since the capacity has to be available when the sun and wind don't show up in sufficient quantity) or wildly overbuild against expected capacity requirements which is prohibitive for cost reasons, never mind that both solar and wind are entirely dependent on fossil fuels for the materials, mining and production. Then Germany bought into the war in Ukraine and sanctions, along with the rest of the EU despite the utter insanity of being dependent on Russian gas, one of the warring nations, flowing through the other nation that is at war! Backing someone who is at war with your now-primary energy supply because you shut down all your own stuff isn't very smart. Electrical costs have skyrocketed and this winter brings the possibility of literally freezing to death. EU Parliament Declares Nuclear Power And Natural Gas As "Green" Energy. The leadership of the European Union (EU) declared that some gas and nuclear power are, in fact, Green energy, a move that will likely stir controversy in the U.S. Under a move labeled the EU Taxonomy, today's vote reclassified the energy sources as both green and sustainable. The revolt against green tyranny has toppled its first government, as farmers' protests spread across Europe. Green tyranny has finally provoked mass reactions, and the first government has fallen after imposing insane policies that wrecked the food supply for its people. Both the president and the prime minister of Sri Lanka are resigning in the wake of massive mobs storming and occupying their residences, burning the PM's private house and refusing to leave the presidential palace until both men are out of office. [...] Sri Lanka foolishly signed on to the green initiative in farming, going organic and limiting the importation and use of chemical fertilizers. Food production, including tea, a vital export earner of foreign exchange, collapsed, and now the government is broke, people are hungry. [...] Farmers in Holland, in open revolt against government plans to destroy their livelihoods by limiting nitrogen application for fertilizer, are tying up that country's roads and cities. And the revolt is spreading to Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland. Do Democrats have any comprehension of how intentionally destructive their energy policies are? There is all kinds of nonsense going on now over the issue of global warming that Democrats fawn over. It's an unscientific theory that has gripped big-money Democrats and their media allies for decades, and what they are trying to do is force this non-science into every area of society, destructively so. [...] Here are some questions for Biden, Harris, Kerry, AOC, Pelosi, and Schumer: How will we get all the solar panels and rare Earth minerals for batteries from China without ships and planes powered by oil? Won't we have trouble building all the roads without asphalt? Where are the electric road graders and other equipment? What type of tires will go on all the electric cars, trucks, and bicycles since we won't have rubber? How will we fight wars against China, Russia, Iran, and other adversaries without machines powered by oil since they won't give theirs up? Won't we lose? Is the EU driving the first nails into the Green Energy coffin? One of the most obvious effects of the Green Energy movement is that it is profoundly regressive insofar as it returns those nations that embrace it to a pre-modern era. That would be an era that looks pretty in BBC productions but that was, in reality, filthy, disease-ridden, and both very cold and very dark. A recent European Union vote to classify natural gas and nuclear energy as sustainable (i.e., "green") energy suggests that, having gotten a glimpse into the abyss, pragmatism is beginning to triumph over the mindless "green" ideology that has governed the left for so long. Germany, which dominates the EU, is also the nation that has made the greatest strides in implementing the "green" agenda. The results of abandoning reliable fossil fuel and replacing it with renewables have been problematic. For some years now, Germany has been facing rolling blackouts and, in 2021, it decided to teach people how to use flowerpots and candles to provide heat during the winter when the electricity is gone. Having Scoffed at Trump's Warnings, Germany Now Fears Complete Russian Gas Cut-Off. Having mocked and rejected President Donald Trump's warning about the country's dependence on Russian energy, the German government now fears that Russia may soon cut off their gas supply. As war rages in Ukraine, Russia has drastically reduced its energy supply to Germany and other western European countries, forcing Berlin to declared emergency measures to save and ration existing gas supplies. In the wake of these measures, Germany fears widespread disruption of its economy and industrial production. "Germany warned that Russia's moves to slash Europe's natural gas supplies risked sparking a collapse in energy markets, drawing a parallel to the role of Lehman Brothers in triggering the financial crisis," Bloomberg reported last week. The
Silliness of Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Beltway nostrums are a dime a dozen, and the climate
Fossil fuels are far better than blackouts. As the world watched, French President Emmanuel Macron explained the basics of supply and demand in oil markets to President Biden this week. Video of the encounter made it obvious: Energy experts need to begin loudly restating the basic truth that reliable energy is essential to human health and well-being. Macron's Energy 101 tutorial with Biden reinforced the reality that the world is grappling with a growing energy crisis, and the Middle East won't be able to bail out markets. The U.S. would do well to heed this fact. It should implement protective measures for oil and gas markets, as well as for electricity markets, before it's too late. And make no mistake, "too late" is bearing down on us. For example, last month a Michigan utility closed an 811-megawatt nuclear plant almost a decade before its operating permit expired. Last week, the Michigan Public Service Commission took it a step further by approving a request by Consumers Energy, a major utility, to close its last remaining coal plant by 2025. That's 15 years ahead of schedule. The closure will mean 1,560 megawatts of reliable capacity lost so the company can meet its wholly voluntary goal of net-zero CO2 emissions by 2040. Wood-burning Stoves and Firewood in Short Supply in Germany as Citizens Fear Freezing to Death Due to Gas Shortages. In 2018 during his speech to the UN General Assembly President Donald Trump lodged a warning to Germany about their country's reliance on Russian energy. The German delegation laughed on camera at the remarks. [...] The Germans aren't laughing now. In fact, gas prices are so high in Germany today that wood-burning stoves and firewood have become scarce nationwide. German citizens are loading up on wood to heat their homes next year — just like they did in the Middle Ages. Chasing
Utopian Energy: How I Wasted 20 Years of My Life. Utopian energy is an imagined form of energy that's
abundant, reliable, inexpensive, and also clean, renewable, and life-sustaining. But utopian energy is as much a
fantasy as a utopian society. Seeking the fount of perfect energy allows us to pretend there aren't real-world
tradeoffs between, say, banning fossil fuels and helping people in impoverished nations or between using solar and wind power
and conserving natural habitats. For years, I chased utopian energy. I promoted solar, wind, and energy
efficiency because I felt like I was protecting the environment. But I was wrong! [...] I started to realize that I had
accepted as true certain claims about energy and our environment. Now I began to see those claims were false.
For example:
How are those windmills working out? Energy crisis making aggressive green agenda look like peacetime luxury. Soaring costs are driving many countries toward more of the fossil fuels they had sought to phase out, proving the aggressive shift toward green energy to be a luxury of peacetime. The war in Ukraine caused a spike in oil and natural gas prices, which were already creeping up before Russia's invasion. Western governments have responded by pledging to spend even more, and faster, on scaling up renewable energy sources, but at the same time, they have committed to building more gas infrastructure and have sought to increase power generation from coal to displace gas demand and keep the industry running in the short term. Renewable Energy or Reliable Energy — But Not Both. Australia's new ALP Government has gigantic green energy plans to be funded by electricity consumers and taxpayers. They promise (with a straight face) that Australia's electricity will be 82% renewable by 2030. They predict 43% reduction in emissions and "on track for net zero by 2050". They threaten to litter the landscape with 400 community batteries, 85 solar banks and a $20B [million?] expansion of the electricity grid. This gigantic "green" electricity plan will need at least 150 million Chinese solar panels covering outback kingdoms of land, plus thousands of bird-slicing metal-hungry wind turbines, plus never-ending roads and powerlines — not friendly to grass or trees and with no room for native birds, bees, bats or marsupials — not green at all. Questions the Climate Police Won't Answer. How much battery storage will be required to handle a worst-case scenario of a solid week when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine after we 'transition' to green energy and everybody is supposed heat their homes and run their cars with electric power? Who has made that calculation and what does it show about how realistic Biden's green energy 'transition' is? How realistic is it to expect people to eat bugs and seaweed, as the climate police would have us do, just to save the planet? 'In the future, you will eat bugs and be happy' isn't going to cut it. By the way, the climate police weren't kidding. They're already feeding bugs to schoolkids in Britain. How can we trust computer climate models when they all assume different temperature inputs, are wrong about stratospheric cooling, are bad at predicting rainfall, and can't even model regional climate accurately? And you're telling me these models know with certainty what the climate will be a hundred years from now for the entire planet? Who are you kidding? Why is Arctic ice at 30-year high when the planet is supposedly burning up and Al Gore repeated scientists' claims there wouldn't be any Arctic ice at all by 2013? Questions the Climate Police Won't Answer. Why isn't anybody talking about the World Bank study which concluded one hundred percent solar, wind, and electric battery energy would be "just as destructive to the planet as fossil fuels"? Such a transition would require unfathomable amounts of copper, lead, zinc, aluminum and iron — not to mention unsustainable quantities of rare earth minerals — all of which would end up as toxic landfill. This transition would also require impossible amounts of land for wind and solar power — the size of five South Dakotas, by one estimate. How is any of this green? Germany's 'Green' Energy Disaster Is A Warning To The United States. As gas hit historic highs, leftists keep arguing it's a perfect time to transition to a "clean energy" economy. "Now is the moment to double-down, triple-down, and quadruple-down on clean energy," Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Friday, linking to a CNN piece that contends "wind and solar" have been "bailing out" Texas during its recent heat wave. In the piece we learn that wind, solar, and nuclear have "powered about 38% of the state's power in 2021, rivaling natural gas at 42%." That's quite the sleight of hand; [...] Subsidized solar power generates less than 2 percent of Texas' energy during the year. Nuclear power generates around 10 percent and wind nearly 20. Coal accounts for nearly 15 percent and natural gas for more than 52 percent of electricity generation. It would be far more accurate to say that coal, nuclear, and gas are bailing out Texas. No nation has anything approaching a clean energy economy. And those that have promised to build one are all struggling. Renewables are going nowhere. The fundamental problem with wind and solar power is that they don't work. Both generate electricity less than half the time, and this isn't a question of improving technology, it is inherent in obsolete systems that depend on the weather. As a result, the ballyhooed "green revolution" has fizzled. The Germans, formerly committed to a "green" makeover, are starting to face reality, even if their politicians aren't quite there yet: [...] After decades of hype and trillions in wasted ratepayer and taxpayer dollars, wind and solar can't satisfy three percent of the world's energy needs. Nor can they prevent the blackouts that are inexorably making they way toward our communities. Shifting to green energy is currently impossible due to global shortage of batteries and minerals needed for energy storage. The Biden regime's catering to the far left of his Democrat Party when it comes to their radical 'green' agenda will plunge our country into widespread unemployment and poverty, say most sane economists, because our first-world economy cannot power itself simply on wind, solar and prayers. But that reality isn't stopping the president's push — and neither are sky-high gasoline, diesel fuel and natural gas prices. That said, what will stop Biden and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-led 'Green New Deal' brigade is reality: There is no current way to meet the objectives of moving vast portions of our economy and existence over to wind and solar because the materials to manufacture the batteries required to store the 'green' energy are impossible to obtain. And what materials we can get are coming from an enemy nation: China. Rolling Blackouts [are] on the Way. In the recent past, California and Texas have suffered blackouts due to inadequate electricity supply. This year, as the summer heats up, it is the midwestern states served by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) that are most likely to see their lights go out. [...] Why are blackouts suddenly occurring after many decades of reliable energy? Because of profiteering by "green" energy hucksters. ["]MISO may simply not have enough reliable power plants on the grid this summer after 3,200 megawatts (MW) of reliable power plants, mostly coal and nuclear, retired last year.["] This is a scandal. "Green" energy liberals have demanded, successfully, that reliable coal and nuclear plants be closed so they can be replaced by wind farms and solar installations. But those unreliable, intermittent sources can never replace power plants that actually work 24/7. Hence the blackouts that are now beginning, and will become more and more widespread if we continue to rely increasingly on undependable sources of power. Dems "Renewable" Energy Plans Face Battery Shortage As They Run Up Cost Of Reliable Fossil Fuels. One aspect of wind and solar power that doesn't get mentioned much is that the power generated from these energy sources must be stored in batteries to be used, as needed, by the public. With no batteries, you get wind machines and bird fryers. So the green justice plans to convert the entire nation to renewable energy use may fizzle as a result of a potential energy shortage. [...] When the use of technology is forced, rather than allowed to progress along sensible production, engineering, and economic timelines, these are the types of issues that can be predicted. That is, unless you are wearing green-colored glasses... either because you are profiting from the renewable energy mandates or you are a green activist ideologue. Battery shortage is affecting U.S. energy, drive to replace fossil fuels with other sources. U.S. renewable energy developers have delayed or scrapped several big battery projects meant to store electrical power on the grid in recent months, scuttling plans to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar energy. At least a dozen storage projects meant to support growing renewable energy supplies have been postponed, canceled or renegotiated as labor and transport bottlenecks, soaring minerals prices, and competition from the electric vehicle industry crimp supply. [...] The slowdown in utility-scale battery installations threatens the pace of the U.S. transition away from fossil fuels as the Biden administration seeks to decarbonize the grid by 2035. The delays could pose a threat to power reliability in states that already depend heavily on renewable energy like California. Global Shift to Renewables Could Cost $120 Trillion: Australian Energy CEO. The world will need to pour trillions of dollars into the energy sector if it wants to reach the net-zero target, according to the CEO of Australia's largest electricity operator. Frank Calabria, Managing Director of Origin Energy, which operates Australia's largest coal-fired power station, has also urged to "bring as much coal supply back into the system as soon as possible." He said this would aid a "successful transition" to renewables over the longer term and ease pressure on the power price. Speaking at the Australian Energy conference on June 7, the energy boss described the shift to a renewable economy as a "multi-decade, large-scale, global transformation that will fundamentally change the way we source, produce, supply, distribute and use energy." Calabria estimated that such transformation requires A$120 trillion (US$86.25 trillion) to be invested in the energy sector. Coming on top of this is the investment in additional transmission to connect solar and wind developments to the major population centres. This process, he noted, will cost A$70 billion (US$51.30 billion) in Australia only. The
"Net Zero" Agenda Has Devastating Consequences. Human beings — regardless of race, religion or
culture — like to embrace any belief that is absolute. This is because absolute beliefs are simple, easy to
comprehend, and false positives that offer us a false sense of security. [...] We've many examples throughout history but
let us today consider this one of CO2 emissions which feeds into "renewables" and a "sustainable" future. Never in the
history of man have we transitioned from a more dense energy form to a less dense one. The reason is simple. It
is [backward]. If we look at any time we've transitioned from a less energy dense form to a more energy dense one we
see a number of things.
The great renewables ripoff. Back in March, the Energy and Climate Information Unit, a think tank funded by green billionaires, made a great deal of noise about so-called "negative subsidies" paid out under the Contracts for Difference Scheme. With market prices for electricity having soared, generators in the scheme found that they were having to pay back large sums of money into the scheme, rather than taking money from it as they normally do. The sums involved are not insignificant. The net repayment into the scheme was £133 million in the final quarter of 2021, and the ECIU declared, somewhat breathlessly, that consumers have benefited to the tune of £660million by April 2023. One small (well, rather large actually) problem with this claim was that the beneficiaries of these repayments were actually the electricity suppliers. That's because the CfD scheme only dictates that the money gets that far: there is no mechanism in the legislation to return it to consumers. Beware: 100% green energy could destroy the planet. The untold story about "green energy" is that it can't possibly be scaled up to provide anywhere near the energy to replace fossil fuels. (Unless we are headed back to the stone ages, which is what some of the "de-growth" advocates favor). Right now, the United States gets 70% of its energy from fossil fuels. To go to zero over the next 20 years would be economically catastrophic and cost tens of millions of jobs. With gas prices at nearly double their price back from when Trump left office and inflation up from 1.5% to 8% in just 15 months, we are already experiencing the economic damage from the green energy crusaders. But we also have to ask whether green energy is even good for the environment. Some environmentalists are pointing to a little-noticed study by the World Bank showing that moving toward 100% solar, wind, and electric battery energy would be "just as destructive to the planet as fossil fuels." Biden Administration Declare National Emergency for Clean Energy Production. Joe Biden shut down domestic energy development, cancelled pipelines, cancelled leases, retracted the ability to drill in ANWAR (Alaska), and triggered massive new regulatory approaches from the Commerce, Interior and Energy departments. The resulting increases in oil, natural gas, gasoline, electricity and energy costs overall — which became fuel on the furnace of inflation, have now created the energy crisis that Joe Biden is declaring a national emergency to solve. Biden himself has no idea what is happening; he is simply following the instructions of the policy operators who are in control of the administration. It is the people in the circles of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and the climate change activists within the DC bureaucracy that are executing the nuts-and-bolts shifts. They tell Biden what to do, and he cluelessly does it. We are the people who end up paying the price for their effort. Australian voters have set themselves up for a green nightmare. Australians took a great green gamble in the recent election. Green millionaires and other left-wing activists supported slick campaigns promoting a gaggle of well-off women who won six seats in the leafy green suburbs. Being rich blue-bloods with dark green policies, they adopted teal-colored uniforms. [...] This Teal-Green-ALP lurch to the left promises a disorderly rush into green energy. Their aim is to cover this huge continent with solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines, access roads, giant batteries, and national parks. Offshore wind turbines will start sprouting, but no new coal development will be approved. The new P.M. wants to make Australia a "renewable energy super power" and "Get-Up" wants to "protect indigenous communities from fracking." Green Energy Chickens Coming Home to Roost. This year will graphically demonstrate the malign consequences of the misguided efforts to replace cheap, reliable fossil fuel energy with unreliable, inefficient "renewable" energy like wind and solar. Never in history has a civilization willfully embarked on destroying its material foundations, based solely on a hypothesis rather than scientifically established fact. The first red flag alerting us to this feckless policy appeared during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Much of Europe — the most aggressive nations in replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels — has grown dependent on Russian exports to make up for the energy lost from shutting down nuclear and coal-fired power plants. Since directly helping Ukraine by fighting is politically impossible, sanctions were imposed on Russia's oil and gas industries. But sanctions severe enough to concentrate Putin's mind carried a political cost as well as an economic one. So Europe is still buying Russian energy, postponing tougher sanctions until the end of the year. NEC Director Brian Deese Defends Policy as U.S. Economy Transitions Away from Oil and Gas to Windmills and Solar Power. Anytime you hear the code-word "transition", what the explainers mean is the change from traditional oil, gas and fossil fuels to renewable energy and the Green New Deal. The phrase "economic transition" is used to explain the economic collapse of Main Street that will happen during the switch. [...] National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, aka the U.S. version of Baghdad Bob, appears before several audiences today in an effort to use as many words as possible to explain the "transition," without actually explaining the "transition." Why? Because they don't want the average person to know what the "transition" is all about. Because if the average person knew what this "transition" is all about, then they might realize all of these massive increases in price are being done intentionally. The Day the Electricity Died. [Scroll down] First, we need to understand a little bit about how electric grids work. They cannot store electricity without a battery. Batteries are scarce and expensive. Electric demand must be met with electricity generation, always. If supply cannot keep up with demand, the utility will shut down electricity for some or many. For nearly a week, Texas utilities were unable to meet demand. They shut down the electric grid. Five million people lost power, and from 250 to 700 died. If an electric grid breaks, all the people it serves will be without electricity for weeks or months. Nonetheless, Progressives favor energy policies that will make grid failures more frequent, widespread, and prolonged. They want to close coal plants without enough full-time power ready to take their place. They seem unconcerned about reliability. They want coal plants torn down even if we have to keep paying them — like selling your car to get a newer one while you still owe lots on the first. 'Recipe For Blackouts': Millions Of Americans Face Power Outages Thanks To Green Energy Transition. Consumers nationwide are facing a summer of blackouts as utility companies and local governments continue to push a rapid transition to renewable energy. Independent operators of major regional electric grids serving tens of millions of Americans have recently warned that as temperatures rise this summer, they may have to resort to scheduled blackouts and other emergency measures to prevent significant wide-scale impacts. For several years, states have unveiled laws mandating a green transition and prohibiting fossil fuel infrastructure, forcing U.S. energy providers to plan renewable energy infrastructure upgrades worth hundreds of billions of dollars. "You're doing everything you can to increase the demand for electricity while constraining supply," Jonathan Lesser, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has experience in the utility industry, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. "Well, that's a recipe for blackouts. Simple as that." Green Energy Industry Is In For A Rude Awakening. Leading renewable energy groups, large solar and wind companies and politicians have supported lavish subsidies and credits for green tech. In the U.S., Democrats have pushed for an additional $100 billion in renewable energy subsidies over the next decade as part of the Build Back Better Act. "The whole thing has been sort of a government created industry, from the get go," Dan Kish, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF in an interview. [...] "The media hasn't covered the cost of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, manganese or lithium," Kish told the DCNF. "Lithium batteries, for example — if you want to call gasoline the fuel of internal combustion engines, lithium is the fuel of electric vehicles." [...] "Put very simply, all the world's cell production combined represents well under 10% of what we will need in 10 years," RJ Scaringe, Rivian's CEO, told reporters in April, according to the WSJ. "Meaning, 90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist." Kish noted that the price of lithium has risen 1,000% over the last two years. Greenpeace's Dream Of A Solar-Powered Village Fell Apart In Just A Few Years. Eco-activist group Greenpeace brought solar power to Dharnai, India, in 2014, constructing a green micro-grid it said would make the tiny village "energy independent" and a model for the rest of the country to follow. Eight years later, reports indicate the solar micro-grid is not only defunct, but being used as a cattle shed. The Dharnai venture is only one of many failed attempts by environmental groups, like Greenpeace, to "green" the developing world, according to one of its co-founders. "It's the same thing that's happened a lot across Africa: goody two-shoes comes in and builds them a small solar facility," CO2 Coalition Director Patrick Moore, who co-founded Greenpeace in the 1970s, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. "Then, pretty soon the battery wears out and it just doesn't get repaired and they don't know what to do because they don't have any expertise," said Moore, who departed Greenpeace in the 1980s after he said the group lost touch with its original purpose. "There's plenty of those stories." 'Green' Energy Doesn't Save Money, It's 4 to 6 Times More Expensive. President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to "renewable energy" is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden. He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration's climate czar, who recently claimed that "solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas." Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars. This couldn't be more wrong. Proponents of "green" energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don't require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power. Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030? In the contest to be the most virtuous of all the states on the "carbon-free" electricity metric, the race is on between California and New York. In 2018 California enacted a bill going by the name "SB100," which set a mandatory target of 60% of electricity from "renewables" by 2030 (and 100% by 2045). Not to be outdone, New York responded by enacting its "Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act" in 2019, setting its own statutory targets of 70% of electricity from renewables by 2030 (and 100% by 2040). So is any of this real? Or is it just so much posturing to show conformity with current fashions, all of which will be forgotten by the time the now-seemingly-distant deadlines approach? As to New York, I have had multiple posts explaining how the supposedly mandatory goals are completely unrealistic as to both feasibility and cost, and how the people charged with achieving the goals have no idea what they are doing. Is California any less clueless? Stark Raving Green. 2050: That's the deadline that President Joe Biden has set to decarbonize the U.S. power sector and supposedly save the planet from man-made climate catastrophe. In issuing his December executive order prioritizing a "Clean Energy Economy," Eco-Joe pledged you, the American taxpayer, to spend billions in the next three decades to achieve net-zero carbon emissions "across federal operations" by mid-century. Blue-state governors and some power companies hail the proposals as ground-breaking, according to the International Business Times. However, Biden is facing hostility from Republicans and coal-producing states, who are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Supreme Court about whether the administration has authority to implement the scheme. What few are talking about is how unfeasible the plans actually are. California's electrical grid has an EV problem. California energy officials issued a sobering warning this month, telling residents to brace for potential blackouts as the state's energy grid faces capacity constraints heading into the summer months. And since the state has committed to phase out all new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 — well ahead of federal targets — the additional load from electric vehicle (EV) charging could add more strain to the electric grid. "Let's say we were to have a substantial number of [electric] vehicles charging at home as everybody dreams," Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, who authored a recent study looking at the strain electric vehicle adoption is expected to place on the power grid, told Yahoo Finance. "Today's grid may not be able to support it. It all boils down to: Are you charging during the time solar power is on?" The Editor says... A climate change class action lawsuit. The UN IPCC and associated green activist groups; Federal, state, and local entities; universities; foundations; non-profit groups; and many corporations argue that the world will be destroyed without policies designed to turn on their heads the current energy system and American economy. However, the green agenda that is designed to eradicate fossil fuels will inflict enormous economic damage on America's ordinary citizens and overall economy — and will do the same to other countries as well. This is true even though the "climate change" models have never been fully and objectively vetted, so there is no solid evidence to justify these upheavals. Nevertheless, American Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency and, indeed, almost every federal agency and their federally funded cohorts in many state agencies are committed to decarbonization. This is true for a commitment that they admit that they do not know how to implement, as to which they cannot ascertain the final cost, and they're unable to determined the overall consequences of their policies. The People Promising Us "Net Zero" Have No Clue About Energy Storage. The problems of trying to provide enough storage to back up a fully wind and solar system without fossil fuels are so huge and so costly that you would think that everyone pushing the "net zero" agenda would be completely focused on these issues. And given that the issues are quite obvious, you would think that such people would be well down the curve with feasibility studies, cost studies, and demonstration projects to make their case on how their plans could be accomplished. Remarkably, that is not the case at all. Instead, if you read about the plans and proposals in various quarters for "net zero" in some short period of years, you quickly realize that the people pushing this agenda have no clue. No clue whatsoever. The World Does Not Run on Magic. [Scroll down] It seems that we assume the world can run in a magical way. We need only wish a thing, and it will happen, because somebody will take care of it, or rather something, a mysterious agent in a black box. To save the world from climate change, we should use electricity instead of burning fossil fuels. But where do we get the electricity? It must simply happen, like lightning from the sky. I daresay we have all read hundreds of articles on the need to provide power in a clean, efficient, and sustainable way. But how many address the fundamental problem posed: that is, that all electricity is generated by the brute physical fact of making a great shaft of magnetic metal turn? Green Energy Industry Is In For A Rude Awakening. Renewable energy prices have skyrocketed while new wind and solar installations have plummeted over the last year, even as governments continue to forge ahead with ambitious climate plans. While the U.S., European Union, other Western nations and international organizations have all pursued aggressive climate agendas that involve expanding renewable energy technology and infrastructure, prices have surged and profits have declined, according to industry reports and corporate earnings reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. President Joe Biden has made a series of climate pledges, including a commitment to decarbonize the grid by 2035 and achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions by 2050, while pushing a long list of anti-fossil fuel policies. Commodity markets tied to global renewable energy development have been roiled by inflation, supply chain issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and, more recently, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Even as project demand has stayed high, industry profitability has declined because of these factors. How to Turn a Whole State's Power Production to Wind and Solar Dreams. Many ideas considered radical a decade ago now enjoy mainstream support in the environmentalist movement. Demands to "decarbonize" electricity production are proceeding apace despite the limitations of generating electricity reliably and affordably from renewable sources alone. The technology to store energy simply hasn't kept pace with our ability to generate it, leaving renewable sources like wind and solar handicapped by their inherent intermittency. Consequently, renewables provide only a fraction of Nebraska's energy needs and find economic viability only through a regime of heavy government subsidy. Despite this technological deficiency, clean energy advocates still insist we decommission "dirty" sources sooner rather than later. Cities and regions who have done so have encountered grave disruptions in production and delivery, resulting in rolling blackouts, brownouts, and at times grid failure under heavy demand. This is not entirely by accident. Artificial scarcity raises prices, which in turn reduces consumption, a prime goal of the modern environmental movement. 'Green Energy'? Let's Do the Math. Rather than argue climate politics and ideology, let's look at math, the language of the universe. Americans own approximately 270 million private gasoline vehicles (GVs) and drive 3.2 trillion miles per year, consuming 123 billion gallons of gasoline. Why? Because we want to. Because we (still) are free to do what and go as and where we want. Democrats don't like this. They prefer that we little people live in little boxes wedged-in with a hundred other little boxes, next to the (subsidized) light rail and the (un-air-conditioned) workplace and the (un-air-conditioned) grocery store selling bugs instead of food. President Brandon read from his teleprompter that he wants to build 500,000 EV charging stations. By comparison, our 279 million GVs require only 115,000 "charging" (gas) stations. "Charging" a GV for the next 400 miles takes about 10 minutes. Absent fast chargers, charging an EV for the next 400 miles can take up to eight hours. Spending less time per person charging requires having more stations — about four times more. How much CO2 will be expelled into the atmosphere to build this costly infrastructure? As with windmills, arguably more than using them will reduce. Renewables: the pandemic of wishful thinking. There is a transition underway in our electricity sector. Fundamentally, the people financing, regulating, designing, and operating these systems, are driving a public relations campaign promoting renewables as cheap and effective. Activism disguised as leadership is bringing about significant changes in the electricity system, changes that are having far-reaching consequences on the Australian economy and security. Until recently, economists, engineers, and CEOs could be relied on to objectively consider all sides of a problem, making fact-based decisions for the best outcomes for their clients and shareholders (and themselves). But the much-vaunted 'transition' in the electricity sector has seen the share price of our two ASX-listed electricity retailers (AGL and Origin) shrivel. In February 2021, AGL announced the write-down of AUD $1.9 billion of wind power contracts. AGL paid too much for long-term fixed-price contracts with wind developers and Origin had a similar write-down for the same reasons in July 2021. Combined, these two companies supply over 50 percent of the Australian retail electricity market. Further afield, Germany's wind and solar gamble is failing too. "Green" Dreams Kill People. The amount of land needed for unreliable, intermittent wind and solar installations (which always must be backed up by natural gas plants that supply electricity most of the time, when wind and solar are idle) is immense. Robert Bryce, in a paper written for American Experiment, calculated that it would require an area more than twice the size of California to meet America's existing electricity needs (not all energy needs) with wind turbines. Of course that isn't going to happen. But as the destructive Green Machine rolls on, the land devoted to turbines and solar panels won't be in cities or suburbs. It will be farm land. [...] Wind and solar are not remotely competitive. They exist only because of government subsidies and, worse, mandates. The FARM act would at least ensure that we, the taxpayers, are not paying to destroy farm land at a time when the world needs all of the food America can produce. Mines,
Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check. Among the material realities of green energy:
The Magic of Rare Earth Elements & the Hypocrisy of Clean Energy. [Scroll down] The villages surrounding Baotou are now desolate, the inhabitants long gone. Where once there was greenery and fields, there are now factories. With the factories came tailing ponds, containing toxic chemicals along with radioactive elements such as thorium, which, if ingested, causes cancers of the pancreas and lungs, and leukemia. Li Guirong secretary general of the local branch of the Communist party, is one of the few who dares to talk about it. It was in 1958, when he was 10, that a state-owned concern, the Baotou Iron and Steel company (Baogang), started producing rare-earth minerals. The lake appeared at that time. "To begin with we didn't notice the pollution it was causing. How could we have known?" The soil and groundwater are now saturated with toxic substances. Eventually, Li had to get rid of his sick pigs, the last survivors of a collection of cows, horses, chickens and goats, killed off by the toxins. Bungling Biden tells families they can save $500 a month by switching to renewable energy: White House issues a correction. President Joe Biden vastly overpromised Americans that they can expect savings of $500 a month by transitioning to renewable energy, which the White House corrected by saying the savings would actually come over a year. In a fumble during his speech on gas prices on Thursday, Biden touted rebate programs for consumers switching to green energy but incorrectly cast how much would be saved. 'If your home is powered by safer, cheaper, cleaner electricity like solar or heat pumps, you can save about $500 a month on average,' Biden said. The White House corrected Biden's remark in a transcript, making clear he meant to say the savings he predicted would be over a year, not a month. [...] Biden is grappling with fallout from surging energy prices, including gasoline that has reached an average of $4.23 per gallon, after the United States banned imports of Russian oil and gas. Granholm: We Have to 'Use' War to Move to Clean Energy. On Thursday's broadcast of MSNBC's "All In," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated that many hoped "we would be focusing solely on clean energy solutions, renewable, making that transition," but the war in Ukraine has thrown a wrench into that and said that "we have got to use this reason to become energy independent with clean energy." Unrealistic Paths for Net Zero: You Can't Get There From Here. Depending on your crystal ball reaching Net Zero by 2050 is either the Holy Grail or a complete nightmare. The concept that transportation, manufacturing, construction and life generally will produce zero carbon emissions or at least negligible emissions in less than 30 years is a vaulted promise which has become politicized to the point of overlooking the basic realities, say critics like former banker and now energy sector analyst Parker Gallant. The fatal flaw in the equation is that there's no plan for where the energy to replace fossil fuels will come from other than vague claims of wind and solar which are almost useless without robust storage and, at this stage, affordable, compact and high energy density batteries just don't exist other than the laboratory. More than that, it all ignores the irrefutable laws of supply and demand. No Amount Of Incremental Wind And Solar Power Can Ever Provide Energy Independence. No amount of incremental wind and solar power can ever provide energy independence. Electricity gets consumed the instant it is generated. Electricity is consumed all the time, and therefore must be generated all the time. Indeed, some of the peak times for electricity consumption occur on winter evenings, when the sun has set, temperatures are very cold, the wind is often completely calm, and the need for energy for light, heat, cooking and more are high. During such times, a combined wind and solar generation system produces zero power. It doesn't matter if you build a thousand wind turbines and solar panels, or a million, or a billion or a trillion. The output will still be zero. And calm winter nights are just the most intense piece of the problem. A fully wind/solar generation system, with seemingly plenty of "capacity" to meet peak electricity demand, will also regularly and dramatically underproduce at random critical times throughout a year: for example, on heavily overcast and cold winter days; or on calm and hot summer evenings, when the sun has just set and air conditioning demand is high. Renewable Failure. The "Greens" promise renewables, solar and wind power, will replace fossil fuels. After all, the wind and sun are free, and they don't pollute! Oops. Now countries that embraced renewables are so desperate for power that they eagerly import coal, the worst polluter of all! Do they apologize? No. Greens never apologize. The Editor says... How solar power hurts people and the planet. The truth is this: every source of energy has costs and benefits that have to be carefully weighed. Wind and solar are no different. Most people are familiar with the benefits of wind and solar: reduced air pollution, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced reliance on fossil fuels. But not as many recognize the costs of wind and solar or understand how those costs hurt both the environment and people — especially people with lower incomes. The Editor says... 41
Inconvenient Truths on the 'New Energy Economy'. The Sheer Madness of Today's Left. [Scroll down] Normally, the mad Left would not object terribly to the ensuing fuel price hikes. Remember, Joe Biden bragged on the campaign trail that he would end fossil fuels during his tenure. Obama's soon-to-be Energy Secretary Steven Chu said during the 2008 campaign he wished to see American gas prices match those in Europe (i.e. $9-10 a gallon). And then President Obama himself did not disagree. He meekly added that such increases should be "gradual." He had also warned that his cap-and-trade initiatives would necessarily "skyrocket" electricity prices — without suggesting that his off-guard brag was even a gaffe of unexpectedly telling the truth. So green orthodoxy dictates that the highest possible fossil fuel prices are good. Unaffordability will hasten the end of gas and oil, ensuring currently subsidized but uneconomical green energy as the only remaining alternative. Imagining
Regime Change Without Tears. [Scroll down] Then there's California, going full-steam ahead to a
fossil-fuel-free future, where the state goals include:
Biden's America: The inmates are running the asylum. How does one sanely describe what has happened to the United States since Joe Biden was inaugurated? The nation has been effectively ruined by the policies of Biden's band of incompetents; every Cabinet member is a disaster, promoted for his previous record of failure. Not one of them is qualified for the jobs they've been given. [...] As evident to all by now, Biden is suffering from advancing dementia, so he is clearly not making any of the policy decisions that now bedevil America. Cutting off our vast supplies of oil is sheer moonbattery, as if Air Force One will soon be able to take off on solar or wind power. And yet Biden promises that "net zero" is near. Not even close. Fossil fuel is the gift that keeps on giving and will for eternity. Those who continue to hawk the hoax of climate change as a means to subdue the world's population are mind-numbed cultists whose dreams of a fossil-fuel-free world will never be realized, certainly not in their lifetimes. And yet, we are currently benighted by these authoritarian dreamers who think they can and should be able to control how the rest of us live our lives. Ukraine and the Great Energy Reset. [Scroll down] If there were ever a time for energy realism, it is now. The data are clear regarding the challenge, in cost and time, to abandon hydrocarbons. The European Union and the United States have, over the past two decades, spent more than $5 trillion and made countless mandates and exhortations in the service of replacing oil, natural gas, and coal. They didn't do these things to minimize the now starkly evident risks of dependence on Russia (or OPEC, for that matter) but to "decarbonize" the global energy system. Overall global energy demand is up 50 percent since 2000 because of economic and population growth. To put it in terms that illustrate the scales involved: that growth equals twice the total annual energy use of the United States. That growth was fueled by a 30 percent increase in global oil production and a 60 percent increase in both coal and natural gas production. Yes, the $5 trillion spent on alternatives did help reduce the hydrocarbon share of all energy use. It's down to 84 percent today — a mere two percentage-point decline relative to two decades ago. Meantime, burning wood still supplies far more energy than all the world's solar panels, and oil still fuels nearly 97 percent of all the world's transportation. Two weeks of War undoes thirty years of energy propaganda: Everyone wants fossil fuels. There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It's perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting? The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD. A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. The climate crisis disappearing act. [Scroll down] Mr. Biden forgot to mention that there is no evidence — none — of a climate crisis or of any attendant "devasting effects." His entire proposal to achieve net-zero US emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 would reduce global temperatures by less than 0.173 degrees C by 2100, using the EPA climate model under assumptions that exaggerate the effects of emissions reductions. (An immediate and permanent 50 percent emissions cut by China: 0.184 degrees C.) And "environmental justice," notwithstanding the infinite elasticity of that phrase, means massive subsidies for Democratic Party constituencies, both geographically and politically. It cannot mean anything else. Would the up-front cost of "weatheriz[ing] your homes and businesses" be less than the present value of the annual $500 energy-cost savings of Mr. Biden's imagination? If so, why are households and businesses not doing it already? Is the president oblivious to the reality that the expanded use of unconventional electricity has yielded skyrocketing energy costs in Europe and in the US despite all the subsidies and other policy favoritism? (As Pravda in its glory days would have put it: It is no accident that California has almost the highest electricity costs in the lower 48 states.) Is there anything "clean" about unconventional energy? Yes, emphatically, if we ignore the heavy-metal pollution, wildlife destruction, noise and flicker effects, massive and unsightly land use, landfill pollution, and all of the other environmental problems created by unconventional energy. And about that monthly savings of $80 "because you'll never have to pay at the gas pump again": Does Mr. Biden believe that the electricity consumed to recharge electric vehicles is free? Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer. We have been told that intermittent electricity from wind and solar, perhaps along with hydroelectric generation (hydro), can be the basis of a green economy. Things are increasingly not working out as planned, however. Natural gas or coal used for balancing the intermittent output of renewables is increasingly high-priced or not available. It is becoming clear that modelers who encouraged the view that a smooth transition to wind, solar, and hydro is possible have missed some important points. The Strategic Threat from Net-zero Emissions. [Scroll down] Analysis of published grid data in the US shows that, notwithstanding close to 10% of capacity contributed by unreliables, only 0.3% of total grid emissions is being abated. By the time emissions from construction and cabling are taken into account, that 0.3% becomes a net-zero cut in emissions. Forgive the pun. In any event, net-zero emissions are unnecessary. Climatologists perpetrated a grave error of physics in 1984 when they borrowed feedback method from control theory in engineering physics without understanding it. They forgot the Sun was shining. They added the large solar feedback response to, and miscounted it as part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to the small direct warming by greenhouse gases. Thus, they overstated CO2-driven warming fourfold. After correction, global warming will continue to be, as it has long been, small, slow, harmless, and net-beneficial. Not a cent need or should be spent on attempts — futile in any event — to abate it. Standing Up To Putin Means Ditching Net-Zero. Until now, Western leaders have been saying that the biggest threat to the world is climate change. Now comes Putin armed with nuclear weapons, tanks, and thousands of troops declaring his intent to overthrow Europe's post-Cold War order. The dilemma for the West: you can't win a geopolitical conflict lasting years or decades with an economy powered intermittently by wind turbines and solar panels. [...] One of the Biden administration's first actions was cancelling the license for the Keystone XL pipeline. Thanks to inadequate infrastructure connecting New England to the rest of the country and the century-old Jones Act — requiring that all goods moving by water between American ports travel on ships built, owned, and manned by Americans — the winter of 2018 saw Russian liquefied natural gasbeing brought ashore in Boston Harbor. The stampede of Green lemmings. Solar energy has a huge problem. Even on sunny days, almost nothing is generated to meet the demand peaks around breakfast time and dinner time — the solar energy union only works a six-hour day, goes on strike with little warning, and takes quite a few sickies. So, for at least 18 hours of every day, electricity must come from somewhere else. Then, around noon, the millions of solar panels pour out far more electricity than is needed, causing electrical and financial chaos in the electrical grid. Naturally, our green "engineers" see wind power as filling the solar energy gaps. But wind power has a union, too, and they take lots of sickies when there is no wind over large areas of the continent. And they down tool in storms, gales, or cyclones in case their whirling toys are damaged. So the green planners claim that batteries can solve these intermittent problems of the green energy twins. They will need humongous batteries. Batteries are just a crutch for a crippled generation system. High Electricity Prices Are Unavoidable with Solar and Wind! The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) establishes a "Net Zero" target by 2050 and the Draft Scoping Plan defines how to "achieve the State's bold clean energy and climate agenda". However, there hasn't been a feasibility plan that fully addresses the cost and technology necessary to provide reliable energy in the future all-electric net-zero New York energy system. [...] I have written extensively on implementation of the Climate Act because I believe the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy outstrip available technology such that it will adversely affect reliability and affordability, risk safety, affect lifestyles, will have worse impacts on the environment than the purported effects of climate change in New York, and cannot measurably affect global warming when implemented. Worthless Wind & Solar: Once Again Output Totally Collapses During Freezing Weather. Keen to survive when dead-calm, freezing weather sets in? You'd better have access to nuclear or fossil-fuelled power sources, simply because wind and solar generators are bound to deliver absolutely nothing, at all. Texans and Germans know all about it. Now, Canadians are getting a taste of what it is when you pin your daily energy hopes on the weather. In the middle of a bitter, frigid Northern hemisphere winter, wind and solar output have been utterly pathetic, notwithstanding claims that we're well on our way to an all wind and sun-powered future. You know, that old chestnut about the 'inevitable transition'? How Green Energy Fantasies Can Amplify Civil Unrest. Policies that make energy scarce and expensive, promoted by wealthy elites, result in domestic unrest while diminishing a nation's ability to vigorously pursue its national interests. Since 2011, this has been the case in Egypt, France, Kazakhstan, Germany, and others. Even California and Texas are grappling with similar problems. Texas is approaching the one-year anniversary of its epic four-day electrical blackout, triggered by a polar vortex bringing record cold and freezing rain, but exacerbated by the state's growing dependence on federally subsidized unreliable wind and solar. That conservative Texas, America's energy capital, isn't immune to the trendy push to decarbonize at all costs, should be a warning that the forces of energy chaos are formidable. Decades of federal subsidies for wind and solar have caused those resources to be overbuilt in the Lone Star State, leading to extreme price volatility and distorted, sometimes even negative, wholesale prices. The high cost of the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Center of the American Experiment analyzed Virginia's compliance with the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) legislation passed in 2020. This analysis models the cost of meeting the renewable energy mandates established by the VCEA and analyzes its impact on the electric grid's reliability. Our study examines two scenarios. One scenario, called the VCEA scenario, examines the cost and reliability impacts of fully meeting electricity demand in Virginia using a combination of the state's existing nuclear power plants and new offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, and battery storage technology by 2050. The other scenario, called the Reliable Resource Scenario (RRS), focuses on maintaining existing nuclear, natural gas, and coal-fired power plants to optimize affordability and reliability. It also adds natural gas generation capacity to reduce the need for electricity imports from other states. Fracking would have saved Britain from the energy crisis. Exports are flat. Imports are rising. The UK is, despite the best efforts of the Government, still struggling to pay its way in the world, and sterling remains perpetually at the mercy of foreign investors. It would be easy to blame the UK's woeful trade performance on our departure from the European Union, and no doubt some die-hard Remainers will do their best to make that case. And yet there is a far simpler explanation: our catastrophic energy policy. Figures from the Office for National Statistics published yesterday showed imports of energy rising by £800 million month-on-month and hitting historically high levels. Our deficit on natural gas alone is now running at almost £2 billion a month and has doubled in a year. That is crazy. The UK has plenty of gas of its own under the North Sea. And it has even more abundant reserves of shale oil and gas. When the Left Hates Green Energy. Although renewables have exhibited tremendous growth over the past year, a quick look at Germany's energy policy indicates that renewables are not sufficiently mature to power the entire globe. The country's heralded transition to carbon-neutral energy has suffered from a lack of reliability, high costs, and general ineffectiveness. Similar problems have arisen domestically, where ultra-liberal states such as California have struggled with reliability as they transition to renewables. Even in deep red Texas, a lack of reliability from the state's heavily subsidized wind power contributed in part to the deadly blackout that plagued residents last February. Indeed, countries that have shut down nuclear plants have typically encountered both higher emissions and higher energy costs. Germany to raze a 1,000-year-old forest in the name of 'going green'. Germany, as we well know with its Russian gas capers, is a highly industrialized society in need of a lot of energy. Fine and dandy. But how they get it presents increasingly bad options. They got rid of their nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown after a big earthquake in Japan, (despite Germany not being in a quake zone), driving themselves to dependency on foreign suppliers. That's presented problems for them what with Russia filling that role, so their other recourse has been the one Joe Biden is touting for America: Green energy — like wind and solar power. It's costly, requiring state subsidization, given that Germany is not a big sunshine zone nor particularly windy: But it's costlier than just the wasted cash. They also are now looking at the loss of their 1,000-year-old Reinhardswald old-growth forest — known as the Grimm's Fairy Tale forest. Backlash Against Renewables Surged In 2021, With 31 Big Wind And 13 Big Solar Projects Vetoed Across US. Despite the many false claims about the land intensity of renewables, the physics and the math don't lie. The incurably low power density of wind and solar energy means that they require cartoonish amounts of land. Furthermore, the notion that there are plenty of rural towns and counties who just can't wait to have forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines and oceans of solar panels inflicted upon them is nothing more than rank propaganda. Furthermore, as the industry has grown, the land grab (and ocean grab) being attempted by companies like NextEra Energy, Invenergy, Avangrid, Copenhagen Energy Partners, and others, has spawned a backlash that is raging from the fishing docks in Montauk and Rhode Island, to McKibben's home state of Vermont (where, by the way, you can't build wind turbines), out west to Shasta County and Oahu, as well as in Canada, Germany, France, Australia and other countries around the world. Fossil Fuels Aren't Going Anywhere As New England Learns. On the evening of Tuesday, January 11, New England's grid provided key insights on what cold snaps amid a forced energy transition look like — stagnant windmills and burning oil for electricity. ISO New England, the region's grid operator, utilized oil capacity to provide for 17 percent of the region's electricity needs as temperatures dropped well below freezing. Because of high natural gas prices, and scant availability of the region's renewable capacity, the most economical move for the region was to bring oil and coal fired capacity online to power the grid. Additionally, a large portion of the renewable capacity that was online on Tuesday wasn't exactly the green utopian vision that the energy transition movement has envisioned. Of the 7 percent of overall capacity that came from non-hydro renewables, 29 percent was from burning trash, with an additional 23 percent came from burning wood. So, in this instance, less than four percent of the grid was powered by wind and solar. The EU is sabotaging its economy in the name of unattainable climate targets. As Europe is suffering an energy crisis, the European Union continues to boast about its energy strategy, the "European green deal", which is supposed to point the way to the rest of the world. This is all happening under pressure from countless green NGOs, combined with a lack of critical reflection which is prevalent within EU institutions. Faced with the COP26 fiasco, the EU failed to notice that the rest of the world is not following it. Now, it continues to stubbornly promote renawble energy even more, even though this EU policy is at the root of Europe's energy crisis. Natural gas prices on the spot market have risen fivefold in one year, due to a very strong economic recovery in China which caused an equally strong increase in its energy consumption. Thanks to an abundance of natural gas — the energy source of the future — a single, liquid market now exists between the EU and Asia, while the geographically isolated United States rejoices in the very low price of its shale gas. Stanford Professor's Plan to Save the World. Professor [Mark] Jacobson built a showcase solar house, presumably to demonstrate the practicality of his ideas. His house can be seen here. There are solar panels, batteries, and Tesla battery-powered cars. One little problem is that the house is still connected to the electric grid. Clearly when the solar fails due to clouds, and the batteries run flat, the electric company steps in. The operators of the electric grid must maintain infrastructure — generating plants and distribution lines — sufficient to keep every solar house running when the sun and batteries fail. Given the massive subsidies that usually apply to rooftop solar homes, the homeowners don't pay their fair share for that infrastructure. Non-solar electric customers subsidize the solar homes. Residential roof top solar is essentially a symbol that makes no sense economically or environmentally. Green Technologies Have a Glaring Problem of Scale. In the context of the massive attention paid to climate change, nations around the world have committed to substantially reducing and even eliminating their carbon emissions by 2050. Achieving these goals relies on several 'green' technologies that would form the basis of a future energy system. As envisioned, mass deployment of these technologies will encounter fundamental physical limits that call into question their ability to function as replacements for their equivalents in the current energy system. By placing firm targets, nations around the world have committed to terminating their carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 to offer confidence that a better world is achievable if only society implements the right policies and employs the correct technologies. This assumption is inaccurate, based on a view that is at odds with nature. Due to unavoidable physical constraints, future green technologies offer little promise for achieving economies of scale. Many of the improvements suggested to improve their performance remain marginal and frequently come with the environmental costs of additional embedded energy requirements, extensive land use and greater material complexity. Assessing Virginia's Hidden Wind And Solar Costs. Among Governor Glenn Youngkin's first actions was Executive Order #9 initiating Virginia's withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Northeastern U.S. "carbon market" that sets and enforces emission limits for coal and gas power plants. RGGI also lets utilities buy "carbon credits" when emissions exceed those limits, passing costs on to families, businesses, hospitals and schools. Special interests will contest withdrawal, but the EO sets the proper tone for reforming Virginia's energy system. Meanwhile, though, the 2020 "Virginia Clean Economy Act" still requires that utility companies close all fossil fuel generating plants — and replace them with wind and solar power by 2045. The VCEA also stipulates that "not less than 5,200 megawatts" (rated capacity) of that "clean, renewable" power must come from offshore wind. That translates into 370 14-MW turbines, 430 12-MW turbines or 865 6-MW turbines off the Virginia coast. Construction of the first 180 has already hit cost overruns and could reach $10 billion. Stop posing. Start drilling. The current energy crisis, with domestic bills set to rise some 50 percent in April, has confronted Net Zero-loving Westminster elites with the stark reality of the choices they've made. Twenty-five retail energy companies have gone bust, another has been nationalised, along with a fertiliser plant — so that it can produce carbon dioxide for fizzy drinks — all now featuring as extra costs on either bills or taxes. We are shipping fracked gas from the United States while banning fracking here, and we have undermined investment in the North Sea, while allowing Putin to use Nord Stream 2 as a bargaining chip over the future sovereignty of the Ukraine. It is literally the case that we are using public money to import gas to manufacture CO2, while claiming to lead the world on tackling climate change. Unsurprisingly, no one is following. Lights Out for New York? New York can have 100 percent zero emissions electricity in 2040. But it can't have enough of it to keep the lights and the heat on. Last night [12/20/2021], New York's Climate Action Council voted to release its Draft Scoping Plan ("the Plan") to implement the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Unfortunately, the Plan fails in its most important task — ensuring a reliable supply of electricity at all times. This risks leaving New York in the dark due to severe electricity shortages. The Plan explicitly admits that in 2040 there may be a gap of 15-25 gigawatts of electricity production, as much as 10 percent of the state's electricity needs, according to the New York Independent Systems Operator (NYISO). The gap is much more than it takes to power every home in the state, and is equal to as many as 10 hydroelectric or nuclear power plants. The problem is that the Plan calls for a dramatic increase in electricity demand without sufficient increase in production. The Catastrophe of Nord Stream 2. There is a real possibility that the European Union (EU) will endure major fuel shortages this winter. Record-high electricity prices are currently the norm with no end in sight. Russian president Vladimir Putin astutely understands that the EU heavily relies on Russian natural gas, which the Nord Stream 1 and now 2 (NS2) natural gas pipeline will provide. [...] The Germans and EU have created a geopolitical nightmare for every EU member state, NATO, and the U.S. by following net-zero dogma, allowing Putin to dictate whether the Europeans are going to receive enough Russian natural gas to heat their countries this winter. The Texas blackout of mid-February 2021 should make the EU realize the foolishness of relying on renewables, the push for net-zero or attempting to electrify entire economies. This will only lead to energy poverty, death, and the demise of European security backstopped by NATO.
It wasn't very windy this morning, and that's a problem. It is a well-understood phenomenon that wind generation in the Midwest essentially disappears when the mercury dips below -22° F. Electricity generation from wind turbines drops under these circumstances because wind turbines are programmed to automatically shut off when the temperatures get this cold to prevent them from breaking. Ironically, wind turbines are actually net consumers of power during these periods because they have electric heaters installed in the gearboxes to keep the oil inside the wind turbines from freezing. Hourly data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows wind production plummeted yesterday as the temperatures dropped overnight. Falling wind output resulted in an increase in coal, natural gas, and oil generation. Green energy firms [are] the biggest corporate welfare recipients ever. How much would solar, wind and electric vehicle companies have gotten in federal handouts and tax loopholes in President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill? Well over $100 billion in taxpayer largesse. If all the tax credits are included, that number could reach half a trillion dollars. No other industry in American history has ever received this lucrative a paycheck. The folks at the Institute for Energy Research calculated that this is on top of the more than $150 billion in subsidies these industries received from Uncle Sam in the last 30 years. The umbilical cord to taxpayer wallets never gets cut. Yet, laughably, the left says all these subsidies to "green energy" are necessary for an "infant industry." Really? Does Big Wind or Big Solar ever grow up? Incidentally, our ancestors were using windmills and solar panels during the Middle Ages. Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Renewable Energy Wall? [Scroll down] Worldwide, fossil fuel usage continues on a steady upward trajectory, pretty much as if the whole decarbonization obsession didn't exist. But then there is that handful of very wealthy, small population jurisdictions that have convinced themselves that they can save the planet by eliminating their own fossil fuel use and substituting wind and solar power, even as the rest of the world laughs at them behind their back. Four jurisdictions stand out from the rest, two of them European countries and the other two U.S. states: Germany, the UK, California, and New York. In the aggregate, these four places have population of about 200 million, or about 2.5% or world population. Each of the four has announced draconian targets for net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, with even more stringent interim targets for eliminating carbon emissions from things like electricity generation and home heating. All these places, despite their wealth and seeming sophistication, are embarking on their ambitious plans without ever having conducted any kind of detailed engineering study of how their new proposed energy systems will work or how much they will cost. Europe Shows the Way to Energy Chaos and Disaster. Europe's energy crisis has been aggravated by its policy choices designed to stifle investment in fossil fuel projects and encourage renewable energy. All of this is ostensibly to reach a net zero carbon future, which is literally impossible in that fossil fuels are needed to make renewable energy technologies. The result has been record-high energy prices, blackouts and economic dislocation, placing more Europeans into energy poverty where they cannot pay their energy bills or have to choose not to heat their homes. The dire situation has prompted Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) to comment, "The upheaval in Europe is giving us a preview of the economic fiasco caused by underinvesting in reliable and secure fossil fuels. For Democrats, Europe is a model. For the rest of us, it should be a warning." Natural gas prices in Europe are five times what they were in early 2021 and they are approaching 10 times the equivalent price in the United States. Decarbonization cannot manufacture the products demanded by civilization. As late as the 1800's, the world was "decarbonized" as there were no coal or natural gas power plants, and what the Beverly Hillbillies situation comedies of the 1960's theme song called "oil that is, black gold, Texas tea", had not been discovered as something that could be manufactured into usable products. Before the 1900's life was hard and dirty, and most people never traveled 100-200 miles from where they were born, and life expectancy was short. Today, crude oil is manufactured into all the products used in the medical industry, fertilizers, electronics and more than 6,000 other products that are the basis of lifestyles and economies. Now, worldwide efforts are in place to have electricity generated by breezes and sunshine to decarbonize the electricity being generated by coal and natural gas. The "other" fossil fuel of crude oil is caught on the chopping block efforts to eliminate ALL 3 fossil fuels, but crude oil is seldom ever used for electricity generation! Renewables' Reckoning Is Long Overdue. It's not just that renewables are so intermittent and unreliable that they must be legislated and subsidized; eat up land; will require more storage than physically possible; have nearly bankrupted and blacked out Germany with little emissions improvement; and are doing the same to California and other jurisdictions adopting mandates. Despite these indisputable truths, the White House's policy remains "a carbon pollution-free electricity sector" by 2035 and "net-zero emissions economy-wide" by 2050. Yet three additional existential threats must and will lay the renewables narrative bare. The first was reflected in Joe Biden's recent signing of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Forty-five percent of the worldwide supply of solar-grade polysilicon stems from China's Xinjiang region, where it is reportedly largely produced by enslaved Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims. (China overall produces three-quarters of polysilicon and 95% of solar wafers.) Skeptics argue public should know true costs of state's push for carbon-free grid. A government watchdog group is urging New Yorkers to be skeptical of claims that the state's ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gases will yield billions of dollars in economic benefits, with a new analysis finding it could lead to a net cost of up to $300 billion. The assessment for the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, argues that the Climate Leadership and Protection Act, enacted in 2019, questions the assumptions in the legislation that target dates for slashing the emissions of greenhouse gases can be achieved without damaging the state's business climate. "I would say at stake is the cost to New Yorkers and whether the benefits of it are really going to be worth the costs they are going to be paying," said James E. Hanley, the researcher who completed the study. Utility Bills to Rise up to 10 Percent to Green NYC Electricity Grid. A pair of recently inked contracts to fuel more than one-third of New York City's electricity grid with renewable energy will raise monthly electricity bills for upstate ratepayers up to 9.9 percent once the projects are on-line. Both downstate (ConEdison) and upstate (National Grid) customers will bear the project costs equally based on load share, but upstate customers — who tend to have lower electricity bills — are expected to experience roughly double the percentage increase. That's according to a petition just filed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which is now seeking to have the contracted projects approved by the Public Service Commission. Doug Casey on Why the Carbon Hysteria is a Huge Threat to Your Personal Freedom and Financial Wellbeing. [Scroll down] I'm all for green energy in principle. There's no question that solar and wind are worthwhile and effective for select applications — generally small, isolated, special locations where conventional fuel is inconvenient or too costly. The efficiency of solar has been tremendously improved over the last few decades, as has wind efficiency. But neither make any sense for mass base-load power in industrial economies. With further technological advances, they may become more economic someday. Perhaps people will eventually put large collectors in high Earth orbit and microwave the power down to the surface. There are all kinds of sci-fi possibilities. But right now, "green" is just a nice word for "stupid," "ideological," or "government-sponsored." Doing things the green way takes power away from the markets, which is where people vote with their dollars. It instead places power in the hands of ideologues and bureaucrats. Europe's Energy Crisis Better Wake America Up. [Scroll down] Britain and various US cities and states want to ban natural gas heating and cooking — and replace them with expensive heat pumps and other electric appliances, powered by expensive, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels. Meanwhile, energy prices have been skyrocketing in response to Covid recovery and anti-fossil-fuel policies. Climate theory has long held that most 21st-century warming will occur in northern latitudes during winter months. But now we're now told a warming Arctic could also be causing colder winters, which could endanger far more people than rising temperatures or more frequent heatwaves. Actually,far more people die in cold weather than in hot weather or heat waves. In the United States and Canada, cold causes 45 times more deaths per year than heat: 113,000 from cold versus 2,500 from heat. Worldwide, where air conditioning is far less available, some 1,700,000 people die annually from cold versus 300,000 from heat — a ratio of almost 6:1. Green energy: A bubble in unrealistic expectations? Presently, natural gas is going for $29 per million British Thermal Units (BTUs) in Europe, a quadruple compared to the same time in 2020, versus "just" $5 in the US, which is a mere doubling. As a consequence, wholesale energy cost in Great Britain rose an unheard of 60% even before summer ended. Reportedly, nine UK energy companies are on the brink of failure at this time due to their inability to fully pass on the enormous cost increases. As a result, the British government is reportedly on the verge of nationalizing some of these entities — supposedly, temporarily — to prevent them from collapsing. (CNBC reported on Wednesday [10/6/2021] that UK natural gas prices are now up 800% this year; in the US, nat gas rose 20% on Tuesday alone, before giving back a bit more than half of that the next day.) Serious food shortages are expected after exorbitant natural gas costs forced most of England's commercial production of CO2 to shut down. (CO2 is used both for stunning animals prior to slaughter and also in food packaging.) Additionally, ballistic natural gas prices have forced the closure of two big US fertilizer plants due to a potential shortfall of ammonium nitrate of which "nat gas" is a key feedstock. How Many People Must Be Thrown into the Volcano Before the Left Is Happy? The whole "global warming" schtick is predicated on the idea that fractional temperature deviations (what climatologists and geologists understood as a natural condition of the planet before their expertise could be used for political and financial gain) are a threat to human life. Yet temperature fluctuations are poppycock compared to the loss of human life that will be precipitated by choking off the fuels necessary to generate electrical power. Where electricity is neither stable nor cheap, surviving the winter with scant heat is never guaranteed. Where refrigeration, water pumps, and lighting are scarce, so too are medicines, food, and personal security. Killing electricity means killing people, plain and simple. Net zero greenhouse emissions is an impossible goal. The scale of the effort needed to meet net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) targets is extremely large and appears impossible to achieve on a reasonable timescale. All alternatives to current en-ergy systems start from relatively very low bases, and face serious, and perhaps insurmountable, environmental, economic and materials-availability barriers. The debate over net zero needs much more honesty, a sense of realism, and an appreciation of broader global developmental, economic and environmental needs. Even if 40% of the UK's fossil fuel use could be eliminated through efficiency improvements, 120 GW of new, continuous CO2-free energy generation capacity — equivalent to 40 nuclear power plants of Hinkley Point C size or 300 GW of new offshore wind — would be required to replace the remaining 60%. The capital cost would be over £1 trillion, even without the necessary back-up. Storage costs and operating costs would also be very high. The UK government has announced a new target of reducing GHG emissions to 22% of 1990 levels by 2035. Red China Tried To Go Green, Now It's Going Dark. Last year, President Xi Jinping announced that Communist China was going to go carbon neutral by 2060. Like every Communist 5-year-plan, it began with lies and ended in disaster. The 14th Renewable Energy Development Five Year Plan would have China dominate the green energy industry and increase its share of non-fossil fuel energy from 15% to 20%. That was last year. This year, China is importing American coal to keep the lights on in its cities. China's desperate buying spree has sent the price of lignite coal, the dirtiest coal, up from $20 to $120. While Democrats are trying to destroy coal in America, our shipments of coal have increased 30 times making China our second biggest coal market. And we have the "green energy" of the reds to thank for it. The Real Cost of Government Mandated Wind and Solar. The government and big financial institutions promote a fraudulent analysis of the cost of solar and wind electricity. Their narrative is that wind and solar are competitive with traditional fossil fuels and that the cost of wind and solar is rapidly dropping. Academics and the media amplify and spread the fraudulent analysis. The basis of the fraud is a simple comparison of the cost per kilowatt hour at the plant fence for electricity produced by wind or solar versus electricity produced by a traditional plant. Some or all of the massive subsidies for wind and solar are ignored in such comparisons. With such a rigged comparison, wind or solar may seem competitive. A proper comparison reveals that wind or solar are five or even ten times more expensive than natural gas or coal electricity. The Grid Isn't Ready for the Renewable Revolution. You can almost hear the electrical grid creaking and groaning under the weight of the future, as two forces converge to push it — often literally — to its breaking point. One force is climate change, which can exacerbate disasters that take down parts of the grid, as Hurricane Ida did this summer, knocking New Orleans offline just as a heat wave settled in. Or extreme weather can suddenly spike the demand for energy just when the grid is least able to provide it, like during last winter's Texas freeze and subsequent power system failure. The other force, ironically enough, is the massive deployment of renewable power — the best way to fight climate change and avoid these kinds of disasters. But this will demand a fundamental rethinking of how the grid operates. Gas and coal power plants generate continuous power by burning fuel, and how much they burn can be modulated based on the demand for electricity. But the generation of solar and wind energy fluctuates. The sun doesn't shine at night, and turbines don't turn without wind. This can create a mismatch between demand and supply. A Closer Look at Renewable-Energy Disposal. Every source of energy — including fossil fuels, wind and solar power, and nuclear power — have both positive and negative attributes. Often, proponents or opponents of a certain source gloss over, or hype up, specific challenges or benefits in order to promote their favored solution. In order to make informed decisions about which energy sources can meet America's energy needs, policymakers and the public need to know about the entire life cycle of all energy sources. For example, proponents of fossil fuels often highlight their affordability and reliability, while ignoring the effects of waste disposal or extraction. Likewise, renewable-energy advocates focus on "zero emissions" without considering the materials used in the production of the source or the ultimate disposal of the byproducts or equipment. Climate Crazies Claim Global Stilling At Fault For Wind Turbines Not Producing Energy. The far-left Gaia worshippers say that the "Climate Crisis" is responsible for floods, droughts, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. A longer list of crazy things blamed on climate change is at the end of this post. Their latest crazy belief is that their unproven hypothesis caused the slowing of global wind speeds. Is there nothing that "climate change" doesn't affect? [...] I'm old enough to remember when climate grifter and former Vice President Al Gore insisted that lower Manhattan, San Francisco, and half of Florida would be underwater by now because of the terrifying melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. That didn't happen. Frankly, the climate hysterics have been 0 for 50 in half a century of their Chicken Little-like predictions of an "eco-pocalypse." China's Stunning Green Energy Collapse Should Come As No Surprise. As reported in the FrontPageMag article "Red China Tried To Go Green, Now It's Going Dark," the U.S. is currently experiencing widespread supply chain disruptions caused in part by China's disastrous renewable energy collapse, which has led to a severely crippled economy brought on by widespread power blackouts. Democrats tout green energy as a "clean" and "renewable" source of electricity. They also say that producing green energy has minimal impact on the environment (that's a flat-out lie). For those who have been led to believe that green energy is "clean," I strongly urge them to watch Michael Moore's jaw-dropping documentary, "Planet of the Humans." The 2019 feature length film exposes the Democratic Party's push for subsidized wind and solar energy for what it is: a brazen environmental hoax that causes eye-popping harm to the environment, while funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to Al Gore and other inside investors in government-backed green energy projects. The Green Agenda or How This Energy Crisis is Different from All Others. The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally. Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures. What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy. What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months. Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide. Heating costs in NY expected to spike for many customers this winter. A new forecast on energy costs for heating in New York state calls for a spike in those expenses this coming winter. During an annual presentation by the state of the NY State Public Service Commission last week, staffers said that on average, statewide, consumers will be hit with about a 21% increase in heating costs over the entire winter compared to last year. Rochester Gas and Electric is forecasting about a 33% average increase over the winter for natural gas customers. The Editor says... 'Global stilling' blamed as wind speeds drop across Europe and threaten to drive up energy prices. Industry experts are warning that climate change may have caused wind speeds in Europe to plummet this year in news that threatens to drive energy prices even higher. Long labelled as a saviour of the energy industry, wind farms have cropped up across the continent in recent years and have been billed a low-cost, renewable and dependable source of power. Increased dependence on green forms of energy has also been touted as a solution to Britain's national gas crisis, amid soaring global prices and energy bills set to reach record-breaking levels. The Editor says... Renewables won't keep the lights on. Boris Johnson announced yet another new green target at last week's Conservative Party conference. All the UK's electricity must be generated from 'clean' sources by 2035. According to Boris, if Britain drops gas turbines and replaces them with renewable-energy production, 'our own clean power' will help put a lid on the soaring electricity prices that are blighting Britain right now. If that's the plan, we have a long way to go. In 2020, 43.1 percent of the UK's electric power was supplied by renewables. Even the BBC's greener-than-thou environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, is sceptical. 'Hitting the 2035 goal won't be easy — especially at a time when finances are squeezed. And the public won't appreciate any home-grown energy shortages', he argues. The Future Of Power Generation. The current consensus on energy and climate is both unserious and incoherent. Burning fossil fuels is said to be responsible for global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions. Although nuclear power is a carbon-free energy solution, much of the public seems to be more afraid of a reactor accident than extinction by the greenhouse effect. Solar and energy conservation have been media darlings since the energy crisis of the 1970s. President Barack Obama spent $100 billion on "green energy" in just one stimulus package. Yet there is little to show for it. World energy use is projected to grow rapidly. Solar accounts for only one percent of energy production. Although I can't agree with his conclusions, Director Jeff Gibbs did an outstanding job of skewering solar energy in [...] Planet of the Humans. (Michael Moore is executive producer.) Ethanol, hydrogen-powered cars, solar cells, and other supposedly renewable solutions are exposed as frauds that are dependent on fossil fuel once you scratch the surface. Brazil's forests are being converted to sugar cane and burned as part of the ethanol scam that Goldman Sachs promotes. The manufacturing process requires a great deal of electric power. There is an amusing scene in the film where a manager explains that Iowa is the perfect location for an ethanol plant because it is near coal deposits. South Australia's big Tesla battery [is being] sued for not helping during Queensland coal power station failure. South Australia's big Tesla battery is being sued for allegedly failing to live up to its promises to help rescue the power grid in the event of catastrophe. The 150-megawatt battery was being paid to be on standby to pump energy into the grid at short notice in order to arrest a system failure in the event of a major power plant or transmission failure. But the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) alleges it did not deliver as promised during a major Queensland coal plant failure in 2019, "creating a risk to power system security and stability". The Federal Court legal action against owner Hornsdale Power Reserve comes months after the AER successfully sought financial penalties from wind farms for failures associated with South Australia's statewide blackout. Those $4.5 trillion 'infrastructure' and 'reconciliation' bills are far more radical and dangerous than you think. These "woke" Democrats are determined to break us. The premise of both bills is that by enjoying safe and comfortable lifestyles, we are causing floods, fires and droughts that are ruining the planet. They say this is because we are burning too much fossil fuel. The goal of both bills is to cut America's fossil fuel use in half during the next nine years. If these bills become law, the federal government will heavily fine every power company that does not systematically shut down most of its coal, oil, and natural gas power plants by then. It would also pay billions as bribes to companies to build and use new solar panels and wind turbines instead. The federal government would also pay people, businesses, and schools to buy electric cars, trucks, and buses. It would also pay for more solar panels. This would permanently end prosperity in America. Solar panels and wind turbines cannot power a modern economy. The electricity they generate is too weak, intermittent, unpredictable, and unreliable. Solar and wind energy is often wasted. It cannot be stored when not needed. It saves little if any fossil fuel. That is because back-up generators must always be running to give the grid steady power whenever the wind stops, night falls, or a cloud goes by. Crippling Cost of Ontario's Obsession With Wind Power: 71% Increase in Power Bills. Ontario's government determined to eliminate coal-fired power in the deluded belief that wind power would soon replace it. The result, as the protesters above predicted, has been an unmitigated economic disaster. Power prices in the Province have spiralled out of control, as a direct result of its suicidal energy policy. Thousands of jobs have been destroyed, never to return. A recent paper from Elmira Aliakbari, Kenneth Green, Ross McKittrick and Ashley Stedman — Understanding the Changes in Ontario Electricity Market and Their Effects — demonstrates that the disaster was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable. Understanding the Changes in Ontario's Electricity Markets and Their Effects. When it comes to energy, policymakers in Ontario have made poor policy decisions, resulting in rising electricity costs, lower employment, and lower competitiveness, while achieving minimal environmental benefits. Ontario's main policy shift began around 2005 when the government made a decision to begin phasing out coal. [...] The high cost associated with aggressively promoting renewable sources is particularly troubling given the relatively small amount of electricity generated by these sources. Ontario's decision to phase out coal contributed to rising electricity costs in the province, a decision justified at the time with claims that it would yield large environmental and health benefits. The subsequent research showed that shuttering these power plants had very little effect on air pollution. Between 2005 and 2015, the province decided to increase its renewable capacity to facilitate the coal phase-out. However, since renewable sources are not as reliable as traditional sources, the government contracted for more natural gas capacity as a back-up. As a result of these structural shifts and poor governance, electricity costs have risen substantially in Ontario. Dutch Greenhouses Go Dark As Energy Crisis Worsens; Food Inflation Fears Mount For Europe. Soaring European gas and electricity prices are getting worse by the day, forcing a vast network of Dutch glasshouses, the largest on the continent, to limit output or go entirely dark, according to Bloomberg. This could have a devastating impact on food supplies and boost prices ahead of the holiday season. The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant and is the world's second-largest exporter of food by value, primarily thanks to its 25,000 acres of greenhouses that supply Europe with vegetables like cucumbers, tomatoes and bell peppers, and flowers. And It's Not Even Winter! Europe's Energy Supply Debacle Already Here: Painful Prices, Shortages, Blackouts. Empty gas stocks, windless days, disrupted supply lines, CO2 certificates, soaring inflation, blackouts, bitter cold and other forebode a winter of discontent across Europe. Recently Bloomberg reported on how Europe was on the path to a severe energy crisis this winter, with risks of blackouts. [Tweet] Germany's N-TV also reports a dire picture, writing "Europe's gas storage facilities are largely empty, and supplies are not flowing as they should. Already surging energy prices are forcing the first companies to close factories in Europe, and German companies like BASF and copper producer Aurubis are complaining about extremely high prices for energy sources. Greenie energy leaves Europe in the cold — the freezing cold. Greenie energy has been vaunted by politicians such as President Obama, Joe Biden, and virtually every European politician in power as progress itself, the way forward, the wave of the future. Anyone who's got problems with it, as Obama smarmily assured, is "stuck in the past." Turns out that's [false]. After going green and shutting down its coal, fossil fuel, fracking, and nuclear energy production, and feeling mighty virtuous for doing it, Europe is now going cold — freezing cold. The region faces a very bad winter ahead with energy shortages across the board. Seems green energy can do everything to make a lefty European feel good except produce the actual energy. So, courtesy of the phony prophets of greenie virtue, Europeans are going without, even as Joe Biden is [trying] to take America down that cliff. Europe is switching back to coal to survive bleak winter. Having banned fracking in much of Europe and with low wind speeds compounding the continent's energy crisis, gas prices in the UK and much of Europe are going through the roof. A shortage of affordable natural gas is forcing European companies to switch to coal to survive a bleak winter. How the Tories have fuelled Britain's energy crisis. Britain is caught in an energy crisis of the government's own making. It is true that gas prices have spiked all over the world — but Britain is suffering more than most. Energy suppliers are going out of business, thanks to the government's price cap. Even fertiliser companies are going bust, with serious knock-on effects for the food industry: the British Meat Processors Association says shortages could hit within a fortnight. The trigger for this crisis has been the sudden surge in demand for gas as the global economy recovers from the Covid lockdowns. Gas prices have doubled in the United States, for example. In Britain, however, prices are five times higher. Why? Because America exploited fracking technology and capitalised on its huge inland gas reserves. Britain passed up the fracking opportunity, in spite of vast reserves found in Lancashire and Yorkshire. We are living with the consequences. While the UK government is right to phase out the burning of coal (easily the dirtiest form of energy, emitting around twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants), it is also running down our gas infrastructure without providing a viable alternative. The Editor says... Europe's energy crisis: A switch back to coal is on the cards. Having banned fracking in much of Europe and with low wind speeds compounding the continent's energy crisis, gas prices in the UK and much of Europe are going through the roof. A shortage of affordable natural gas is forcing European companies to switch to coal to survive a bleak winter. Low wind speeds have compounded the continent's energy crisis, prompting utilities to turn to coal to bridge the shortfall. The deepening energy crisis comes at a time when Western governments are trying to push emerging and developing countries to agree Net Zero targets at COP26 in Glasgow later this year. Europe's embarrassing coal comeback will make any Net Zero demands almost impossible for politicians from the UK and Europe not least because they are also dealing with the growing fear of a voter backlash from the cost of Net Zero and rising energy bills. The Spectator's editorial this week as spot on when it warned Boris Johnson that instead leading the world on Net Zero he "should be prepared for other countries to see, in his energy policy, an example of what not to do". Energy Crisis Hits Europe With Natural Gas Prices Rising a Whopping 250 Percent. The British energy industry is headed for a big shakeup as wholesale natural gas prices have been climbing since the beginning of this year. The latest gas price at the Dutch TTF hub, a European benchmark, gained on Monday [9/202021] to trade at 73.150 euros ($85.69) per megawatt-hour, close to the record high seen last week. The benchmark has risen a whopping 250 percent since January. The Editor says... The Deep Optimism Manifesto. [Scroll down] Renewable energy is not a viable solution. Wind farms and solar arrays destroy the very land and nature we are trying to save, are not scalable, and the economics don't work. The race to Net Zero is a race to the bottom, it's based on false assumptions, the science is seriously distorted, and it has impossible targets. They must all be backed up 100 percent by dispatchable power to make up for shortfalls in production and storage, which will consume more minerals and resources than we are prepared to mine. We will need technology we don't have today, but are renewables worth the cost? Renewables: Is There Anything They Can't Do? [Scroll down] So the transition to so-called renewable energy has really been raking European energy markets over the coals. Literally, in fact, as coal-fired power plants are having to increase production to meet energy demands. And it's making Russia into a one nation OPEC, the only country in the region with an excess of natural gas which will happily export it... for some significant diplomatic concessions. Quite the bind the E.U. finds itself in. Perhaps they might consider changing course, accepting that shutting down their natural gas and nuclear power plants, not to mention banning fracking, is a mistake? Doesn't sound like it! Due in part to renewables... What's causing soaring energy prices in Europe. Europe is facing an energy crunch caused by surging wholesale prices for natural gas, raising the prospects of higher utility bills for customers and forcing some manufacturers to halt operations. A complex brew of forces is causing the European gas market's unprecedented surge, creating a "perfect storm" of higher than expected demand and low supply. [...] There are other factors at play. Stronger demand for liquefied natural gas exports in more competitive Asian markets has diverted cargoes away from Europe. Europe has also experienced unusually calm weather in recent weeks, leading to less wind power output and creating additional strain on gas supply, particularly in the United Kingdom, where wind normally provides 20% of the country's electricity. Will "Green" Energy Destroy Europe? One of today's most important, and weirdly under-reported, news stories is the economic crisis that threatens Great Britain and, more broadly, Europe. Its most striking current manifestation is a food shortage in the U.K. ["]Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain's commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down. [...] The closure of two fertiliser plants in northern England and others in Europe has left the food and drink industry facing a shortage of carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of fertiliser manufacturing.["] The fertilizer plants shut down because of sky-high energy costs: ["]Gas prices in Britain hit record highs this week on fears of energy supply shortages in the winter.["] [...] It is fitting that the current crisis began when the wind stopped blowing in the North Sea, leading to a spike in demand for natural gas. But the problem is inherent: wind turbines and solar panels cannot fuel the world. The delusion that they can do so has led most European countries (France is a notable exception) to fail to provide adequate dispatchable sources of power: nuclear, hydroelectric, coal and natural gas. It remains to be seen whether the Europeans will correct this fundamental policy error before it is too late. Green Britain faces food shortages as energy crisis shuts down factories. As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves. Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions — poorer, colder, hungrier — unless Government changes course. The Disaster of Green Energy. I didn't write anything yesterday [8/12/2021] because my day was taken up with two anti-Green Energy events here in Minnesota. The first was a lunch in Albert Lea, which anti-wind activists drove up to four hours to attend. The second was a cocktail hour program in a Minneapolis suburb attended by more than 250. The speakers were Isaac Orr of Center of the American Experiment and Robert Bryce, one of the country's top energy experts. The title of the program was "The Environmental Catastrophe of Wind and Solar Power," although the program's content was somewhat broader than that. What follows are a few of the slides from yesterday's presentation that illustrate the foolishness of trying to power our electric grid — let alone our whole economy! — with wind and solar energy. Along with inherent intermittency and ridiculously high cost, one of the fundamental problems with wind turbines and solar panels is that they require an enormous quantity of minerals. This is because they are such low-density sources of energy. Low-Density
Intermittent Energy isn't Renewable.
Massive Tesla battery catches fire, takes 150 firefighters, 30 fire trucks four days to put out. A blaze stemming from Tesla's largest battery pack took more than 150 firefighters and dozens of fire trucks to extinguish, Australian authorities said in a statement Monday [8/1/2021]. The fire, which was fully contained as of Monday, began at the Victorian Big Battery project Friday morning in Victoria, Australia, after a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire during testing, Business Insider reported. "There was one battery pack on fire to start with, but it did spread to a second pack that was very close to it," Ian Beswicke, Country Fire Authority (CFA) incident controller and a district assistant chief fire officer, said in a statement. "The plan is that we keep it cool on the outside and protect the exposures so it doesn't cause any issues for any of the other components in the power station," Beswicke added. Tesla Battery Fire Brought Under Control After Three Days Burning. A blaze at a massive Tesla battery site in Australia that started three days ago was brought under control on Monday [8/2/2021], firefighters said. Emergency services were first called to the Victoria Big Battery project — built by French renewable energy firm Neoen using Tesla batteries — on Friday morning. Big batteries could be bigger bombs than Beirut fertilizer. It turns out storing Megawatts of high density energy in a confined space is "like a bomb". Who could have seen that coming, apart from everyone who understands what a megawatt is? Clean, green, noisy and explosive. And they are "unregulated" in the UK. Now is the Time to Get Serious About Nuclear Energy. While no other "carbon free" method of producing electricity comes even close to nuclear energy, climate change alarmists refuse to even consider the option. If you do an objective benefit-cost analysis of nuclear energy compared to the so-called "green energies" of solar and wind you learn that green energies have serious time and space limitations. For example, you learn that with solar and wind there is a disconnect between when they're produced and when they're consumed. Nighttime and cloudy days happen, and the wind does not always blow, but the need for electricity goes on. The only solution to those limitations is reliance on batteries. Batteries, of course, have their own problems. It takes at least an hour and usually eight hours to charge an electric vehicle's batteries. It takes only five minutes to fill your gas tank. The Real Reason They Blame Heat Deaths, Blackouts, and Forest Fires on Climate Change Is Because They're Causing Them. [Scroll down] [W]hat determines whether or not there is enough electricity is whether there are sufficient "baseload," reliable power plants and fuels, not marginally higher use of air conditioners. The people who manage electricity grids knew perfectly well that it could be hot last summer, hot this summer, and that a cold snap like the one that occurred in Texas in February was likely, since worse cold snaps had occurred in the past. The main reason there aren't enough reliable power plants is because progressive activists, scientists, and journalists successfully persuaded policymakers to shut them down, not build them, or not operate them. [...] Hundreds of people have died in North America over the last few days from lack of air conditioning. But for years activist analysts, scientists, and journalists have claimed we have too much of it. "Green Energy über alles," Say Oregon's Lunatic Democrats. Just as the national Democrat Party is chasing the imaginary pot of gold at the end of the green energy rainbow, so too are Oregon's Democrats, and they are all-in on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power as the ONLY sources powering Oregon's electric grid. [...] Some Oregonians actually understand that science and are aghast that Oregon Democrats are hell-bent on committing "green energy suicide" by dooming the state to dozens of future brownouts ala California. One of them is meteorologist Chuck Wiese. Power Grid Operators, Experts And Federal Audit Office Warn Of Blackouts As Coal, Nuclear Get Phased Out. As wildly fluctuating, weather-dependent green energies come increasingly online, German grid operators and the German Federal Audit Office are warning the German government of power blackouts. But the government is ignoring the warnings and continues to insist everything is fine. Grid operator 50Hertz, for example, warns of energy shortages as Germany continues to shut down its nuclear and coal power plants, which currently serve to provide crucial baseload power for the grid. [...] The risk of blackouts are rising due to the unstable supply of growing wind and solar energy. Not Enough "Green" in Green Energy. The business page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday [6/2/2021] reported one of those minor stories that you might blow past if you don't stop and ask yourself about curious missing details. [...] Green energy is supposed to be all the rage among investors these days, but this item suggests that perhaps the rate of return is subpar. Just what is the expected rate of return for this and similar investment firms? The story doesn't say, and the Journal reporters don't seem interested in or able to find out. The huge, destructive green lie. [Scroll down] "Green" power is also inefficient. The need for backup power to use when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow means costly firing-up of alternative means of power or risking brown-outs. Those fossil-fuel power sources, when allowed to run continually, cost far less versus intermittently powering them on. Add in the problems with battery-operated vehicles, and the whole self-righteous green movement should simply turn brown and wither to nothing — and that's exactly what it would do, absent giant government incentives and subsidies and municipal mandates such as Reach Codes which require adding solar (and other things, from a laundry list of greenie ideology, depending on project cost). These codes also prohibit gas hook-ups in new construction, on the grounds that it is a pollutant. Batteries are fossil fuel, too! International Energy Agency report shows that green energy transition is a fantasy because of dependence on key rare minerals. A prestigious intergovernmental organization created by the world's advanced economies is pointing out the bottleneck in the plans to substitute so-called green energy for hydrocarbon-based energy: the availability of key minerals necessary for battery storage, wind farms, solar panels, and other gizmos necessary for the switchover. Simply put: the world can't provide the quantity of those minerals that would be necessary, and the environmental and social impact of trying to mine them in sufficient quantities would be devastating. The cure, in other words, is worse than the disease.
Rural America is fighting back against wind energy projects. Renewable energy is politically popular. Polling data show that about 70 percent of Americans want more wind energy and 80 percent want more solar. Regulators at the local, state, and federal levels have responded to this popularity by passing a myriad of goals, mandates, and subsidies to encourage the development and consumption of wind and solar energy. The Sierra Club claims that "over 170 cities, more than ten counties, and eight states across the U.S. have goals to power their communities with 100% clean, renewable energy." In addition to their political popularity, a spate of academic studies released over the past few years have claimed that the U.S. can run most or, all, of its economy solely on renewables. No oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear required. Although renewables are popular among voters and professors at elite universities, they also have several problems, including their intermittency, need for high-voltage transmission lines, and resource intensity. It Got Serious In A Hurry. Biden's first executive order, shutting down the Keystone pipeline, set the tone. In the beautiful illusion that constitutes woke energy policy, renewable but intermittent solar and wind will soon replace fossil fuels, so why do we need fossil fuels and their pipelines (the cheapest and most environmentally friendly way to transport oil and gas). Everything will be electric — like those cool Teslas! — because electricity just comes from a plug. Never mind the fossil fuels, minerals and metals that must be extracted or mined (nothing environmentally destructive there) to manufacture and transport solar panels, windmills blades, and batteries. Never mind the costly environmental challenges of disposing of them. Never mind the fossil fuels that are burned to provide the electricity for those plugs. Never mind the back-up power that must be supplied by fossil fuels for those times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. After the Texas Blackouts, Follow the $66 Billion of Wind and Solar Money. In the aftermath of the Texas blackouts, one thing became clear: Big Wind and Big Solar have nearly every media outlet in the country on speed dial. Indeed, in the days after the blackouts, numerous media outlets carried stories proclaiming that the near-disastrous failure of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid should not be blamed on wind or solar energy. To cite just one example, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman declared that pointing the finger at renewables after the storm and blackouts that left nearly 200 people dead was "another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism." But the effort to absolve renewables ignores the oldest maxim in politics: follow the money. Doing so shows that wind and solar aren't as blameless as you've been told. Indeed, about $66 billion was spent building wind and solar infrastructure in Texas in the years before the blackouts, yet all that spending was worth next to nothing when the grid was teetering on the edge of collapse during the early morning hours of February 15. The Ugly Truth About Renewable Power. When Texas literally froze this February, some blamed the blackouts that left millions of Texans in the dark on the wind turbines. Others blamed them on the gas-fired power plants. The truth isn't so politically simple. In truth, both wind turbines and gas plants froze because of the abnormal weather. And when Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway said it had plans for additional generation capacity in Texas, it wasn't talking about wind turbines. It was talking about more gas-fired power plants — ten more gigawatts of them. While the Texas Freeze hogged headlines in the United States, across the Atlantic, the only European country producing any electricity from solar farms was teeny tiny Slovenia. And that's not because Europe doesn't have any solar capacity — on the contrary, it has a substantial amount. But Europe had a brutal winter with lots of snow and clouds. EU Admits It Can't Go Net-Zero Without Natural Gas. Last week saw some much-needed good news for natural gas. The European Union signaled that it would include natural gas in its energy plans for the future, emissions and all. The not-so-good news is that speaking of emissions, the EU might oblige suppliers to minimize these as much as is possible. Why Wind and Solar Energy Are Doomed to Failure. Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources. There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail. CA electric power chief says serious problems lie ahead. The head of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) recently gave a revealing interview, in an obscure outlet he probably figured would not travel. It is "Yale Insights" published by the Yale School of Management. Elliot Mainzer, President and CEO of CAISO is a Yalie, so he gave something back. Actually he gave a lot out, if you read the poli-speak correctly. Serious problems lie ahead. Yes, Overreliance On Wind And Solar Helped Feed Texas's Power Outages. When the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn't regulate enough and it wasn't part of the national grid. This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed almost 60 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power — natural gas, coal, and nuclear — due to a reluctance to spend billions of dollars to winterize facilities throughout a state more known for persistently hot summers than for transient polar vortices. Texas: The Lessons and the Not Lessons from the Energy Debacle. The tragedy in Texas is viewed by many as another glimpse of our uncertain future, and that brings up the question of whether it is possible to be prepared for scenarios we can't even imagine in the new, climate-changing world. [...] The storm wreaked havoc on almost all major power-producing technologies. A nuclear generator supplying electricity to 1 million homes tripped off-line due to the cold weather impacting a pump system. Natural gas supplies for heating homes froze up. And wind turbines froze in place. The more climate changes, the harder it will be to predict, and outages like the one in Texas are all but guaranteed. Green investing 'is definitely not going to work'. From his desk in midtown Manhattan Tariq Fancy once oversaw the beginning of arguably the biggest, most ambitious, effort ever to turn Wall Street "green". Now, as environmentally friendly investing grows at an exponential rate, Fancy has come to a stark conclusion: "This is definitely not going to work." As the former chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, Fancy was charged with embedding environmental, social and governance (ESG) corporate policies across the investment giant's portfolio. It takes big energy to back up wind and solar. Power system design can be extremely complex but there is one simple number that is painfully obvious. At least it is painful to the advocates of wind and solar power, which may be why we never hear about it. It is a big, bad number. To my knowledge this big number has no name, but it should. Let's call it the "minimum backup requirement" for wind and solar, or MBR. The minimum backup requirement is how much generating capacity a system must have to reliably produce power when wind and solar don't. For most places the magnitude of MBR is very simple. It is all of the juice needed on the hottest or coldest low wind night. It is night so there is no solar. Sustained wind is less than eight miles per hour, so there is no wind power. It is very hot or cold so the need for power is very high. In many places MBR will be close to the maximum power the system ever needs, because heat waves and cold spells are often low wind events. In heat waves it may be a bit hotter during the day but not that much. In cold spells it is often coldest at night. Texas Senate passes bill to counter federal subsidies for wind and solar power. While President Joe Biden moves to expand the use of renewable energy nationwide, the Texas Legislature is doing the opposite, adding fees on solar and wind electricity production in the state in hopes of boosting fossil fuels. Renewable-Energy Backers Want 10-Year Tax Credits in Biden Plan. The clean energy industry is rushing to hitch a ride on President Joe Biden's emerging infrastructure plan, lobbying for a decade-long extension of coveted tax credits as the White House drafts a recovery proposal that could top $3 trillion. Lobbyists for the industry want to attach the long-term extension of credits used by the wind, solar and other industries, to the plan — a windfall that would be worth billions of dollars if successful. "The flood gates are open," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Senate Finance Committee staffer now with the Progressive Policy Institute. "Everyone is trying to get the maximum amount." The Politicization of Energy Policy Needs to Stop. Renewables being the solution for rising emissions under current technological constraints are imagined benefits, which simply don't exist. Energy and climate policies should be based on economic realities and the basics of energy for over 350 million people in the U.S. and a world needing to provide energy and electricity for a growing population. Energy has to meet five pillars: abundant, affordable, reliable, scalable, and flexible; otherwise it is a fad like green hydrogen with a current price tag of $11 trillion to implement and needing all current global electrical generation for viability. The reasons the sun and the wind are a disastrous choice for energy policy is simply this — while they are abundant — they aren't reliable since the sun and wind are intermittent. Neither are they scalable, affordable, or flexible. Renewables aren't viable without billions spent yearly on government subsidies and mandates. California power projections underscore difficulty of Biden climate targets. California will have to deploy renewable power at record-breaking speed over the next few decades to meet its target for carbon-free electricity by 2045, a transformation that state agencies say in a new report this week is technically achievable but immensely challenging. The scale of deployment California alone will need to achieve underscores the hurdles facing President Biden and his team as he calls for eliminating carbon from the power sector by 2035, 10 years earlier than California's target. The effort would require the biggest transformation of the electricity sector since it was built. Print and save this article. You may need it. Germany Considers Electricity Rationing to Stabilize its Shaky Green Grid. Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts — people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide. Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany and eventually passed the outlandish EEG green energy feed-in act and rules. They insisted that wildly fluctuating, intermittent power supplies could be managed easily, and done so at a low cost. Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets. Germany's rickety and moody power grid now threatens the entire European power grid stability, as we recently witnessed. A Reality Check on Green Energy .
Climate and COVID: The Erosion of Common Intelligence and Common Sense. The notorious Texas freeze, to take a recent instance, should have provided abundant evidence that wind and solar are not only weather-dependent and inadequate suppliers of electric power but potentially disastrous; yet many continue to believe that the answer to such emergencies is even more green technology. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, who introduced the Green New Deal in Congress, claims that the infrastructure failures in Texas "are quite literally what happens when you don't pursue a Green New Deal." The degree of stupefaction here is legendary. Renewables are not only ill-suited for, but wholly contra-indicated to serving as primary energy sources for industrial societies. Renewables and Reliability. Without reliable electricity, modern life doesn't exist. This is why the move to an all-electric society is such a bad idea. Most leaders in the West do not understand this reality. It's why over 3 billion still live in squalid poverty while the West successfully fights COVID-19 with products derived from crude oil. Grids cannot function without energy sources that are abundant, reliable, scalable, affordable, and flexible. Currently, only coal, natural gas, oil, petroleum, and nuclear energy meet this criteria. Even natural gas has limitations compared to coal, because natural gas-fired power plants "depend on just-in-time fuel deliveries," which aren't reliable in extreme weather. Whether in German winters, California summers, or Texas polar vortex storms, electrical grids are fragile and need proper management or blackouts will happen. Trillions are needed to upgrade and build new grids in the U.S. and globally if renewables continuing being deployed for electrical generation. The Myths Of Green Energy. Finance is often cloaked in arcane terminology and math, but the one dynamic that governs the future is actually very simple. Here it is: [Video clip] How Politics is Making Power Failures the Norm. As designed, historically the U.S. power grid has proven remarkably resilient. Sadly, as political considerations have increasingly trumped basic physics and engineering, electrical power failures have become more common in the past couple of decades in the United States. The decline in the reliability of the electric power system has coincided with the increasing incorporation of intermittent wind and solar power into electric power networks. The increase in wind and solar power was not driven by market forces. Instead, it is the result of politicians forcing and incentivizing ever greater amounts onto the power grid. In a single generation, politicians have undermined the integrity of the U.S. electrical grid. [...] A power system that depends on the weather cooperating is a bad idea. Yet, over the past two decades wind and solar power have accounted for an ever-increasing portion of electric power capacity in in the United States. And it's all due to politics. Why The Texas Blackout Has The Greens So Scared: Deflecting blame to a more exciting apocalypse. Last month, President Biden signed a series of executive orders undermining fossil fuels, on the grounds the "climate crisis" forced his hand. "We can't wait any longer. We see with our own eyes. We know it in our bones. It is time to act." Within days, most of the country was seeing "with our own eyes" and feeling "in our bones" a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were left frozen (and inoperable). This constituted a double whammy to the huge global warming establishment. First was the cold, when the "science" had confidently predicted a steadily warming Texas. Second was the failure of renewables, vastly exacerbating the problems for the energy grid. [...] For the global warming establishment, the disastrous performance of renewables was more upsetting than the cold spell itself. Renewables Sector Reels As 150,000 German 'Green' Jobs Evaporate. The great 'green' jobs 'bonanza' is being revealed for the hoax that it truly is. And nowhere is that reality harsher, than in Mutti Merkel's Germany. Plastered in solar panels (albeit blanketed in snow and ice at the moment) and overrun with 30,000 of these things, Deutschland has been held up as a renewable energy 'superpower' by the wind and solar cult, across the globe. A bitter, breathless winter has left them scrambling for the only reliable power source in town: coal-fired power from their own remaining plants and from Poland, and nuclear power from France. One of the promises of its 'transition' to an all wind and sun powered future — aka the 'Energiewende' — was an endless sea of 'groovy' sustainable employment in the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines. Understanding the Texas Energy Crisis. Outsiders may not be aware that Texas has a uniquely independent power grid that is relatively disconnected from regional energy consumers and providers. Outsiders may also be surprised to discover the dramatic growth of wind power in a state that has among the largest fossil fuel reserves in the world. The growth of wind power to be second as a source only to natural gas is the debate raging in Texas politics now. Did wind reliance help set up the energy crisis in an energy rich state? At a moderate level of study, it is apparent that both wind and natural gas was blocked from full utilization by extended severely sub-freezing weather. [...] Has the decade-long move to invest in wind power that placed so many turbines and transmission lines in West Texas proven to be a wise investment for ERCOT and energy providers? The answer is probably 'no.' [...] More profound — was the switch from coal to natural gas completely wise?
Some Interesting Aspects of the Once-in-a-Century Texas Deep Freeze and the Problems of the Electricity Grid. Fossil fuel and nuclear power generation plants all boil water to create steam and the pressurized steam spins turbines that generate electricity. They all have piping mechanisms to move water — and natural gas in plants that burn natural gas to boil water. The historic low temperatures caused the water to freeze in the pipelines — no water => no steam => turbines quit spinning. There is always water vapor present in natural gas flowing through a pipeline. When that temperature inside the pipe drops below freezing, the water vapor will begin to form ice on the inside of the pipeline, and this ice will continue to build up until the pipeline becomes choked or blocked completely, cutting off the flow of gas to boil the water that spins the steam turbines. But the same issue arises with regard to preventative measures dealing with the pipelines as with the wind turbines — what is the cost-benefit analysis of incurring the expense to prevent failure in the system from the occurrence of an event that had never occurred before? An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power. [Scroll down] If this sounds outlandish, here's the head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas: ["]The fundamental decision made in the middle of the night on Monday to have outages imposed was a wise decision by the operators we have here, Magness said. If we had waited and not done those outages ... we could have drifted to blackout. That's not just outages, but we could lose all electricity on system, and it could take months or longer to repair that.["] With a total ERCOT system failure, as many as 12 million customers and possibly 20 million Texans could be in the cold, in the dark, in their cars with nowhere to go — for months. Wind power did this to Texas. Be very afraid of the Green New Deal. Wind
Energy Fails: Grading the Reliability of Energy Sources During the Texas Power Outages. Here were the major factors contributing to the energy crisis:
Texas's Power Grid Disaster Is Only The Beginning. Conservatives have been eager to blame Texas's problems on increased use of wind power. It certainly played a role. Turbines froze in the cold and the focus on expanding renewable energy sources over conventional gas and oil left the state less able to expand energy production in response to a surge. But solar energy is far from the only culprit. Another factor was simply that Texas infrastructure could not handle an outlier weather event. Texas power outage is a warning about 'green energy' reliance and globalist control. The current winter storm in Texas, which has left millions without power, heat, and food, has led to questions about the reliability of so called "green energy" and serves as an example of the danger posed by the green agenda in pursuit of the Great Reset. The storm brought temperatures dipping well below zero degrees Fahrenheit and has left millions of people without power. Over 20 people have died in various states affected by the storm. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages around 90% of Texas's electrical capacity, initially asked residents to "reduce their electricity use," as the system was suffering from "higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units." As Germans freeze, leading newspaper calls green energy strategy 'a dangerous miscalculation'. Little attention is paid to the question of just how much "climate change" is a result of human activity, i.e., CO2 emissions into the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Does anyone have a handle on this? [...] The degree of warming in the tropical troposphere resulting from an increase of CO2 is the central premise behind the climate change hoopla. The fact that such warming is not occurring to the degree predicted by the climate models is not an 'isolated fact,' it is a very strong indication that there is a real disconnect between theory and reality. The linchpin is weak or missing. Whatever observed changes are taking place, they are probably not primarily the result of CO2 "pollution." What's also missing is any great awareness of this by the general population. Try asking friends or acquaintances what their understanding is of the connection between human activity and "climate change." A blank stare is often the result. As far as our climate crisis leadership elites are concerned, I have little idea how many are merely ignorant, or lying, or both. Whatever the case may be, it's misdirection on steroids. 90% politics, 10% science. The irony of Texas's massive power outrages during winter weather. A ferocious winter storm struck the southern plain states with exceptional ferocity over the weekend. By Monday [2/15/2021], millions of Texans found themselves without power. Contrary to what one might expect, the energy problem wasn't primarily because of downed power lines. Instead, in a state that has a quarter of America's proven natural gas reserves, the power went away because Texas has turned to wind generation — and the generators froze. [...] Germany is currently having a similar problem because its winter storms have not only frozen their turbines, but they've also blocked sunlight from reaching the solar panels that generate necessary energy since Germany made the decision to "go green". Toward a Renewable Chaos: Carbon Imperialism and Disadvantaged Smaller Nations. [W]ind and solar make up an insignificant percentage of the world's energy consumption. The renewable contribution to global energy consumption in 2017 was less than 2%. Solar and wind contributed just 7% of the world's electricity in 2018. There is a reason for that. Besides being expensive, they are highly intermittent and so are unreliable. Further, wind and solar power cannot be used without backup by fossil fuel-powered energy sources. Even in Germany, increased reliance on wind and solar has resulted in energy chaos. Berlin is facing energy shortages as both wind and solar have failed during the ongoing winter, and coal plants are running at full capacity to meet the demand. "With this supply of wind and photovoltaic energy, it's between 0 and 2 or 3 percent — that is de facto zero. You can see it in many diagrams that we have days, weeks, in the year where we have neither wind nor PV. Especially this time (winter) for example — there is no wind and PV, and there are often times when the wind is very miniscule. These are things, I must say, that have been physically established and known for centuries, and we've simply totally neglected this during the green energies discussion," said Dr. Harald Schwarz, professor of power distribution at the University of Cottbus. The Dark Side of Clean Energy. When Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland from Denmark in 2019 it was dismissed as illegal and absurd. However, the president's expression of interest was far from absurd, says Guillaume Pitron. Under its soil Greenland boasts one of the largest concentrations of the rare metals that the world will need to power electric cars, computers, mobile phones, robots, solar power plants, artificial intelligence and many high-tech "green" innovations that have not been dreamt up yet. If Trump were after those minerals, buying Greenland would have been a smart move. The global production and sales of rare metals are dominated by China. It mines so much of them on home soil and controls so much of their extraction in Africa and elsewhere that it oversees up to 95 percent of the global production of certain minerals. This puts Beijing in charge of "the oil of the 21st century", writes Pitron, which is a problem for western nations because it means China can restrict supply and drive prices up or down at will, as Opec does with oil. We have "entrusted a precious monopoly of mineral sovereignty to potential rivals", he notes. New York Cannot Buy Its Way Out of Coming Blackouts. New York City will soon be home to the world's biggest industrial-scale battery system. It's designed to back up the city's growing reliance on intermittent "renewable" electricity. At 400 megawatt-hours (MWh), this cluster of batteries will be more than triple the 129 MWh world leader in Australia. Mark Chambers, NYC's Director of Sustainability (I am not making this title up), is ecstatic. "Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency," he brags, "while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today's announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale." In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, president of Con Edison, New York state's power utility, gushes thus:"Utility-scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York's clean energy future, especially in New York City, where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed off shore." This green fantasy will bankrupt us. It's 2050. You wake in your cosy, insulated house, turn on the windfarm-powered lights, cook up a breakfast coffee on the hydrogen stove before jumping into your electric car. You whizz silently along roads with air as fresh as a mountain stream past happy e-bikers and carbon-neutral schools to your heat-pump powered office. So, viewed from Britain in 2020, can you spot the odd one out? Here's a clue: the e-bikers get no subsidy. Everything else on this list loses money, and needs state support on a massive scale to get even halfway to the nirvana glimpsed by the prime minister this week. Today's subsidy, of course, is tomorrow's tax rise. he Green Grift, or Gangrene Energy? The renewable energy fanatics like to point out that the cost of solar power has been falling dramatically over the past decade, the result of technological and manufacturing improvements. This is true, but raises the question: why does the solar industry continue to demand subsidies then? [...] It turns out that prior subsidy contracts yielded nearly 20 percent profit margins for solar power producers, which the French government thinks is "excessive" since the return on investment for conventional energy investments is closer to 5 percent. One thing this makes clear is that solar power "investment" requires big subsidies to attract capital. Without the guaranteed subsidies, green energy turns into gangrene energy in a hurry. Study: Renewable Energy does Nothing to Reduce CO2 Emissions. A group of high profile scientists, including Dr. Willie Soon, have published a meticulously referenced study which discuses the pros and cons of various CO2 reduction strategies. Study Confirms Donald Trump Is Right — 'Clean' Energy Is the Worst. Renewable energy is cripplingly expensive, hopelessly unreliable, massacres wildlife, destroys landscapes, destabilises the grid, harms indigenous peoples, and causes climate change. But apart from that it's great, says a meticulous review published in the scientific journal Energies by a team of Irish and U.S.-based researchers. Actually, the part about renewable energy being 'great' is a joke but the rest is true. The scholarly review — Energy and Climate Policy — An Evaluation of Climate Change Expenditure 2011-2018 — is probably the most thorough meta-analysis published on the so-called 'clean energy' sector. The Green Road to Blackouts. California leads the way to electricity blackouts, closely followed by South Australia. They both created this problem by taxing, banning, delaying or demolishing reliable coal, nuclear, gas or hydro generators while subsidising and promoting unreliable electricity from the sickly green twins — solar and wind. All supposed to solve a global warming crisis that exists only in academic computer models. Energy policy should be driven by proven reliability, efficiency and cost, not by green politics. Wind and solar will always be prone to blackouts for three reasons. [...] The Plague of Renewable Portfolio Standards. Wind and solar are feasible only because the operators of the grid agree to do everything possible to accept whatever amount of wind or solar is coming their way at any time. They assume this posture toward wind and solar because that is required by various regulations and contracts. All the other sources of power are ordered to decrease or increase output as needed to balance the amount of wind or solar power flowing at any moment. If wind and solar are minor players, the burden of accommodating their erratic nature is small. If they become big players, the burden starts to be a serious problem. In some places, like California, it's starting to get serious. Green energy push blamed in California's rolling blackouts. California's electricity grid picked an inconvenient moment to stumble, at least for Democrats seeking to drum up support this week for Joseph R. Biden's $2 trillion green-energy plan at the Democratic National Convention. The Golden State's ambitious renewable portfolio standard is coming under fire as the state's energy grid buckles under the strain of an oppressive heatwave, prompting rolling blackouts that have left millions without power as the state moves to replace nuclear and natural gas as energy sources with solar and wind. California seeks to generate 60% of electricity via renewables by 2030, but Mr. Biden's Green New Deal is even more aggressive, calling for a 100% carbon-free grid by 2035 "to meet the existential threat of climate change while creating millions of jobs with a choice to join a union." The excess costs of Weather Dependent Renewable power generation in the USA. These estimates show that using Weather Dependent Renewables in the USA costs [about] 6 times as much as using Natural Gas for electricity generation and about 1.2 [to] 2 times as much as Nuclear power. The benefit of these expenditures for Weather Dependent Renewables is the replacement of about 9% of USA power gross output capacity by "nominally" CO2 neutral technologies. Electrical power generation results in about 1/4 of the total CO2 emissions output from USA. Why Subsidised Wind & Solar Are Sending South Africa's Power Prices Into Orbit. Rocketing power prices and grid instability are two inescapable consequences of subsidised wind and solar. While sunshine and breezes might be free, attempting to run your power system using nature's gifts, brings with it a raft of other costs which RE zealots tend to gloss over. The electricity generation and distribution system — which wind and solar power are meant to completely replace — is one that was designed to work all on its lonesome; no mythical mega-batteries; no load shedding when the wind drops or the sun sets; no prayers to the wind gods; no fuss; and no failures that can't be fixed in an engineering jiffy. The same can't be said of the unreliables, which always and everywhere depend upon the system as it was — one built on ever-reliable coal, gas, nuclear and hydro (where it's available). But STT is referring to a system that works, always has and always will. On the other hand, those seeking to profit from the wind and solar scam claim keep talking about a new 'system'; when, in reality, all they've got to offer is chaos. And chaos costs. Why "Green" Energy Is Impossible. High on the Left's agenda is mandating 100% "green" generation of electricity — if not 100% of energy, period. I believe Joe Biden, among others, has now come out for 100% "green" energy, meaning wind and solar. But for now, let's stick with energy generation. Would it be feasible to get 100% of our electricity from wind and solar? Basic problems with these energy sources include inefficiency and intermittency. Wind turbines produce energy around 40% of the time, and solar panels do much worse than that in many parts of the country. So how does a utility ensure that the lights will go on, even at night when the wind isn't blowing? The liberals' favorite answer is "batteries." Produce electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and store the energy in batteries for use when electricity is not being generated. Batteries exist, of course; we use them all the time. But where is the battery that can store the entire output of a power plant or a wind farm? That battery does not exist. Further, battery storage is ruinously expensive. Climate science is not settled anymore than pandemic science is. Climate activists are so sure they're right but are still afraid of scrutiny, and of being judged on trust cost impacts, according to Sky News host Peta Credlin. "For years people like me have been saying that climate science is not settled as activists like to say, anymore than pandemic science is settled". "All of us want to do the right thing by the environment, but there's just no way we should be damaging our economy in an endless quest to reduce emissions," Ms Credlin said. £3 Billion-a-Year Cost to Prevent Green Energy Blackouts. An in-depth study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation has revealed the skyrocketing costs of balancing the national grid, largely due to the intermittency of green power generation sources, most notably wind and solar. Since 2002, when these power sources began to be introduced at scale, the cost of balancing the grid has risen from £367 million to £1.5 billion per year by 2019. And now with the lockdown shrinking demand, balancing costs are optimistically projected to be £2 billion, potentially rising to £3 billion if the lockdown persists. Renewable power fails in Germany. Germany is even farther down the alternative energy road to oblivion than the U.S., and the Germans are running up against multiple insurmountable roadblocks. Exorbitant tax subsidies haven't helped, except to drain taxpayers' pocketbooks and enrich industries that otherwise wouldn't be profitable enough to exist. With hubris typical of tax-and-spend fanatics, Germans decided last year to shut down their entirely reliable, less-costly-to-operate 84 coal-ower plants in addition to closing all their nuclear-power plants. Now the Germans are discovering what should have been obvious before they shot themselves in the foot: the alternatives of wind and solar power tremendously costly and will remain completely unreliable to provide energy 24/7 365 days a year at any price. Green Electricity Delusions. With global warming the alleged science is so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is different. It's relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes of confusing data are needed. Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies and fake accounting. Wind and solar add zero value to the grid. Why is wind power and solar power, not making significant gains in providing a substantial amount of renewable electricity? The US has utilized, in its energy mix, about eight percent of wind and two percent solar for more than a decade. The reason it is not growing requires an understanding of the fundamental elements, of an electrical grid. The grid is the electrical industry's term for all of the hardware and software needed to convert fuel into electricity. The electricity is distributed by wires, transformers, sub-stations, etc. to all of us. The system must ensure our safety from malfunctions, security to customers, and safety for the community. Is today's wind and solar technology the solution to our energy problems? Today, close to 8 billion people live on Earth, and 80% of the world's hunger for power is fed with hydrocarbons or 'fossil fuels'. Wind and solar made up an estimated 2% of primary energy in 2018, with the 'non-fossil' remainder largely coming from nuclear, hydro and biomass. Only 100 years ago the global population was 2 billion. Of today's 8 billion people, there are at least 3 billion with no or only erratic access to power. In addition, another 3 billion people are expected to be added during the next 50 years. That adds up to 6 billion new power customers. Not only will the population increase, but as humans continue to crave new gadgets, planes, cars and space travel, the average power consumption per capita will increase dramatically, and with it, the e-waste generated. Abandoning the concept of renewable energy. Renewable energy is a widely used term that describes certain types of energy production. In politics, business and academia, renewable energy is often framed as the key solution to the global climate challenge. We, however, argue that the concept of renewable energy is problematic and should be abandoned in favor of more unambiguous conceptualization.Building on the theoretical literature on framing and based on document analysis, case examples and statistical data, we discuss how renewable energy is framed and has come to be a central energy policy concept and analyze how its use has affected the way energy policy is debated and conducted. We demonstrate the key problems the concept of renewable energy has in terms of sustainability, incoherence, policy impacts, bait-and-switch tactics and generally misleading nature. Why eco-leftists are suddenly turning on Michael Moore. [Scroll down] Director Moore's latest documentary starts with electric cars, the vehicle of choice for the environmentally conscious. As GM proudly unveils its battery-powered Volt, his narrator innocently asks the executive in charge where the electricity to recharge it comes from. Power plants, comes the answer. Coal-burning power plants. Memo from Moore to those who think they are driving green: You may indulge your illusions if you prefer. But all you've really done is transfer your emissions from the tailpipe of your car to the smokestack of the local power plant. Maybe you think solar power is the answer? Moore treats you to a visit to a showy solar array that covers an entire football field. The power-company executive present admits that it can only power ten homes, and then only when the sun shines. COVID-19 and Reliable Energy. Those holding degrees from elite universities now seem useless compared to farmworkers, truck drivers, and warehouse stock clerks. These same university-educated folk believe renewable energy (sun and wind) can deliver "critical medical equipment, ultrasound systems, ventilators, CT systems, X-ray machines, personal protection equipment, masks, (and) gloves." Each of these medical commodities are examples of the over 6,000 products that start from a barrel of crude oil. The plastic in plastic gloves is overwhelmingly made from crude oil. Under current technology, and a world turned upside down by this virus, the United States, European Union (EU), and remaining United Nations signatories are not replacing or banishing fossil fuels and the medical products derived from them with renewables. Zero-carbon societies will ravage lives, leading to death, and wholeheartedly believing in global warming/climate change without thorough questioning of this ideology renders the global, green-aligned environmental movement impotent and feckless in the face of global pandemics. Why Dems are so bent on passing wind amid corona crisis. Renewables live or die by subsidies, in fact. That was proved yet again this week, when Democrats tried (unsuccessfully) to stuff a panoply of Green New Deal measures into the corona-crisis relief bill — including extensions of the tax credits that have been driving the growth of solar and wind energy. That Congressional Democrats would push so hard for solar and wind subsidies at such a critical time for the US economy is particularly galling for two reasons. First, the wind industry already stands to collect some $33.75 billion in subsidies between now and 2029. Second, wind-energy development in some of the most-heavily Democratic states in the country — Hawaii, California, New York and Vermont — has been effectively stopped due to local opposition. To be sure, the Washington favor factory never sleeps. But the American Wind Energy Association and its lobbyists deserve an Olympic gold medal for their utter lack of shame. The Collapse of Intellectual Standards in Science. The renewable energy industry has powerful sources of support for its program to make money by fooling the public. There are many effective lies, repeated over and over. Long term contracts for wind or solar electricity at $25 or $30 per megawatt hour are touted as proving that renewable electricity is replacing "more expensive" fossil fuel electricity. A close examination of the cost of renewable electricity, either wind or solar, shows that the real cost of this electricity is not $25 per megawatt hour, but around $80 per megawatt hour. The difference is the federal and state subsidies. A good chunk of those federal subsidies are set to go away by 2022. Then there is the matter of replacing fossil fuel electricity. Wind or solar electricity displaces some fossil fuel electricity, but they never replace the plants used to generate fossil fuel electricity. The fossil fuel plants are throttled back when the wind or solar is generating electricity. But sometimes wind and solar are asleep. At those times the fossil fuel plants have to power the grid without any help from the wind or solar plants. Nothing is replaced by building wind or solar plants. A dual system is created with dependable fossil fuel plants supplemented by erratically operating wind or solar plants. Renewable Power Theatre of the Absurd. Along with many other states, California, Arizona and Nevada all have "renewable portfolio laws." California requires that 60% of its electric power be from renewable sources by 2030. Nevada requires 50% by 2030. Arizona requires 15% by 2025. Renewable power is defined by law in each state, but usually it amounts to wind or solar. One might think that having a quota for renewable power means that the power has to be generated by wind or solar and consumed within the state. There is a loophole. The "renewable attribute" can be legally separated from the actual power. So, the power can be consumed in one place, but a different place gets credit as if it had actually consumed the renewable power. For example, a wind farm in Colorado can generate a megawatt hour of electricity. The power is actually sold and consumed in Colorado, but California gets credit for a megawatt hour of renewable power. The Colorado wind farm in the normal course of events can sell the abstract credit, known as an RPC or Renewable Power Certificate to California. California needs credits to meet it renewable power quota, so it is willing to pay, for what is a piece of paper. Renewable Energy Fairy Tales. [Scroll down] The technical bottom line is that when the wind or solar starts being a bigger part of the grid, say 15% for solar and somewhat higher for wind, you run into difficulties. Solar and wind surge. For example, midday solar may be 5 times as large as the average solar energy. For wind the surge may be 3 times larger than the average wind energy. If the surge production exceeds some threshold it has to be curtailed for grid stability reasons. The bottom line is that to achieve 50% renewable electricity, electricity storage has to be added to the system to smooth out the surges. The only remotely practically technologies for storage are pumped storage, a closed loop hydroelectric system, or batteries. These are very expensive, and you end up with renewable electricity costing $200 per megawatt hour compared to running existing natural gas plants for $20 per megawatt hour. It's ridiculous and pointless. Wind and solar, by the way, are extremely expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions compared to the alternatives. The Editor says... Germany's overdose of renewable energy. Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources. Over 30 000 wind turbines have been built, with a total installed capacity of nearly 60 GW. Germany now has approximately 1.7 million solar power (photovoltaic) installations, with an installed capacity of 46 GW. This looks very impressive. Unfortunately, most of the time the actual amount of electricity produced is only a fraction of the installed capacity. Worse, on "bad days" it can fall to nearly zero. In 2016 for example there were 52 nights with essentially no wind blowing in the country. No Sun, no wind. Even taking "better days" into account, the average electricity output of wind and solar energy installations in Germany amounts to only about 17% of the installed capacity. Intermittent & Unreliable Wind & Solar The Greatest Subsidy Scam In History. The so-called wind and solar 'industries' were built on lies, myths and propaganda and run on subsidies. As wind power 'investor' Warren Buffett put it: "We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit." Buffett might have continued, that it's the only reason anyone invests in them. As to the lies, myths and propaganda, the spate of bushfires that have swept Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australian this summer have energized doomsday climate cultists who — without a shred of scientific evidence — pronounce, with godlike certitude, that those fires were all caused by Australia's failure to rein in its carbon dioxide gas emissions. Ergo, those fires could have been wholly prevented had we only carpeted every inch of the Australian countryside with windmills and every rooftop with solar panels. It's a sad indictment of Australia's journalistic tradition that the mainstream press not only repeats this nonsense ad nauseam, but magnifies it by berating any politician with the temerity to stick to the facts. Progressive Eco-Group Admits It: Renewable Energy is a Hoax that Benefits its Greenie Elmer Gantries like Al Gore. Independent physicist John Droz, Jr. alerted me to the website of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), an international environmental organization that calls for the total destruction of what it refers to as the "global industrial economy," a.k.a. capitalism. Given the group's hard-left credentials, its call for dismantling capitalism throughout the world is not surprising. What is surprising is that in an unusual show of progressive candor, Deep Green Resistance openly acknowledges what skeptical scientists have been saying for more than two decades: that renewable energy is a government-backed hoax that enriches big corporations — and green energy investors like Al Gore — at the expense of taxpayers and the environment. 10 questions to ask your climate alarmist friends. [#9] How big would a battery have to be to power New York City for one hour? Wind and solar produce power intermittently — the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. Many renewable advocates point out that in order to have stable power supplied around the clock, we would simply need to store excess energy in batteries so that the power could be used later when demand is higher. This is correct in theory, but battery technology currently lags far behind what is needed. For example, in order to power New York City for just one hour, the entire world's battery storage capacity would be completely drained. Green Energy Studies: Consulting, or Advertising? Wind and solar aren't remotely competitive with traditional fossil fuels and cannot replace them. They would scarcely exist if it weren't for massive federal subsidies, and state laws establishing quotas for renewable energy. Neither are good at reducing carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). I wrote a book about wind and solar called Dumb Energy and found them to be mainly political creations. They are a complete waste of money kept alive by political action. Most of the things you have heard from the wind and solar propaganda machine is wrong. But they have their champions. [...] Deloitte publishes academic-style papers touting the virtues of renewable energy. Lazard published a widely quoted study purporting to show the unsubsidized cost of wind and solar energy. These studies pretend to be objective but are actually promotional material for their renewable energy clients. Claim: The Green Energy Lithium Rush is Destabilising South America. Renewables are not exactly covering themselves in glory on the geopolitical stage. Cobalt, a vital component of high capacity batteries, is extracted by teams of children working in dangerous mines operated by brutal Congolese warlords. Chinese peasants suffering toxic pollution released by their hideous rare earth mine (rare Earths are used to produce high strength magnets, vital for efficient wind turbines). Now we can add corruption and political instability in South America to the cost of renewables. Renewables May Make Us Feel Good, But Realistically They Just Don't Work. Despite the hype over the ever-increasing connected capacity at wind and solar farms worldwide, none, yes, let me repeat that, none have replaced any of the hydro, natural gas, coal, or nuclear generating plants that are providing continuous and uninterruptable electricity to people and businesses around the world. Solar may work occasionally at homes and businesses as a source for supplemental intermittent electricity to lower daily demand from the grid, but they're still connected to a reliable source for continuously and uninterruptable power. We all know, if the sun is not shinning, their only source of electricity are the power generating plants feeding the grid even with the burgeoning mass storage technology popping up in the most auspicious places. It's not that we're not trying to tap into the emission free electricity provided by Mother Nature, but wind and sunshine are too intermittent. They are not the panacea. They come with their own ills. 12 Reasons Why Chaotically Intermittent & Heavily Subsidised Wind & Solar Power Make No Sense. It takes a special brand of delusion to believe that the world can run on sunshine and breezes. For wind and sun worshippers, disastrous examples like South Australia — where mass blackouts and load shedding have become the new normal — require not just practiced delusion but a form of self-flagellating stoicism, as well. Oh, almost forgot to mention, that RE superpower suffers the world's highest power prices. And it reached that infamous status after it blew up its last coal-fired power plant. The wind industry has had more than 30 years to get its act together. It was built on subsidies and wouldn't last a minute without them. But, still, there are plenty happy to roll out the excuses and plead for more of the same. Renewable Energy Hits the Wall. If the official definitions of renewable energy were logical, renewable energy would be defined as energy that does not emit CO2 and that is not using a resource in danger of running out anytime soon. But the definitions written into the laws of many states are not logical. Hydroelectric energy is mostly banned because the environmental movement hates dams. Nuclear is banned because a hysterical fear of nuclear energy was created by environmental groups. Both nuclear and hydro don't emit CO2. Hydro doesn't need fuel. Nuclear fuel is cheap and plentiful. Germany's renewable energy program, Energiewende, is a big, expensive failure. The goal of Energiewende was to make Germany independent of fossil fuels. But it hasn't worked out. The 29,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million PV systems provide only 3.1% of Germany's energy needs and have cost well over 100 billion Euros so far and likely another 450 billion Euros over the next two decades. And much more than that when you add in the extra cost of maintaining fossil generation systems to back up the lack of wind and sunshine from seconds to weeks. Because of their extremely low energy density and need for a great deal of space, forests are being cut down, pits dug, and filled with hundreds of tons of reinforced concrete for wind turbines to stand on, 5 acres per turbine. Cost-Effective 'Renewable' Energy Is A Fictional Construct. The left just loves to tout "renewable energy" as the clean, green panacea, something that will save the Earth. [...] Just as electric cars require belching coal plants to produce the gas to fire up the electrical power charging stations, so the wind farms require massive amounts of resources just to get those necessary rare earth minerals, along with Mexican-style quantities of concrete and other unpicturesque things Joni Mitchell once sang against. Climate Trillions Frittered in the Wind. This year, the world will spend $162 billion (US) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost theworld from $1 to $2 trillion (US) a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century. Why wind and solar will never work. This paper by Mark Mills of the the Manhattan Institute and Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, titled "The 'New Energy Economy': An Exercise in Magical Thinking," does an excellent job of explaining why wind and solar energy will never replace fossil fuels or nuclear energy as a primary energy source. The problem is fundamental: the laws of physics. And, no, better batteries are not a solution. 41 Inconvenient Energy Realities. A week doesn't pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the "burden" of the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of one's opinion about whether, or why, an energy "transformation" is called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically "new energy economy" in the foreseeable future. Batteries Not Included; The True Levelized Cost of Renewables. A fascinating article by Roger Andrews at Energy Matters gets into a matter of the highest importance when it comes to renewables. It addresses something that might seem arcane; the Levelized Cost of Energy or LCOE. The truth, though, is that traditional measures of the costs associated with renewables not only don't account for many of the subsidies involved, but also fail to consider the intermittency of renewable energy. Given the fact renewable energy generated at the wrong time is a cost, not a feature, the intermittency issue always has to be addressed with batteries which are not considered in costs. But, if they are considered, we quickly see the true costs of renewables, which are enormous. Disentangling the Renewable Energy Scam. The solar energy industry is telling its pals in Congress that it is willing to lose most of its subsidies. The current subsidy for solar is 30% of the construction cost. To that subsidy, an additional 10% subsidy is available due to special fast depreciation for solar energy plants. The 30% subsidy is scheduled to ramp down to 10% by 2022 and thereafter remain at 10%. This is not a consequence of declining costs of solar that makes the industry no longer in need of such a large subsidy. Solar electricity is a mature industry, and cost declines are moderate. The real reason the solar people are happy with a lower subsidy is that the 30% investment tax credit (ITC) is not their most important subsidy. The real subsidy is more complicated and better hidden. Disentangling the Renewable Energy Scam. Renewable energy has been defined in an illogical way so as to favor solar and wind. The ostensible motive for increasing renewable energy is to lower carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and thus avoid a supposed global warming catastrophe. But hydro and nuclear are prohibited from being used to meet the renewable energy quota, even though they don't emit CO2. The Energy Solution That Should Make Everyone Happy. Renewable energy is a crackpot invention of the environmental Left. Supposedly, renewable energy uses sources of energy that will not run out, anytime soon, like the sun. Renewable energy must not emit CO2, because that might cause global warming. But the renewable energy proselytizers can't stick to their story. Hydroelectricity is obviously renewable, but it is excluded because the environmental Left hates dams. Geothermal energy, using the heat in hot rocks underground to generate electricity, is considered renewable, even though the hot rocks frequently cool because the heat is used up. The "fuel" runs out. Wind and solar are loved by the environmental Left, even though they are expensive and brimming with serious problems. Nuclear is hated and not considered renewable, even though it emits no CO2, the fuel is potentially inexhaustible, and there are no noxious substances coming out of smokestacks. Think California's green, insider, pay-to-play politics is bad? It's about to get worse. Let's looks at energy: what is "green" energy? A source that doesn't use fossil fuels, right? No, because nuclear power plants are not "green." "Green New Deal" champions like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., oppose nuclear power. What about hydropower? Surely that's "green." The Los Angeles Times reports that in California, hydropower near Yosemite National Park, which has "been churning out carbon-free electricity for nearly a century," is somehow not counted as green. Hydropower is responsible for between 5 and 15 percent of California's energy, none of it's "green" because of dishonest lawmakers and the green lobby that pulls their marionette strings. They are pushing lawmakers to restrict what it means to be "green," so only wind and solar, the industry's favored companies, can benefit. Solar Power to Hit the Wall in Nevada. Solar power and wind power are the dominant methods of generating electricity that are acceptable to the extreme left. The left calls its acceptable methods of generating electricity "renewable energy." The definition of renewable energy, enshrined in renewable portfolio laws in many states, tells us what the left likes and doesn't like. It is very arbitrary. The general idea of renewable energy is that it doesn't use fuel that could run out and it doesn't emit CO2. But the left breaks its own rules as is convenient. For example, nuclear power doesn't emit CO2 and running out of fuel is strictly theoretical. Nuclear is also reliable with steady delivery of electricity. The prospects for new technology in the nuclear universe are very bright. Yet, nuclear is arbitrarily banned in renewable portfolio laws. Incredibly, most renewable portfolio laws effectively ban hydroelectric power too, because the environmental left does not like dams. We Shouldn't Be Surprised Renewables Make Energy Expensive Since That's Always Been The Greens' Goal. In 2018, I reported that renewables had contributed to electricity prices rising 50% in Germany and five times more in California than in the rest of the US despite generating just 17% of the state's electricity. And in April, a research institute at the University of Chicago led by a former Obama administration economist found solar and wind were making electricity significantly more expensive across the United States. The cost to consumers of renewables has been staggeringly high. Two weeks ago, Der Spiegel reported that Germany spent $36 billion per year on renewables over the last five years, and yet only increased the share of electricity from solar and wind by 10 percentage points. It's been a similar story in the US. "All in all," wrote the University of Chicago economists, "consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy." Energy and Geopolitics Are under Attack. Global warming. Climate change. Renewable energy. Carbon-free societies. All of these terms have gained status as the balm to eliminate fossil fuels, which is supposedly causing anthropogenic global warming. [...] Nothing energizes environmentalists and citizens like renewable energy. But in every single place renewables have been implemented, they are a disaster. In Germany, Denmark, Spain, Britain, South Australia, Vermont, Minnesota, New Mexico (in the beginning stages of maligning fossil fuels), Arkansas, California, and Texas, solar and wind farms have been valiantly attempted, and they have failed every single time. Green energy schemes have been costly failures. Fully ~85% of global primary energy is from fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas. The remaining ~15% is almost all nuclear and hydro. Green energy has increased from above 1% to less than 2%, despite many trillions of dollars in wasted subsidies. The 85% fossil fuels component is essentially unchanged in past decades, and is unlikely to significantly change in future decades. The fatal flaw of grid-connected green energy is that it is not green and produces little useful (dispatchable) energy, primarily due to intermittency — the wind does not blow all the time, and the Sun shines only part of the day. Intermittent grid-connected green energy requires almost 100% backup ("spinning reserve") from conventional energy sources. Renewable wind and solar electrical generation schemes typically do not even significantly reduce CO2 emissions — all they do is increase energy costs. Claims that grid-scale energy storage will solve the intermittency problem have proven false to date. The only proven grid-scale "super-battery" is pumped storage, and suitable sites are rare — Alberta is bigger than many countries, and has no sites suitable for grid-scale pumped storage systems. Exposing the Real Costs of "Green" Energy. Today Center of the American Experiment released a groundbreaking paper that addresses a relatively mild "green" proposal: legislation that would raise the renewable energy standard in Minnesota from 25% to 50%. Two of my staffers have been working on the paper for months, drawing on publicly available (but rarely consulted) sources to understand what would be necessary to achieve that 50% goal, what it would cost, how it would impact the state's economy, and what effect it would have on global temperatures. The paper is titled "Doubling Down on Failure: How a 50 Percent by 2030 Renewable Energy Standard Would Cost Minnesota $80.2 Billion." With appendices, it runs to 75 pages. Why "Green" Energy Will Never Replace Fossil Fuels. Regular readers of this site are well aware of the inherent inferiority of intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. Nevertheless, the states of California and Hawaii have pledged to get all of their electricity from renewable sources (wind and solar), as have numerous cities and counties. Unfortunately, it can't be done, at any price. A Trove of New Research Documents the Folly of Renewable Energy Promotion. The advocacy for widespread growth in renewable energy (especially wind, solar, and biomass) usage has increasingly become the clarion call of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement. And yet more and more published research documents the adverse effects of relying on renewables. The Ridiculous Myth Of Powering The Nation With Renewable Energy. Technocrats should back up a few steps and look at the foolishness of their plans: To power America with 100% renewable enerty they propose 500,000 wind turbines, 18 billion square feet of solar panels, 75 million residential rooftop systems, 50,000 wind and solar farms. The projected cost is a minimum of $15.2 Trillion. However, we are already fully powered with enough oil, natural gas and coal resources to last another 200 years. Is 100 Percent Renewable Energy Possible? It probably is possible to run on 100% renewable power, if you don't mind crippling the economy by devoting vast sums to that pointless goal. It won't make much difference in CO2 emissions unless you can convince the Asians, who make most of the CO2 emissions, to also switch to 100% renewable energy. The green empress has no clothes. During December 2017, Germany's millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow. Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it. The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed. Truly Green? How Germany's 'Energy Transition' is destroying nature. The German Green Party was founded in 1980. The Greens promised to save nature. They wanted to be the protectors of forests, birds and rivers. But their policies have led to the most widespread destruction of nature in Germany since the Second World War. No industry consumes as much land as the generation of 'natural electricity'. Puerto Rico Might Ditch Oil to Build New Electric Grid Using Renewable Energies. With the majority of Puerto Rico's 3.4 million citizens still without power following Hurricane Maria, the commonwealth's government is floating the idea of starting from scratch as it rebuilds — ditching oil dependency and moving toward renewable energies. The Editor says... Evaluation of a proposal for grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar. A number of analyses, meta-analyses, and assessments, including those performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the International Energy Agency, have concluded that deployment of a diverse portfolio of clean energy technologies makes a transition to a low-carbon-emission energy system both more feasible and less costly than other pathways. [...] In particular, we point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. Renewable energy cost and reliability claims exposed and debunked. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) from NOAA's Earth System Laboratory, Boulder Colorado exposes and debunks the contrived claims of a recent renewable energy study which falsely alleged that low cost and reliable 100% renewable energy electric grids are possible. The new paper concludes that the prior study is based upon significant modeling inadequacies, is "poorly executed" and contains "numerous shortcomings" and "errors" making it "unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100% wind, solar and hydroelectric power system." The Appalling Delusion of 100 Percent Renewables, Exposed. he idea that the U.S. economy can be run solely with renewable energy — a claim that leftist politicians, environmentalists, and climate activists have endlessly promoted — has always been a fool's errand. And on Monday, the National Academy of Sciences published a blockbuster paper by an all-star group of American scientists that says exactly that. The paper, by Chris Clack, formerly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder, and 20 other top scientists, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It decimates the work of Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor whose wildly exaggerated claims about the economic and technical viability of a 100 percent renewable-energy system has made him a celebrity (he appeared on David Letterman's show in 2013) and the hero of Sierra Clubbers, Bernie Sanders, and Hollywood movie stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio. NY's Renewable Energy Plan Gets Dirty . New York governor Andrew Cuomo's renewable-energy ambitions are running headlong into the hard realities of maintaining a reliable electric grid. On July 8, the New York Independent System Operator, the agency charged with managing the state's grid, provided comments on the governor's plan to require utilities to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030. The NYISO maintains that to keep the lights on, the state will have to spend heavily on new transmission infrastructure to accommodate more renewables, preserve all of its nuclear capacity (including the controversial Indian Point Energy Center), and build even more onshore wind-energy capacity in upstate communities. Five days after the NYISO filed its comments, Cuomo's energy czar, Richard Kauffman, fired off an angry — and rather bizarre — letter to Brad Jones, the NYISO president and CEO. Calling the grid operator's comments "misleading, incomplete, and grossly inaccurate," Kauffman claimed that the NYISO showed "an alarming lack" of understanding of "how a modern grid can be developed and operated." How Renewable Energy Is Blowing Climate Change Efforts Off Course . Is the global effort to combat climate change, painstakingly agreed to in Paris seven months ago, already going off the rails? Germany, Europe's champion for renewable energy, seems to be having second thoughts about its ambitious push to ramp up its use of renewable fuels for power generation. Hoping to slow the burst of new renewable energy on its grid, the country eliminated an open-ended subsidy for solar and wind power and put a ceiling on additional renewable capacity. Germany may also drop a timetable to end coal-fired generation, which still accounts for over 40 percent of its electricity, according to a report leaked from the country's environment ministry. Instead, the government will pay billions to keep coal generators in reserve, to provide emergency power at times when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. German Experience With Green Power A Lesson Obama Should Learn. Since the early 1990s, Germany has gone to great lengths to replace fossil-fuel-generated electricity with renewables. Renewable electricity accounted for nearly 30% of the country's electricity by the end of 2014. Germany is thus roughly where Obama hopes to take America over the next 15 years — he's even called on Americans to "look at Berlin" for inspiration. But what are Germany's results? Dramatically higher energy costs for businesses and consumers, an increasingly unstable electricity grid and a recent increase in carbon emissions. Feds Pull Plug on Wave Power Project. The federal government has cancelled permits for a wave power project on the California coast. Renewable power advocates had hailed the project as an alternative to conventional energy sources.The collapse of the green-energy bubble. The parallel-energy universe known as renewables, a place where dollars and economic theory know no bounds and make no sense, looks increasingly like a bubble set to collapse. 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