Sunday, March 31, 2024
War on the Pillars of Civilization Update
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
Data centers—like manufacturing plants—require reliable power around the clock year-round, which wind and solar don’t provide. Businesses can’t afford to wait for batteries to become cost-effective. Building transmission lines to connect distant renewables to the grid typically takes 10 to 12 years.
Because of these challenges, Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Via Steven Hayward.
In any case, this figure shows how the U.S. abandoned nuclear power. Imagine how much lower our carbon footprint would be if we had kept up the pace of the 1950-1990 period. (Keep in mind that the plants that came online in the mid-1980s were begun 10 to 15 years before.)
This film, Climate The Movie, directed by Martin Durkin, features a number of the world’s leading experts on “climate change.” It does a good job of laying out some of the basic data that show the scientific falsity of global warming hysteria. If you have been following the issue, most of this material will not be new to you. But the film goes on from there to expose the evil motives behind “green” dogma, and the evil consequences of climate bullying. By the time the film is over, you should be not only better informed, but angry.
Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
The companies are heavily subsidizing EVs with profits from gas-powered cars. This means middle-class Americans in Fargo are paying more for gas-powered cars so the affluent in Napa Valley can buy cheaper EVs. This cost-shift won’t be financially sustainable as the Biden mandate ramps up, and it may not be politically sustainable either.
Via Scott Johnson.
Liberals are convinced that when markets tell you that people don't want something the solution is always to force them to do it anyway, and that is the intent of the upcoming regulations.
The government already literally pays people thousands of dollars to buy EVs, and even with that incentive, people are balking. EVs are just not ready for Prime Time, and may never be. Billions of dollars are being spent on building chargers, and the results have been dismal.
If you’ve wondered how liberals expect you to heat your house after they have outlawed fossil fuels, the short answer is heat pumps. Heat pumps have joined “batteries” as the all-purpose “green” solution. But in reality, they are no solution at all.
Renewable advocates often claim that the adoption of more wind and solar will lead to lower electricity costs, but the opposite is true. In a previous Substack, we wrote in detail about how utility companies with the largest rate increase requests in the country admit the energy transition is a major reason behind increasing electricity prices for families and businesses. But we are not the only ones reporting this.
Politico recently ran a story that highlights rising electricity costs in California, how they are due to the state’s climate policies, and how residents are becoming fed up with being asked to pony up more money for a failing energy transition. Indeed, the rising cost of electricity that stems from overbuilding tends to result in unhappy electricity ratepayers.
This is a major issue to discuss.
How is it that renewable advocates are so wrong about electricity cost increases stemming from massive wind and solar buildouts? The answer lies in relying on fundamentally flawed means of comparison between different electricity sources and the lack of accounting for the diminished value that wind and solar offer the grid compared to more reliable energy sources like coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
In other words, the framework they use for determining electricity prices is wrong because they don’t account for the full system costs of maintaining reliability.
The bottom line is that a transition from reliable and affordable fossil fuels to unreliable and prohibitively expensive weather-dependent sources of energy would be a human disaster, and therefore, it isn’t going to happen. Ever. Leftists may whine and gnash their teeth, and for now they may reap enormous amounts of ill-gotten money from “green” interests. But what they want, or more likely pretend to want, isn’t possible, and it won’t happen.
You might think that cutting down trees in the southern U.S., thus preventing them from absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere—do they still teach junior high kids about photosynthesis?—shipping them to Europe on diesel-powered ships, and then burning them, releasing carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2, must be the dumbest possible way of generating electricity. And, while it is appallingly stupid, and not “green” in any coherent sense, it is arguably not as dumb as wind and solar.
Yes: burning wood on an industrial scale is idiotic, but at least it works in the dark and when the wind isn’t blowing.
