As Wind and Solar Power Falter, U.N. Climate Agreement Becomes Wishful Thinking
Despite the lip service that governments, nongovernmental organizations and the media continue to pay to wind and solar power, most notably at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai—where some 200 countries signed a nonbinding agreement pledging their support for “transitioning away from fossil fuels”—some global leaders realize that wind and solar energy won’t do the trick and that fossil fuels will be here for a long, long time.
Sweden, for example, recently announced a major bet on nuclear energy and the United States and others have pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2023 alone, China permitted more coal-fired power plants than in all of 2021. Scores of solar and wind energy projects and investments have been canceled or put on hold as costs begin to catch up with reality, and production seems nowhere near where it should be to meet humanity’s needs.
Accepting reality has nothing to do with denying climate change or even that human activity plays a role alongside the natural climate cycle. It’s simply a question of understanding that political decrees and propaganda eventually collide with truth.
The truth is that (1) producing a unit of wind or solar energy requires a significant amount of energy, which defeats the purpose and makes for highly inefficient results, and (2) the declining cost of wind and solar power over the last decade was a function of artificially low interest rates and an abundance of cheap fossil fuels, thanks to the “fracking” revolution.
Regarding truth No. 1, to produce a unit of power output, wind requires three times as much and solar six times as much traditional energy as a combined-cycle natural gas plant. That’s because solar panels and wind turbines require lots of raw materials that depend on fossil fuels.
Regarding truth No. 2, green energy’s low-cost boom appears to be over. Clean energy is getting more expensive. Until recently, wind and solar advocates were touting the dramatic decline since 2010 in the cost of renewables, as measured in dollars per megawatt-hour. But that was a function of cheap capital and cheap energy.
The shale revolution that began 15 years ago turned the world’s biggest energy consumer, the United States, into its biggest energy producer, dramatically lowering energy prices. For example, North Dakota’s Bakken field increased its production sevenfold in the years leading up to 2020.
Other fields, including the Permian basin in west Texas and the Marcellus field in the Appalachian basin (Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York), experienced similar growth.
Unsurprisingly, the price of oil [West Texas Intermediate] declined from $196 per barrel in June 2008 to $73 per barrel in early 2020, pre-pandemic, while the price of natural gas [Henry Hub] fell from $18 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $2 per MMBtu.
Given that the wind and solar industries need energy-intensive materials such as steel, concrete and copper, the low price of oil and natural gas kept their production costs down. But that has changed, helping to drive up the cost of solar energy by 60% since 2021 and the cost of wind power by 30%.
Capital was also cheap. The Federal Reserve slashed the federal funds effective rate from 5.26% in mid-2007 to essentially 0% by the end of 2008 and basically kept it there until 2016, when it began to rise slightly, reaching 2.4% in 2019, well below its mid-2007 level, when it began to fall again. The fight against inflation brought things back to reality. The current rate is about 5.33%.
The double whammy of higher energy and borrowing costs that have hit renewables is unlikely to go away in the near future—though one should never underestimate the ability (and willingness) of politicians to do the same stupid thing again and again. Nevertheless, it seems improbable we’ll see trillions of dollars of zero-interest debt again anytime soon.
Given the decline of the shale fields’ output (with the exception of the Permian basin, but that too seems close to its peak) and the scant investment in traditional energy because of the environmental, social and governance-driven political environment, the dynamics of supply and demand do not point to a sustained return of the low energy prices that renewables ironically depend on.
That’s why we will see more green projects canceled, more countries betting on nuclear energy (forgetting their knee-jerk reactions to the Fukushima, Japan, reactor accident in 2011), and oil, natural gas and coal continuing to enjoy a long life.
According to the International Energy Agency, trillions of dollars have been invested in wind and solar power. This year alone, the figure is about $600 billion. Yet wind and solar represent only about 12% of total electricity generation.
Imagine what would have happened had they not benefited from ultra-cheap capital and energy, not to mention the generous taxpayer subsidies many governments provided. A sober rethinking is long overdue.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14776&omhide=true&trk=title
*****************************************Offshore wind in the U.S. hit headwinds in 2023. Here's what you need to know
There's a lot riding on the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry: the ability to tap into a huge source of clean energy and reduce carbon emissions, the opportunity to create thousands of jobs, the unique chance to jumpstart a new domestic manufacturing industry.
For these reasons, President Biden has made the success of the industry a pillar of his climate agenda. His administration has set an ambitious target of getting 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power flowing into the grid by 2030, which is enough electricity to power 10 million homes.
That goal is a long way off, and given the tumultuous year the industry just had, the future is anything but certain.
2023 has been marked by "headwinds" and "tailwinds," for the young industry. While some of the first large-scale projects in the Northeast started offshore construction and began sending power to the electric grid, the industry as a whole has been hit hard by rising interest rates, inflation, and global supply chain issues.
Making sense of the "whiplash" between good and bad offshore wind news is tough. But to get a full picture of where the industry currently stands, and what to watch for in 2024, here's what you need to know.
Offshore wind projects are moving forward
Until very recently, the U.S. had a total of seven operating turbines: five near Rhode Island and two near Virginia. Together, they generate about 42 megawatts, which is less than a small natural gas power plant.
That's about to change with the addition of the country's first two commercial-scale projects: Vineyard Wind and South Fork Wind.
Vineyard Wind — a 62-turbine wind farm located about 15 miles offshore from Martha's Vineyard — is set to deliver its "first power" to Massachusetts by the end of the year. Once the project is completed sometime next year, it will generate 800 megawatts, which is enough power for 400,000 homes.
South Fork Wind — a 12-turbine wind farm near Long Island — is also under construction and began producing electricity from its one completed turbine in early December. When the project is fully built out next year, its 132 megawatts will generate enough electricity to power about 70,000 homes in New York.
South Fork Wind — a 12-turbine wind farm near Long Island —began generating electricity in December. (South Fork Wind)
There are more than 10,000 offshore wind turbines in Northern Europe and parts of Asia. But adoption of offshore wind in the U.S. has been hobbled by NIMBYism and permitting delays. So industry experts and clean energy advocates say the progress on these first two American commercial-scale projects should not be understated.
"We should not lose sight of the fact that Vineyard Wind was not inevitable," said Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy at the Environmental League of Massachusetts. "It is a very big deal and should be celebrated as such."
Progress in other parts of the U.S.
The Northeast is farthest ahead when it comes to U.S. offshore wind. But the last year was also notable for the fledgling industry elsewhere in the country.
In the mid-Atlantic, the federal government gave final approval to a 2,600 megawatt offshore wind project near Virginia Beach, the sixth and largest proposed project in the country so far. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project will consist of 176 turbines and is expected to begin generating power by 2026.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the government held the region's first auction to lease areas offshore for wind development. The results, however, were "underwhelming." Only one of the three proposed lease areas near Texas and Louisiana received any bids.
Building a west coast offshore wind industry will be challenging, in large part because the water is so deep that only floating turbines will work. But on the heels of a successful auction for five lease areas, California continued to plow ahead this year on its ambitious plan to get 3,000 megawatts of offshore power by 2030 and a whopping 25,000 megawatts by 2045.
In 2024, the federal government has scheduled another lease auction in the mid-Atlantic and is expected to hold auctions in the Gulf of Maine and off the coast of Oregon.
Economic woes and canceled contracts
A year and half ago, the U.S. offshore wind industry looked nearly unstoppable. But global financial challenges and supply chain backlogs of the post-pandemic era, followed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, complicated everything.
The problems first surfaced in Massachusetts when two offshore wind developers announced that the large projects they had signed contracts for were "no longer viable" under the terms of their existing agreements.
Offshore wind farms cost billions to build, so even a small rise in interest rates or the cost of steel can send the price tag of a project soaring. The two companies unsuccessfully pleaded with Massachusetts the state to let them charge more for the electricity, and ultimately ended up backing out of their contracts. Both companies have promised to re-bid their projects, just at a higher cost, during Massachusetts' next round of offshore wind solicitations in early 2024.
Similar economic issues surfaced in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Even in Northern Europe, where offshore wind turbines have been in the water for decades, upcoming projects face unprecedented economic challenges and potential delays.
A major setback to the industry
For a while, offshore wind experts said the industry was simply undergoing a market correction and making up for overly optimistic bids — the projects weren't abandoned, people noted; they just needed new contracts.
Then, in late October, Ørsted, the world's largest offshore wind developer, canceled two projects it had proposed for New Jersey. The decision, which the company blamed on economic challenges and supply chain bottlenecks, shook the offshore wind world.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy called the move "outrageous." Opponents of offshore wind jumped on the news, pointing to it as further evidence that building turbines in the ocean is bad policy and financially irresponsible. Meanwhile, environmentalists quietly worried that other cancellations would follow.
"The world has in many ways, from a macroeconomic and industry point of view, almost turned upside down," Mads Nipper, the company's CEO said at the time. But while Nipper reaffirmed the company's commitment to other U.S. offshore wind projects in the pipeline, headlines about doom and gloom for the industry were everywhere.
"I think the reason the Ørsted cancellations just seemed so astounding was because they never came out and said, 'We want to renegotiate our contracts, we want to rebid,'" said Samantha Woodworth, an offshore wind analyst with consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. "I think that it was the abruptness that caused the industry to sort of go, 'Oh God!'"
In her view, the Ørsted cancellations are part of a bigger story about the struggle to get a new industry off the ground in a challenging economic situation.
"I don't think the offshore wind industry in the U.S. is going to fail," she said.
Other experts agree; meeting Biden's 2030 goals is more a matter of "when" than "if," they say.
"I think we will see the continuous rise of offshore wind," said Jan Matthiessen, director of the offshore wind program at The Carbon Trust, which advises governments and industry. "It is a young sector. We are scaling up, we are growing. And that also means you have some bumps in the road that you need to overcome."
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Sorry, USA Today, Weather Isn’t Getting Weirder or More Extreme
USA Today ran a story titled, “The weather is getting cold. Global warming is still making weather weird.” Both the second half of the headline and the story underlying it are false. Data refutes claims that weather has been unusual in recent years. Winters are still cold, with some places being colder and receiving more snow than others as has been true throughout history. Also summers are still hot with some regions being hotter and more prone droughts and heatwaves, than others.
Dinah Voyles Pulver, writing for USA Today says:
[Researchers are] compiling increasing evidence that climate change is bringing weirder weather, even in frigid locations like this northeastern landmark.
Notoriously fickle, the world’s weather is lurching from one extreme to another more often and to a greater degree as the warming atmosphere pushes natural variability to new extremes, breaking records time and again, the researchers say.
…
Human-induced climate change alters the intensity, frequency and duration of many extreme events during every season of the year, according to the report. Drought, flooding and wildfire are becoming more frequent and severe, with cascading effects in every part of the country.
There is no evidence whatsoever that weather is wildly swinging from one extreme to the other in a way that it has not done in the past, outside of unjustifiably alarming mainstream media headlines proclaiming it. The data just doesn’t support the claim.
Specifically, contrary to Pulver and USA Today’s claims, as discussed in Climate At A Glance: Drought and across dozens of Climate Realism articles, here, here, here, and here, for example, data refutes claims that droughts in the United States or globally have increased in number or intensity in recent years. The earth certainly hasn’t experienced any of the 100 year or longer droughts that research shows have occurred multiple times in past centuries and millennia, long before humans began pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Nor have wildfires or floods increased in frequency, intensity, or duration outside of their historical norms amidst recent modest warming, as data presented in Climate At A Glance: U.S. Wildfires, Climate At A Glance: Floods, and articles at Climate Realism discussing flood and wildfire trends demonstrate.
In the end, the USA Today’s story on weird weather is wrong on almost every testable claim made in it. Scientists’ anecdotes and impressions aside, no real-world data exists suggesting that weather in recent decades is getting weirder, however defined, or that extreme weather events are becoming more common or severe when they occur. Sorry, Pulver and USA Today, climate change can’t be causing something that isn’t happening. Such a claim is laughably false.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/12/sorry-usa-today-weather-isnt-getting-weirder-or-more-extreme
**************************************************Crude Oil Isn’t Going Away Soon
We’ve become a very materialistic society over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of more than 6,000 useful products and different fuels for planes, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space program made from crude oil that did not exist before the 1800’s.
As a refresher for those pursuing net-zero emissions, wind and solar do different things than crude oil.
Wind and solar renewables only generate occasional electricity but cannot manufacture anything. The problem with renewable electricity from wind turbines and solar panels is that they don’t work most of the time, and thus are unreliable for “just electricity”!
Then there is “the nameplate farce” of those renewables. There should be financial penalties for the subsidies and tax credits provided to wind and solar power plants for their inability to deliver at least 90 percent of their permitted nameplate ratings on an ANNUAL basis, like their backup competitors of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants that provide continuous uninterruptable electricity.
Of the three fossil fuels, coal and natural gas are used to generate electricity, but the third, crude oil, is virtually never used to generate electricity. However, when crude oil is manufactured into petrochemicals, it is the basis for virtually all the products in our materialistic society that did not exist before the 1800’s.
Today’s policymakers do not understand that everything that needs electricity is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, from the light bulb to the refrigerator, iPhone, defibrillator, computer, and communications equipment. Thus, “just electricity” from the so-called green renewables of wind turbines and solar panels are not displacing the need for crude oil.
We should be careful with what we wish for. From the proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” tells us that:
You can’t rid the world of crude oil and,
Continue to enjoy the products and transportation fuels that are currently made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil.
The few wealthy countries of the United States of America, Germany, the UK, and Australia representing about 6 percent of the world’s population (515 million vs 8 billion) are mandating social changes to achieve net zero emissions. Those developed countries have come a long way from the zero emissions society that existed before the 1800’s when:
There were no coal fired power plants before the 1800’s.
There were no natural gas-powered plants before the 1800’s.
There were no nuclear power plants before the 1800’s.
There were no products for heating, cooling, or irrigation to prevent weather related fatalities and injuries before the 1800’s.
There were no tires or asphalt to support transportation infrastructures.
Life expectancy was short, as life longevity was about 40 years of age before the 1800’s.
When people were born, they seldom traveled more than 100 miles from their birthplace before the 1800’s.
There was no medical industry before the 1800’s.
There were no electronics before the 1800’s.
There were no transportation infrastructures before the 1800’s.
There were no airplanes and thus no airports before the 1800’s.
There were no cruise ships nor merchant ships, other than sailing vessels before the 1800’s.
There were no military ships or planes before the 1800’s.
Looking beyond the few wealthy countries setting environmental policies for the other 94 percent of the world’s population,
Nearly Half the World Lives on Less than $5.50 a Day, as billions still struggle to meet basic needs. They may never be able to enjoy the materialistic living styles of those in wealthier countries.
At the recent climate summit gathering in Dubai that attracted more than 70,000 from around the world that enjoy their carbon-intensive lifestyles, as well as more than 600 emission-spewing private jets, the president of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber stated that a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”, i.e. back to the pre-1800’a as noted above.
Until a crude oil replacement is identified that can support making the more than 6,000 products in today’s society, the world cannot do without crude oil that is the basis of our materialistic “products” society.
Without crude oil, here are several conundrums that 8 billion on this planet would need to adjust to:
There would be no products that are based on oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil! Such as tires, asphalt, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioners, X-Ray machines, life-saving medical equipment, and the other 6,000 products that did not exist 200 years ago that make our lives better, and just about everything we take to be modern, such as cell phones.
The elimination of all of today’s militaries and space programs as the world reverts to when civilization existed without the products and fuels from oil, i.e., pre-1800.
The elimination of the tents and sleeping bags utilized by the growing homeless population, as tents and sleeping bags are just a few of the products made from petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil.
Eliminate the need for airports that now accommodate more than 25,000 commercial aircraft and more than 14,000 military aircraft.
Eliminate the more than 50,000 merchant ships, that are moving products around the world to support the 8 billion on this planet that are made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil!
Eliminate the needs for major shipping ports that accommodate military, cruise, and merchant ships.
Wealthier countries continue their pursuit of wind and solar generated electricity. believing that electricity will reduce crude oil usage, the wealthier countries renewables dream would mean sacrificing an estimated 6,000 useful products that rely on the petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil – products that range from tires and asphalt for highways to fertilizers, cosmetics, synthetic rubber, medicines and medical devices, cleaning products, and so many more.
Without fuels and without products now based on crude oil, we would be unable to operate the international and military airports that now accommodate a large number of the more than 25,000 commercial aircraft and a large number of the more than 14,000 military aircraft, as well as many of the more than50,000 merchant ships.
Just as food is fuel (no pun intended) for our bodies, crude oil is food for our way of life. It provides the products we need for prosperous lives. No sane person would cut off their main food supply without lining up for a new food supply, first unless they wanted to starve to death.
So, before we jump out of the airplane without a parachute, and revert to the pre-1800’s, let’s identify the back-up “source” that can continue to support the making of more than 6,000 products and the various fuels of our materialistic society that are now based on crude oil.
https://heartland.org/opinion/crude-oil-isnt-going-away-soon
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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