The renewable green energy disaster off the northeastern US is getting worse Less than one per cent of the way to the Biden 2030 target
A slow-motion collapse in the offshore wind industry continues to grow as sticky inflation and supply chain challenges force developers to delay or cancel major projects. In particular, progress towards the Biden administration’s goal of building large amounts of floating wind off the northeastern US coast is just about stalled.
Shell, which invested in a series of offshore wind projects in recent years, including offshore the northeastern United States, announced last week it would lay off much of its offshore wind business staff as the oil giant advances its program of refocusing on its core oil and gas business.
“We are concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” a Shell spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Shell is looking at how it can continue to compete for offshore wind projects in priority markets while maintaining our focus on performance, discipline and simplification.”
Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced even bigger layoffs, saying it would cut 15 per cent of its global staff to adjust to a slowing market. The announcement comes after the company reported a €4.6 billion loss for 2023, a losing trend that has continued over the first half of 2024.
“Our current situation demands adjustments that go beyond organizational changes. We have to adapt to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio,” said outgoing CEO Jochen Eickholt in a letter to staff.
On May 29 came survey results compiled by London-based energy consultancy Westwood indicating the global floating offshore wind industry is likely to deliver less than 3 gigawatts (GW) of new floating generation capacity by 2030, and a total of roughly 10 GW by 2040. Westwood cites lack of standardization of floating technology (55 per cent), manufacturing capability and capacity (51 per cent) and port infrastructure (50 per cent) as the primary impediments.
In light of the industry’s gloomy outlook, Westwood notes that “calls are ringing out for governments to provide more specific policy and regulatory support for technology development in addition to cost reduction and investment in port infrastructure to accelerate adoption.”
This is completely predictable, since the voracious rent-seeking wind business invariably calls for more government largesse in response to any challenge that arises. Unfortunately, the call is too often answered by policymakers who have made big political bets on being able to show off arrays of mammoth windmills floating atop various oceans and seas, intermittently producing some electricity – generally 25-30 per cent of nominal plant capacity over time.
This latest bad news for offshore wind could become especially troublesome for US President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, since he has invested so much of his personal political capital in pushing a major buildout of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic northeast. A 2023 Department of Energy fact sheet sets the administration’s goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 for the US alone, exceeding Westwood’s just estimated potential for global new capacity by that year by a factor of 10 times over.
To date, regulators under Biden have approved permits for 6 major offshore projects, several of which have already been delayed or cancelled by developers in response to tougher economic factors. In late 2023, major Danish wind developer Orsted cancelled two projects off the Atlantic coast, and Shell divested its 50 per cent stake in another in March of this year. Equinor and BP announced in January they were cancelling plans for their Empire Wind 2 project, citing similar economic concerns.
One US offshore project, Vineyard Wind 1, was able to begin delivering its intermittent 25-30 per cent of 68 megawatts (MW) to Massachusetts residents in January with the activation of 5 offshore turbines. The South Fork Wind Project was also able to commence first deliveries into New York in March, with 12 turbines capable of generating some proportion of 130 MW.
But this is less than one per cent of the Biden goal of 30 GW, with just five and a half years remaining until 2030. Given the wind industry’s insatiable appetite for ever-increasing subsidies and constantly rising utility charges, it’s an open question how many more billions of dollars the federal government will be allowed to print to keep projects alive before the voters start to rebel at the cost.
It’s a rebellion that could commence as soon as this coming November.
https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/the-renewable-green-energy-disaster
***********************************************As Climate Lawsuits Increase Against Oil and Gas, So Could Energy Costs
As U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies struggle under an array of regulations and permitting roadblocks, they also face new challenges from climate activists in the form of lawsuits, fines, taxes, and shareholder activism from blue-state pension funds.
Meanwhile, U.S. states increasingly are set against each other, with liberal states leading the charge against fossil fuel companies, while red states attempt to defend them.
Starting in 2018, states including New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, and California, as well as the District of Columbia, began filing lawsuits against energy giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Sunoco, BP, and others.
Oil companies also face legal action from dozens of cities, including Honolulu; Chicago; Baltimore; New York City; Charleston, South Carolina; San Francisco; Oakland, California; and Boulder, Colorado.
Analysts say there are multiple goals driving these suits.
“It’s partly ideological, trying to drive these companies out of business,” Kenny Stein, policy vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. He also said he believes it has to do with consumers’ use of fossil fuels.
“These governments are trying to mandate that people use less oil and less natural gas, but people want to heat their homes as much as they want, they want to drive as far as they want,” Mr. Stein said. “If the state banned the sale of oil, the population would revolt, so this is their backdoor way of trying to impose their will.”
Many of the climate lawsuits assert that pollution caused by oil companies creates a “public nuisance” and the companies intentionally deceived the public about the harmful effects when they caused global temperatures to rise.
The activist organization Climate Analytics tried to calculate the alleged damages.
“Between 1985 and 2018, we estimate partial damages of the combined CO2 emissions from 25 companies—oil and gas carbon majors—of about $20 trillion USD,” Climate Analytics states.
Meanwhile, on May 30, Vermont became the first state to pass a law that forces oil companies to pay for damage caused by “extreme weather events,” such as floods. According to this law, Vermont will tally the cost to residents of extreme weather events over the past 30 years; any company that has released more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 1995 to 2024 will be forced to pay its share of that cost into a state climate superfund.
But it’s not just about money.
“This is simply a strategy for the left to accomplish what they’ve been unable to do in Congress through the ballot box, and that is to implement a nationwide climate policy that’s consistent with their green agenda,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Marshall and 18 other attorneys general—all from red states—appealed to the Supreme Court on May 22, asking the justices to rule on whether individual states and cities can “assert the power to dictate the future of the American energy industry.
“Their actions imperil access to affordable energy everywhere and inculpate every State and indeed every person on the planet,” the attorneys general wrote. “Consequently, [they] threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among States, but our basic way of life.”
States are not just suing oil and gas companies; they are also lodging climate-related lawsuits against food companies.
In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS USA Food Co., a U.S. subsidiary of the Brazil-based JBS Group, the world’s largest meat processor, alleging that the firm misled the public about its environmental impact and that “beef production emits the most greenhouse gasses of any major food commodity.”
The Climate Litigation Industry
The potential for enormous payouts from these lawsuits has attracted not only a seemingly endless supply of plaintiffs, but also numerous law firms and even wealthy investors who are placing bets that the lawsuits will succeed.
The plan to potentially wrest trillions of dollars out of energy companies has been developing for more than a decade. A 2012 workshop hosted by the Climate Accountability Institute sought to draw on prior successes that states had in suing tobacco companies.
A post-conference recap of the workshop stated that the group had fostered “an exploratory, open-ended dialogue“ about whether it might ”use the lessons from tobacco-related education, laws, and litigation to address climate change.”
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Global Pushback Against the Greens
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has proclaimed fossil-fuel companies “godfathers of climate chaos,” but many Europeans, Africans, and Americans clearly disagree. They’ve shown recently what they think of the green agenda of costly renewables and instead support politicians who will let them keep their cars.
In elections for the European Parliament, a good number of Europeans joined the pushback that has already begun in the U.S and South Africa against the green-energy movement. Right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, and France, all with platforms opposing the green agenda, fared strikingly well.
French President Emmanuel Macron called national elections after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, which supports fossil fuels, gained 12 seats and won 31% of the vote: a plurality, and about twice the total achieved by Macron’s Renaissance Party.
Major losers in the European parliamentary elections included Renew Europe, the party that boasts “it has played a leading role in raising the European Union’s ambitions to reach climate neutrality by 2050,” and the European Greens Party, which seeks a green deal and wants the union to be powered 100% by renewable energy by 2040.
On June 5, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, indefinitely postponed New York City’s planned “congestion charge,” or tax, which was originally set to go in effect June 30. Had it been implemented, drivers would have been required to pay $15 per day to enter Manhattan’s central business district below 60th Street.
New York expected to raise $1 billion a year from drivers to fund public transit, although one congressional report commissioned by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., forecast revenues of over $3.4 billion.
Proponents said that the tax would improve air quality, reduce congestion, and fund public transit, but it would have disproportionately hurt small businesses, poor residents, and others who rely on personal transportation.
The tax would also have been harsh on older and handicapped people, many of whom can’t take public transit. And at a time when working from home has been hitting the economy of downtown Manhattan, it would have been an additional reason for office workers to forsake the city.
The Big Apple is fortunate to have escaped this outcome. There was vast resistance to the new tax, and Hochul was wise to cancel it. People don’t like to be without their cars, and she listened.
Virginia residents escaped a similar outcome recently, as Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin decided not to abide by California’s new Advanced Clean Cars II standards. Passed in 2022, the standards require 35% of new passenger vehicles sold in the Golden State to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2026 and 100% to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2035. Virginia will comply with federal law rather than California law.
Virginia’s prior governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had required that the commonwealth embrace the 2021 automobile standards of the California Air Resources Board, which would have mandated that a certain share of auto dealers’ sales in 2025 be battery-powered cars. The 2022 standards are stricter but were passed after Virginia (and 15 other states) had signed on to California’s 2021 standards.
Virginia is the first state to walk away from California’s 2022 standards, and it will encourage others to do the same. People need affordable, reliable transportation for personal and business use. Electric tractors can’t substitute for diesel-powered ones. Small businesses rely on gasoline-powered pickup trucks that can tow equipment without having to stop for an hour or two to recharge during long trips. Construction workers need inexpensive cars to get to work. And this is a global reality.
In the South African general elections last month, the African National Congress won only 40% of the popular vote, failing to secure a majority for the first time since the party’s 1994 founding. Although South Africa has vast supplies of coal and gas, blackouts have damaged the economy and contributed to the ANC government’s unpopularity.
Unplanned outages rose from 176,000 in 2007 to almost 20 million in 2023. Between 2012 and 2022, South Africa’s gross domestic product per capita declined by 17%, from $8,174 to $6,766, and manufacturing output decreased by almost a third. The latest official unemployment rate is 32.9%.
South Africa’s new government will need to ensure a reliable energy supply to revive the country’s manufacturing sector and reduce unemployment.
Fossil fuels are demonized by the secretary-general of the United Nations, but they enable people to heat and cool their homes, operate their vehicles, and use electrical appliances reliably. And resilient sources of fuel are essential to many countries’ manufacturing sectors.
Voters know this, and they are making themselves heard all over the world.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/global-pushback-against-the-greens/
*******************************************Australia: A price to pay for climate change fantasy
Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien haven’t reignited the climate wars, as Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen claim. The climate wars never went away and they are being waged all over the world. It’s just that almost everything you hear about climate policy in the official and semi-official discussion in Australia is basically misleading, if not outright wrong.
Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.
The Kyoto Protocol was adopted, in the serene and beguiling Japanese city of that name, in 1997, 27 years ago. Kyoto itself built on the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So for more than three decades the world has been decarbonising, right?
We’ve had many solemn moments and announcements, especially the 2015 Paris Agreement. Dutton says he would abandon Australia’s 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent, but he’s committed to honouring the Paris pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. He wants to do it in part by building nuclear energy.
In truth Australia, whether led by Albanese or Dutton, is a very, very minor player in all this, being responsible for a tick over 1 per cent of global emissions. Every Labor leader since Kyoto, and quite a few Liberal leaders, has told us the world is decarbonising. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, early in the life of the Albanese government, caused a ripple of concern by rejoicing in the fact that coal was being phased out globally.
So after three decades of decarbonising, how is the world going in phasing out fossil fuels, to wit, gas, oil and coal?
Let’s start with gas. Everyone except the Greens understands that gas is, at the very least, a critical transition technology.
Much of the reduction in the carbon intensity of economies – that is, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of production – has come from substituting gas for coal and oil.
Nonetheless, after 30 years of relentless decarbonisation, you’d expect a pretty severe drop in gas use. Actually, according to the International Energy Agency, consumption of natural gas is at or just near its record high. The rate of growth of demand has slowed but demand is still growing.
Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. What about oil, that must be well down, with fuel efficiency standards, the global campaign for electric vehicles, the decline of oil in power generation?
Guess what. Last year, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration, world use of oil was at a record high, higher than the peak before the Covid pandemic, at more than 100 million barrels a day. Not only that, the US under pro-green Joe Biden produced more crude oil, more than 13 million barrels a day, than any country has ever done.
Oil production dipped in the global financial crisis of 2008 and again during Covid. But it’s now roaring ahead, stronger than ever.
But surely the US constantly lectures everyone else about climate change, the dangers of fossil fuels etc. How is that consistent with record crude oil production? Bear that thought in mind, for it’s a clue to the wider reality.
OK, so we’ve struck out in looking for global reductions in gas and oil, but obviously coal use must be well down. I have myself caused something near pandemonium by suggesting on the ABC’s Q+A and on Insiders that coal has a future as well as a past. It was as though a leading atheist had infiltrated the Spanish Inquisition. So now I must face the truth about coal. Surely its use has declined?
But what do you know? According to the IEA: “Global coal consumption reached an all-time high in 2022, and the world is heading towards a new record in 2023.”
Advanced economies such as the US and the EU are using less coal but, says the IEA, “the growth in China and India, as well as Indonesia, Vietnam and The Philippines, will more than offset these decreases on a global level”. And the price of coal, at $US140 a tonne, is very healthy.
That’s a good thing because our top three export earners are coal, iron ore and gas. We couldn’t afford any fancy green measures, or Medicare, or the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or anything else, without the minerals industry.
According to the IEA, fossil fuels make up about 80 per cent of global energy, just a tick under their level 10 years ago.
So how has the world been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions for so long, with these fossil fuels all reaching record production and consumption levels? Well, actually, the world hasn’t been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.
Oops again. Another surprise. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, greenhouse gas levels are rising again, and reached record levels last year. The IEA’s own figures, and studies from Stanford and other universities, confirm this.
None of the foregoing bears on the question of what should be happening. But our debates ought to start with reality. What is happening in the world is more or less the opposite of what the government and the climate change propaganda agencies tell us is happening.
How often have you heard any of the facts above in the Australian climate debate? The debate is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are so committed to the idea of Australia taking radical action that they insist on pretending radical action is being taken globally.
The developed countries are reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the developed countries are no longer the big story. China is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far. It accounts for more than 29 per cent of global emissions, more than the US and EU put together. The top 10 emitters are: China, the US, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Iran, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Of those only two, the US and Japan, are rich, developed countries. Almost none of the others has binding targets or any commitment to when their emissions will even peak.
Indonesia is a fascinating case. Like China, it has a goal of net zero by 2060. It has nearly 280 million people and is still a poor country. It has more than 250 operational coal-fired power plants. It has an international deal to retire some of them early. Well, that seems to be progress, you might argue.
Except that it also has an out clause that says plants that have already been approved, or “captive” plants that don’t feed directly into the grid but only power an industrial park or a specific project, or are concerned with National Strategic Projects, can go ahead. There are 40 plants under construction and more in pre-approval.
Recently, Indonesia has had huge success expanding its nickel production. In 2020, Jakarta banned the export of unrefined nickel. Like Australia, it has a lot of nickel. It didn’t want to dig it up and ship it overseas. It wanted refining and processing to take place within Indonesia.
This move defied every tenet of orthodox economics and was almost universally criticised by international commentators (including me). Yet as so often, reality doesn’t conform to the textbook.
Indonesia’s move worked. It attracted Chinese partners who also bought the product. Low-grade nickel is used to make steel. High-class nickel is used for very sexy products like lithium-ion batteries. A bit like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, low-class nickel can be transformed into high-class nickel with enough money. There are industrial processes that will do the trick but they require enormous amounts of power. So Indonesia’s Chinese collaborators built a swag of coal-fired power stations to provide the power to work the magic on the nickel.
In 2017, Indonesia produced 385,000 tonnes of nickel. Last year it produced 1.8 million tonnes. It’s murdering the Australian competition. The Albanese government talks a lot about Australia’s position with rare earths, of which we have a lot in the ground, and how we’re going to become a renewable energy superpower.
By the way, almost every country in the world plans to be a renewable energy superpower (surely now one of the iconic cliches of our time), suggesting many, many of them will be sorely disappointed.
The Indonesian policy has succeeded magnificently from its point of view. Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, has genuine environmental ambitions. But he’s also determined to develop his nation. Similarly, anyone with even the vaguest familiarity with Indonesian politics will know just how entrenched and powerful are coalmining and energy interests. Indonesia pays its population fuel subsidies – the exact opposite of a carbon tax – and has typically subsidised coal energy.
But the deeper pattern and perversity of the industrial politics of renewable energy revealed in the Indonesian nickel example occurs more broadly across Asia, especially in China. The production and sale of wind turbines is dominated by China. To make them so cheaply, China typically uses cheap coal-fired power. Coal power is still mostly the cheapest power in the world despite what the Albanese government tells you (more on that below).
So the true carbon cost of even renewable energy ought to take into account the role of coal-fired power in making the renewable energy products. In any event, here’s the paradox of energy politics: to become a renewable energy superpower, you need lots and lots of cheap coal-fired power.
China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines and in due course the poorer nations of Asia, and beyond that lots of African nations, are extremely unlikely to compromise their national development by embracing vastly more expensive and unreliable renewable energy over coal, gas and the like.
Two factors allow some modern, wealthy, industrial nations to run low emissions levels. One is a natural topography that lends itself to hydro-electric power. Hydro power is the only genuinely cost-competitive renewable energy and still the most important renewable energy. The other is already having a lot nuclear power.
None of this, as I say, is to argue what Australian policy should be. But the realities sketched here almost never figure in the Australian debate. How come?
Let me nominate one international factor and one specifically Australian factor.
Accompanying this article is a graph from the IEA showing the rise of the use of gas, oil and coal, measured in exajoules (one joule, a measure of energy, to the power of 18; that is to say, lots of joules, one joule being the equivalent of 107 ergs). The left side of the graph’s curve, up to the peak in 2022, which has been maintained in 2023, describes things that have already happened. That part of the graph is indisputable fact.
The right side of the graph shows a steep decline in the use of coal, oil and gas. But that’s purely speculative. That’s more or less taking an end point of declared policy, the Paris targets, and plotting a line that gets there. But that’s the future, and government predictions of the future have never been reliable. Indeed the Climate Tracker website describes Argentina, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, Canada, Mexico and Indonesia as “critically insufficient” in meeting their greenhouse gas reduction targets, and Australia, China, Brazil, the EU and Britain as “highly insufficient”.
The point about the graph is that huge amounts of climate literature are presented this way. The average reporter, the average citizen, tends to see such graphs as one entity and unconsciously gives the authority of the left-hand side of the graph, which represents factual history, to the right-hand side of the graph, which represents Nostradamus-like prophecy.
Within Australia, governments do this kind of thing very deliberately and with shockingly good effect. I’ve been following the national defence budget pretty closely for some decades. I’ve never seen a defence budget projection, or capability projection, actually come true if it concerns any period of the future longer than about six months. And defence is an area where the Australian government entirely controls what it spends. Australian governments can’t even predict what they themselves are going to do more than five minutes hence.
Yet somehow we are supposed to believe government agencies can forecast exactly what’s going to happen in energy and climate years and years, even decades, ahead. Gimme a break.
Thus the Albanese government has got great mileage from a Climate Change and Energy Department projection that Australia will reach a 42 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, just 1 per cent shy of our target of 43 per cent. Apparently the government now can predict the course of the Ukraine war, the effects of a possible Donald Trump victory in America, greenhouse gas emissions caused perhaps by a sudden spike in migration to Australia, and all the other manifold variables. You think?
Predicting we’ll be just 1 per cent short is a sweet touch. Just try a little harder, Australia! Yet a UN committee examining the issue doesn’t think even one G20 country will meet its target. The government is miles behind in the rollout of renewables. Electric vehicle sales are a small fraction of the forecast sales. But still we are, according to the magic forecast, just 1 per cent off target.
This is the problem, though. Almost every piece of information in this area is designed to produce a political effect. Disinterested information is at a premium.
When like is genuinely compared with like, coal is cheaper than renewables. Because with renewables you have to take account of the fact that most of the time they don’t operate so you need vast extra capacity, sometimes there are wind droughts and long cloudy periods so you need vast back-up systems of gas or coal or something else, the transmission infrastructure is enormous and the costs huge, and after 25 years or so you’ve got to throw away all the renewable stuff and replace it.
Almost everywhere that introduces vast renewable energy, apart from hydro, sees big electricity price rises. It might be that we still want to make the change because of our commitment to lowering our greenhouse gas emissions. But we need to recognise the cost, otherwise there will certainly be a backlash and the policy may well be reversed in time.
On the other hand, perhaps we should have some other conversations as well. Almost everyone wants to make some contribution to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But given that whatever we do will have no discernible impact on the global environment, we should think pretty carefully about the cost. Especially given that it’s not happening globally.
Switching to renewables will make us poorer. They say the key policy dilemma for China is: will it grow rich before it grows poor?
For us the question is: do we want to grow richer before we grow poorer? And how poor do we really want to be?
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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