Should electric vehicles be illegal?

From ESPN: “Randall Cobb, family ‘lucky to be alive’ after house fire.”

Wide receiver Randall Cobb and his family escaped a fire at their Nashville, Tennessee, home this week, with his wife, Aiyda, posting, “we are lucky to be alive.”

Aiyda Cobb posted to her Instagram story this week that a Tesla charger “caught fire in the garage late last night and quickly spread” through their home.

“We got out of the house with nothing but the clothes on our back and no shoes on our feet,” she wrote.

The Cobbs have three young sons.

Electric vehicle batteries, like the large batteries used to store electricity from inept sources like wind and solar, are prone to burst into flame. And those fires are hard to extinguish. Out of curiosity, I googled “battery fire.” Here is a sampling of news headlines from the last 36 hours:

Driver sustained major injuries after colliding with a tree in an EV vehicle that caught fire.

Fiery Tesla Crash Poses Unique Challenges for Firefighters Near Anderson Valley.

Crews respond to battery fire at East Penn facility.

Man critically hurt in Brooklyn fire, e-bike battery probed as cause.

U.S. safety board probes fatal Tesla accident in Florida.

Baseus power banks recalled after dozens of fires, 13 burn injuries.

E-bike catches fire after being left in the sun in West Valley.

Route 35 closed in Naples due to fatal electric vehicle crash, battery fire.

This former Detroit firefighter is tackling the EV battery fire problem.

Lithium Batteries Are Set to Power the World—and Pose New Fire Risks.

Lithium-ion batteries, suspected in Keene fires, fuel widespread concern.

Three rescued from apparent lithium-ion battery fire in Midwood.

Fire breaks out in Tesla Megapack unit in Australia during testing.

Lithium-ion battery found at Brooklyn apartment fire: FDNY.

And, if we go back just 72 hours: Lithium battery factory fire kills 22 in South Korea.

Where is the Consumer Products Safety Commission? Where is the Congressional investigation? In what other context are products that spontaneously burst into flames legally marketed? If electric vehicles, e-bikes and batteries for wind and solar installations were not darlings of the “green” scam that controls government at most levels, would they even be legal?

These are serious questions.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/06/should-electric-vehicles-be-illegal.php

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NYT: Islands not drowning

Remember how we’ve been told for years now that climate change, and hence rising sea levels, were an imminent threat to islands and island nations around the world? Well, the New York Times reported a few days ago, oops:

The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish

[W]hen the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.

Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.

Climate realists have been reporting the growth of island atolls for years, but were resolutely ignored. And now of course the Times behaves like they and their sources are noticing this inconvenient fact for the very first time.

The rest of this long—very very long—feature labors mightily to say there’s a still a problem, and scientists are working hard to understand the “complexities” of the situation.

One thing the story avoids saying, however, is that the science apparently isn’t “settled.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/07/a-fresh-embarrassment-for-the-climate-cult.php

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New British Energy Secretary Overrules Officials And Bans New North Sea Oil Exploration

Ed Miliband has ordered an immediate ban on drilling in new North Sea oil fields in a decision that overrules Energy Department officials and risks triggering a wave of legal action

In an unusual intervention into what is typically an apolitical process, the Energy Secretary has decided that regulators will not approve a round of drilling in new oil fields that was slated for confirmation in the coming weeks.

His decision to block the licences means that companies will have wasted millions of pounds on preparing their bids, with experts warning they are likely to take legal action as a result.

The decision comes after The Telegraph asked for updates on outstanding drilling licence applications.

The applications, from companies seeking to exploit up to 35 new North Sea areas, were submitted as part of the 33rd offshore oil and gas licensing round initiated by the last government in autumn 2023.

It saw 76 oil and gas companies submitting 115 bids to drill for oil and gas across 257 “blocks” of the North Sea, Irish Sea and East Atlantic. The NSTA said these would boost UK oil output by 600 million barrels.

Bids for up to 35 areas were still awaiting a decision from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator, when the election was called. The NSTA is an arms-length agency overseen by the Energy Department.

On Wednesday afternoon the NSTA said that applications were still being considered, despite the change in Government. A spokesman reiterated the NSTA’s pre-election statement that:

“Further consideration is being given to a small number of remaining applications and a few more may be offered at a later date.”

However, a spokesman for Mr Miliband subsequently said that licences for new fields would not be approved.

In a terse statement issued late on Wednesday, his spokesman said:

“We will not issue new licences to explore new fields, and will not revoke existing oil and gas licences. We will manage existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan.”

Whitehall sources have also made clear that the NSTA’s role and structures are likely to be reviewed and overhauled.

Presiding over new licences would have been deeply embarrassing for Mr Miliband, a committed opponent of oil and gas.

In a debate earlier this year, he said:

“Oil and gas licensing will not reduce energy costs for households and businesses … will not enhance energy security, and offers no plan for the future of the UK’s offshore energy communities.

It will ensure the UK remains at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets and is entirely incompatible with the UK’s international climate change commitments.”

Mr Miliband and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, also pledged in opposition to raise taxes on UK oil and gas production profits from 75pc to 78pc and to slash the industry’s investment allowances.

The King’s Speech, at the state opening of Parliament on July 17, is expected to outline more of Labour’s plans for taxing UK oil and gas – including allowing existing fields to keep operating.

That has prompted eco-activists to step up their campaign against oil and gas developments.

On Wednesday activists from Just Stop Oil spread orange paint across three road junctions around Westminster. The group has also threatened to blockade airports through the summer.

Labour’s policies have also attracted widespread criticism from within the energy industry which points out that the UK spent almost £27bn on imports of crude oil and over £21bn on gas imports last year.

One leading analyst said:

“Right now the UK gets 75pc of its total energy from oil and gas and a lot of that already has to be imported.

The remaining North Sea oil and gas fields are absolute treasures and one day they will all be developed. These remaining fields could reduce reliance on imports.”

Oil industry insiders said any attempt to block legitimate licence applications “could result in a legal action for damages” by the affected companies.

Offshore Energies UK, which represents the industry, warned that UK production was already falling at eight percent a year but this would accelerate to 15 percent a year without new drilling – accelerating the surge in imports.

David Whitehouse, chief executive, said:

“We remain deeply concerned that some of the new proposals being put forward for our industry will undermine the energy transition we all want to deliver.

Labour’s leadership has recognised that North Sea oil and gas will be with us for decades to come and they have committed to managing this strategic national asset in a way that does not jeopardise jobs.

They now need to deliver on their commitment to support our industry.”

https://principia-scientific.com/miliband-overrules-officials-and-bans-new-north-sea-oil-exploration/

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Big batteries bring big problems

Viv Forbes

Solar generators won’t run on moon-beams – they fade out as the sun goes down and stop whenever clouds block the sun. This happens at least once every day. But then at mid-day on most days, millions of solar panels pour so much electricity into the grid that the price plummets and no one makes any money. And after a good hail storm they never work again.

Turbine generators are also intermittent – they stop whenever there is too little, or too much wind. In a wide flat land like Australia, wind droughts may affect huge areas for days at a time. This often happens when a mass of cold air moves over Australia, winds drop and power demand rises in the cold weather. All of this makes our power grid more variable, more fragile, and more volatile. What do we do if we have a cloudy windless week?

Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – ‘Big Batteries’.

But big batteries bring more big problems – they have to be recharged by the same intermittent green generators needed to keep the lights on, the trains running, and the batteries charged in all those electric cars, trucks, and dozers. And if anyone has been silly enough to build some power-hungry green hydrogen generators, they too will need more generation capacity and more battery backups. How long do we allow them to keep throwing our dollars into this green whirlpool?

Collecting dilute intermittent wind and solar energy from all over a big continent like Australia and moving it to coastal cities and factories brings another ‘green’ energy nightmare – an expensive and intrusive spider-web of powerlines that are detested by landowners, degrade the environment, cause bushfires, and are susceptible to damage from lightning, cyclones and sabotage.

They call them solar ‘farms’ and wind ‘parks’ – they are neither farms nor parks – they are monstrous and messy wind and solar power plants. And these very expensive ‘green’ assets are idle, generating nothing, for most of most days.

Big batteries sitting in cities have proved a big fire risk and no one wants them next door. So our green ‘engineers’ have another solution to these problems caused by their earlier ‘solutions’ – ‘Mobile Batteries’. (This is a worry – no one knows where they are – maybe they will be disguised as Mr Whippy ice cream vans?)

Train entrepreneurs want to build ‘batteries on tracks’ – a train loaded with batteries, which parks beside a wind/solar energy factory until the batteries are full. Then the battery train trundles off to the nearest city to unload its electricity, preferably at a profit. They can also play the arbitrage market – buy top-up power around midday and sell into peak prices at breakfast and dinner times when the unreliable twins usually produce nothing useful. This will have the added advantage of sending coal and gas generators broke sooner by depressing peak prices. Once coal and gas are decimated, then the battery trains can make a real killing.

But battery trains may be the perfect answer to supplying those energy-hungry AI data centres. Let’s start a pilot project and park a battery train beside the National AI Centre near the CSIRO in Canberra…

A more ambitious idea is the BBB Plan – ‘Big Batteries on Boats’.

It would work like this:

The Australian government places an order with China to build a fleet of electric boats (sail-assisted of course) that are filled with batteries (and lots of fire extinguishers). The batteries are charged with cheap coal-fired electricity at ports in China. They then sail to ports in Australia where the electricity is unloaded into the grid whenever prices are high or blackouts loom.

Australian mines can profit from the iron ore used to make the boats, the rare minerals used to build the batteries, and any Australian coal used by the Chinese power plants to charge the batteries.

This solution allows Australian politicians to go to world conferences boasting that Australia’s electricity is ‘Net Zero’, and more tourists can be enticed to visit our endangered industrial relics – coal mining and steam generator museums.

Of course, there is another danger in the BBB solution – some entrepreneurs may load their boats with nuclear generators plus enough fuel on board for several decades of operation. Or they may even site a small nuclear reactor beside a closed coal power station and make use of all the ready-to-go power lines already in place.

This sort of dangerous thinking could well demolish another Queensland green dream – ‘CopperString’ – a $5 billion speculation to build 840 km of new transmission line from Townsville to Mt Isa. We are not sure which way the power is expected to flow. They will probably not get there before the great copper mine at Mt Isa closes.

Why not just send a small nuke-on-a-train to Mt Isa?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/big-batteries-bring-big-problems/

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