Monday, May 15, 2023
Oxford University's "Our World in Data" falls for renewables industry spin
Campaigning group Net Zero Watch has called on Oxford University’s Our World in Data (OWID) site to withdraw its webpage on the cost of renewable energy.
In a letter to OWID’s director Max Roser, NZW’s Andrew Montford explains that the site is putting its reputation at risk by ignoring the highly transparent UK data in favour of numbers that are not replicable, and most likely to be based on “hearsay”.
Mr Montford said:
"The UK is almost unique in having a high penetration of renewable energy and freely available financial accounts data. A series of reviews of this information confirms that the cost of offshore wind power is high, and hardly coming down at all. It is hard to comprehend why Our World in Data would ignore this hard data in favour of unsubstantiated spin from the renewables industry. Their page on the subject should be revised before anyone else is misled.”
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From: Andrew Montford
To: Dr Max Roser
11 May 2023
Dear Dr Roser
Our World in Data (OWID) is usually a rather reliable source of information, so I wanted to draw your attention to what I believe is an uncharacteristically flawed article on your website. This is ‘Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?’, which examines the levelised cost of renewable energy.
Firstly, I should point out that the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) isn’t actually data at all. In simple terms, LCOE divides the lifetime costs of a generator by its lifetime output, but neither of those figures are known until the generator closes down at the end of its life. So while the Capital Expenditures (capex) element of lifetime cost is knowable at the start, the lifetime Operational Expenditure (opex) and the output have to be modelled. So whether a site called Our World in Data should be discussing LCOE at all is worthy of consideration.
Where LCOE is discussed, the data used as input needs to be grounded in reality, the modelling assumptions need to be made clear, and caveats spelled out. This is not the case for the sources you cite. For example, while widely cited, the assumptions used by Lazard are demonstrably false. For example, for offshore wind, the version of the report you cite (version 13) claims a capital cost of £2.3-$3.5m/MW, roughly half the cost of offshore windfarms in the UK, and a third of the cost of the only (admittedly experimental) offshore windfarm in the US. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the assumptions for capacity factor and opex are similarly divorced from reality.
You also cite the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), whose figures are similarly problematic, notably because they convert all their numbers into US dollars, giving them a large and entirely spurious downwards trend as a result of the appreciation of the dollar against most other currencies.
It’s not clear where Lazard and IRENA are getting their input figures from, but it’s unlikely to be anything that could reasonably be called ‘data’. IRENA is supposed to be global in nature, and Lazard are vague about whether their estimates are for the US or for the world. Either way, the majority of the financial inputs cannot be data because such information is not available for most of the world: word of mouth and/or developer announcements seem the most likely sources. In the UK, developer announcements are typically 15-20% lower than outturn cost.
The clear exception to this rule is the UK, where financial data is freely available for all offshore windfarms and many large onshore ones (as well as a few solar parks). This then is the only reliable data for estimating the levelised cost of renewable energy. I refer you to the paper by Aldersey-Williams et al. (2019) on the LCOE of offshore wind, which presents a very different story to the one in your article, and which has been replicated by others.
By basing your article on figures that can only be based on hearsay, rather than on empirical data, you are risking your hard-won reputation as a reliable source. I would advise you to revise the article accordingly.
With best regards
Andrew Montford
Director, Net Zero Watch
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The wind and solar power myth has finally been exposed
Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future. The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It's widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this. This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.
These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.
In the real world a wind farm’s output often drops below 10 per cent of its rated “capacity” for days at a time. Solar power disappears completely every night and drops by 50 per cent or more during cloudy days. “Capacity” being a largely meaningless figure for a wind or solar plant, about 3000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity is needed to replace a 1000 MW conventional power station in terms of energy over time: and in fact, as we shall see, the conventional power station or something very like it will still be needed frequently once the wind and solar are online.
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation have developed an expectation that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have had to be shut down.
In fact it's already common to see efficient combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions machinery as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
Certain countries are helped because their power systems are supported by major inter-connectors to adjacent regions that have surplus power available. The increasingly troubled French nuclear fleet, which formerly had plenty of spare energy on tap, for a long time helped to make renewables plans look practical across Western Europe.
But this situation is not sustainable in the long term. Under net-zero plans, all nations will need to generate many times more electricity than they now can, as the large majority of our energy use today is delivered by burning fossil fuels directly. Neighbouring regions will be unable to provide the backup power needed; emissions from open cycle gas turbines (or new coal powerplants, as in the case of Germany at the moment) will become unacceptable; more existing base load stations will be forced to shut down by surges in renewables; more and more wind and solar power will have to be expensively dumped when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.
Power prices will soar, making more or less everything more expensive, and there will be frequent blackouts.
None of this is difficult to work out. Building even more renewables capacity will not help: even ten or 100 times the nominally-necessary “capacity” could never do the job on a cold, windless evening.
Only one thing can save the day for the renewables plan. Reasonable cost, large scale energy storage, sufficient to keep the lights on for several days at a minimum, would solve the problem.
What are the options?
First we need to consider the scale of the issue. Relatively simple calculations show that that California would need over 200 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage per installed MW of wind and solar power. Germany could probably manage with 150 MWh per MW. Perhaps this could be provided in the form of batteries?
The current cost of battery storage is about US$600,000 per MWh. For every MW of wind or solar power in California, $120 million would need to be spent on storage. In Germany it would be $90 million. Wind farms cost about $1.5 million per MW so the cost of battery storage would be astronomical: 80 times greater than the cost of the wind farm! A major additional constraint would be that such quantities of batteries are simply not available. Not enough lithium and cobalt and other rare minerals are being mined at the moment. If prices get high enough supply will expand, but prices are already ridiculously, unfeasibly high.
Some countries are gambling on hydro pumped storage. Here the idea is to use electricity to pump water uphill into a high reservoir using surplus renewables on sunny, windy days: then let it flow back down through generating turbines as in a normal hydropower plant when it’s dark and windless.
Many pumped systems have been built in China, Japan and United States but they have storage sufficient for only 6 to 10 hours operation. This is tiny compared with the several days storage that is needed to back up wind and solar power through routine sunless calm periods. Much larger lakes at the top and bottom of the scheme are needed. There are very few locations where two large lakes can be formed with one located 400-700 m above the other and separated by less than 5-10 km horizontally. Such a location must also have an adequate supply of make-up water to cope with evaporation losses from the two lakes. Another problem is that at least 25 per cent of the energy is lost while pumping and then generating.
Hydro pumped storage will seldom be a feasible option. It cannot solve the problem on a national scale even in countries like the USA which have a lot of mountains.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuel stations is also touted as way of avoiding the problems of wind and solar power. But this is not a technology, just a case of wishful thinking. In spite of many years of work and enormous amounts of money spent, nobody has yet devised a technology that can provide large scale, low cost CCS. Even if capture worked and didn't consume most or all the energy generated, storing the carbon dioxide is a huge problem because three tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burned.
Hydrogen is another technology which is often suggested for energy storage: but its problems are legion. At the moment hydrogen is made using natural gas (so-called “blue” hydrogen). This, however, will have to stop in a net-zero world as the process emits large amounts of carbon: you might as well just burn the natural gas. Proper emissions-free “green” hydrogen is made from water using huge amounts of electrical energy, 60 per cent of which is lost in the process. Storing and handling the hydrogen is extremely difficult because hydrogen is a very small molecule and it leaks through almost anything. At best this means that a lot of your stored hydrogen will be gone by the time you want to use it: at worst it means devastating fires and explosions. The extremely low density of hydrogen also means that huge volumes of it would have to be stored and it would often have to be stored and handled cryogenically, creating even more losses, costs and risks.
The conclusion is simple. Barring some sort of miracle, there is no possibility that a suitable storage technology will be developed in the needed time frame. The present policies of just forcing wind and solar into the market and hoping for a miracle have been memorably and correctly likened to “jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and hoping that the parachute will be invented, delivered and strapped on in mid air in time to save you before you hit the ground.”
Wind and solar need to be backed up, close to 100 per cent, by some other means of power generation. If that backup is provided by open-cycle gas or worse, coal, net zero will never be achieved: nor anything very close to it.
There is one technology that can provide a cheap and reliable supply of low-emissions electricity: nuclear power. Interest in nuclear power is increasing as more and more people realise that it is safe and reliable. If regulators and the public could be persuaded that modern stations are inherently safe and that low levels of nuclear radiation are not dangerous, nuclear power could provide all the low cost, low emissions electricity the world needs for hundreds or thousands of years.
But if we had 100 per cent nuclear backup for solar and wind, we wouldn't need the wind and solar plants at all.
Wind and solar are, in fact, completely pointless.
Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE(rtd) is a power systems engineer with more than 60 years experience on projects around the world. He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
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Alarming drop in mining derails drive for Net Zero
Green transition will take six times the mineral output world is producing now
The latest key Canadian and global mining production numbers are out, and they’re grim. The International Energy Agency says that to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, we need to be producing six times the current global output of mineral inputs just to build the turbines, transmission lines, batteries and other items essential for low-carbon energy infrastructure. Instead, we are mining less than we did in 2019. While policy-makers constrain new investments in fossil fuels, the raw materials we need in order to develop alternative forms of energy are not coming along quickly enough. The result seems likely to be an energy crunch.
The 38th edition of the World Mining Data report, published annually by the Austrian government, finds that mining production is not meeting the hopes of governments working to increase their own domestic and friendly sources of minerals. Rather, production has roughly plateaued, with the sector yet to match the peak production of 18 billion metric tons achieved in 2019. Far from growing our outputs, we’re struggling to maintain them.
Even more troubling: more than a third of global mining production remains controlled by our two biggest geopolitical adversaries. China is still responsible for over a quarter of the total and Russia another 9.2 per cent on top of that. China is the world’s largest producer of 29 different commodities and dominates the processing and refining of many others.
Global mining financing is barely a third what it was a decade ago
In Canada, meantime, we are punching below our weight, ranking only eighth in world production, well behind our peers, the U.S. (second) and Australia (fourth). We do lead the pack in new exploration spending but our actual production of critical minerals is falling, despite renewed attention from the federal government and bilateral agreements with most of our closest allies to increase supply.
Natural Resources Canada released its annual mining production results in mid-April, confirming that in 2022 we produced fewer critical minerals — the copper, cobalt, nickel, zinc, uranium and platinum-group metals that are essential to the energy transition — than in 2019. Output of gold, which is a hedge against inflation and economic uncertainty, did increase, as did output of silver, iron and potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer. But they won’t help us hit our climate goals, and output of metals that would won’t be taking off any time soon, according to the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.
Mining investment is anemic around the world, having plummeted 35 per cent between 2021 and 2022, a victim of high interest rates and price volatility. Overall global mining financing is barely a third what it was a decade ago, falling from US$119 billion at the peak of the last commodity cycle in 2013, to a dismal US$42 billion last year. Far from growing mineral production for a future net-zero world, we are living off investments made in the past.
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Australia: Federal Minister approvess Hunter coal mine expansion
The Environmental Defenders Office sought to overturn an approval allowing the expansion of Mt Pleasant mine. The Independent Planning Commision approved and application to extend the mine's life by 22 years to the end of 2048.
Environment groups have slammed federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek's refusal to stop the approvals of four coal projects, including the Mt Pleasant mine expansion near Muswellbrook.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission conditionally approved MACH Energy's expansion plans late last year.
The approval will extend the mine's life by 22 years to the end of 2048, a result that opponents argue would result in more than 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions.
Mt Pleasant was among 19 coal and gas projects Environment Justice Australia, acting on behalf of Environment Council of Central Queensland, applied under federal laws to have thrown out before they had completed their full environmental assessments.
The group argued that the potential emissions from the projects should rule them out of any further consideration.
But in order to stop a project from proceeding, federal laws require proof that its emissions would be a substantial cause of climate change effects on the Australian environment.
Ms Plibersek's department said on Thursday night that this had not been proven in regard to Mount Pleasant, the Narrabri Coal mine expansion, the Ensham coal mine extension and the Isaac River coal mine, both of which are located in Queensland's Bowen Basin
"The Albanese government has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law - that's what happens on every project, and that's what's happened here. Since the election we've doubled renewable energy approvals to a record high. The government will continue to consider each project on a case-by-case basis, under the law," federal Department of Environment spokeswoman said.
The Environment Council of Central Queensland said it was considering all legal options including a Federal Court challenge and any injunctions needed.
"Today's decision means Minister Plibersek joins a long line of federal environment ministers who have said it's not their job to consider the climate risk of new coal and gas mines," President Christine Carlisle said.
"We're already dealing with floods, bushfires, and droughts and the evidence shows these new coal and gas proposals will make the devastation much, much worse.
"This is the real test for the minster. Australians who voted in favour of climate action have a right to feel betrayed by these decisions. We want our kids and our grandkids to be able to experience our natural wonders."
In giving its conditional approval for the expansion last year, the planning commission said the project would provide up to 447 direct and indirect jobs in the Muswellbrook and Upper Hunter, 643 jobs in the wider region, and 444 jobs elsewhere in NSW.
Mt Pleasant is also one of the few known habitats of the Hunter Valley Delma. The Delma is a species of legless lizard endemic to the Hunter Valley and Liverpool plains and was found on the mine site by researchers from the Australian Museum in 2022.
The Climate Council said Ms Plibersek's ruling was 'reckless' and 'out of line with the science'.
"This decision takes us in entirely the wrong direction to protect Australians from the worsening effects of dangerous climate change," Climate Council head of advocacy Jennifer Rayner said.
"The environment minister has a responsibility to scrutinise all risks of harm to the environment, and it is irresponsible that she has refused to look at the immense and indisputable climate harm that all new coal and gas projects pose.
"We cannot have new, highly polluting coal as we're living through the age of climate consequences. What we need is far more action to boost clean energy sources which can replace coal altogether, like the renewable hydrogen investments the government started in this week's budget."
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Sunday, May 14, 2023
Sen. Manchin Vows to Block All Biden EPA Nominees Over Regulation Targeting Power Plant Emissions
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has threatened to oppose all Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nominees proposed by President Biden due to a forthcoming regulation aimed at power plant emissions.
Manchin criticized the administration for seeking to close fossil fuel-fired power plants without considering the impact on the national power grid.
Manchin highlighted that neither the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law nor the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the EPA with the authority to regulate power plant emissions.
He stated, “However, I fear that this Administration’s commitment to their extreme ideology overshadows their responsibility to ensure long-lasting energy and economic security and I will oppose all EPA nominees until they halt their government overreach.”
The EPA regulation, expected to be released shortly, would require coal and natural gas-fired power plants to cut or capture the majority of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2040. The Biden administration believes the IRA allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions extensively.
Manchin expressed his concerns about the administration’s climate agenda, saying, “This Administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability.”
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Cantuar's climate confusion
It is widely expected that Justin Welby, having now screwed the crown on Charles III’s head, will shortly retire as Archbishop of Canterbury and put himself out to grass. If so, he is not going quietly. This afternoon, in the House of Lords, he launched a wholesale attack on the government’s Illegal Migration Bill, which includes measures to offshore the processing of asylum-seekers in Rwanda, describing it as ‘isolationist, morally unacceptable and politically impractical’ to leave developing countries to handle the world’s refugees.
But one comment in particular stands out in the Archbishop’s speech. He asserted that ‘the IPCC forecasts that climate change by itself, let alone the conflicts it is causing, will lead to at least 800 million more refugees a year – in total – by 2050’.
It is an extraordinary claim, but is there any truth in it? If the Archbishop was trying to say that 800 million people would be displaced by climate change every year that would mean one in ten of the world’s population having to do a runner every single year. But let’s assume – which seems fair given his delivery – that the words ‘a year’ were an error and that the Archbishop was correcting himself when he added the words ‘in total’. It is still a stark figure, that 800 million people could be displaced by climate change by 2050, so did the IPCC really predict that?
The IPCC’s 85-page synthesis report, published in March, does not mention the word ‘refugee’ once. Nor does the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report published last year. What the synthesis report does say is that between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people ‘are living in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change’ – in order words, there is some negative form of climate change going on where they live. It does not, however, speculate on how many of them will at some point have to flee their homes.
Others, however, have made predictions which include a number similar to that quoted by the Archbishop. The closest match appears to be a report published in 2015 by a group of scientists calling themselves Climate Central. That forecast that ‘carbon emissions causing 4 degrees celsius of warming (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) – a business as usual scenario – could lock in enough eventual sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people globally’.
Climate Central was not saying that these people would be driven from their homes by 2050 (indeed, the IPCC’s central estimate is for 32-62cm of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century, which would not cause mass evacuation of land anywhere save for marshlands, and communities built on marshland without sea defences). What it was saying was that were global temperatures to rise by 4ºC – which itself would only happen if the world took no action on climate change whatsoever – then eventually (which could mean several centuries’ time) sea levels would rise to flood land currently inhabited by between 470 and 760 million people.
That is somewhat different from the Archbishop’s alarmist claim of mass exodus by 2050. But will anyone notice? Or will Welby prove yet again that prominent figures rarely get into trouble by making exaggerated and scientifically-illiterate claims about climate change.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/justin-welbys-climate-confusion/ ?
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Forest Service Wants to Permanently Close 226K Acres to Recreational Shooting
The Biden administration continues to wage war on public lands access to deter activities like hunting, fishing, and shooting sports. Mind you, these activities pump back billions to conservation funding annually.
The U.S. Forest Service, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is considering a rule to permanently close over 226,000 National Forest Service (NFS) lands to recreational shooting opportunities. The affected areas will include three locations in Colorado: Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland. The national forests cumulatively comprise 1.4 million acres. Public comments closed on May 5th, 2023.
Under multiple-use management of public lands, recreational target shooting is allowed on National Forest Service lands. Efforts to increase access on public lands are underway as more Americans lawfully purchase firearms and desire to go outdoors to do some safe target shooting.
This rule, if implemented, would deprive visitors to these public lands of opportunities. This recommendation first originated from the 2019 Recreational Sport Shooting Management Decision and Forest Plan Amendment, which determined these areas are “unsuitable” for shooting sports. The three reasons given include “residential housing density,” “high-use recreation areas on NFS and other government lands, and existing conflicts between recreational shooting” and “other uses on NFS and other government lands.”
The rule, if enacted, seeks to do the following: “When fully implemented, the 226,113 acres identified as unsuitable for shooting will be closed. The three geographic areas included in the current Dingell Act notice comprise 141,095 acres of that, including 94,900 acres when Devil’s Nose opens and 46,195 acres when the Clear Creek Shooting Sports Park opens.”
What’s the reasoning for pursuing permanent closures here? Naturally, it’s under the guise of “protect[ing] public safety by improving management of recreational sport shooting.”(It’s reminiscent of talking points employed by gun control advocates to ban firearms under the guise of “safety.”) An initial draft claimed legal hunting opportunities won’t be affected. But the Biden administration is not to be trusted here either.
Unfortunately, the Forest Service rule is not the first of its kind by this White House. As I’ve noted here at Townhall, the Biden administration has worked behind closed doors with anti-hunting preservationist groups to undo a Trump-era opening of 2.3 million acres to new hunting and fishing opportunities on national wildlife refuge lands.
Additionally, the Biden-appointed Alaska Federal Subsistence Board voted to close off 60 million acres of public land to moose and caribou hunting to non-locals last spring. According to Outdoor Life, the proposal known as WSA21-01 isn’t “supported by science or data of big-game harvests.”
Moreover, the Commerce Department is mulling obtuse vessel rules for recreational and commercial boating activities under the guise of protecting endangered right whales. But anglers and boaters worry these closures–upwards of six months–throughout the East Coast would create no-go zones, have negative economic ramifications, and displace countless Americans from recreational and boating industry jobs.
And there are, sadly, more public land and public water closures being mulled as we speak.
Whenever closures to sporting activitieson public lands occur, access is usually never restored. A prime example is California instituting Marine Protection Areas (MPAs) in the 1990s.
California regulators claimed overfishing was decimating Pacific fisheries. Despite evidence showing recovery, the California Fish and Game still refuses to reopen MPAs to recreational fishing as of 2016. Why? They operate as if there’s still a “fisheries crisis”--yet the Golden State created “draconian no-fishing zones that prevent recreational anglers and their families from going out for a day’s fishing…”
Several years ago, the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) concluded the Marine Life Protection Act, which created MPAs, is “having serious negative financial impacts on coastal communities and on California’s $2.2 billion saltwater recreational fishing industry, while attempting to address a fishing crisis that no longer exists.”
Their document continued, “While there are examples of overfishing and declining fish stocks in oceans around the world, such is not the case off the Pacific coast. The fisheries crisis that the MLPA is supposed to solve has been effectively addressed by implementation of traditional fishery management tools.”
Exporting California policies nationwide–including preservationist environmentalist ones–is a recipe for disaster. Federal agencies, naturally, are replicating the same misguided policies on public lands nationwide.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the Biden White House isn’t a friend to true conservationists who fish, hunt, and partake in shooting sports. On the contrary. It’s actively undermining our way of life, despite lauding the $1.6 billion generated in conservation funds by the Pittman-Robertson Act last year.
While these prohibitions may not be overt, they’re coming. If you think your preferred style of fishing or hunting is safe from regulators or preservationists, think again. They’re inevitably coming for all facets of the sporting lifestyle.
Let’s defend our way of life by opposing bad rulemaking emanating from Washington, D.C.
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Australia: Federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek has indicated that will approve the coking coalmine near Moranbah
The Australian government has approved a new coalmine development for the first time since it was elected last year.
Tanya Plibersek, the federal environment minister, indicated she would give the green light to the Isaac River coalmine in Queensland’s Bowen basin. It was announced late on Thursday.
The mine, to be developed by Bowen Coking Coal, is planned for 28km east of Moranbah, next to five other coalmines, and expected to produce about 500,000 tonnes of metallurgical coal a year for five years. Metallurgical coal, also known as coking coal, is used in steelmaking.
“The Albanese government has to make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law – that’s what happens on every project, and that’s what’s happened here,” a spokesperson for Plibersek said.
“Since the election we’ve doubled renewable energy approvals to a record high. The government will continue to consider each project on a case-by-case basis, under the law.”
The government said no submissions had been received about the project during the public consultation period, including from environment groups.
However climate campaigners had made public statements calling on Plibersek to reject the mine in line with scientific advice that no new fossil fuel developments should go ahead if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C.
“Scientists, energy and climate experts have said that the climate cannot afford new coalmines, and they’ve said it so many times I’ve lost count,” said Rod Campbell, research director at The Australia Institute.
“The fact that this is a small coking coalmine is beside the point – fossil carbon needs to stay in the ground. We’ve already got more than enough coalmines approved to cook the planet, including coking coalmines that could run into next century.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Thursday, May 11, 2023
World not ready yet to 'switch off' fossil fuels, COP28 host UAE says
The United Arab Emirates said on Tuesday that countries should agree to phase out fuel emissions - not the production of oil, gas and coal - at the upcoming U.N. climate change negotiations that it will host this December.
The comments reflect deep divisions between nations over how to combat global warming ahead of the COP28 talks. Some wealthy Western governments and climate-afflicted island nations have been pushing for a phase out of fossil fuels, while resource-rich countries have campaigned to keep drilling.
UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment Mariam Almheiri told Reuters in an interview that phasing out fossil fuels would hurt countries that depend on them for revenue or can not easily replace them with renewable sources.
She favored phasing out fossil fuel emissions using capture and storage technologies while ramping up renewable energy, saying this strategy lets countries fight warming while continuing to produce oil, gas, and coal.
"The renewable space is advancing and accelerating extremely fast but we are nowhere near to be able to say that we can switch off fossil fuels and solely depend on clean and renewable energy," Almheiri said on the sidelines of the Agriculture Innovation Mission (AIM) for Climate conference in Washington.
"We are now in a transition and this transition needs to be just and pragmatic because not all countries have the resources," she added.
The UAE is co-hosting the AIM conference with the United States.
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Ryanair dismisses Net Zero aviation agenda as it places biggest ever order for Boeing jets
Ryanair has unveiled its biggest-ever aircraft order as one of its top executives said the switch to hydrogen or electric powered planes will not happen “in my lifetime”.
The budget carrier has agreed a $40bn (£31.7bn) deal with Boeing to buy 150 of the manufacturer’s 737 Max 10 jets with an option for a further 150.
The planes will be delivered by Boeing to Ryanair between 2027 and 2034 and be powered by conventional aircraft engines.
Neil Sorahan, Ryanair’s finance chief, who was in Washington to sign the landmark deal with Boeing, said that the deal was a clear sign of what the future held for commercial aviation.
The 51-year-old said: “They [hydrogen or electric powered planes] may be the future. But I’m not sure they will get there in my lifetime,” he said, before likening hydrogen jets to space rockets that carry a handful of passengers with huge tanks of fuel.
Unlike sustainable aviation fuel, made from used cooking oils and other waste, hydrogen was not a “drop-in solution” and would require “massive investment in the infrastructure”, he added.
“So I’m afraid it ain’t going to get there,” Mr Sorahan said. “Batteries don’t have the capacity at this stage to get the range that is needed.”
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Scots favour North Sea drilling over importing oil and gas
A large majority of people in Scotland oppose the SNP government’s stand against new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea and believe the industry must continue to meet the country’s energy demands, a poll suggests.
The government’s draft energy strategy proposes a “presumption against” new developments despite licensing being reserved to Westminster.
Consultation on the plan has ended but the poll suggests 75 per cent of people believe the UK should meet its demand for oil and gas from domestic production rather than importing it from overseas.
The research by Survation, for True North, an advisory firm, suggests voters are against “pulling the rug” from under the sector and it suggests that 61 per cent of the population think energy companies operating in UK waters provide a boost to the country’s economy.
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Glaring electric car problem exposed after man’s tyre goes flat
An Australian driver has revealed a glaring problem with electric vehicles after finding himself stranded on the side of the road when one of his tyres went flat.
Eddy May was driving home in his electric Mercedes-Benz EQC-400 on Sunday just before midday when his rear left wheel deflated, leaving him and his wife stranded on the side of the road in Adelaide.
Making use of an in-car customer service offered in the luxury model, he pressed a button and spent five minutes on the phone with Mercedes about the tyre.
“I’ve spoken to them, they’re sending a tow truck,” Mr May told his followers in a clip shared to TikTok.
“Quick five minutes on the phone, a $200 cab charge voucher to get home, [and the] car’s going to get towed to Mercedes and the car’s going to be fixed tomorrow apparently,” he said.
About 35 minutes later, the $128,000 vehicle was loaded onto a tow truck and the couple’s taxi arrived.
By just after 12pm, they were on their way home. “Pretty good. Well done Mercedes,” Mr May said.
But his video praising Mercedes for their service raised questions over why a spare tyre wasn’t kept inside the car as it would be for petrol cars.
“There’s no spare in this f**king car because all the room is taken up with batteries and so forth,” Mr May said.
Most electric vehicles don’t come with spare tyres given the extra space and weight they require.
“I would be severely unimpressed with needing a tow truck, taxi ride, loan car and what 1-2 days without my car over a flat tyre,” one comment on the video read. “I would much prefer the 10 minutes to change the tyre,” another wrote.
“Great service, interesting way of saving the planet and reducing carbon emissions. Taxi ride and tow truck compared with carrying a spare tyre,” a third said.
Mr May argued the vehicle still worked out to be friendlier on the environment overall, even though it used a lot of resources when a tyre blew out.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Net Zero Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) cites “the climate crisis” at almost every opportunity.
President Biden calls it a greater threat than nuclear war.
They and their allies champion “carbon-free” electricity generation by 2035 and nearly fossil-fuel-free energy by 2050. [emphasis, links added]
Achieving “net zero” carbon dioxide emissions will be painless, they assure us. Costs will be so low you’ll need a magnifying glass to see them.
Governments merely have to enact mandates, provide subsidies, and the transformation to “clean” energy will just happen. Almost like in a fairy tale.
Here in the real world, however, we would need literally millions of weather-dependent wind turbines, billions of equally unreliable solar panels, millions of half-ton battery modules for vehicles, billions more modules to back up intermittent electricity generation, millions of transformers, and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
All these technologies must be manufactured from metals, minerals, and petroleum extracted from the Earth, via mining on scales unprecedented in human history.
The dollar costs alone — just for a U.S. transformation — are almost incomprehensible.
Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23 trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that.
Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays.
Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn-out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.
Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity-generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies.
None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines, or transformers.
Energy analyst Francis Menton estimated that New York’s plan to procure 24,000 megawatt-hours of battery storage would provide only 0.2% of what the state would actually need as backup.
But even that would require 300,000 Tesla Long Range 80-kilowatt-hour battery modules — before New York mandates electric automobiles and home heating and cooking systems.
Each of those modules weighs over 1,000 pounds and holds 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
Each one contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and over 550 pounds of aluminum, steel, graphite, plastics, and other materials, energy analyst Ron Stein reports.
To manufacture each module, we must mine 30,000 pounds of cobalt ore (much of it with child labor in the Congo), 5,000 pounds of nickel ore, and 25,000 pounds of copper ore, plus inject and extract 25,000 pounds of brine to get the lithium.
Backing up New York’s peak summertime electricity needs for just 45 minutes (those 300,000 battery modules) would require 3,750 tons of lithium, 9,000 tons of nickel, 6,600 tons of manganese, 4,500 tons of cobalt, 30,000 tons of copper, and 82,500 tons of other materials.
Together, we’d need to mine more than seventy-five million tons of ores for those New York grid-backup batteries — after removing at least as much overlying rock to get to the ore bodies.
Backing up California’s currently planned wind and solar electricity generation would require nearly 310,000,000 Long-Range modules.
Imagine the batteries, materials, and ores that we would need for the entire USA — or the world!
Processing those ores into finished metals requires acids and other chemical processes, and results in extensive toxic wastes that cause horrific air and water pollution if not handled properly.
This is absolutely not clean, green, affordable, ecological, or sustainable.
The bottom line: “Net zero” is aptly named — if what is meant is the sum total of our nation’s bank account and natural resources after it’s implemented.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/net-zero-grid-batteries-alone-would-bankrupt-america/
**************************************************Biden's New 'Green' Power Plant Rule Is Probably Illegal
Despite taking a major loss at the Supreme Court of the United States last year in West Virginia v. EPA, President Biden and his administration are set to announce another regulatory policy affecting power plants later this week that will drive energy costs even higher and is probably illegal, too.
Politico called the forthcoming EPA policy "aggressive" for "ushering in the most stringent regulations on fossil fuel plants in the nation’s history." After reportedly making the rule even more restrictive over the past several months, it looks like the final version will "require power companies to capture most of their carbon emissions rather than letting it enter the atmosphere," according to Politico. Currently, however, "[n]o commercial power plants in the United States use carbon-capturing technology." So, as Politico noted, Biden is again throwing caution to the wind and "testing the limits of what the court will tolerate" by enacting another extreme policy.
So, Biden is going to try forcing the change — the Constitution and American consumers be damned — and conservatives are already hitting the White House for its latest attempt to force its radical supposedly "green" energy policies that run afoul of the law and make already high costs even more untenable for Americans.
Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump-Pence EPA transition team, said that, "like his proposal to essentially ban gas-powered cars by setting stringent emissions standards, Biden’s proposal to set stringent emissions standards so as to ban fossil fuel plants without carbon capture is illegal and has no chance of withstanding legal scrutiny in light of last year’s SCOTUS decision in West Virginia v. EPA." Milloy warned that "it may take years for SCOTUS to rule on this controversy and, in the meantime, much damage will be done to the fossil fuel plants that our electricity grid depend on."
"Biden’s EPA proposed power plant rule ignores the fact that U.S. air quality is better than ever, and worldwide coal use is growing," noted Frank Lasee, the president of Truth in Energy and Climate. "Communist China uses more than half of the 8 billion tons of coal used annually," Lasee reminded, adding "China and 14 other nations are growing their coal usage."
That reality, Lasee explained, means "closing our coal and natural gas plants will not change the weather or the climate" and instead "will needlessly cause our electricity prices to go up even more. By forcing reliable electricity plants to close, it will lead to more blackouts caused by shortages and heavier reliance on taxpayer subsidized, unreliable, part-time wind and solar," he said.
Tom Harris, the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, pointed out that, "contrary to the assertions of activists, politicians and most mainstream media, we are close to the lowest levels of CO2 in Earth’s history." What's more, Harris noted that "the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change summarized thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that either debunk or cast serious doubt on the hypothesis that emissions of CO2 from human activities will cause catastrophic climate change."
"The Biden administration's proposed rule will cause an additional spike in energy costs to American households," said Heartland Institute President James Taylor. "Apparently, $4-per-gallon gasoline is simply not enough to satisfy this president's blood lust for higher inflation and less available American energy."
So, exactly how bad will the EPA's new emissions policy be? We'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out. But if the Biden administration's repeated losses at the Supreme Court have shown Americans anything, it's that the president and his cabinet are unconcerned with legal guardrails. And, if Biden's energy policy so far as displayed anything, it's that Biden — or those handling him — will stop at nothing to force the so-called "transition" to more expensive and less reliable "green" energy.
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Unicorn Dreams: Biden Clean Energy Push Expensive, Environmentally-Destructive
The Biden administration is adamant about ridding our nation of fossil fuels. It has a goal of attaining “a 100% clean electricity grid by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.” Dare oppose these goals and you’re guilty of wanting to “perpetuate the climate crisis.” You’ll even be accused of harboring “antiquated views.”
Despite the frequent bullying and accompanying gaslighting for pointing out net-zero’s deficiencies, decarbonization is merely a unicorn dream devoid of reality. How can one be environmentally virtuous yet support paradoxical measures that require destroying the environment in order to save it? This is not remotely conservationist.
Of late, aggressive onshore and offshore wind pushes have been scrutinized– and for good reason. The White House wants to harness 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030, describing it as “bold” and claiming it’ll be safer than offshore oil and gas. They also are bullish on onshore wind despite communities across the U.S. rejecting them.
The industrialization of our oceans will have ruinous environmental effects and not reduce energy bills. Wind is not reliable, as it doesn’t boast a 24/7 baseload. These structures aren’t cost-effective and boast a short shelf life. The WSJ recently reported, “GCube, a renewable-energy insurer owned by Japan’s Tokio Marine HCC, sees a downside. It found that component failures in turbines with 8-megawatt capacity or greater occur on average after just over a year. That compares with over five years for turbines of 4-to-8 megawatts.” The alternative energy source also contributes to light pollution.
The blades undoubtedly kill countless birds–including eagles. The Department of Energy even concedes, “Turbines produce noise and alter visual aesthetics. Wind farms have different impacts on the environment compared to conventional power plants, but similar concerns exist over both the noise produced by the turbine blades and the visual impacts on the landscape.”
Not to mention, these structures pose immense threats to endangered North Atlantic right whales. Repeated denials, however, only result from the Biden administration–namely NOAA Fisheries and the Marine Mammal Commission (MMC). MMC, however, said there are Level A and B harassment concerns that emanate from ocean industrialization, in such “devices used by wind energy developers for geophysical and site characterization surveys can generate sound that may affect a marine mammal’s behavior (e.g., habitat use) and may lead to more serious consequences (e.g., stranding).”
And even the Pentagon warned proposed construction of wind turbines in the Mid-Atlantic poses significant national security risks. But mounting evidence against wind is unconvincing to Biden and company. Very troubling.
What about solar? Like wind energy, solar energy is not a viable substitute for coal, oil, and gas. Additionally, it boasts many trade offs and negative impacts on the landscape. Not only is it an intermittent energy source, it takes destroying productive agricultural lands - by means of deforestation - to prop up these structures.
Real Clear Investigation reports, “Although done in the name of fighting global warming, some amount of deforestation will be the inevitable result of clearing land for ground-mounted solar panels. Environmental groups say they hope to steer solar farms to "disturbed" or degraded land and rooftops, but those options are often expensive and impractical.”
The American Farmland Trust claims 3,900 square miles nationwide are required to accommodate these lofty solar goals–meaning 1.5% to 6% of Eastern states will lose undeveloped productive farmland to solar projects.
Other potential ecological impacts include habitat destruction, altering drainage and rainfall patterns, and killing species–endangered or not. More problematic: solar panels - especially those made in China - emit more carbon emissions than nuclear.
Let’s not forget the problematic nature of forced electric vehicle pushes from Washington. Last month, the White House announced it wants 50 percent of new cars sold to be electric by 2030 and for 66 percent of new cars sold to be electric by 2032.
EVs, however, aren’t viable without subsidies and only benefit already affluent customers. More troubling for these EV endorsers: there’s little appetite among the general public to “go electric” either.
An April 2023 AP-NORC poll found 59 percent of Americans are unlikely to purchase EVs, even with financial incentives. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) also poured cold water on EVs, stating, “We project that the total electric vehicle share―including BEVs and PHEVs―of on-road LDV stock grows from less than 1% in 2021 to 9% in 2050...”
With inflationary pressures still weighing Americans down, investment in so-called clean energy projects are taking a backseat—despite promises from the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Why? These investments are proving risky and will lead to a poor return on investment–a byproduct of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement.
This past week, American Electric Power announced plans to sell off “$1.5 billion sale of its 1,360-MW unregulated renewables portfolio to IRG Acquisition” by July. Yikes. That certainly casts doubt of our supposed clean energy future.
The evidence is clear: The U.S. can’t and shouldn't abandon coal, oil, and gas anytime soon–unless Americans want to forgo their first-world living standards.
Nuclear and geothermal are the only viable alternative supplements - or complements - that won’t destabilize our electric grid.
Enough of the unicorn dreams; let’s stick with reliable, cheap energy sources.
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Western Australia’s government dreams an impossible climate dream
Western Australia’s biggest electricity system will need to roughly triple in size over the next 20 years, as the state seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and go green.
In a landmark report released today, the WA government outlined the massive scale of building that would be required to replace coal-fired power stations and meet surging demand from customers — particularly industry — electrifying their operations.
WA Energy Minister Bill Johnston revealed an extra 4,000km of new high-voltage transmission lines would need to be built by 2042 under the government’s central plans.
Within the same time frame, Mr Johnston said peak demand for electricity from the state’s main grid — the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) — would treble to about 13,000 megawatts.
The minister also revealed the amount of generation capacity in the system would need to jump by a factor of 10 to account for rocketing demand and the intermittent nature of wind and solar power.
Despite the monumental scale of the flagged expansion, Mr Johnston said just $126 million would be initially set aside to help “kickstart early network planning”.
Mr Johnston said the report, titled the SWIS Demand Assessment, would be the blueprint to guide the overhaul of WA’s biggest grid, which covers Perth and much of the state’s southern half.
“The SWIS Demand Assessment provides a vision of what the future grid might look like as industry seeks to decarbonise,” Mr Johnston said.
“An expanded grid is the most cost-efficient way of supporting decarbonisation as it can reach further for wind and solar.
“The SWIS cannot rely on other electricity systems to support it, so having a strong transmission backbone is critical for reliable supply.”
Cost of plans unclear
Under the plans outlined by Mr Johnston, several new high-voltage transmission lines would need to be built to connect renewable energy zones, particularly in windy and sunny areas north of current SWIS footprint.
However, Mr Johnston said how much the upgrades would cost and how they would be paid for — and by whom — were still open questions.
The minister acknowledged that big industrial users, such as mineral processors and manufacturers, would ideally help pay for the work.
He noted it was these customers who would drive much of the extra demand on the grid by using electricity — rather than fossil fuels such as gas — to power their operations.
According to Mr Johnston, it would be unfair to spread the costs of the required upgrades on to household and business customers who contributed much less to the increase in demand.
While anticipating a massive increase in the amount of renewable energy, Mr Johnston argued gas would continue to play a key role in keeping the system stable.
But he insisted this would not derail efforts to decarbonise the WA economy, noting electrification of gas-heavy industrial processes would have a much bigger effect.
'Transition plan does not work': Opposition
Speaking after the announcement, Shadow Energy spokesman Steve Thomas said today's report was embarrassing for the government.
"This document demonstrates that their transition plan does not work," he said.
"It's not costed, it's not funded, and it can't deliver the transition that government is talking about, and this document actually reinforces that."
Dr Thomas said he expected the total cost of the state's transition away from coal to be closer to $15 billion – with the 4,000 kilometres of new transmission infrastructure accounting for about $8 billion of that.
"You'd think with the biggest surpluses, the greatest boom in our history, if you were going to transition the electricity system you might have the money to do it, but the government has not invested anything like the amount of money necessary," he said.
"They've got the time frame wrong, they've got the infrastructure requirements wrong, they've got the budget wrong, there's not much they've actually got right on the transition to renewable energy and at this stage it will not work."
The ability to cope with the loss of generation that closing coal by 2029 would have was another significant issue, according to Dr Thomas, as well as finding the people and resources to drive the transition in a globally-competitive market.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Tuesday, May 09, 2023
The Pentagon Tilts at Windmills
We know climate change tops the White House agenda, but it’s still depressing to see it supersede even national defense. Witness how the Department of the Interior rolled over Pentagon warnings that offshore wind installations in the mid-Atlantic could interfere with military training.
President Biden has set a goal of generating 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030. Waters off the coasts of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware are prime real estate for wind farms because they are relatively shallow. But they are also training grounds for the Navy and Air Force, including North Carolina’s Dare County bombing range.
Offshore wind turbines three times the height of the Statue of Liberty could interfere with training and radar. As the Energy Department explains, “if not mitigated, such wind development can cause potential interference for radar systems involved in air traffic control, weather forecasting, homeland security, and national defense missions.”
National defense appears to have been a fifth or sixth thought for Interior, which is in charge of offshore wind leases in federal waters. Interior last November identified six potential leasing areas after consulting with the fishing industries, environmental groups, shippers, the wind lobby and states in the region.
Interior said it considered input from these “stakeholders” as well as state and local renewable energy mandates and “information on domestic and global offshore wind market and technological trends.” Notice who was missing: the Pentagon. Four of the six potential lease areas were flagged by the Defense Department as “highly problematic” on a map dated last Oct. 6 that was published by Bloomberg News.
The Interior lease proposal from November says that it doesn’t “reflect a final assessment of the Department of Defense (DOD) regarding compatibility of the proposed [wind energy areas] with DOD needs.” But why didn’t Interior consider the Pentagon’s concerns before issuing its proposal?
It’s possible the military could modify exercises and operations to accommodate wind farms, but this shouldn’t be necessary. Power generated by offshore wind isn’t needed to keep U.S. lights on. The only purpose the installations would serve is to help Mr. Biden, states and utilities meet their green energy goals.
Offshore wind is three times more expensive than onshore wind or gas power and could make the electric grid less reliable. But the Biden Administration’s climate agenda won’t surrender to energy reality or national defense.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagon-tilts-at-windmills-7acd2c73
**************************************************Green Energy Is Stuck at a Financial Red Light
After years of uncertainty, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act finally gave America’s renewable-energy industry a long, green signal. Now the economy is blocking the road.
The wind and solar industries have always suffered from the short-term nature of subsidies, with federal tax credits often extended in nail-biting one-year increments. Last year’s climate bill changed that, giving the industry subsidies that last at least a decade. But just as policy winds blow in their favor, two critical growth drivers—interest rates and equipment costs—are moving in the wrong direction.
Wind and solar projects are especially sensitive to rates because debt can comprise as much as 85% to 90% of capital expenditures. Renewable developers have known only low rates for most of their history. Nearly all U.S. utility-scale solar facilities and 85% of onshore wind farms were installed since 2009, during which period the target federal-funds rate was close to 0% in eight out of 13 years. Not any more: After the most recent hike, rates are the highest since 2007.
Renewable energy projects tend to be financed with floating-rate loans that rise and fall with the benchmark interest rate. Thankfully, most of those projects are well-shielded from rate risk because lenders require them to hedge at least 75% of their loans through swaps, according to Elizabeth Waters, managing director of project finance at MUFG. Most ended up hedging 90-95% to lock in low rates, she noted. But those swaps won’t help new projects. Some new solar and wind projects facing higher borrowing costs than when they were planned might not make it off the drawing board.
Borrowing isn’t the only thing that costs more. Following years of price declines thanks to technology and economies of scale, equipment is getting more expensive too. Trade policies aimed at Chinese manufacturers have caused delays and shortages for the solar industry, which relies heavily on the country for its components. German utility RWE, an active developer in the U.S., said in its annual report released last week that imports of solar modules from Asia are now subject to “stringent checks” and said it could fall behind on its expansion plans if the U.S. continues to “impede the procurement of solar panels.”
After falling to a record low in 2020, the average price of a solar photovoltaic system rose in 2021 and then again in 2022, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie. Meanwhile, the average cost to build an onshore wind farm in the U.S. rose in 2020 and 2021 before leveling off last year, according to data from BloombergNEF. Supply-chain issues and interconnection delays already started slowing the clean power industry last year: In 2022 it installed 25.1 Gigawatts of total capacity, a 16% decline from a year earlier, according to the American Clean Power Association, which tracks solar, wind and energy storage. While that’s still enough to meet roughly half of Texas’ electricity demand, it was nonetheless below expectations–though part of the drop was driven by an preplanned phase-down for tax credits commonly used by the wind industry before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.
Ultimately, solar and wind’s ability to absorb cost and interest-rate hikes depends on how willing utilities and corporations are to pay higher prices. Many onshore wind and solar projects have been able to renegotiate pricing on their power purchase agreements because demand is robust, according to industry executives. But cracks are showing for offshore wind, which is more exposed to rising costs and rates because it takes longer to develop. BloombergNEF estimates that the weighted average cost of capital for U.S. offshore wind projects rose to 5.25% in 2022 from 4.41% in 2020.
Developer Avangrid Renewables, for example, is trying to terminate its power purchase agreement with utilities in Massachusetts for a 1.2 Gigawatt offshore wind project after an unsuccessful attempt at renegotiating its fixed-price contract. If built, Commonwealth Wind would generate enough energy to power 700,000 homes. The company cited “historic price increases for global commodities, sharp and sudden increases in interest rates, prolonged supply chain constraints, and persistent inflation” since the project secured a contract in late 2021. Avangrid plans to bid the same project into the state’s next competitive offshore wind procurement, a spokesman said over email. Danish power company Orsted said in its annual report released February that it incurred an impairment of 2.5 billion Danish kroner, the equivalent of $369 million, on its 50% interest in the Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York, noting that the project cost has increased substantially since its bid in 2019.
As the name implies, the Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to relieve some of these cost pressures. But it won’t feel like a bonanza without clarity on how the rules apply. Expanding the eligibility of tax credits to more technologies, for example, has spread the limited pool of tax equity investors—that is, those with both the tax burden and the know-how to use renewable tax credits—more thinly across more projects. Ironically, that has shrunk the pool of tax equity available to solar and wind in the near term. The bill tries to address this by making such tax credits transferable, but industry executives said that pool of capital will remain constrained until there is more guidance.
There are two other more recent developments worth watching: One is the plummeting cost of natural gas which, if prolonged, could impact demand for solar and wind on the margins. The U.S. benchmark Henry Hub has fallen 49% year to date. Secondly, banks’ recent turmoil could shrink their ability to lend. Ted Brandt, chief executive of clean-energy focused investment bank Marathon Capital, notes that the industry has always had cheap debt, cheap equity and “massive liquidity chasing it.” How the industry will respond to expensive capital is still an open question, he said.
It isn’t enough for policy winds to blow in the right direction for a renewable energy boom–economic headwinds need to abate too.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/green-energy-financing-interest-rates-3f0e3dc3
********************************************Wind-power auction at Morro Bay shows how money matters in climate projects
The auction awarded rights to build vast flotillas of wind turbines 20 miles off the coasts of San Luis Obispo and Humboldt counties. This was supposed to be a clarifying moment in California’s commitment to wind energy. The Golden State, for all its supposed climate leadership, has lagged the East Coast in developing offshore wind power.
This is partly because of all the local opposition here — from fishing industries, Indigenous communities, and local stakeholders — to changes anywhere near our beloved shoreline.
In response, the rules of the federal government’s lease auction considered not just the amount companies bid, but whether bidders engaged with local communities. Under the formula, companies who reached benefits agreements with a community could earn credits, giving them an edge in the auction. One bidding company did exactly that. But was it worth the effort?
This head-scratching story is centered on Morro Bay. When offshore wind development became a public issue there nearly a decade ago, citizens expressed concerns about the impacts of turbines on birds, fisheries, or, even at a distance of 20 miles from land, the natural beauty of the coast.
But in 2015, Castle Wind LLC — a joint venture between Washington state-based Trident Winds and the subsidiary of a Germany utility — started a dialogue with residents and stakeholders. Castle Wind, following local leaders’ advice, talked first with fishermen, whose struggles are well-known. After two-plus years of discussions, Castle Wind and two fishermen’s associations forged a novel mutual benefits agreement.
The 2018 agreement offered three main benefits for fishermen: a new fund for infrastructure improvements for the commercial fishing industry, new training and employment opportunities, and a process for the local fishers to help shape wind project design.
With the fishermen on board, the Morro Bay City Council subsequently approved its own community benefits agreement with Castle Wind. The company agreed to hire local residents, create internships and training programs at local schools and universities, establish a maintenance and monitoring facility in the Morro Bay harbor, and promote local businesses.
Both agreements proved popular. Indeed, last year, Castle Wind and the fishermen deepened their partnership by creating a “mutual benefits corporation” as a legal vehicle for carrying out future joint projects. Alla Weinstein, the Castle Wind CEO who conducted the conversations, said last fall in a statement announcing the corporation: “Our approach has been to acknowledge, as early as possible, that impacts may occur…Castle Wind has created a platform for the developers to mitigate anticipated impacts of offshore wind to the commercial fishing industry without causing stakeholder fatigue.”
But when the auction was held in December, the benefits agreements and the corporation didn’t make any difference. Castle Wind, even with credits, did not win a single lease. Instead, the leases in areas off San Luis Obispo County went to three higher bidders — each of whom bid over $100 million, among them Equinor, a Norwegian state-owned oil company. None had reached agreements with Morro Bay locals, as Castle Wind had.
The auction has raised many questions about the future of climate and community. Federal officials, Castle Wind, and other bidders have been tight-lipped about the result.
Locally, city officials and fishermen’s groups have expressed disappointment, and noted pointedly that the winning bidders had not forged agreements and did not have their support. In Morro Bay, there is still considerable hope that winning bidders will approach the fishermen, the city, and others to execute agreements and make partnerships like those forged with Castle Wind.
That hope is based on the widespread view that Castle Wind’s agreements were thoughtful and well-drafted, and stood to benefit everyone — from the company, which wanted the lease, to the city and its fishermen, who sought to create new job and development opportunities for the city.
That hope also reflects political reality. California needs clean energy, but constructing wind farms will take years — and is unlikely to succeed if local communities and their state and federal representatives stand in the way.
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/op-ed/article274806076.html
***********************************************California Sets ‘Zero Emissions’ For Passenger And Freight Locomotives
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has enacted new regulations that will require “zero emissions” locomotives to be introduced after 2030, focusing on a sector often seen as a “green” alternative to cars and trucks
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Under the new regulations, zero-emissions models will be required for all switch, industrial and passenger locomotives built after 2030 and for all freight line locomotives built after 2035. Any non-zero emissions locomotive that is 23 years old or more will not be allowed to operate in the state past 2030.
The regulations also require train operators to open a spending account by July 2024 that they must deposit into every year to purchase or lease cleaner diesel trains and buy zero-emissions infrastructure.
Operators that generate more pollutants are required to deposit more into the spending account, and the amount required to be deposited would also increase every year.
It is unclear how the new regulations on trains would affect interstate commerce, which is regulated by Congress under the U.S. Constitution, since many trains in California also travel through other states.
Last August, CARB finalized regulations that ban the sale of gas-powered cars in the state after 2035. California also plans to ban diesel and gas-powered trucks by 2040, and will require all-electric trucking fleets by 2042.
It is unclear how the state’s electrical grid will support all of the “zero emissions” vehicles demanded, since it is already struggling to provide enough electricity to charge a limited number of electric vehicles at peak demand.
The aim is to fight ‘climate change’ — not through directly affecting global climate, on which California has little impact, but to foster the development of ‘clean’ technology and encourage others to follow California’s example.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, May 08, 2023
Brits would be told to eat bugs under bonkers green plans by civil servants
A leaked Whitehall draft of the Carbon Budget proposed the “development of more sustainable protein sources for human diets”. Along with promoting a vegan diet, it said that “insects may offer environmental benefits”.
Both references were axed from the final document published last month. It only says more research is needed on “alternative protein”.
Government insiders were especially angry at moves to copy the EU with plans for a creepy-crawly diet. Earlier this year, Brussels approved crickets and mealworms to be sold as “novel foods” for humans.
Scientists claim insects have a smaller carbon footprint as they require fewer resources to be farmed.
But Countryside Alliance chief Tim Bonner said: “Civil servants need to get real about what the public are prepared to swallow and I can’t see there being very much of an appetite for mealworm burgers.
“We already have a vastly sustainable red meat sector in this country that has incredibly high animal welfare standards.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22219500/brits-eat-bugs-bonkers-green-plans-civil-servants/
************************************************The climate scaremongers: How the ‘world disaster’ figures lie
According to AP last year: ‘A disaster-weary globe will be hit harder in the coming years by even more catastrophes colliding in an interconnected world, a United Nations report issued Monday says. If current trends continue the world will go from around 400 disasters per year in 2015 to an onslaught of about 560 catastrophes a year by 2030, the scientific report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said. By comparison from 1970 to 2000, the world suffered just 90 to 100 medium to large scale disasters a year, the report said.
‘The number of extreme heat waves in 2030 will be three times what it was in 2001 and there will be 30 per cent more droughts, the report predicted. It’s not just natural disasters amplified by climate change, it’s Covid-19, economic meltdowns and food shortages. Climate change has a huge footprint in the number of disasters, report authors said.’
Last week it was the turn of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) to bang the climate change drum. Their State of the Global Climate 2022 report commented: ‘From mountain peaks to ocean depths, climate change continued its advance in 2022 . . . Droughts, floods and heatwaves affected communities on every continent and cost many billions of dollars. While greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and the climate continues to change, populations worldwide continue to be gravely impacted by extreme weather and climate events.’
The WMO is, of course, a UN body, so unsurprisingly this report has little to do with science and everything to do with politics.
But have natural disasters become so much more common in recent years? A closer look at that graph above reveals that the number of disasters has actually been declining since 2000, a fact which should immediately cast doubt on the ‘global warming is making everything worse’ meme.
The real reason for the ‘increase’ is that many natural disasters in years past were never officially logged in the UN database, called EM-DAT, which is compiled by CRED, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The database was not created until 1998, and CRED relied on informal reports for disasters prior to that year.
CRED has acknowledged that many events were missed by them in the past. In their 2006 report, they warned that earlier data was incomplete and should not be used for comparing long-term trends. In particular, over the past 30 years development in telecommunications, media and increased international cooperation has played a critical role in the number of disasters reported. In addition, increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters.
In fact the unreliability of the database in earlier years is much worse than we thought. Take a look, for example, at the official data for the number of deaths from floods in the UK:
Now look again, and see if you can spot what is missing. Yes, the North Sea floods in 1953, recognised as one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit Britain, and which left 307 dead on the east coast alone. The death toll in 1952, by the way, reflects the Lynmouth disaster, which killed 34.
How any supposedly reputable database can omit an event like the 1953 flood and still claim to be credible is beyond me. Other bad flooding events have also been missed, such as those in Somerset in 1968 which killed 15 people.
Flooding events in the UK have been thoroughly recorded as far back as the 19thC and beyond. If CRED cannot even get accurate data for the UK, what chance is there of compiling full and accurate data for the rest of the world?
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Energy security first: Norway set to accelerate Arctic oil and gas drilling
Companies operating in the Norwegian Continental Shelf are planning for more drilling in the Arctic areas in the Barents Sea, encouraged by Norway’s government which wants more oil and gas discoveries to boost energy security and help European partners with energy supply.
At a conference on the Barents Sea in Hammerfest last week, Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Minister Terje Aasland called on oil and gas companies to fulfill their “social responsibility” and “leave no stone unturned” to find more natural gas resources in the Barents Sea, the area estimated to hold most of Norway’s undiscovered oil and gas resources.
“The petroleum adventure in the north has only just started,” Aasland said, adding that the government would help the Barents Sea industry as Norway must develop, not liquidate, its petroleum industry.
Apart from being in a harsher environment so far north, the Barents Sea poses another roadblock to developing oil and gas resources—the north lacks the infrastructure in the more developed areas on the shelf that would make tie-ups and resource development easier.
Still, operators are not giving up.
“Even if we want to maintain production, we have to explore more, we have to find more,” Torger Rod, CEO of Barents-focused energy producer Var Energi, told Bloomberg in an interview.
In March, Var Energi confirmed an oil discovery in the Countach well in a production license northwest of Hammerfest near Goliat, one of two operational oil and gas fields in the Barents Sea.
Var Energi will consider potential commercial development options and tie-in of the discovery to Goliat FPSO.
“This discovery is yet another in a series of successful exploration wells in the Barents Sea in recent years, including Lupa – the largest discovery on the Norwegian shelf in 2022. At the same time, the discovery confirms our exploration strategy and our position in the area,” said Rune Oldervoll, EVP Exploration and Production in Var Energi.
Equinor, which plans to start production from the Johan Castberg field in the Barents Sea at the end of 2024, is also betting on obtaining more licenses in the Arctic.
Early this year, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy proposed including additional areas in the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea in the next licensing round for Awards in Predefined Areas (ARA) expected to be awarded in early 2024.
“The North has always been important for us,” Grete Birgitte Haaland, senior vice president for exploration and production north at Equinor, told Bloomberg.
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Ford is losing roughly $60,000 for every electric vehicle sold
Ford lost tens of thousands of dollars per electric vehicle sold in the first quarter of 2023, as the division remained on track for roughly $3 billion in yearly losses, according to the company’s Tuesday evening earnings report.
Ford’s electric vehicle division — which was separated from its traditional gas and professional-grade vehicle departments in a late March reorganization — lost $722 million in the first three months of 2023, while selling just 12,000 units, according to the company’s first quarter earnings report. This amounts to a roughly $60,167 loss for each vehicle sold, according to calculations made by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Because the auto industry is very capital intensive and has high fixed costs that need to be spread out over thousands of units, it is not uncommon to have steep losses initially which are followed by profits,” Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Imagine, for instance, needing to retool a factory and rebuild an assembly line to build different vehicles. That is much more expensive than the revenue from the first few vehicles that are produced.”
Despite this, however, Antoni characterized the decision to go “all-in” on electric vehicles as a “tremendous risk” that required ongoing support from government subsidies. Private analysts expect that the total cost of the green manufacturing subsidies offered by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will top $1 trillion, with subsidies for the electric vehicle battery packs alone topping $130 billion.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/03/ford-losing-tens-of-thousands-per-ev/
***************************************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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Sunday, May 07, 2023
Sodium technology could create batteries from seawater
And how do you get the sodium out of seawater? Via a HUGE expenditure of energy. So it will make energy sourcing worse. It USES energy in order to store it
New research has brought sodium battery technology to the point where it’s starting to replace lithium, the metal that powers our laptops, phones, electric cars and energy grids. That includes a battery created with molten salt, which can be derived from seawater, at the University of Sydney.
Dr Shenlong Zhao’s low-cost sodium-sulfur battery has four times the capacity of lithium, which he described as a significant breakthrough for renewable energy storage.
“When the sun isn’t shining and the breeze isn’t blowing, we need high-quality storage solutions that don’t cost the Earth and are easily accessible on a local or regional level,” Zhao said.
“Storage solutions that are manufactured using plentiful resources like sodium – which can be processed from seawater – also have the potential to guarantee greater energy security more broadly and allow more countries to join the shift towards decarbonisation.”
Lithium has received the lion’s share of research and industry interest over the past few decades because it’s extremely lightweight and energy-dense, general manager of Deakin University’s Battery Research and Innovation Hub, Dr Timothy Khoo, said.
“Lithium itself as an element is smaller and lighter than sodium. It’s number three on the periodic table right down the bottom. Sodium’s number 11, so it’s a big ion and it’s heavier.”
But research priorities are shifting from designing the most energy efficient, powerful batteries possible to creating cells that can be made from sustainable and cheap materials.
That’s where sodium comes in. It’s chemically similar to lithium, but it’s about 1 to 3 per cent the price and is one of the earth’s most abundant elements (a little pile can be found on most dining tables).
Lithium-ion batteries also rely on cobalt, a metal mined mostly in Africa in operations plagued by human rights violations, whereas sodium batteries can operate without cobalt, said University of Wollongong energy storage specialist Dr Jon Knott.
“There are some significant concerns around the sourcing of cobalt. Sodium-ion batteries not needing to use cobalt could actually be a good benefit beyond a technical benefit.”
Australia’s first large-scale sodium-sulfur battery was installed last week at a mine southeast of Kalgoorlie by researchers testing how the technology could be used in Australian power infrastructure.
“They can function in really harsh climates,” National Battery Testing Centre QUT project lead, Dr Joshua Watts, said. “The battery itself runs hot, so it doesn’t need any air conditioning, so it’s perfect for the desert.”
Watts will be monitoring the battery’s functionality and potential to fully power remote communities and mine sites, and support the integration of wind and solar energy into electricity grid.
In China, which is driving the boom in sodium battery technology, manufacturers CATL and BYD will produce sodium-ion batteries to power electric cars for the first time this year.
But sodium battery technology is best suited to large-scale applications such as power grids and storing renewable energy, and both Khoo and Knott said it’s unlikely to supersede lithium’s use in smaller applications such as cars, phones and airpods.
“I don’t see it as something that’s going to replace lithium, in the same way that lithium hasn’t completely replaced lead acid batteries, for example,” Khoo said. “We’ve got both of them running side by side and certain for certain applications. It’ll be the same case with sodium batteries.”
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King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down
This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history. No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly. Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.
In 2000, the BBC invited the then-Prince of Wales to give the last of the 2000 Millennium Reith lectures on sustainable development. Charles spoke of his belief in the “bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which sets limits to our ambitions and define the parameters of sustainable development.” He name-checked the founders of the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson and Fritz Schumacher, authors, respectively, of Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful. He embraced the precautionary principle, warning that the absence of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences from genetically modified (GM) crops should not be taken as a green light to exceed nature’s limits.
Instead of looking to science for all the answers, mankind should work with the grain of nature, Charles argued. If a fraction of the investment going into GM technologies was devoted to improving traditional systems of agriculture, “the results would be remarkable,” he declared. He then praised fellow Reith lecturer Vandana Shiva, an environmental campaigner and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, for condemning large-scale commercial farming “so persuasively and so convincingly.”
Unfortunately for the people for Sri Lanka, Shiva also convinced the Sri Lankan government to ban GM crops and chemical fertilizers and switch to organic farming. The results were worse than remarkable; they were disastrous. According to Matt Ridley, within months of Sri Lanka going organic, “the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.” Soon after, the government collapsed, too. Street protests forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to the Maldives in an air force jet.
In a 2013 speech on protecting rainforests, the prince’s rhetoric became distinctly unroyal, accusing those who questioned the need to act as belonging to “the incorporated society of syndicated skeptics and the International Association of Corporate lobbyists.” This would have come as news to his father and sister. Asked in a 2020 interview whether she discussed farming with her brother, Princess Anne replied, “Yes … occasionally, but rather short,” adding “I don’t even go down the climate change route.”
According to the terms laid down by his son, Prince Philip would also be numbered among the syndicated skeptics and corporate lobbyists. In 2018, Philip wrote to Ian Plimer to congratulate him on his book The Climate Change Delusion. Prompted by Ridley’s 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture on how carbon dioxide emissions were greening the earth, Prince Philip had lunch in the House of Lords with Ridley and Nigel Lawson.
Father and son clashed on wind farms. In 2011, a wind farm developer reported that Prince Philip had told him that wind farms were “useless, completely reliant on subsidies, and an absolute disgrace.” In his movie “Harmony—A new way of looking at the world,” Charles speaks of wind energy “working with nature’s freely-given forms” and the need to “end our dependence on fossil fuels.” In the film’s opening sequence, showing a wind turbine in a meadow, Charles intones, “Time is running out.”
Indeed, time has run out for Charles’s forecasts of climate apocalypse. In March 2009, Charles warned that only 100 months remained to avert “irretrievable climate collapse.” That forecast expired in 2017, with no climate collapse. Subsequent dating of doom was pushed further out and became less precise. In 2015, the 100-month deadline was stretched to 35 years.
A 2021 paper on extreme climate forecasts tabulates 79 predictions of climate-caused catastrophe dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Charles has the distinction of being the only individual to be featured three times, with separate predictions of climate apocalypse. As the paper’s co-author David Rode of Carnegie Mellon University comments, alongside Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Prince Charles has “warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain . . . and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”
Here’s hoping that the reign of King Charles will be a happier affair than his failed forecasts of climate doom. Long live the King.
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Will Electric Vehicles Disappoint You? Beware of the range claims on the sticker
No doubt many taxpayers have already developed a healthy skepticism if not distaste for government-subsidized electric vehicles. But consumers may also have reason to beware, based on a recent report from automotive magazine Car and Driver.
Also in the news is one more reminder that it can be a bumpy road to the energy transition envisioned by the White House.
Why, it was just three months ago that a Reuters report from David Shepardson noted: Two senior Biden administration officials got behind the wheel of new electric vehicles (EV) Wednesday at the Washington, D.C. auto show to urge Americans to consider buying a zero-emission model.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi took spins in a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Chevrolet Bolt as they touted revamped $7,500 EV tax credits and new $4,000 second-hand EV credits.
But perhaps all subsidized things must someday come to an end. The Journal’s Mike Colias reports on General Motors today: The Detroit auto maker... said Tuesday it would drop the Chevrolet Bolt from its lineup, killing off its first mainstream electric vehicle as it moves to newer battery technology...
GM’s decision to unplug the Bolt—while expected by analysts—ends a troubled run for the model, which had become a black eye for the company after battery fires and costly recalls dented its early push into electric vehicles.
Fortunately many car shoppers seemed to be aware of the vehicle’s problems long before the federal officials who kept urging them to buy.
Now there seems to be another concern that goes beyond Chevy. Regardless of the manufacturer, taxpayers looking to get some of their money back from the feds by purchasing a subsidized e-car should be careful to restrain their expectations.
Caleb Miller reports for Car and Driver: A new paper published by SAE International uses Car and Driver’s real- world highway test data to show that electric vehicles underperform on... efficiency and range relative to the EPA figures by a much greater margin than internal-combustion vehicles. While the latter typically meet or exceed the EPA-estimated highway fuel economy numbers, EVs tend to fall considerably short of the range number on the window sticker.
The paper, written by Car and Driver’s testing director, Dave VanderWerp, and Gregory Pannone, was presented this week at SAE International’s annual WCX conference. It points to a need for revised testing and labeling standards for EVs moving forward. “Basically we’ve taken a look at how vehicles perform relative to the values on the window sticker, looking at the difference between what the label says and what we actually see in our real-world highway test,” explained VanderWerp.
“We see a big difference in that gap between gas- powered vehicles and the performance of EVs. The real question is: When first-time customers are buying EVs, are they going to be pleasantly surprised or disappointed by the range?”
On Car and Driver’s 75-mph highway test, more than 350 internal- combustion vehicles averaged 4.0 percent better fuel economy than what was stated on their labels. But the average range for an EV was 12.5 percent worse than the price sticker numbers.
The column will go out on a limb and predict that ensuring e-car benefits are not overstated will not be the top priority of the Biden Environmental Protection Agency. Looking at the happy federal officials pictured in the doomed car model at the top of this page—and considering all the lobbying that went into subsidizing it—one can only wonder: Would you buy a schmoozed car from these people?
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.pol-incorrect/c/uRDCCBJ3ZVY
****************************************Green New Deal Appeasement Leads Nowhere
It is frustrating to watch people who should know better, including politicians, state regulators, and even leaders of traditional energy companies, play along with the green energy transition. Any day now, I expect a modern-day Neville Chamberlain to say that in the war on carbon, it is peace for our time.
The rationale offered is that cooperating with the Net Zero agenda will buy some time for traditional energy producers. I understand that there is pressure concerning quarterly financial disclosures, but appeasement will only end one way. The time is coming when your upcoming quarterly financial reports will be your last. Efforts to go along to get along will not be enough.
The sad story of North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, Coal Creek Station, should be an important lesson for anyone involved in carbon-based energy. The prior owner of Coal Creek was Minnesota-based Great River Energy, which has come under growing pressure from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to rethink its coal dependency and was looking at its options, including mothballing the dependable plant that was producing reliable and affordable electricity for 1.7 million consumers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In 2021, Rainbow Energy, based in North Dakota, agreed to buy the plant. The sale closed in mid-2022. Rainbow Energy’s plan to save Coal Creek Station included a large-scale carbon capture and storage project. That plan should have been music to the ears of Green New Dealers.
Rainbow Energy’s carbon sequestration plan had several significant technical hurdles and it was also going to be expensive. The company’s initial estimate was that pumping the CO2 back underground would take 30 percent of the power produced by Coal Creek, and that estimate will be low if the plan is fully implemented.
The plan got another boost when the (ahem) Inflation Reduction Act was passed by Congress, which included a boost in the 45Q tax credits from $50/ton to $85/ton. The carbon capture and storage plan not only checked the 45Q tax credit boxes, but it made the electricity produced green enough that Great River Energy agreed to buy the electricity (at least the output left over after capturing and storing the CO2) for 10 years. Great River Energy CEO David Saggau said, "Purchasing energy and capacity from Rainbow was not in our original plan, but it will serve as a reliable steppingstone in our power supply transition.”
It looked like a win for coal and a win for appeasement, but there was a catch. There is always a catch.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave notice to Coal Creek Station, now named Rainbow Energy Center, that it is considering the denial of a permit for its coal ash disposal system. The comment period for this proposal closed on April 15, 2023, and if EPA follows through, the power plant will be shut down for three years.
The impact on the electric grid will be significant. According to reports, Rainbow Energy Center generates nearly half of the electricity in North Dakota and 40 percent of the power exported to other states.
North Dakota governor Doug Burgum said the EPA “is moving the goalposts after the game started.” He is right, but the larger lesson is not getting through to the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors. Appeasing those who want you gone is a fool’s errand.
Rainbow Energy Center is the poster child in the multi-front war on carbon, but the signs are everywhere. In April, EPA announced aggressive plans to crack down on power-plant emissions. For anyone who believes in karma, these rules also target natural gas-powered plants. Early on, the natural gas sector quietly, and not so quietly, applauded the attacks on coal. A short-lived tactic, as it turns out. Also, last month, EPA announced three settlements with natural gas plants for air pollution violations.
Then last week, in an example of the ever-shortening time lapse between conspiracy theory and fact, New York lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to ban natural gas hookups in new construction.
At the federal level, the three-letter agencies continue to make laws as actual lawmakers navel gaze. The U.S. Supreme Court announced it will finally take up a case aimed at the agency authority under the Chevron Doctrine next term. So, maybe a year from now, the out-of-control federal agencies may lose a bit of their power.
The future looks increasingly dark for the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/green_new_deal_appeasement_leads_nowhere.html
***************************************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
