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They will not tell you that the best scientists see climate change as a wicked problem not amenable to any one solution. They will not admit their effort to greatly reduce the carbon dioxide Co2 foot print of the planet is a ‘death sentence’ for millions. The reason is wind and solar cause substantial increase in retail electricity costs because of intermittency and subsidies. The Paris Accord and radical left action on climate is the greatest social reversal in world history.Adelaide Hills pharmacist Kirrily Chambers forced to throw out medicine from the fridge after a blackout. Picture: Kelly Barnes/The AustralianWind and solar fail to replace fossil fuels and when added to the grid increase brown outs threatening hospital safety. Also they increase the cost of electricity to consumers causing fatalities from heat poverty. All the more horrific since the evidence mounts everyday that the current UN IPCC claim of global warming /climate change is not real so there is no reason to shackle the economy and threaten our well being with failing renewables.Wind and solar are an economic disaster failing to make any difference to energy consumption world wide. Many companies in this sector have gone bankrupt with subsidies. Now subsidies are being taken off the table leaving the industry to meet the test of market forces. Wide spread bankruptcy is the result.As Warren Buffett said wind farms don’t make sense without the tax creditIn the real world of business and commerce, the cost of renewables makes them unaffordable without intervention by the state. As Warren Buffet explained in 2014, “on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”World’s Most Expensive Joke: $2 Trillion Squandered on Wind & Solar (So Far)…August 4, 2018 by stopthesethings 2 CommentsThe point, if there was one, of throwing hundreds of $billions in subsidies at wind and solar was to slash emissions of carbon dioxide gas. Taxpayers and power consumers who are on the receiving end of the bill for all this environmental piety would, after almost 20 years, be entitled to ask just how much bang they’re getting for their buck?The short answer is: not much.STT leaves the battle over carbon dioxide gas to others.Our view is pretty simple: if a naturally occurring beneficial trace gas, essential for all life on earth, really is killing the planet, then there is only one available solution. And that’s nuclear power.In 2018, if a climate alarmist is still waging war on CO2 (although he’ll call it ‘carbon’) and not talking about nuclear power, you know you’re dealing with a deluded crank.One character who’s still pretty fired up about carbon dioxide gas is Michael Shellenberger. However, Shellenberger worked out in short order that wind and solar don’t provide any solution, to anything. Whether that’s providing meaningful power; or reducing CO2 emissions in the electricity generation sector.Remember, that the only real justification for intermittent and unreliable wind and solar is that this pair reduce CO2 emissions.So – given that there’s no proof of reductions in CO2 emissions due to the introduction of wind and solar and plenty of proof to the contrary – those cashing in on climate alarmism are little more than a well-drilled band of thieves operating under State license.Carbon Emissions Rose in 2017 Despite Record Solar & Wind — More Proof They Can’t Save The ClimateForbesMichael Shellenberger13 June 2018Carbon emissions are on the rise despite record-breaking deployment of renewables, according to new BP Energy data released today.“Despite the extraordinary growth in renewables in recent years,” said BP, “and the huge policy efforts to encourage a shift away from coal into cleaner, lower carbon fuels, there has been almost no improvement in the power sector fuel mix over the past 20 years.”The data is further evidence that dilute and unreliable sources of energy like solar and wind cannot replace coal and other fossil fuels and will not lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions.Coal grew one percent in 2017 — its first growth since 2013. For the last few years, energy analysts had speculated that we had reached “peak coal,” thanks to abundant cheap natural gas.Natural gas consumption grew three percent globally and a whopping 15 percent in China in 2017.The last few years have seen huge amounts of hype about India’s investment in solar, but according to BP, the global rise in coal consumption came mostly from India, and to a lesser extent, China.And, “despite all the talk of peak oil demand, increasing car efficiency, growth of electrical vehicles,” BP notes, oil consumption grew 50 percent faster in 2017 than its decade-long average.The growth of coal and natural gas was enough to wipe out any emissions reductions from wind and solar, which grew 17 percent and 35 percent, respectively.Wind and solar account for just just six percent of total electricity globally, despite decades of subsidies. The growth of fossil fuels was enough to wipe out any emissions reductions from wind and solar, which grew 17 percent and 35 percent, respectively.According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), public and private actors spent $1.1 trillion on solar and over $900 billion on wind between 2007 and 2016. According to BNEF, global investment in these clean 10 energies hovered at about $300 billion per year between 2010 and 2016.To put this roughly $2 trillion in investment in solar and wind during the past 10 years in perspective, it represents an amount of similar magnitude to the global investment in nuclear over the past 54 years, which totals about $1.8 trillion.A big part of the problem has been the decline of nuclear. “The share of non-fossil in 2017 is actually a little lower than it was 20 years ago,” noted BP, “as the growth of renewables hasn’t offset the declining share of nuclear.”My organization, Environmental Progress, was the first to alert the world about the impact that declining nuclear power as a share of global electricity was having on efforts to deal with climate change.Over the last two years, renewable energy advocates have insisted that solar and wind can make up the difference. The new BP Energy data is further proof that they cannot.ForbesUKTransition to wind and solar renewables makes electricity go up. :..people will die if this renewable energy idiocy continuesRenewable energy’s dreadful costs and awful electricityUnreliable capacity and excessively high costs make renewable energy nothing more than a ‘green’ idealogue’s dream. Subsidies are a great waste and are being abandoned around the world so market forces will be the death nell of this nonsense.12 DECEMBER 2018 - 13:55 ANDREW KENNYWind turbines are not the way to go, says Andrew Kenny, just ask Germany.Picture: THINKSTOCKSA is stumbling towards energy disaster. On top of Eskom’s failures comes the calamitous Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2018, a plan for ruinously expensive electricity. (The IRP 2018, drawn up by the department of energy, plans SA’s electricity supply.) The IRP is mad, based not on the real world but on a fantasy world of computer models.The IRP’s “least-cost option” is in fact the most expensive option possible, which has seen electricity costs soaring wherever it has been tried. This is a combination of wind, solar and imported gas. It was drawn up by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and supported by the IRP. It is a recipe for calamity.It seems strange that SA should forsake its own huge resources of reliable energy and depend on foreign sources. Worse is its reliance on unreliable solar and wind.South Australia actually did implement something like the CSIR’s “least-cost option”. It closed coal stations, built wind turbines and some solar plants, and supplemented them with natural gas, which Australia, unlike SA, has in abundance. The result was soaring electricity prices, reaching, at one point in July 2016, the astonishing figure of A$14,000/MWh (R140/kWh). Eskom’s average selling price is R0.89/kWh. The “least-cost solution” resulted momentarily in an electricity price more than 150 times Eskom’s. It would be worse here because we don’t have much gas.The renewable energy companies and the greens seem to have captured the department of energy (quite legally, quite differently from Gupta capture)It also caused two total blackouts for South Australia. In panic it ordered the world’s biggest battery from Elon Musk. Jaws dropped when people discovered how expensive it was and how inadequate (with 0.5% of the storage capacity of our Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme).The IRP and CSIR refuse to recognise the essential cost that makes renewables so expensive. Here is the key equation: cost of renewable electricity equals price paid by the system operator plus system costs.The system costs are the costs the grid operator, Eskom in our case, has to bear to accommodate the appalling fluctuations of wind and solar power so as to meet demand at all times. The renewable companies refuse to reveal their production figures but I have graphs of total renewable production since 2013, the beginning of renewable energy independent power producers (IPPS) procurement programme. The graphs are terrible, with violent, unpredictable ups and downs.In March 2018, power output varied from 3,000MW to 47MW. To stop this dreadful electricity shutting down the whole grid, Eskom must have back-up generators ramping up and down to match the renewables; it must have machines on “spinning reserve” (running below optimum power), and extra transmission lines. These cause system costs, which can be very expensive. The renewable companies don’t pay for them; Eskom does, and passes them on the South African public.NonsenseThe system costs, ignored by the IRP and CSIR, are one of the reasons their models are nonsense. They explain an apparent paradox. Week by week we hear that the prices of solar and wind electricity are coming down; but week by week we see electricity consumers around the world paying more as solar and wind are added to the grid. Denmark, with the world’s highest fraction of wind electricity, has just about the most expensive electricity in Europe. Germany, since it adopted the absurd Energiewende (phasing out nuclear and replacing it with wind and solar) has seen electricity costs soaring.The answer lies in the green desire for conquest. Nuclear power, as you can see driving past Koeberg, works in harmony with nature. The greens don’t like that. They want to conquer and dominate natureThe renewable energy IPP procurement programme, hailed by renewable companies as a huge success, has forced on SA its most expensive electricity ever — and its worst. Eskom’s last annual report, for the year ending 31 March 2018, revealed it was forced to pay 222c/kWh for the programme’s electricity compared with its selling price of 89c/kWh. But the system costs make it even more expensive.We get an idea how much more from the one renewable technology that does provide honest electricity and covers its own system costs. This is concentrated solar power (CSP) with storage, where sunshine heats up a working fluid, which is stored in tanks and used for making electricity for short periods when required. The latest such plants charge about 500c/kWh at peak times. So the best solar technology, with an award-winning project, in perhaps the world’s best solar sites, produces electricity at more than 10 times the cost of Koeberg and about five times the cost of new nuclear.Carbon dioxide realityAfter the procurement programme proved a failure, Lynne Brown, then public enterprises minister, ordered Eskom to sign up for a further 27 renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs), each lasting 20 years. Malusi Gigaba, then finance minister, endorsed her.Nuclear reduces carbon dioxide emissions; renewables don’t. The Energiewende has turned Germany into the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in Europe, because wind and solar, being so unreliable, had to be supplemented with fossil fuels, especially coal.Two reasons drive renewables: money and ideology. Renewable energy companies make a fortune when they persuade governments to force their utilities to buy their awful electricity.But why do the green ideologues love wind and solar? Not because of free energy, which is actually very expensive. Tides, waves, solar, wind and dissolved uranium in the sea can all provide free energy but, except for the uranium, it is always very costly to convert it into usable power. (Uranium from the sea would be naturally be replenished but it is cheaper to buy it from a commercial mine.)I think the answer lies in the green desire for conquest. Nuclear power, as you can see driving past Koeberg, works in harmony with nature. The greens don’t like that. They want to conquer and dominate nature. They love the idea of thousands of gigantic wind turbines and immense solar arrays dominating the landscape like new totems of command. Wind and solar rely entirely on coercion by the state, which the greens also love (in a free market nobody would buy wind or solar grid electricity).SA NEEDS TO DIVERSIFY ENERGY SOURCES TO DELIVERSA is not taking advantage of the clear lead the country has in solar and wind resources.OPINION 2 months agoThe renewable energy companies and the greens seem to have captured the department of energy (quite legally, quite differently from Gupta capture). If they get their way, the rest of us are going to suffer.Since 1994, Eskom has been wrecked by bad management, destructive ideology and corruption. Because it didn’t build stations timeously, the existing stations have been run into the ground and are failing. Its once excellent coal supply has been crippled. There is massive over-staffing and Eskom is plunging into debt. Seasonable rains threaten another fiasco to match January 2008, which shut down our gold mines.The last thing Eskom needs now is to be burdened by useless, very expensive renewable electricity. Recently, the parliamentary portfolio committee on energy, after listening to submissions on IRP 2018, recommended that coal and nuclear should remain in our energy mix. Perhaps a ray of hope for sanity.• Kenny is a professional engineer with degrees in physics, mathematics and mechanical engineering.Let’s look at the current picture, according to the Energy Information Administration.So-called renewables comprised just over 11% of U.S. energy consumption in 2017. Of the renewable sources, hydro, geothermal, and biomass aren’t going to grow enough to achieve any of the Green New Deal’s goals.Rep.-elect Ocasio-Cortez must be counting on wind and solar to power her plan. Together they supply just 3% of total energy consumed.If we confine the discussion to power generation, wind and solar comprise just 7.6% of the 4 trillion kilowatt-hour total. (Source: What is U.S. electricity generation by energy source?)If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?Wind intermittency makes coal a necessary and expensive partnerMichael Shellenberger via ForbesOVER the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percentwhile the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.Electricity prices increased by:Electricity prices increased by:o 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;o 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;o over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?Electricity prices increased by 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy.One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.But, again, that’s not what happened.The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.Electricity prices increased 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017.Another hypothesis might be that the closure of nuclear plants resulted in higher energy prices.Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that nuclear energy leaders Illinois, France, Sweden and South Korea enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the world.The facts are the most expensive retail electricity comes from countries with the most renewables!German Flagship Daily FAZ: High Energy Prices Would Be ‘Death Sentence For Poor’By P Gosselin on8. March 2019Share this...A commentary at flagship German online daily FAZ looked at a recent study by the German Umweltbundesamt – UBA – (Federal Environment Agency) which examined the per capita consumption of natural resources by different population groups.Not surprisingly, high income groups were found to own a large number of cars and live in large homes with energy-guzzling appliances – thus making this group of people large consumers of energy.Frequent flier climate activistsAlso the study found that the “urban, academic young classes who tend towards voting for the Greens have far above-average CO2 emissions per capita” and these emissions “are not offset by them buying vegetables from the local region in the organic shop”.The FAZ writes that the study found that this particular class — who are worried about the CO2 emissions and the climate — have “an above-average number of frequent flyers” and like to take long-haul flights to distant places like “New Zealand or Canada to admire nature”.The UBA study also found that traditional working classes (whose lifestyles the Greens often complain about) in fact are energy modest and fly less frequently.Here the FAZ concludes:The bottom line of the study was that those with a ‘positive environmental attitude’ had the highest actual energy consumption and CO2 emissions.”Al Gore: “a hypocrite and a Pharisee”The FAZ also mentions former Vice President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth”, where he “praised his ‘CO2-neutral lifestyle’ and claimed he compensated for his air travel. But later it was exposed how Gore’s 10,000 square foot mansion in Tennessee consumed “about twenty times as much energy as the house of an average American family”.“The green-preaching politician was a hypocrite and a Pharisee,” the FAZ commented over Gore.Back to extreme povertyThe FAZ commentary also wrote about the “Fridays for Future” movement. Here the involved activists are calling on society to wean itself off fossil fuels. This for example could be done by enacting a high CO2 tax, they claim. However the FAZ comments that this would lead to “a sharp rise in energy costs, which would be difficult for low-income groups to bear” and that “millions of poor people in other parts of the world, such as Africa, would be pushed below the absolute poverty line.”High energy tax “a death sentence”According to the FAZ: “To put it bluntly, the path naively advocated by some well-off activists could, in extreme cases, be the death sentence for the poor in developing countries whose future well-being and survival they are supposed to be fighting for.”Today Germany’s flagship political daily, the renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), which has long been a disciple of global warming religion (woeful deficits in climate sciences have long been a problem of the German mainstream media) raised a few eyebrows in daring to feature the global warming-blasphemous chart that no German was ever supposed to see.Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’February 18, 2019 by stopthesethings 21 CommentsBill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar.When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind and solar have all but trashed the electricity generation and delivery system, as we know it. Germany and South Australia are only the most obvious examples.During an interview at Stanford University late last year, Bill Gates attacks the idiots who believe that we’re all just a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.Gates on renewables: How would Tokyo survive a 3 day typhoon with unreliable energy?Jo Nova BlogJo Nova14 February 2019Make no mistake, Bill Gates totally believes the climate change scare story but even he can see that renewables are not the answer, it’s not about the cost, it’s the reliability.He quotes Vaclav Smil:Here’s Toyko, 2p7 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.As Gates says: Let’s not jerk around. You’re multiple orders of magnitude — … — That’s nothing, that doesn’t solve the reliability problem.Bill GatesDuring storms, clouds cut solar panel productivity (unless hail destroys it) and wind turbines have to shut down in high winds.The whole interview was part of a presentation at Stanford late last year:Cheap renewables won’t stop global warming, says Bill GatesThe interview by Arun Majumdar, co-director of Stanford Energy’s Precourt Institute for Energy, which organized the conference, can be watched here.When financial analysts proposed rating companies on their CO2 output to drive down emissions, Gates was appalled by the idea that the climate and energy problem would be easy to solve. He asked them: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”“The idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we could just beat on them and put (solar panels) on our rooftop—that is more of a block than climate denial,” Gates said. “The ‘climate is easy to solve’ group is our biggest problem.”If he only looked at the numbers in the climate science debate…Jo Nova BlogGreen New Deal? Wind Power ‘Dropped Off’ The Grid During Polar VortexAs Congress debates the Green New Deal, which calls for a massive increase in renewable energy use, new reports show wind energy “dropped off” as frigid Arctic air descended on the eastern U.S. earlier this year.“An earlier than expected drop in wind, primarily caused by cold weather cutoffs, increased risk of insufficiency for morning peak,” according to a report from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which oversees electricity delivery across 15 states.The wind power shortfall triggered a “maximum generation event” on the morning of Jan. 30 when temperatures plummeted, MISO reported Wednesday of its handling of the historic cold that settled over the eastern U.S. in late January.Unplanned power outages were higher than past polar vortex events, MISO reported, much of it because wind turbines automatically shut off in the cold. Coal and natural gas plants ramped up production to meet the shortfall and keep the lights on.“This what happens when the government starts mandating and subsidizing inferior energy sources,” Dan Kish, a distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.Kish, a Green New Deal opponent, said the proposal would “double down with more ‘Rainbow Stew’ sources” that “don’t work when you need them the most.”Kish isn’t alone in his concern. Energy experts for years have been exploring the feasibility of integrating more solar and wind power onto the grid. The Green New Deal brought that debate to the forefront.While the Green New Deal doesn’t explicitly ban any fuel sources, it does call for achieving “net-zero” emissions within 10 years by “dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources.”The bill’s main champion, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said the Green New Deal was about “transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy,” at a press conference introducing the resolution in early February.Green New Deal supporters say wind and solar are necessary to fight global warming, but critics say increasingly relying on intermittent renewables poses a threat to grid reliability.The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a report Tuesday that detailed how “[w]ind generation dropped off … mainly caused by wind plants reaching their cold weather cutoff thresholds.”Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, based on MISO dataWind turbines are shut off when temperatures dip below minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, as happened in the upper Midwest and Great Plains — an area often dubbed the “Saudi Arabia” of wind energy. On top of that, when it gets, say, minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s not much wind.EIA said that “wind accounted for an average of 5%, ranging from 5% to 15% on surrounding days” on Jan. 30, while “coal supplied about 41% of MISO’s load and natural gas supplied about 30%.”The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment, but the group did publish a blog post in February on the polar vortex.AWEA’s research director Michael Coggin said wind energy’s performance was “strong” during this year’s polar vortex. Coggin said high voltage power lines allowed wind power from the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic to send power westward.Read more at Daily CallerJanuary 21, 2019Why 'Green' Energy Is Futile, In One LessonAre electric vehicles really environmentally friendly?Electric cars are often presented as “non-polluting” or “zero emission” vehicles. But they are not necessarily less polluting than conventional vehicles!To assess their ecological performance, it is important to take into account several elements...The energy used: green or not?Even if driving a fully electric vehicle does not cause any air pollution, the way the electricity it uses is generated should not be forgotten.An average of 60 % of the electricity produced in the world comes from coal and gas, i.e. fossil fuels. This means that an electric car produces nearly as much CO2per kilometer as a petrol or diesel vehicle.Are electric cars worse for the environment?Crunch the numbers, and it looks like all those subsidies might be counterproductive.By JONATHAN LESSER 05/15/2018 05:06 AM EDThttps://www.politico.com/agenda/...If you believe the headlines, traditional automobiles are speeding toward a dead end. All those V8s, V6s and turbocharged vehicles we’ve grown to love will soon be replaced by squadrons of clean, whisper-quiet, all-electric vehicles. And if you believe the headlines, the environment will be much better off.Policymakers at every level have done their part to push electric vehicles by creating a tankful of subsidies. Thanks to laws signed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, electric-vehicle buyers can feast on federal tax credits of up to $7,500 that reduce the initial purchase cost of their vehicles. Not to be outdone, many states also dangle their own mix of goodies for electric vehicle buyers, including purchase rebates as large as $5,000, additional rebates for vehicle chargers, and free use of public charging stations—which, of course, are only “free” because they’re subsidized by ratepayers and taxpayers. Some states even give electric vehicles preferential access to carpool lanes.Then there are the electric vehicle mandates. In January, California Gov. Jerry Brown decreed that 5 million electric vehicles must be on his state’s roads by 2025, along with 250,000 charging stations. Eight other states are following California’s lead. One California lawmaker has even introduced legislation to ban all internal combustion vehicles by 2040.All of this might make sense if electric vehicles, as their supporters claim, were truly likely to reduce air pollution and tackle climate change. But are they?To answer that question, I used the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s most recent long-term forecasts for the number of new electric vehicles through 2050, estimated how much electricity they’d use, and then figured out how much pollution that electricity would generate, looking at three key pollutants regulated under the U.S. Clean Air Act—sulfur dioxide (SO2), oxides of nitrogen (NOX), and particulates—as well as CO2 emissions. I compared them to the emissions of new gasoline-powered vehicles, using the EIA’s “real world” miles-per-gallon forecast, rather than the higher CAFE standard values.What I found is that widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution.That might sound counterintuitive: After all, won’t replacing a 30-year old, smoke-belching Oldsmobile with a new electric vehicle reduce air pollution? Yes, of course. But that’s also where many electric vehicle proponents’ arguments run off the road: they fail to consider just how clean and efficient new internal combustion vehicles are. The appropriate comparison for evaluating the benefits of all those electric vehicle subsidies and mandates isn’t the difference between an electric vehicle and an old gas-guzzler; it’s the difference between an electric car and a newgas car. And new internal combustion engines are really clean. Today’s vehicles emit only about 1% of the pollution than they did in the 1960s, and new innovations continue to improve those engines’ efficiency and cleanliness.And as for that electric car: The energy doesn’t come from nowhere. Cars are charged from the nation’s electrical grid, which means that they’re only as “clean” as America’s mix of power sources. Those are getting cleaner, but we still generate power mainly by burning fossil fuels: natural gas is our biggest source of electricity, and is projected to increase. And coal, while still declining, will remain the second largest source of electricity for some time. (Third is nuclear power, which doesn’t generate emissions but has other byproducts that worry some environmentalists.) Even with large increases in wind and solar generation, the EIA projects that the nation’s electric generating mix will be just 30% renewable by 2030. Based on that forecast, if the EIA’s projected number of electric vehicles were replaced with new internal combustion vehicles, air pollution would actually decrease—and this holds true even if you include the emissions from oil refineries that manufacture gasoline.As for states like California with stringent mandates to use more renewable energy for their power grid, they also have the highest electric rates in the continental US, 50% higher than the US average. And electric rates in those states just keep increasing. So it’s a cleaner power mix, but makes recharging your car more expensive. The higher the electric rate, the lower the incentive for a new car buyer to purchase an electric vehicle.As for greenhouse-gas emissions, my analysis shows that electric vehicles will reduce them compared to new internal combustion vehicles. But based on the EIA’s projection of the number of new electric vehicles, the net reduction in CO2 emissions between 2018 and 2050 would be only about one-half of one percent of total forecast U.S. energy-related carbon emissions. Such a small change will have no impact whatsoever on climate, and thus have no economic benefit.So, if electric-vehicle subsidies don’t help the environment, what—or who—do they help? Most electric-vehicle buyers are far wealthier than average Americans. A nationwide survey in 2017 found that 56% had household incomes of at least $100,000 and 17% had household incomes of at least $200,000. (In 2016, median household income for the US as a whole was less than $58,000.) So it’s fair to say the subsidies disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, who cannot afford to buy even subsidized electric vehicles or live in their own homes to take advantage of residential chargers or solar panels.Not only that, the wires and charging stations needed to charge all those electric vehicles will be paid for by all ratepayers, further raising electric rates. And as more wealthy customers install solar panels to charge their electric vehicles, the costs to provide them back-up power will fall on those who cannot afford to do so.In effect, the wealthy owners of electric vehicles will enjoy the benefits of their clean, silent cars, while passing on many of the costs of keeping their vehicles on the road to everyone else, especially the poor.To be sure, electric cars are impressive. Some are quicker off the line than a Formula 1 race car. But there is no economic or environmental justification for the many billions of dollars in subsidies that America is already paying to speed their adoption.So what to do? First, Congress should immediately terminate those electric-vehicle tax credits, which just benefit the wealthy. Congress should also eliminate zero-emissions credits, which electric-vehicle manufacturers have used to boost their bottom line – $860 million for Tesla alone in the last three years. And third, states should eliminate their various subsidies for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, which are also paid for disproportionately by the poor and are contributing to rising electric rates.Electric vehicle subsidies and mandates share an unfortunate, and all too common trait with other government policies: They’re based on “conventional wisdom” that turns out to be wrong. Wealthy consumers who have purchased Teslas and Chevy Bolts primarily to signal their green bona fides for their friends and neighbors, and who have socialized many of the costs of their purchases to those who are less well-off, might wish to take a closer look at the numbers. Their hands may not be quite so clean as they believe.Jonathan Lesser is the President of Continental Economics, an economic and regulatory consulting firm. His new report, “Short Circuit: The High Cost of Electric Vehicle Subsidies” was published by the Manhattan Institute on May 15.Solar and wind taking over the world We hear it all the time Only it is wrong Now: 0.8% 2040: 3.6%Wind Power: Unfolding Environmental Disaster – Entire Ecosystems CollapsingNovember 9, 2017 by stopthesethings 8 CommentsAs STT followers are well-aware, this site doesn’t mince its words: wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud in human history.Pull the subsidies, and this so-called ‘industry’ would disappear in a heartbeat.For the best part of 20 years, the wind cult has attempted to justify the hundreds of $billions squandered on subsidies for wind power, as being all for the greater good.Armchair environmentalists – who have never planted trees to prevent erosion on creek lines or dragged junk and gunk out of polluted waterways – claim ‘mission accomplished’, every time a new wind turbine whirls into (occasional) action.Obsequious charlatans (like Simon Holmes a Court) even encourage naïve and gullible virtue signallers into ‘investing’ in so-called community wind farms (see our post here). They never get their money back, but at least they can tell their mates at Getup! that they’ve done their bit for the environment.And yet, when the trifling amount of electricity generated by these things across the planet is compared with the grief caused to communities, neighbours and the environment itself, it’s hard for anyone gifted with our good friends, logic and reason, to make a case for wind power. Here’s why.Scientists: Expansion Of Wind Turbines ‘Likely To Lead To Extinction’ For Endangered Vulture SpeciesNo Tricks ZoneKenneth Richard5 October 2017When pondering the future of wind power and its ecological impacts, it is well worth re-considering this seminal analysis from Dr. Matt Ridley.[W]orld energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, […] it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area half the size of the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year.If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area half the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfill the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.The profound costs to wildlife of future-planning to expand wind energy to the levels demanded by “green” advocates — just to meet the world population’s additional energy demands with 350,000 more turbines each year — has been increasingly documented by scientists.The last remaining vulture species native to southeastern Europe is “likely” faced with extinction in the next few decades due to an “eight to ten times greater” mortality rate associated with the rapid expansion of wind energy projects in the region (Vasilakis et al., 2017).Bat species can be found dwelling in a wide variety of terrestrial habitats, including deserts and along sea coasts. Each species may play a fundamental role in its local ecosystem. For example, Kuntz et al., (2011) indicate that 528 different plant species rely on bat pollination and seed dispersal for sustainability. Boyles et al., (2011) estimated that by controlling pest populations (insects), the agricultural benefits of bats may reach $22.9 billion (U.S.D.) annually in the continental U.S. alone.In addition to White Nose Syndrome, deaths connected to collisions with wind turbines are now the leading cause of multiple mortality events in bats (O’Shea et al., 2016). Roughly 25% of North American bats are now classified at risk for extinction (Hammerson et al, 2017), in large part due to the explosion of wind turbines across the landscape. If the expansion of wind turbines continues at its current pace, the hoary bat population is projected to be reduced by 90% (Frick et al., 2017) within the next 50 years. As Hein and Schirmacher (2016) conclude, the “current and presumed future level of fatality [for bat populations] is considered to be unsustainable.”Even large mammals like the already endangered Portuguese wolf (“between 200 and 400 individuals” left) has had its reproduction rates reduced by the recent addition of nearly 1,000 new turbines in their shrinking habitat range (Ferrão da Costa et al., 2017 ).So what, exactly, are we gaining in exchange for increasingly endangering critically important wildlife species? Slightly above nothing.According to the IEA, wind energy provided for 0.39% of the world’s total energy demands as of 2013.At what point may we ask: Are the benefits of wind energy worth the ecological and wildlife costs?Wind Power: Unfolding Environmental Disaster – Entire Ecosystems CollapsingAussie Heatwave ElectricityAussie Heatwave Electricity Shortfall, Hospital Emergency Measures, Coal BlamedUNRELIABLE Energy – Wind and Solar – A Climate Of CommunismPosted: October 16, 2017 | Author: Jamie Spry |Green is the new red.“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers***IN AUSTRALIA, where the Liberal party, the Labor opposition and the Greens have all embraced massive renewable energy targets, we have some of the most expensive electricity anywhere in the world, South Australia officially the highest.THE massive subsidies tipped into the unreliable energy sector makes it unprofitable for 24/7/365 base-load power solutions (coal, hydrocarbons) to operate when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.JUST as socialist central planning failed miserably before it was replaced by free market economies, green central planning will have to be discarded before Australia will be able to see a return to energy security and erase its name from the unenviable title of having the “highest power prices in the world.”UNTIL big government backs off, taxpayers and businesses will continue to pay billions of dollars more for the most important utility they need to sustain life and prosperity – cheap, abundant and reliable electricity.FINALLY the green madness that’s threatening our ability to turn on the lights and air conditioners is being exposed as a socialist policy-driven, big government debacle…Australia’s poor left powerless by soaring prices and green energyIT’S 100 years ago next month that Lenin forced communism on to Russia, sending armed thugs to storm the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.Yet even though he, Stalin, Mao and Castro then put their people in chains and kept them poor, faith in Big Government is miraculously on the rise again in Australia.See, green is the new red. Global warming is the excuse that has brought back the commissars who love ordering people how to live, even down to the things they make and the prices they charge.All big parties share the blame. Even the Turnbull Government forces us with its renewable energy targets to use more electricity from the wind and solar plants it subsidises.True, this green power is expensive, unreliable and driving cheap coal-fired power stations out of business, leaving us dangerously short of electricity for summer.But the government now has an equally crazy $30 million scheme to fix that, too: it will bribe Australians with movie tickets and $25 vouchers to turn off their electricity when they most need it — like during a heatwave, when a million air conditioners are switched on.Movie tickets are a bribe only the poor would take.That’s a bribe only the poor will take. Would Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull really turn off the switches at his Point Piper mansion for two free tickets to Hoyts?And with power prices so high, the very poor would have little real choice. Conclusion: the poor will sweat so the rich may have air con.But it was actually Greens leader Richard Di Natale who last week took out the Lenin Prize for useful idiocy.Asked on the ABC about our soaring gas prices, Di Natale suggested a solution once found in a Soviet Five Year Plan: “The simple way of dealing with the problem … is government has got to step in and regulate prices.”Same deal with electricity prices, which Greens MP Adam Bandt has urged be “capped”.“Governments absolutely need to step in,” insisted Di Natale.“They can regulate prices. We’ve got a plan … We build battery storage technology. We get more solar and wind in the system …“It’s good for prices, it’s good for jobs and most of all, it’s good for the planet.”All lies, of course. Look at South Australia: the state with the most wind power has the world’s most expensive electricity and Australia’s worst unemployment.Adelaide’s Salamon family reading by candle and torch light during South Australia’s frequent blackouts.And it’s all for nothing, because our emissions are just too tiny.As Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has admitted, even if Australia ended all emissions from cars, power stations, factories and cows, the difference to the climate would be “virtually nothing”. But the difference to the economy would be devastating.To Commissar Di Natale, it all sounds simple: just force business to charge less for the product they risked a fortune to find, extract, market and transport. But which business would risk a dollar to find more gas if they were then forced to charge prices so low that they’d lose their shirts?Already, Labor and the Greens have frightened off investment in new coal-fired power stations or even in big upgrades to existing ones, which is why we now face summer blackouts.That’s dragged even the Turnbull Government into considering whether to itself finance a new coal-fired plant, just as Lenin would have done and as Nationals MPs now demand.But Labor last Saturday proposed its own Big Government fix. In a speech in South Australia, federal leader Bill Shorten actually praised the state government for having “climate-proofed” the electricity supply.Adelaide Hills pharmacist Kirrily Chambers forced to throw out medicine from the fridge after a blackout. Picture: Kelly Barnes/The AustralianNever mind that it’s left the state with power prices so high that businesses have been driven broke.Shorten on Saturday promised South Australia relief, but not by dropping his own lunatic promise to force all Australia by 2030 to take 50 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy.No, he simply promised more subsidies — a $1 billion Australian Manufacturing Future Fund to hand out cheap business loans no bank would risk.Shorten said this new fund for manufacturers would be like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which hands out cheap government loans for the kind of renewable energy schemes that have helped to destroy our electricity system.The circle is complete: Labor in effect promises to subsidise business to survive the electricity crisis caused by subsidising green power, while the Liberals subsidise the poor not to use it at all. Meanwhile, we all pay. And all for nothing.Only Big Government could cause such a dog-chases-tail circus. We didn’t learn from Lenin, did we?Andrew Bolt on energy crisis: Poor will be left powerless by soaring prices and green energy | Herald SunjamesmatkinwritingsNovember 2, 2017 at 7:09 amWhat a mess we have from the political distortion of climate science. The AGW theory is “thought experiment” dubbed “meritless conjectures” by major research relying on > 100 peer reviewed references. See http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?paperID=9233The alarmists have been duped by the hidden role of chance. See –https://www.academia.edu/33638398/_Fooled_by_Randomness_The_Hidden_Role_of_Chance_in_Life_and_in_the_Markets_by_Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb._Judith_Curry_chides_alarmists_missing_black_swan_massive_winter_snowfalls_in_their_models._Like_astrology_climate_change_is_not_falsifiable_when_it_covers_every_change_in_climatehttps://climatism.wordpress.com/2017/10/16/unreliable-energy-wind-and-solar-a-climate-of-communism/Eric Worrall / 3 hours ago January 19, 2018Guest essay by Eric Worrallh/t JoNova – South Australia and the Australian State of Victoria learned the hard way that when power demand surges, you can’t turn up the solar panels.Melbourne hospitals switch off lights as mercury risesGrant McArthur and Aleks Devic, Herald SunJanuary 19, 2018 7:36pmPATIENTS were left in the dark after one of Melbourne’s biggest hospitals switched off its lights and non-essential equipment as temperatures soared on Friday.The Alfred turned off the lights on wards, in corridors and cafeterias about midday in a bid to conserve power.The dramatic move followed a Department of Health memo to hospital chiefs on Thursday night asking them to ensure back-up power supplies were effective, prompted by the increased risk of disruption in the heatwave.“Hospitals within Alfred Health have taken the initiative to act as good corporate citizens and reduce the use of electricity that is not directly needed for patient care. This is consistent with the advice provided by Australian Energy Market Operator,” she said.“Hospitals within Alfred Health have strong backup and emergency power supply capacity and in the event of a power outage expect clinical services to continue without interruption.”Department of Health spokesman Tim Vainoras said no directive was issued for hospitals to switch off equipment or conserve energy, however hospitals were advised to prepare for the impact of extreme heat including preparations for possible energy disruptions.A memo reiterating the state’s extreme weather protocols was sent to hospitals at 8pm on Thursday.“With increased temperatures across the state, demands on Victoria’s electricity supplies are likely to increase. This may lead to electricity disruptions in some parts of Victoria,” the DHS memo states.“It will be important to ensure your backup power is effective for the maintenance of critical services and that you have access to fuel supplies to support extended periods of power outages.”…Read more: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news...JoNova provided a link to a site which at the time of her post showed Queensland feeding NSW, which was passing the power to Victoria – though this changes hour to hour (see the live feed here).Australian Electricity Power Flow between States. Source AEMOIntermittent renewables are sometimes contributing, for example at one point when I looked at the feed it showed net power coming from South Australia, as opposed to South Australia sucking power in JoNova’s screenshot. But as the Victorian hospital shutdown demonstrates, the renewable contribution simply isn’t reliable. Businesses and emergency facilities throughout the affected states were required to switch off lights and “unessential” systems, so the politicians who created this mess could avoid vote losing mass blackouts.Greens were quick to blame coal for this terrifying brush with mass blackouts during the middle of a heatwave.Loy Yang B failure sends prices soaring, triggers supply safeguardsJANUARY 19 2018 – 2:18PMCole LatimerThe Australian Energy Market Operator has kicked off emergency measures to protect power supply after Victoria’s Loy Yang B brown coal-fired power station failed on Thursday afternoon, sending electricity spot prices soaring.As temperatures rose around southern Australia Loy Yang B’s generators failed at around 4pm, instantly taking around 528 megawatts of energy out of the state’s grid.The outage ahead of a major heatwave on Friday came despite assurances by its owner Alinta Energy that the ageing power station had the capability to continue providing power in the heat.“There are no issues expected ahead with the forecast hot weather,” Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery told Fairfax Media on Monday.…Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/t...This greensplaining ignores the central issue – the shortage of reliable, dispatchable power capacity. Despite billions of dollars worth of investment in Aussie renewables, a shortfall of a few hundred megawatts was enough to trigger a multi-state emergency.The system as it stands is not fit for purpose.One new coal plant, or a decent size zero CO2 emission nuclear plant, maybe even one new generator at an existing plant, is all that would have been required to avert this dangerous shortfall, all it would have taken to provide a sufficient supply buffer so the failure of one decrepit old coal plant couldn’t bring the whole system to its knees.But nobody wants to invest in new dispatchable capacity in Australia.Renewable mandates supported by Australian Federal and State Governments have made dispatchable energy unprofitable. Worse, power companies have no grounds for hope that any investment in dispatchables will become economically viable in the foreseeable future. The deeper green Federal opposition party wants more aggressive renewable targets, 50% renewables across the board in Australia in the next decade.The takeaway lesson for Australian politicians and people throughout the world should be that you can’t run hospitals and businesses on unreliable electricity. Next time turning off the cafeteria lights might not be enough; people will die if this renewable energy idiocy continues. Lets hope enough politicians learn this lesson quickly enough to avert a major disaster.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018...