Sunday, July 6, 2014 For My Yoke Is Easy, And My Burden Light: Fill & Download for Free

COST. Wind and solar are costly to build and costly to use failing under severe winter weather.Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.They are intermittent and not cost effective because when introduced into the electric grid they require back up power from fossil fuels. The evidence of excessive consumer costs when renewables are added is well documented and I submit this factor alone means renewable energy future is dim. Wind and coal are coupled to ensure reliable power as this next photo shows. How is that renewable power when it depends on coal?Wind turbines in Europe, coupled with a coal power plant in the distance.Ina Fassbender/ReutersThese Countries Have The Highest Energy Usage Per PersonTHE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING (RETAIL ELECTRICITY RATES) FOR CONSUMERSSouth Australia has the highest investment in renewables for its grid and the highest cost electricity as a result. It is a matter of math renewables demand two producers one unreliable (wind and solar) and one fully reliable (fossil fuels)These graphs tell the story as more renewables go into the grid the price of electricity goes up. Why? Intermittency of wind and solar require backup of fossil fuel reliability.It is a big mistake to look at wind and solar in isolation from their effect on installed power where the intermittency hits the consumer hard with dramatically increased costs.This site provides a detailed report of the European costs of renewables showing they are too expensive - The excess costs of Weather Dependent Renewable power generation in the EU(28): 2020ENVIRONMENTFEBRUARY 14, 20217:05 PMUPDATED 2 DAYS AGOIcy weather chills Texas wind energy as deep freeze grips much of U.S.By Steve Gorman3 MIN READ(Reuters) - Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a rare deep freeze across the state locked up turbine towers while driving electricity demand to record levels, the state’s grid operator reported.FILE PHOTO: Wind turbines generate power at the Loraine Windpark Project in Loraine, Texas U.S. August 24, 2018. Picture taken August 24, 2018. REUTERS/Nick OxfordResponding to a request from Governor Greg Abbott, President Joe Biden granted a federal emergency declaration for all 254 counties in the state on Sunday, authorizing U.S. agencies to coordinate disaster relief from severe weather in Texas.The winter energy woes in Texas came as bone-chilling cold, combined with snow, sleet and freezing rain, gripped much of the United States from the Pacific Northwest through the Great Plains and into the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend.An Arctic air mass causing the chill extended southward well beyond areas accustomed to icy weather, with winter storm warnings posted for much of the Gulf Coast region, Oklahoma and Missouri, the National Weather Service said.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, issued an alert asking consumers and businesses to conserve power, citing record-breaking energy demands due to extreme cold gripping the state.“We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units,” the agency said.Wind farms in West Texas, stricken by weekend ice storms, were particularly hard hit.Of the 25,000-plus megawatts of wind-power capacity normally available in Texas, some 12,000 megawatts was out of service as of Sunday morning “due to the winter weather event we’re experiencing in Texas,” ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said.Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year, behind natural gas, which represented 45%, according to ERCOT figures.Forecasts call for heavy snow and freezing rain to spread across a larger swath of central and eastern sections of the country through Monday, with a storm front in the West likely to dump 1 to 2 feet of snow in the Cascades and northern Rockies through Tuesday, according to the weather service.Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston and Heather Timmons in Washington; editing by Diane CraftResearch in the UK shows that thanks to expensive subsidies for renewables seniors must decide whether to heat or eat. This is horrible and in addition these subsidies for renewables do nothing for the climate.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state power grid and the flow of power to more than 26 million Texas customers, is working with generators to “make sure they can supply power during the coldest periods,” said communications manager Leslie Sopko.“We’ve had a significant number of wind facilities that had to be taken out of service due to icing. That is certainly something that we are having to work around during this time,” she said.The wind turbines that have been coated in ice will need time and warmer temperatures before they can function again, says Ramanan Krishnamoorti, chief energy officer at the University of Houston.“When ice forms on a turbine, it weighs it down and can break it,” Krishnamoorti said. “There is significant load on the electricity and gas markets, and we could lose a big source of electricity generation from the wind turbines. That is the conundrum we are facing.”Wind generates about 20 percent of electricity in Texas. But the rest of the state’s power system isn’t immune to the extended cold period and precipitation.The sustained period of colder than normal temperatures will put pressure on demand as people try to keep their homes warm.Utilities hope to keep power on as bitter cold, precipitation sweep HoustonTHE TRUTH ABOUT THE GREAT WIND POWER FRAUDHeartless: Renewable Energy Advocates Hate the Poor & Want to Keep Them That WayJuly 30, 2020 by stopthesethings Leave a CommentSince World War II affordable power was regarded as a birthright: RE obsessed virtue signallers have destroyed that notion in a heartbeat.In California, compassion is a rare commodity among those promoting and profiting from subsidised wind and solar. Seminal Californian Punk outfit, the Dead Kennedys seem to have foreshadowed their State’s insane energy policy with their cheery ditty, ‘Kill the Poor’. Because it’s the poor and vulnerable that suffer most from rocketing power prices.As in South Australia, Ontario, Denmark and Germany, so it goes in California.After decades of throwing $billions of taxpayer’s money at intermittent wind and solar, Californians now pay 60% more for their electricity than the next most expensive state in the US: power prices have risen more than five times as fast than the other states over the last eight years.For the unemployed, underemployed and a large proportion of the working poor, electricity is now, and forever, out of reach.Where, once upon a time, policy-makers engineered ‘progressive’ taxation – designed to place the greatest burden on those who could most afford it – these days, the ultimate cost of subsidised renewables is not just regressive, it’s crushing.Steven Greenhut takes a look at the characters who evidently hate the poor and want to keep them that way, forever.State energy policies help rich over the poorOrange County RegisterSteven Greenhut3 July 2020A prominent new study from UCLA researchers about California’s energy policies is fascinating not so much for its Captain Obvious conclusions, but because it points to a growing rift on in the environmental world between those who favor the state’s far-reaching “green” policies — and those who want to hector us to use less energy.“Wealth is a prominent driver of demand for residential energy,” the authors wrote. “Worldwide, wealthier groups lead more materially and energetically intensive lives than the less affluent, consuming in excess of what they require to meet their essential needs.” That’s stunning for its inanity. Is anyone shocked that those with higher incomes live in bigger houses, and spend more to cool them, than those with lower incomes?“This level of consumption is clearly beyond what you need to provide for your survival, to allow you to be a functioning member of society,” the study’s lead author, Eric Fournier, told the Los Angeles Times. He and his fellow authors thought long and hard about their descriptions of “excessive” and even “profligate” energy consumption. Apparently, academics should decide how much electricity everyone else should use.I’ve found a constant theme from the environmental community when it comes to every resource-related policy debate, from electricity production to fossil fuels to water availability. Activists talk about improving efficiencies and battling climate change, but they mainly seem offended that people aren’t conserving enough. I’m going out on a limb here, but it’s an undeniably good thing that we can use more energy than we need for our basic survival.Nevertheless, the study has raised an interesting — albeit stunningly obvious — point, as California continues its headlong rush toward a green-energy future based on command-and-control edicts, subsidies and quasi-market mechanisms such as cap and trade. It found that incentive programs for electric cars and solar panels and some other costly energy policies “have been found to disproportionately benefit wealthier individuals.”Well, poor people generally aren’t installing solar panels or buying $50,000 cars. One need not peruse the study’s charts of Los Angeles County to know that electric vehicle adoption is higher in Beverly Hills than Watts. I’m all for the development of alternative energy industries, but using public funds, and hobbling old-line energy industries with excess regulations and taxes, is a wealth transfer from poor to rich. As usual, the state’s progressive policies have unintended consequences.If the state’s alternative energy policies are successful, they are “likely to greatly increase future electricity demand,” the study laments. So far, those policies mainly are boosting prices, but if they do eventually reduce them, people will indeed use more energy. That’s how supply and demand works. Cheaper energy allows everyone, rich and poor, to live more-enjoyable lives. It lowers the costs for businesses, which can then provide jobs and opportunities.That brings us back to that above-mentioned tension. Are environmentalists mainly interested in cleaning up the environment or changing the way we live? It often seems to be the latter. As Fournier added, “At some point, you have to get to a place where you’re using less energy.” Why is that so? If energy becomes more abundant and more environmentally friendly, who cares if I use more of it to keep the hot tub toasty? It’s no one’s business but my own if I leave the lights on all day — as long as I pay my utility bill.California is the world’s fifth-largest economy. It’s a land of unfathomable wealth, yet it also has the nation’s highest poverty rate. That rate is above 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted model, even though California has the most-generous anti-poverty programs, also. One reason for those dismal numbers is our state’s environmental policies, which increase that cost of living.California has adopted slow-growth policies that limit housing construction by driving up the cost of developable land. The state imposes regulatory costs that, in some localities, comprise 40 percent of the cost of a new home. The result are median-home prices that are unattainable for low-income and even middle-class people. We all like open space, but every policy choice comes at a price, often a high one.Similarly, our energy prices are among the highest in the nation. Thanks to California-specific formulations, our gasoline costs more than other states, except for remote Hawaii. Our water and electricity policies boost the costs of those necessary products — and the state adds to our sky-high tax burdens by doling out subsidies. California imposes alternative-energy requirements that force it to import 29 percent of our electricity, raising prices on those who can least afford it.Then researchers are shocked to discover that California’s energy policies impose disproportionate costs on poor folks. The solution is to promote energy abundance, freer markets and less regulation — rather than to create even more programs or to hector suburbanites who “overconsume” air conditioning to cool their homes.Orange County RegisterAn ideology the poor can never afford.Extinction Rebellion’s pasty-faced and ghoulish-looking members aren’t renowned for their common sense on energy matters. But – in a road to Damascus moment – one of its leading lights, the aptly named Zion Lights has, indeed, seen the light. And it’s one powered by nuclear energy.Zion Lights proves that there might still be hope for this lot.https://stopthesethings.com/2020/07/30/heartless-renewable-energy-advocates-hate-the-poor-want-to-keep-them-that-way/Mexico Says “Hasta La Vista” To Inefficient Green Energies. Could Be “Death Knell” For Renewables”By P Gosselin on22. May 2020German public broadcasting Deutsche Welle (DW) here reports how Mexico has decided to end its transition the renewable energies, angering activists and investors.The move, DW reports, “is scaring off environmentalists and investors” and could be the “death knell for renewable energies.”Apparently President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had traveled to Oaxaca and saw how the local hills were blighted by wind turbines, commenting: “These windmills are spoiling the landscape” and “produce very little energy.”Wind energy is notorious for its inefficiency, unreliable supply, high costs, blight to the environment and health hazards. Moreover, the business has been taken over by crony capitalists out to make a killing on the massively subsidized projects. In fact, as Michael Moore’s latest film shows, green energies aren’t really green at all.The move by the Mexican government has angered green energy activists and investors. Another reason cited by the Mexican government is “grid instability”.The reform will have some impact on German investors, DW reports. For example: the Potsdam-based company Notus, who since 2014 has been planning five solar and wind power plants. Now their future remains uncertain.“The new directive could be the death knell for renewable energies,” DW reports. “Protest letters from the Canadian and European Union embassies refer to 44 ongoing projects worth USD 6.8 billion.” Another problem is Mexico’s power grid is not designed to handle the massively fluctuating power fed in by wind and sun.Though DW suggests that the return to fossil fuels is going to mean higher costs for Mexican consumers, most results from around the world suggest the opposite is the case. Germany, for example has committed a whopping 1 trillion dollars to green energies since 2000, yet today the country has among the world’s most expensive electricity prices for consumers. Annually tens of thousands of households see their power cut off because they can no longer afford to pay the power bills.Mexico is wise to move to a source of energy that is plentiful, affordable, stable and one that doesn’t destroy the environment on a massive scale.Mexico Says “Hasta La Vista” To Inefficient Green Energies. Could Be “Death Knell” For Renewables”Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’February 18, 2019 by stopthesethings 41 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.During 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 BlogBill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind & Solar: ‘Let’s Quit Jerking Around With Renewables & Batteries’Global Investment in Renewable Energy Has StalledGuest Blogger / February 6, 2018By Steve GorehamEarlier this month, the Trump Administration announced a decision to apply a 30 percent tariff on imported solar cells and panels. The Solar Industries Association denounced the measure, projecting job losses and cancellation of solar investments. But the solar tariff discussion hides a larger renewable energy issue. Global investment in renewables has stalled in the US, in Europe, and in many markets across the world.Since the 1990s, sustainable advocates have called for investment in wind, solar, and biofuel energy as the solution to global warming, pollution, and feared resource depletion. National, state, and provincial governments responded, promoting green energy with feed-in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards laws, renewable grid priority, and other subsidies and mandates. Carbon trading markets and carbon taxes were enacted to impose costs on hydrocarbon fuels to favor renewable energy.These efforts resulted in a rapid rise in renewable deployments across the world. From 2004 to 2011, global renewable energy investment grew at a 26.7 percent compounded annual rate. By the end of 2012, more than 200,000 wind turbines were operating worldwide. Germany alone boasted more than one million solar rooftop installations.But since 2011, investment in renewables has stalled. From 2011 to 2017, global green energy investment grew at only 0.7 percent per year—essentially flat. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, 2017 investment in renewables grew only 1 percent in the US, but was down 16 percent in Japan, down 20 percent in India, down 26 percent in Germany, and down 56 percent in the United Kingdom. Investment in China was up 26 percent, supporting a meagre 3 percent global renewable investment growth in 2017.European nations have the highest per person renewable investment in the world and extensive experience with renewables. Europe invested over $100 billion each year in renewable energy in 2010 and 2011. But last year Europe’s renewable investment was only $57.4 billion, down 50 percent from the record years of 2010‒2011.So why is renewable investment faltering? One answer is that renewable projects are heavily dependent upon subsidies, and subsidies are being cut. The combination of rising electricity prices and budget-busting subsidy bills is forcing nations to cut back.Europe invested $850 billion dollars in renewables from 2000 to 2014 and continues to pay a huge ongoing price. Residential electricity prices climbed to three times the US price in Spain and four times the US price in Denmark and Germany. German consumers pay an EEG levy in their electric bills, amounting to €25 billion a year to subsidize renewable energy. Environment minister Peter Altmaier estimates that cumulative renewable subsidies paid by German consumers will total an astonishing one trillion euros by 2040.Over the last five years, subsidies or mandates have been cut in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Retroactive cuts to feed-in tariffs were made in Bulgaria, Greece, and Spain. Germany cut feed-in tariff subsidies by 75 percent and levied grid fees on residential solar owners. In 2015, the UK government suspended all new subsidies for onshore wind farms and reduced subsidies for residential solar installations, causing a steep fall in investment in both 2016 and 2017.US subsidy cuts are also in process. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 began a phased reduction of the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) from 2016‒2019. If not extended again, the PTC subsidy will expire after 2019. The Act also reduced investment tax credits for wind and solar.Some claim that renewable energy can power modern society. A 2017 paper by Mark Jacobsen and others at Stanford University, calls for 100 percent renewables by 2050, with wind and solar providing 95 percent of the energy. But this wishful thinking is not supported by the trends.Since 1965, global energy consumption more than tripled to 13.3 billion tons of oil equivalent, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. In 2016, wind and solar provided about two percent of the total. Each year the world consumes an additional United Kingdom worth of energy. Wind and solar sources are unable to supply even the annual growth in world demand, let alone replace our traditional energy sources.Renewable energy investment has stagnated, buried by rising energy prices and unaffordable subsidies. The world is being forced to return to sensible energy policies based on cost, performance, and real environmental benefit.COMMENTSmichael hart February 6, 2018 at 10:30 amAgreed. It is one of the greatest travesties of our time that the might of German engineering capabilities has been so recklessly squandered on such foolishness as large-scale wind power.I still find it hard to believe that an earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific near Japan somehow led to Germany deciding to close it’s nuclear fleet even faster than planned. The power of the green vote in Germany, of all places, never ceases to amaze and dismay me. The so often finest technical nation in the world, hamstrung by the technical illiteracy of environmentalism.Shrug.Gregory White February 6, 2018 at 10:33 amIndonesia may beat them to it. They start construction of a full scale test reactor next year. Thorcon PowerSparky February 6, 2018 at 11:16 am‘Michael Hart’ – penman of “Hubris”?Global Investment in Renewable Energy Has StalledThe Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant ToMichael Shellenberger ContributorEnergyI write about energy and the environment.“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” reports... [+]DER SPIEGELOver the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.Most Popular In: EnergyGuyana’s Election Controversy Threatens Its Energy FutureWith Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace, criticized Germany, journalists came to the country’s defense. “Germany has fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so ambitious,” one of them argued last summer.“If the rest of the world made just half Germany’s effort, the future for our planet would look less bleak,” she wrote. “So Germany, don’t give up. And also: Thank you.”But Germany didn’t just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” ("Murks in Germany"). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” write Der Spiegel’s Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story.Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.“The politicians fear citizen resistance” Der Spiegel reports. “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.”In response, politicians sometimes order “electrical lines be buried underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer.”As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were added in 2017.Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of electricity from today's 35%... [+]AG ENERGIEBINLANZENDer Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany's renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar.Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is below 40%... No viable business model can be developed from this.”Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 will start coming to an end next year. “The wind power boom is over,” Der Spiegel concludes.All of which raises a question: if renewables can’t cheaply power Germany, one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to “leapfrog” fossil fuels?The Question of TechnologyThe earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century, Martin Heidegger.In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning of Technology,” Heidegger condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.The use of “modern technology,” he wrote, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.”The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating the natural environment, and praised windmills because they “do not unlock energy in order to store it.”These weren’t just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to industrialize.In the US, Heidegger’s views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to bring modern civilization "into harmony with the ecosphere."The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic Environment.Bookchin admitted his proposal "conjures up an image of cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds."But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were profitable aside from subsidies.Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars.Journalists reported breathlessly on the cost declines in batteries, imagining a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be “disrupted.”But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more devastating.The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds. Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.“It’s one of the three worst sites for a wind farm that I’ve seen in Africa in terms of its potential to kill threatened birds,” a biologist explained.In response, the wind farm’s developers have done what Europeans have long done in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project.Kenya won't be able to “leapfrog” fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of electricity and make Kenya’s slow climb out of poverty even slower.Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities.Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. “It’s our gift to the world,” a renewables advocate told The Times.Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent on renewables would redeem them. “Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in the 21st,” noted a reporter.Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely “botched,” but it wasn't. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant ToDigging It: Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality CheckAugust 16, 2020 by stopthesethings 6 CommentsIt takes audacity to suggest that the wholesale environmental destruction wreaked by the wind and solar industries is all for the good of planet.Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans managed to lift the lid on green hypocrisy, focusing on the raft of inconvenient truths behind the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.Such as the fact that those ‘planet saving’ solar panels that give virtue signallers such a warm inner glow are really ‘coal’ panels, where the core ingredient is made from strip-mined quartz, which is converted to silica using coal-fired furnaces. Inconvenient for those claiming renewable energy piety, but true enough.Mark P Mills treads the same path with his investigation into hypocritical claims that renewable energy is all about saving the planet when, in reality, wind and solar are simply devouring it.Victims Vindicated: Farmers Victorious in Landmark Legal Battle Over Wind Turbine NoiseAugust 25, 2020 by stopthesethings 5 CommentsVictors vindicated: Don Fairbrother and his community’s tormentors.A farming community tormented by wind turbine noise for years is celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision that declared it an unlawful nuisance.The community surrounding the Bald Hills wind farm, built by a Japanese developer, Mitsui and Co, have been tortured by incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound since March 2015, when its 52, 2 MW Senvion MM92 turbines spun into action.Neighbors started complaining to the developer about noise, straightaway.But, as is their wont, the developer and its goons simply rejected the mounting complaints and carried on regardless…That was in August 2017. 12 months later, an independent investigator deemed that the turbine noise generated constitutes a nuisance, rendering the Council liable to act under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008. We gave detailed coverage of the operation of that Act here.Based on the investigation and the opinion given by a Melbourne Queen’s Counsel, Paul Connor, the Council was forced to accept the inevitable conclusion. The noise generated is a nuisance and, accordingly, an unlawful interference with the use and enjoyment of residents’ homes. That led to a Council resolution to that effect, including the following findings:Council is satisfied that there exists a nuisance of the kind alleged by the complainants, for the following reasons:A. The credible and consistent character of the noise logs provided by the complainants and/or the complaints made by the complainants about sleep disturbance and the injury to their personal comfort;B. The conclusions of the Smith Report; andC. The weight of the other evidence presented to Councillors suggests the existence of a nuisance.The wind power outfit was furious. Not least because the Council’s findings threatened its entitlement to receive Large-Scale Generation Certificates (aka RECs) under the LRET legislation (as to which see our post here).With the prospect of losing hundreds of $millions in subsidies, it appealed the council’s decision to the Supreme Court. Here’s a couple of articles detailing the delightful result.Bald Hills Wind Farm neighbours win historic legal battle against turbines ‘too close to homes’ABC NewsJedda Costa20 August 2020The South Gippsland Shire Council and local residents have won a legal fight against the Bald Hills Wind Farm (BHWF) near Tarwin Lower, about 150 kilometres south-east of Melbourne.Key points:A council in Victoria’s south-east has won a historic legal battle against a wind farm near Tarwin LowerLast year, the operator of the Bald Hills Wind Farm sued the South Gippsland Shire Council after a report found turbine noise was affecting the wellbeing of nearby residentsThe Supreme Court yesterday ruled there were no legal errors made by the councilVictims Vindicated: Farmers Victorious in Landmark Legal Battle Over Wind Turbine NoiseMines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality CheckManhattan InstituteMark P Mills9 July 2020Executive SummaryAs policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.Among the material realities of green energy:Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.DOWNLOAD PDFManhattan Institutehttps://stopthesethings.com/2020/08/16/digging-it-mines-minerals-and-green-energy-a-reality-check/Oh Dear: Plug Pulled On French Electric Car Which Nobody Wants To BuyDate: 29/07/20Car AdviceOne of Australia’s cheapest electric cars – the Renault Zoe – has had its plug pulled after just 63 were sold over the past three years.Indeed, over the same period, Australians bought two-and-a-half times more Rolls-Royces (158), seven times as many Lamborghinis (457), and 12 times as many Ferraris (818) than Renault Zoe electric cars.In an online briefing with media, Renault Australia executives blamed absent government incentives for the lack of widespread interest in the Zoe, even though it was already one of the cheapest electric cars on sale, priced from $47,490 plus on-road costs.Critics of electric-car subsidies say the vehicles should sell on their merits rather than receiving taxpayer support – especially as drivers of such vehicles are perceived as getting a free ride on Australian roads by avoiding fuel excise.Oh Dear: Plug Pulled On French Electric Car Which Nobody Wants To Buy - The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)Author Steve Goreham discusses the costs of wind and solar being added to the grid and how consumers pay in two ways – for subsidies and through much higher electricity rates. In the US, electric power rates in 9 of 12 wind states went up 12 to 35% from 2008 to 2015, while in the same time overall US power prices rose only 4.8%. He explains that South Australia is now seeing wide area blackouts due to unreliability related to wind power on the grid and simultaneous coal phase-out. Steve’s full presentation can be seen at: Climate Science and the Myths of Renewable Energy: https://youtu.be/mtHreJbr2WMThe next article California’s Green Energy Corruption reveals why California has the nations most expensive and least reliable consumer electricity thanks to renewables.California’s Green-Energy Corruption And Those Rolling Blackoutsby ccdeditorThe last California Governor blamed for rolling energy blackouts was recalled by voters and replaced. In 2003, Governor Gray Davis was recalled over leadership issues, high taxation, and inaction over a struggling California economy and rolling energy blackouts.Gov. Gavin Newsom is already facing a recall, and now with rolling blackouts, he may have just guaranteed it.Most countries around the world think that it’s a good thing to have cheap energy. In California, we have plenty of cheap energy available, just not the political will to access it.California depends on natural gas-driven turbines and hydroelectric generators to provide just 38 percent of its energy needs.The state imports 12 percent of its oil from Alaska, and another 58 percent from foreign nations, relying heavily on Canada, which has 19 commercial nuclear reactors and is the world’s third-largest producer of hydroelectricity.So why are California’s utilities cutting power, and imposing rolling blackouts again?It’s political. And it’s corrupt.The state is awash in ultra-cheap natural gas, yet in California, our corrupt government finds ways to create an energy shortage, and charge ratepayers the highest rates in the country.This is one reason California electricity costs more than twice the national median—thanks to a government-created shortage.California’s natural gas shale formation is one of the largest in the world. And, California has been a pioneer in renewable energy, albeit still unreliable and unproven.While California sits on one of the largest known deposits of recoverable oil and gas, production has steadily fallen.The state ignores its vast onshore and offshore deposits, which are fully accessible through conventional and hydraulic fracturing technologies.Another reason is that the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s energy “regulator,” has a historic, dubious relationship with Wall Street, making promises to keep the profits higher of the state’s publicly held utilities, than utility profits elsewhere.California politicians have gloated over being the first state to enact such aggressive green energy and greenhouse gas busting policy, but have yet to produce any proof that these oppressive and business-killing laws have had any “green” results.All while they ignore that natural gas is clean, less expensive to extract, natural and abundant. It wasn’t that long ago that natural gas used to be the left’s preferred alternative to all other “dirty fuels.”But as the oil and gas industry found better, more affordable ways to access natural gas, it fell out of favor with emotional, whimsical environmentalists.Many California residents have purchased expensive generators to keep refrigerators and freezers on, but generators rely mostly on natural gas.Democrats in the California Legislature want to ban natural gas to homes and require only electric appliances. So California residents won’t even be able to keep our power on in this “new normal.”With triple-digit heat in California – a typical August – rolling blackouts will not be popular among voters. Californians are now being charged very high-tiered energy rates, with the most expensive usage during the times it is most needed – 4 pm to 8 pm.Every which way that ratepayers turn, we are getting seriously bilked by the politicians in this state.