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cybersecurity is the body of technologies, processes and practices designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access. In a computing context, security includes both cybersecurity and physical security.Ensuring cybersecurity requires coordinated efforts throughout an information system. Elements of cybersecurity include:Application securityInformation securityNetwork securityDisaster recovery / business continuity planningOperational securityEnd-user educationTo deal with the current environment, advisory organizations are promoting a more proactive and adaptive approach. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, recently issued updated guidelines in its risk assessment framework that recommended a shift toward continuous monitoring and real-time assessments.According to Forbes, the global cybersecurity market reached $75 billion for 2015 and is expected to hit $170 billion in 2020.Application securityApplication security is the use of software, hardware, and procedural methods to protect applications from external threats.Once an afterthought in software design, security is becoming an increasingly important concern during development as applications become more frequently accessible over networks and are, as a result, vulnerable to a wide variety of threats. Security measures built into applications and a sound application security routine minimize the likelihood that unauthorized code will be able to manipulate applications to access, steal, modify, or delete sensitive data.Actions taken to ensure application security are sometimes called countermeasures. The most basic software countermeasure is an application firewall that limits the execution of files or the handling of data by specific installed programs. The most common hardware countermeasure is a router that can prevent the IP address of an individual computer from being directly visible on the Internet. Other countermeasures include conventional firewalls, encryption/decryption programs, anti-virus programs, spyware detection/removal programs and biometric authentication systems.Application security can be enhanced by rigorously defining enterprise assets, identifying what each application does (or will do) with respect to these assets, creating a security profile for each application, identifying and prioritizing potential threats and documenting adverse events and the actions taken in each case. This process is known as threat modeling. In this context, a threat is any potential or actual adverse event that can compromise the assets of an enterprise, including both malicious events, such as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, and unplanned events, such as the failure of a storage device.information security (infosec)Information security (infosec) is a set of strategies for managing the processes, tools and policies necessary to prevent, detect, document and counter threats to digital and non-digital information. Infosec responsibilities include establishing a set of business processes that will protect information assets regardless of how the information is formatted or whether it is in transit, is being processed or is at rest in storage.Infosec programs are built around the core objectives of the CIA triad: maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT systems and business data. These objectives ensure that sensitive information is only disclosed to authorized parties (confidentiality), prevent unauthorized modification of data(integrity) and guarantee the data can be accessed by authorized parties when requested (availability).Many large enterprises employ a dedicated security group to implement and maintain the organization's infosec program. Typically, this group is led by a chief information security officer. The security group is generally responsible for conducting risk management, a process through which vulnerabilities and threats to information assets are continuously assessed, and the appropriate protective controls are decided on and applied. The value of an organization lies within its information -- its security is critical for business operations, as well as retaining credibility and earning the trust of clients.Threats to sensitive and private information come in many different forms, such as malware and phishing attacks, identity theft and ransomware. To deter attackers and mitigate vulnerabilities at various points, multiple security controls are implemented and coordinated as part of a layered defense in depth strategy. This should minimize the impact of an attack. To be prepared for a security breach, security groups should have an incident response plan (IRP) in place. This should allow them to contain and limit the damage, remove the cause and apply updated defense controls.business continuity plan (BCP)A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that consists of the critical information an organization needs to continue operating during an unplanned event.The BCP should state the essential functions of the business, identify which systems and processes must be sustained, and detail how to maintain them. It should take into account any possible business disruption.With risks ranging from cyber attacks to natural disasters to human error, it is vital for an organization to have a business continuity plan to preserve its health and reputation. A proper BCP decreases the chance of a costly outage.While IT administrators often create the plan, the participation of executive staff can aid the process, adding knowledge of the company, providing oversight and helping to ensure the BCP is regularly updated.What a business continuity plan needsAccording to business continuity consultant Paul Kirvan, a BCP should contain the following items:Initial data, including important contact information, located at the beginning of the planRevision management process that describes change management proceduresPurpose and scopeHow to use the plan, including guidelines as to when the plan will be initiatedPolicy informationEmergency response and managementStep-by-step proceduresChecklists and flow diagramsSchedule for reviewing, testing and updating the planIn the book Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning for IT Professionals, Susan Snedaker recommends asking the following questions:How would the department function if desktops, laptops, servers, email and internet access were unavailable?What single points of failure exist? What risk controls or risk management systems are currently in place?What are the critical outsourced relationships and dependencies?During a disruption, what workarounds are there for key business processes?What is the minimum number of staff needed and what functions would they need to carry out?What are the key skills, knowledge or expertise needed to recover?What critical security or operational controls are needed if systems are down?Business continuity planning stepsThe business continuity planning process contains several steps, including:Initiating the projectInformation-gathering phase, featuring business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment (RA)Plan developmentPlan testing, maintenance and updatingOnce the business has decided to undertake the planning process, the BIA and RA help to collect important data. The BIA pinpoints the mission-critical functions that must continue during a crisis and the resources needed to maintain those operations. The RA details the potential internal and external risks and threats, the likelihood of them happening and the possible damage they can cause.The next step determines the best ways to deal with the risks and threats outlined in the BIA and RA, and how to limit damage from an event. A successful business continuity plan defines step-by-step procedures for response. The BCP should not be overly complex and does not need to be hundreds of pages long; it should contain just the right amount of information to keep the business running. For a small business, especially, a one-page plan with all the necessary details can be more helpful than a long one that is overwhelming and difficult to use. Those details should include the minimum resources needed for business continuance, the locations where that may take place, the personnel needed to accomplish it and potential costs.Watch this video to understand perfectly.The BCP should be current and accurate, which can be achieved through regular testing and maintenance. A business continuity plan test can be as simple as talking through the plan and as complex as a full run-through of what will happen in the event of a business disruption. The test can be planned well in advance or it can be more spur-of-the-moment to better simulate an unplanned event. If issues arise during testing, the plan should be corrected accordingly during the maintenance phase. Maintenance also includes a review of the critical functions outlined in the BIA and the risks described in the RA, as well as plan updating if necessary.A business continuity plan is a living document and should not sit on the shelf waiting for a crisis. It needs to be continually improved and staff should be kept up to date through regular educational awareness and testing activities. In addition, an internal or external business continuity plan audit evaluates the effectiveness of the BCP and highlights areas for improvement.Business continuity planning software, tools and trendsThere is help available to guide organizations through the business continuity planning process, from consultants to tools to full software. An organization bases its investment in assistance on the complexity of the business continuity planning task, amount of time and budget. Before making a purchase, it is advisable to research both products and vendors, evaluate demos and talk to other users.The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's Business Continuity Planning booklet contains guidance for financial -- and nonfinancial -- professionals, delving into the BIA, RA, BC plan development and testing, standards and training.For more complicated functions, business continuity planning software uses databases and modules for specific exercises. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, through its Plan Ahead for Disasters website, offers software in its "Business Continuity Planning Suite." Other business continuity software vendors include ClearView, Continuity Logic, Fusion and Sungard Availability Services.The role of the business continuity professional has changed and continues to evolve. As IT administrators are increasingly asked to do more with less, it is advisable for business continuity professionals to be well versed in technology, security, risk management, emergency management and strategic planning. Business continuity planning must also take into account emerging and growing technologies -- such as the cloud and virtualization -- and new threats, such as cyberattacks like ransomware.Business continuity planning standardsBusiness continuity planning standards provide a starting point.According to Kirvan, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 22301:2012 standard is generally regarded as the global standard for business continuity management. ISO 22301:2012 is often complemented by other standards, such as:ISO 22313: Guidance for a business continuity management system and continual improvementISO 22317: Guidelines for business impact analysisISO 22318: Continuity of supply chainsISO 22398: Exercise guidelinesISO 22399: Incident preparednessOther standards include:National Fire Protection Association 1600: Emergency management and business continuityNational Institute of Standards and Technology SP 800-34: IT contingency planningBritish Standards Institution BS 25999: The British standard for business continuityEmergency management and disaster recovery plans in BC planningAn emergency management plan is a document that helps to mitigate the damage of a hazardous event. Proper business continuity planning includes emergency management as an important component. The specifically defined emergency management team takes the lead during a business disruption.The emergency management plan, like the BCP, should be reviewed, tested and updated accordingly. It should be fairly simple and provide the steps necessary to get through an event. The plan also should be flexible, because situations are often very fluid, and the team should communicate frequently during the incident.Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning are often linked, but they are different. A DR plan details how an organization recovers after a business disruption. A business continuity plan is a more proactive approach, as it describes how an organization can maintain operations during an emergency.Network securityNetwork security consists of the policies and practices adopted to prevent and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources. Network security involves the authorization of access to data in a network, which is controlled by the network administrator. Users choose or are assigned an ID and password or other authenticating information that allows them access to information and programs within their authority. Network security covers a variety of computer networks, both public and private, that are used in everyday jobs; conducting transactions and communications among businesses, government agencies and individuals. Networks can be private, such as within a company, and others which might be open to public access. Network security is involved in organizations, enterprises, and other types of institutions. It does as its title explains: It secures the network, as well as protecting and overseeing operations being done. The most common and simple way of protecting a network resource is by assigning it a unique name and a corresponding password.Network Security conceptOnce authenticated, a firewall enforces access policies such as what services are allowed to be accessed by the network users.Though effective to prevent unauthorized access, this component may fail to check potentially harmful content such as computer worms or Trojans being transmitted over the network. Anti-virus software or an intrusion prevention system (IPS)help detect and inhibit the action of such malware. An anomaly-based intrusion detection system may also monitor the network like wireshark traffic and may be logged for audit purposes and for later high-level analysis. Newer systems combining unsupervised machine learning with full network traffic analysis can detect active network attackers from malicious insiders or targeted external attackers that have compromised a user machine or account.OPSEC (operational security)OPSEC (operational security) is an analytical process that classifies information assets and determines the controls required to protect these assets.OPSEC originated as a military term that described strategies to prevent potential adversaries from discovering critical operations-related data. As information management and protection has become important to success in the private sector, OPSEC processes are now common in business operations.Operational security five-step processOperational security typically consists of a five-step iterative process:1. Identify critical information: The first step is to determine exactly what data would be particularly harmful to an organization if it was obtained by an adversary. This includes intellectual property, employees' and/or customers' personally identifiable information and financial statements.2. Determine threats: The next step is to determine who represents a threat to the organization's critical information. There may be numerous adversaries that target different pieces of information, and companies must consider any competitors or hackers that may target the data.3. Analyze vulnerabilities: In the vulnerability analysis stage, the organization examines potential weaknesses among the safeguards in place to protect the critical information that leave it vulnerable to potential adversaries. This step includes identifying any potential lapses in physical/electronic processes designed to protect against the predetermined threats, or areas where lack of security awareness training leaves information open to attack.4. Assess risks: After vulnerabilities have been determined, the next step is to determine the threat level associated with each of them. Companies rank the risks according to factors such as the chances a specific attack will occur and how damaging such an attack would be to operations. The higher the risk, the more pressing it will be for the organization to implement risk management controls.5. Apply appropriate countermeasures: The final step consists of implementing a plan to mitigate the risks beginning with those that pose the biggest threat to operations. Potential security improvements stemming from the risk mitigation plan include implementing additional hardware and training or developing new information governance policies.You can also watch video to optimise or enhance your knowledge -OPSEC and risk managementWhen it comes to risk management, OPSEC encourages managers to view operations or projects from the outside-in, or from the perspective of competitors (or enemies) in order to identify weaknesses. If an organization can easily extract their own information while acting as an outsider, odds are adversaries outside the organization can as well. Completing regular risk assessments and OPSEC is key to identifying vulnerabilities.OPSEC trainingThe Center for Development of Security Excellence (CDSE) offers diverse security training for military members, Department of Defense (DoD) employees and DoD contractors. CDSE's training programs are presented through a variety of platforms including e-learning, webinars, virtual classes and in-person instruction. Topics covered in OPSEC training include:CounterintelligenceCybersecurityInsider threatsPersonnel securityPhysical securityOperations securityCDSE's OPSEC Awareness training program is presented on their Security Awareness Hub. This course is free and its goal is to ensure safe and successful operations and personal safety by providing information on the need to protect unclassified information regarding operations and personal information.Educating the end user and eliminating the biggest security riskWhen weighing up the biggest security hazards to an organisation, it may come as a surprise to discover that the end user within the organisation is often the first to compromise security.Through no fault of their own, and mainly due to a lack of awareness, employees frequently open the virtual gates to attackers.With the rise in cybercrime as well as the increase in the consumerisation of IT and BYOD, it is more important than ever to fully educate employees about security attacks and protection.Although BYOD has given them an increased level of flexibility, it has also given the end user even more potential to cause security breaches.Threat actors actively target end-users as a primary route to compromise. Some criminals may be targeting the end-user directly, for example to conduct financial fraud, others will be leveraging the user to gain access to the organisations IT infrastructure.It is important to note that threat actors can target end users on their home networks and mobile devices, who will then unwittingly bring the “infection” inside the organisation.Increasingly these days, the criminals use a technique called spear phishing; an attacker sends a highly targeted email, often with personal contextual details that fools the user into clicking a link and, unknown to them, downloading malware.Once this has been downloaded, it provides access to the end users device which is used as a launch point to harvest network information and expand control inside the network.Due to the detrimental ramifications, it is vital that end users have a full understanding of the most common ways for threat actors to target them.This includes educating employees that they will be targeted, encouraging them to be vigilant at all times, teaching employees what qualifies as sensitive data, how to identify and avoid threats, acceptable use policies and security policies.It’s also crucial that end users understand their role and responsibilities in maintaining the organisation’s compliance with relevant regulations, such as PCI DSS for payment card data or HIPAA for health records.In short, educating the work force is critical and is a key requirement of information security standards such as ISO27001.There are a number of ways that security awareness training can be delivered to end users. The most popular tends to be the e-learning variety, where online courses covering the essentials of security awareness are mandated for all employees.This would teach the user that they are a target, how to look out for social engineering and phishing, password security, handling of sensitive data, plus any specific compliance-driven requirements.This is good for compliance and building a basic level of awareness, but it might not engage the user as well as it could.The most effective way the CIO can deliver practical and memorable education is to make it real and physically demonstrate what can be achieved as a result of an attack.Taking employees through a real life example of someone clicking an email which looks authentic presents what takes place behind the scenes and makes evident the power the attacker acquires.This illustrates precisely what a threat entails in an easy to understand and influential manner.BYOD means users must be aware of the risks and responsible for their own ongoing security, as well as the business.Employees who manage both their work and private lives on one device access secure business information, as well as personal information such as passwords and pictures.Ensuring that they know the right procedures for accessing and protecting business information is crucial.Making it personal and teaching employees how to protect their own data adds value by highlighting how a threat could impact their personal life as well as their employer.Implementing best practice will then become second nature as people adopt the same practices in both their personal and professional lives.While giving consideration to security awareness training to the whole organisation, special thought must be given to the education of an even more crucial group – the senior management team.Most members of most SMTs have very little knowledge or awareness of information security as it’s not their domain and it’s traditionally something that’s delegated.However news today is filled with companies suffering severe reputational damage, and in some cases ceasing trading, due to information security breaches.Getting time with the SMT to present a high-level analysis of the risks faced by a business and market, and giving examples of businesses not taking those risks seriously enough, should be high on any CIO or CISOs priority list. It will also help when trying to secure investment to mitigate those risks.Although end user education will help to prevent the risk of human error, it’s impossible to eliminate it completely.Protection of assets and detection of malicious activity is just as important, if not more so; the CIO needs to protect end users from their own mistakes.Processes and technology can be put in place to limit and control what information end users can access within a network as well as the actions they can take.In order to take control and minimise risks, end users should only have access to the information necessary for them to perform their roles.As a final point to consider, the security of an organisation relies on detection. Prevention is important but detection is crucial.The key to tackling threats is determining what normal behaviour is, as an enabler for the identification of anomalous activity.If an organisation understands their baseline then this makes it a lot easier to spot abnormalities, such as excessive access to information or out of the ordinary access requests.It was very hard to write this big information but finally i did it.Thanks for reading.

No. Wind and solar fail to replace fossil fuels and when added to the grid increase electricity brown outs threatening hospital safety. Also they increase the cost causing fatalities from heat poverty. Also there is no grave problem of climate change because temperatures seesawing between warm and cold are natural variation over the past 500 million years. Today we are in the interglacial period of the last ice age and the climate has yet to change to warming. The real fear is that the Little Ice age is continuing.The term climate change does not mean human caused global warming as this makes the term nonsense like the way Alice in Wonderland used words. Renewables are irrelevant to that debate because of their abysmal performance.In less than 2500 years we have had 5 discernible Climate Changes that appear to be on 500–600-year cycles and Man and CO2 were not a factor in ANY OF THEM! The first was the Roman Warm Period when it was much warmer than today. We know that — at least I do — because portions of the route that Hannibal took with his elephant troops in his war with Rome are now covered with glaciers that formed during the Little Ice Age (more about that below). The warm period lasted from about 300 BC to about250 AD.The Roman Warm Period was followed by a modest cooling period that lasted until about 800 AD with the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period, which was also much warmer than today. We know that — at least I do — because Eric the Red, followed by his son Leif Ericson, began colonizing Greenland in 985 AD. There were several settlements and numerous farms that were moderately successful until the onset of the Little Ice Age (LIA) about 1350 AD.ALSO GHANGIS KHAN CONQUERING MUCH OF THE KNOWN WORLD TAKING ADVANTAGE OF HORSES AND THE WARM WEATHE OF THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD.The Little Ice Age -- with its famine and death – extended until about 1850 and was by far the most miserable period in recorded history with famine and outright starvation. Colder weather and shorter growing seasons reduced food production dramatically. During that period, new glaciers were formed and existing glaciers grew dramatically around the world, including those on Kilimanjaro that Al Gore included in his famous slide show!The Little Ice Age caused suffering across the world including many revolutionary soldiers freezing to death in the march to Valley Forge 1777 under Washington.In Europe farms and entire villages were overrun by glaciers. Iceland lost half of its population and Finland lost one-third. The LIA ended about 1850 and the earth has been gradually warming — with slight ups and downs — since that time. Hopefully warming will continue until we reach a period similar to the Medieval Warm Period with milder climate, longer growing periods and bountiful crops. If the recent cycles are repeated the current warming should last until about 2350-2400.Buddy SpearsTransition 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.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 CollapsingLet’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 percent while 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:o51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;o24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;oover 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!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 LessonRENEWABLES AND CLIMATE POLICY ARE ON A COLLISION COURSEDate: 09/12/18Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy EditorThose advocating climate change mitigation policy have hitherto wagered everything on the success of renewable energy technologies. The steadily accumulating data on energy and emissions over the period of intense policy commitment suggests that this gamble has not been successful. Pragmatic environmentalists will be asking whether sentimental attachment to wind and solar is standing in the way of an effective emissions reduction trajectory.For almost as long as there has been a climate policy, emissions reduction has been seen as dependent on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Policies supporting this outcome are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world; markets have been coerced globally, with varying degrees of severity it is true, but with extraordinary force in the OECD states, and particularly in the European Union. The net result of several decades of such measures has been negligible. Consider, for example the global total primary energy mix since 1971, as recorded in the International Energy Agency datasets, the most recent discussion of which has just been published in the World Energy Outlook (2018):Figure 1: Global Total Primary Energy Supply: 1971–2015. Source: Redrawn by the author from International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2017 and 2018. IEA Notes: 1. World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. 2. Peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. 3. “Other” Includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.It is perfectly true that the proportional increase in modern renewables, the “Other” category represented by the thin red line at the top of the chart is a significant multiple of the starting base, but even this increase is disappointing given the subsidies involved, and in any case it is almost completely swamped by the increase in overall energy consumption, and that of fossil fuels in particular. Renewables in total, modern renewables plus biofuels and waste and hydro, amounted to about 13% of Total Primary Energy in 1971, and in 2016 are almost unchanged at somewhat under 14%. Thirty years of deployment, almost half of that time under increasingly strong post-Kyoto policies, has seen the proportion of renewable energy in the world’s primary energy input creep up by about one percentage point.Furthermore, what is true at a global level is also true in every national jurisdiction of importance, with the exception that in the less economically vibrant parts of the developed world, including the EU and the UK, energy consumption is actually declining, largely due the transfer of much manufacturing to other parts of the world, principally China.It should therefore come as no surprise to anybody that emissions not only continue to rise, but have recently started to increase at the highest rate for several years, a point that is revealed in the latest release of the Global Carbon Budget, 2018, and can be conveniently illustrated in the chart derived from this paper’s data and published in the coverage of the Financial Times:Figure 2: Global Emissions 1960 to 2018. Source: Financial Times, 6 December 2018, drawn from Global Carbon Budget Report 2018.These dismal facts are producing the obtuse reaction that the current renewables dependent policies are insufficiently aggressive, or, to use the accepted jargon, ambitious, and that the world must try harder. The reaction of the BBC’s Matt McGrath may be typical. He asks: “Why are governments taking so long to take action?”.But this is a misplaced question. The plain reality is that the global market coercions, and related policy pressures favouring renewables are already intense and incessant, and have been so with growing intensity for over fifteen years. Many economies, large and small, have tried very hard indeed, but the global energy markets have barely moved. Why? Because the effort is wasted; the picked winners, the renewable technologies, remain stubbornly uneconomic, with the consequence that spontaneous, uncoerced and rapid adoption remains a dream.This is what policy failure looks like. At what point do those sincerely concerned to see prompt and sustainable emissions reductions begin to wonder whether the renewables industry is a liability and an obstacle to the aim of climate change mitigation?Instead of blaming lazy governments, or the irrational consumer, now rioting in the streets of Paris in protest at climate policy impositions on transport fuels, environmentalists and campaigning analysts might spend their time more fruitfully by reviewing the wisdom of the policies that they have pressed on decision-makers. In doing so they could reflect that climate change mitigation is in certain important respects no different from other insurance policies, and must therefore pass the same tests: Is the policy providing real cover and is the premium affordable and proportional to the risk?Since the rising trend in emissions leaves no doubt that the current policies have as yet provided no real insurance, discussion of affordability becomes in a sense academic, though we can note in passing that it is also true that the emissions abatement cost of renewables is so great that it exceeds even high end estimates of Social Cost of Carbon, meaning that the policies are more harmful than the climate change they set out to mitigate. – This is not only wasted effort, it is counterproductive to human welfare.It will take time for this evidence and reasoning to change minds. Many environmentalists have a sentimental attachment to renewable energy flows in spite of their evident thermodynamic inferiority as fuels. They see them as Goop energy, pure heavenly gifts, handed down, naturally, from a benevolent sun, as opposed to the dirty and artificial earthly products of the soil that are fossil fuels and nuclear. But such feelings must be set aside in the interest of practicality. Climate campaigners must now ask themselves which they prefer, renewables or the stable and long-term reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for it is increasingly clear that they cannot have both. The renewables industry, the vested interests of Big Green, and the widely endorsed imperative for climate change mitigation cannot co-exist for much longer. One or the other, or perhaps both, has to give way.Renewables and Climate Policy Are On A Collision Course - The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)HEAT POVERTY RESEARCH BLAMES UK SUBSIDIES FOR 50% INCREASE IN FUEL.Elaine Morrall died in a freezing home – the state is tossing away people’s livesFrances RyanThe tragic death of this mother of four following benefit cuts shows how the government is failing even in its most basic duty – to keep its citizens safe

COST, INTERMITTENCY AND SEVERE WEATHER. Wind and solar power are the most expensive power because they must double up with fossil fuels lack of storage and to cover up intermittency so the lights can stay on. The public are fooled by the deceit of the industry that ignores the reality although Michael Moore figured it out. What has happened across the Northern Hemisphere this February with the massive winter snowstorm has exposed the frail reality of these old fashioned technologies.Coal Rescues Germany from Its Renewable FollyBY IERFEBRUARY 17, 2021Germany’s millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and its 30,000 wind turbines are doing nothing as the freezing weather has no wind resource to keep the turbines operating. Instead, the solar and wind units are drawing power from the grid powered mainly by coal to keep their internal workings from freezing up. Despite Germany being the poster child of Europe’s renewable future, the country’s Energiewende—transition to wind and solar power—is not working. The Germans have found that dependable, dispatchable coal can work in any weather and is the savior during these cold months. The plan is that Germany will have to rely more on natural gas from Russia, coal power from Poland and nuclear power from France, importing power along huge cables, instead of building a huge fleet of batteries to back up its intermittent renewable power.However, for this unreliability of wind and solar power during this year’s snowy and icy winter, German consumers paid $38 billion ($30.9 billion euros) in subsidies for its renewable energy growth in 2020, despite the financial needs of other sectors of its economy afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic. The renewable energy subsidy is paid directly by consumers in their electricity bills, helping make German residential retail power costs the highest across the European continent and 3 times higher than those of the United States. Americans need only triple their utility bills to get a sense of the burden Germany’s system places on its citizens. The U.S. economy is about 5 times the size of Germany’s, to compare relative expenditures for similar practices. The subsidy only raised renewable energy’s share of Germany’s electricity mix by 3 percentage points—from 43 percent in 2019 to 46 percent last year.Source: BloombergOver the next two years, the German government plans to take a third off the costs that consumers pay by using some of the nation’s budget to share the burden. The costs of the subsidy, known as Renewable Energy Law aid, are expected to peak in 2022-2023 before stabilizing. Germany switched to auctions to expand wind and solar capacity in 2017, abandoning the system of guaranteed feed-in tariffs for all new renewable projects to reduce the increasing expense burden.Joe Biden needs to use caution on his plans for a 100 percent carbon free electricity sector by 2035 and his carbon free U.S. energy sector by 2050 as Germany—the first country to take on the 100 percent carbon free electricity future in Europe—is failing in its ability to keep the lights on using solely carbon free power. Solar and wind power achieve less than half of the energy carbon sources achieve, despite massive subsidies.Europe’s Power Grid Avoids BlackoutExtremely cold weather caused power demand to surge across Western Europe on January 8 and the continent’s electricity network came close to a massive blackout. Europe’s grid, which is usually connected from Lisbon to Istanbul, split into two as the northwest and southeast regions struggled to keep the same frequency. The problem originated in Croatia due to a fault at a substation that caused overloading on other parts of Croatia’s grid. It led to the equivalent of 200,000 households losing power across Europe. Supply to industrial sites was cut in France and Italy.Source: BloombergAs Europe replaces large coal and nuclear stations with thousands of smaller wind and solar units and as sectors electrify via intermittent sources due to policy edicts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the possibility of blackouts is likely to become more frequent.Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply, which the grid has to be able to handle. European transmission grids need to stay at a frequency of 50 hertz to operate smoothly and any deviations can damage equipment that is connected. The frequency swings on January 8 were reduced within minutes, avoiding damage across the entire European high voltage network, which potentially could have caused blackouts for millions.Europe has not had a major blackout since 2006 when over 15 million households were out of power for hours. In 2019, there was another narrow escape when the frequency dropped dangerously low. Europe’s grid operators have put in automatic responses like splitting the network and triggering standby generation or demand reduction. Spinning turbines of thermal plants connected to the grid create kinetic energy called inertia which helps keep the network at the right frequency. The spinning cannot be created by wind turbines or solar panels.The European near-blackout shows that problems in one nation can rapidly cascade as states become more reliant on their neighbors for power. Continental Europe was separated into two areas due to outages of several transmission network elements in a very short time. Longer, harder to fix disturbances that rip across countries are a real threat.Europe is Not AloneIn Australia, wind power was blamed for a blackout in 2016 that cut supply to 850,000 homes. Australia was the first country to install a 100-megawatt mega battery in 2017, hoping that high-cost battery storage could be the solution.In California, where about a third of its generation is from renewables, record-breaking temperatures caused rolling blackouts as the state’s electricity supplies could not keep up with demand, particularly when solar plants stopped generating for the day and were 33-percent less effective due to the smoke from the state’s wildfires. Like Australia, California utilities are looking to large batteries to help solve the problem of intermittent electricity from wind and solar power, though the state also imports a large amount of power from neighboring states that were also having record-breaking temperatures this past summer and thus, not able to help with California’s energy demandConclusionCountries and states with a great deal of intermittent electricity from wind and solar power are having problems keeping the lights on when the weather does not cooperate. Germany had to turn to coal this past winter when freezing temperatures made its solar and wind units inoperable and it plans to import from neighboring countries to back-up its renewable electricity in the future, as its continues to retire its coal plants. Australia’s answer to its 2016 blackout caused by lack of wind power is to obtain high-cost batteries to store excess energy when the wind does not blow. California, which already imports electricity from neighboring states, got hit by record breaking temperatures and had to use rolling blackouts when the country’s solar and wind units could not meet demand. The state is also planning on using high-cost batteries to store its excess power for later use.Joe Biden’s plans are to put the United States into the same situation as Germany, Australia, and California by his campaign promises to make the U.S. electricity sector carbon free by 2035—10 years earlier than even California has planned—and the U.S. energy sector carbon free by 2050. Americans need to be aware of the situation that other countries are facing when they turn to intermittent renewables. The record so far is not good.Coal Rescues Germany from Its Renewable FollyWhat does this mean? ANSWER wind and solar are a failure to generate much needed grid electricity around the world.10 of 10 “highest-generating U.S. power plants were” not renewables.David Middleton / 22 hours ago September 25, 2020Guest “No energy transition for you!” by David MiddletonSEPTEMBER 25, 2020In 2019, 9 of the 10 highest-generating U.S. power plants were nuclear plantsAccording to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on power plant operations, 9 of the 10 U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were nuclear plants. These 10 plants generated a combined 230 million megawatthours (MWh) of electricity in 2019, accounting for 5.6% of all electricity generation in the United States. The makeup of power plants that generate the most electricity has shifted in the past 10 years from a mix of nuclear and coal plants to almost all nuclear in 2019.In 2010, the top 10 highest-generating power plants in the United States were a mix of nuclear and coal-fired generators. In 2010, coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation was 45%, compared with 23% in 2019. Decreased cost-competitiveness relative to other power resources, especially natural gas, has made coal less economical for electricity generation. Coal plants are also run at lower levels because of tighter air emission standards, which is the primary reason coal plants fell from the top 10.The Palo Verde, Browns Ferry, and Oconee nuclear power plants have consistently been among the 10 largest generators of electricity in the United States because they are the only nuclear plants with three reactor units, which gives them more generating capacity. A plant’s refueling and maintenance schedules may also affect annual electric power generation capacity. For example, Comanche Peak was one of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2010 but was not one in 2019 because scheduled refueling and maintenance reduced plant availability in 2019.Electric power plants that have relatively large electricity generating capacities generally also operate at high capacity factors, or utilization rates. The capacity (the maximum amount of electricity a power plant can produce) of the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019 ranged from 2,300 megawatts (MW) (Byron) to 3,937 MW (Palo Verde). Although these plants have a lower nameplate capacity than the Grand Coulee hydroelectric facility (6,809 MW of capacity) in Washington, they generate more electric power each year. Grand Coulee operated at a lower utilization rate and generated 16.6 million MWh of electricity in 2019.Nuclear power plants have the highest capacity factor of any energy source in the United States, at 94% fleet-wide in 2019, because nuclear plants generally operate around-the-clock until they are taken offline for maintenance or refueling. Capacity factors for the nine nuclear plants in the top 10 range from 89% (Browns Ferry) to 99% (Byron and Peach Bottom). Natural gas combined-cycle units have the second-highest capacity factor in the United States, at 57% fleet-wide in 2019. The natural gas plant that was among the top 10 highest-generating power plants in 2019, West County Energy Center, operated at a capacity factor of 65%, slightly higher than the fleet-wide capacity factor.Almost all of the U.S. power plants that generated the most electricity in 2019 were in the eastern half of the country, and they tended to be close to areas with high electricity demand such as major cities or industrial production centers.More information about the fleet of power plants in the United States is available in the latest Annual Electric Generator Report, released on September 15, 2020.Principal contributor: Paul McArdleTags: nuclear, power plants, electricity, generationUS EIANatural gas combined cycle power plants can actually deliver 85% or better capacity factors, but generally aren’t operated 24/7 at full capacity.Over the same time period, renewables generation doubled in the US, due to “massive” solar and wind capacity additions. Despite this and the lack of nuclear power capacity additions…Top Ten Power Plants 2008Figure 1. 6 Nuclear generating stations and 4 coal-fired power plants.Top Ten Power Plants 2018Figure 2. 9 Nuclear generating stations and 1 natural gas-fired power plant.To paraphrase The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld:No Energy Transition for You!Figure 3. Can you spot wind and solar on this chart?Figure 3. Too fracking funny! US EIA10 of 10 “highest-generating U.S. power plants were” not renewables.Advancing subsidies for renewables is a deadly mistake when they cause heat poverty and brown outs that threaten hospital safety.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 the cost causing fatalities from heat poverty. Also there is no grave problem of climate change because it is natural. The term climate change does not mean human caused global warming as words matter. Renewables are irrelevant to that debate because of their abysmal performance.Transition to wind and solar renewables makes electricity go up. :..people will die if this renewable energy idiocy continuesSolar 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 CollapsingLawrence Solomon: Are solar and wind finally cheaper than fossil fuels? Not a chanceVirtually every major German solar producer has gone underA wind turbine spins amidst exhaust plumes from cooling towers at a coal-fired power station in Jaenschwalde, Germany.Getty ImagesLawrence SolomonApril 27, 2018“’Spectacular’ drop in renewable energy costs leads to record global boost,” The Guardian headline reported last year. “Clean Energy Is About to Become Cheaper Than Coal,” pronounced MIT’s Technology Review. “The cost of installing solar energy is going to plummet again,” echoed Grist, the environmental journal.Other sources declare that renewables are not only getting cheaper, they have already become cheaper than conventional power. The climate-crusading DeSmogBlog reports that “Falling Costs of Renewable Power Make (B.C.’s) Site C Dam Obsolete” and that “Coal Just Became Uneconomic in Canada.” It implores us to discover “What Canada Can Learn From Germany’s Renewable Revolution,” as does Energy Post, an authoritative European journal, which described “The spectacular success of the German Energiewende (energy transition).”Virtually every major German solar producer has gone underHere’s what Canada can learn from Germany, the poster child for the global warming movement. After the German government decided to reduce subsidies to the solar industry in 2012, the industry nose-dived. By this year, virtually every major German solar producer had gone under as new capacity declined by 90 per cent and new investment by 92 per cent. Some 80,000 workers — 70 per cent of the solar workforce — lost their jobs. Solar power’s market share is shrinking and solar panels, having outlived their usefulness, are being retired without being replaced.· Wind power faces a similar fate. Germany has some 29,000 wind turbines, almost all of which have been benefitting from a 20-year subsidy program that began in 2000. Starting in 2020, when subsidies run out for some 5,700 wind turbines, thousands of them each year will lose government support, making the continued operation of most of them uneconomic based on current market prices. To make matters worse, with many of the turbines failing and becoming uneconomic to maintain, they represent an environmental liability and pose the possibility of abandonment. No funds have been set aside to dispose of the blades, which are unrecyclable, or to remove the turbines’ 3,000-tonne reinforced concrete bases, which reach depths of 20 metres, making them a hazard to the aquifers they pierce.The cost to the German economy of its transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050Those who hoped that Germany’s newest coalition government would provide the renewable industries with a reprieve were disappointed last week when Germany’s new economic minister indicated that there would be no turning back. All told, the cost to the German economy of its much-vaunted energy transition to renewables is estimated to reach 2 to 3 trillion euros by 2050.Germany’s experience is being replicated throughout Europe — as subsidies fall, so does investment in wind turbines and solar plants, and so do jobs in these industries.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.”In the imagined world of politicians and environmental ideologues, renewables are not only affordable, they are inevitable. The difference in cost cited by those in the real and imagined worlds is called wishful thinking. This wishfulness is propped up through academic exercises that provide a stamp of authority on the ideologues’ beliefs.One method for proving that renewables have arrived is something called “levelized cost of electricity,” which the U.S. Energy Information Administration says is “often cited as a convenient summary measure of the overall competiveness of different generating technologies.” Environmentalists cite levelized costs as if you can take them to the bank, but they are really no more than predictions of what the costs of various technologies will be over subsequent decades. By assuming that costs of producing solar panels and wind turbines will drop and the costs of fossil fuels will rise over the 30-, 40- or 50-year lifetime of a new plant a utility must build, and describing those levelized costs as if they were current costs, studies state authoritatively that renewables have become cheaper than fossil fuels.Today’s claims that renewables are cheap and getting cheaper are familiar. They harken back to the first Earth Day in 1970, whose message of “New Energy for a New Era” was all about accelerating the transition to renewable energy worldwide. Then, as now, the belief in the viability of a renewable energy future was twinned with the conviction that fossil fuels, being finite, would inevitably become scarce and price themselves out of the market. To the ideologues’ never-ending dismay, peak oil never comes. Instead comes shale gas, shale oil, and peak renewables.Lawrence Solomon executive director of Toronto-based Energy [email protected] Grant Matkin ·In the real world of business and commerce, the cost of renewables makes them unaffordable without intervention by the state." The data supports this conclusion of Lawrence Solomon. Australia, Denmark, Germany and Italy are highest in electricity costs and wind and solar output: > 40 Euros / Kwh. US is lowest in renewables and lowest in electricity costs: 15 Euros / Kwh. In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.https://climatism.blog/.../climate-activist-if-solar-and.../http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-are-solar-and-wind-finally-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-not-a-chanceRenewable 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:51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;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!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 LessonAustralia’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/Pap...The alarmists have been duped by the hidden role of chance. See –https://www.academia.edu/3363839...https://climatism.wordpress.com/...RENEWABLES AND CLIMATE POLICY ARE ON A COLLISION COURSEDate: 09/12/18Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy EditorThose advocating climate change mitigation policy have hitherto wagered everything on the success of renewable energy technologies. The steadily accumulating data on energy and emissions over the period of intense policy commitment suggests that this gamble has not been successful. Pragmatic environmentalists will be asking whether sentimental attachment to wind and solar is standing in the way of an effective emissions reduction trajectory.For almost as long as there has been a climate policy, emissions reduction has been seen as dependent on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Policies supporting this outcome are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world; markets have been coerced globally, with varying degrees of severity it is true, but with extraordinary force in the OECD states, and particularly in the European Union. The net result of several decades of such measures has been negligible. Consider, for example the global total primary energy mix since 1971, as recorded in the International Energy Agency datasets, the most recent discussion of which has just been published in the World Energy Outlook (2018):Figure 1: Global Total Primary Energy Supply: 1971–2015. Source: Redrawn by the author from International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2017 and 2018. IEA Notes: 1. World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. 2. Peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. 3. “Other” Includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.It is perfectly true that the proportional increase in modern renewables, the “Other” category represented by the thin red line at the top of the chart is a significant multiple of the starting base, but even this increase is disappointing given the subsidies involved, and in any case it is almost completely swamped by the increase in overall energy consumption, and that of fossil fuels in particular. Renewables in total, modern renewables plus biofuels and waste and hydro, amounted to about 13% of Total Primary Energy in 1971, and in 2016 are almost unchanged at somewhat under 14%. Thirty years of deployment, almost half of that time under increasingly strong post-Kyoto policies, has seen the proportion of renewable energy in the world’s primary energy input creep up by about one percentage point.Furthermore, what is true at a global level is also true in every national jurisdiction of importance, with the exception that in the less economically vibrant parts of the developed world, including the EU and the UK, energy consumption is actually declining, largely due the transfer of much manufacturing to other parts of the world, principally China.It should therefore come as no surprise to anybody that emissions not only continue to rise, but have recently started to increase at the highest rate for several years, a point that is revealed in the latest release of the Global Carbon Budget, 2018, and can be conveniently illustrated in the chart derived from this paper’s data and published in the coverage of the Financial Times:Figure 2: Global Emissions 1960 to 2018. Source: Financial Times, 6 December 2018, drawn from Global Carbon Budget Report 2018.These dismal facts are producing the obtuse reaction that the current renewables dependent policies are insufficiently aggressive, or, to use the accepted jargon, ambitious, and that the world must try harder. The reaction of the BBC’s Matt McGrath may be typical. He asks: “Why are governments taking so long to take action?”.But this is a misplaced question. The plain reality is that the global market coercions, and related policy pressures favouring renewables are already intense and incessant, and have been so with growing intensity for over fifteen years. Many economies, large and small, have tried very hard indeed, but the global energy markets have barely moved. Why? Because the effort is wasted; the picked winners, the renewable technologies, remain stubbornly uneconomic, with the consequence that spontaneous, uncoerced and rapid adoption remains a dream.This is what policy failure looks like. At what point do those sincerely concerned to see prompt and sustainable emissions reductions begin to wonder whether the renewables industry is a liability and an obstacle to the aim of climate change mitigation?Instead of blaming lazy governments, or the irrational consumer, now rioting in the streets of Paris in protest at climate policy impositions on transport fuels, environmentalists and campaigning analysts might spend their time more fruitfully by reviewing the wisdom of the policies that they have pressed on decision-makers. In doing so they could reflect that climate change mitigation is in certain important respects no different from other insurance policies, and must therefore pass the same tests: Is the policy providing real cover and is the premium affordable and proportional to the risk?Since the rising trend in emissions leaves no doubt that the current policies have as yet provided no real insurance, discussion of affordability becomes in a sense academic, though we can note in passing that it is also true that the emissions abatement cost of renewables is so great that it exceeds even high end estimates of Social Cost of Carbon, meaning that the policies are more harmful than the climate change they set out to mitigate. – This is not only wasted effort, it is counterproductive to human welfare.It will take time for this evidence and reasoning to change minds. Many environmentalists have a sentimental attachment to renewable energy flows in spite of their evident thermodynamic inferiority as fuels. They see them as Goop energy, pure heavenly gifts, handed down, naturally, from a benevolent sun, as opposed to the dirty and artificial earthly products of the soil that are fossil fuels and nuclear. But such feelings must be set aside in the interest of practicality. Climate campaigners must now ask themselves which they prefer, renewables or the stable and long-term reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for it is increasingly clear that they cannot have both. The renewables industry, the vested interests of Big Green, and the widely endorsed imperative for climate change mitigation cannot co-exist for much longer. One or the other, or perhaps both, has to give way.Renewables and Climate Policy Are On A Collision Course - The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)HEAT POVERTY RESEARCH BLAMES UK SUBSIDIES FOR 50% INCREASE IN FUEL.Elaine Morrall died in a freezing home – the state is tossing away people’s livesFrances Ryan‘Elaine Morrall’s body was found at her home in Runcorn wrapped up in a coat and scarf.’ Photograph: FacebookWhen Elaine Morrall’s body was found at her home in Runcorn this month, she was wrapped up in a coat and scarf. That Elaine was only 38 and has left four children behind are heartbreaking details to a case that has rightly been shared widely on social media. But one aspect is particularly haunting: Elaine’s home was cold because, unable to pay the bills, she only turned the heating on when her children came home from school.