Conservation Landscaping Rebate Application: Fill & Download for Free

I see on a comment that you’re in San Jose, so this is going to be a South Bay-specific answer.If you have any sort of irrigation system, get it checked for leaks and figure out how much water it flows. You can put out tuna cans and figure it out for yourself, or sign up for the Water Wise Survey Program and a water audit.Grass is a ridiculous crop in our arid climate, but just in case you or someone else reading this answer really has their heart set on having a lawn, or isn’t quite ready to replace theirs, there are ways to maintain one with a minimum of water. At the very least, turn off your sprinklers from November until it stops raining in April or May. If the hills are green, your lawn will be, too. Use a generous application of compost, rather than any weed-n-feed products. Keep it cut long, and water more deeply, but less frequently. Water in early morning or late evening, when the water will have time to soak in.The better choice is to plant hardy natives and other drought-tolerant perennials. Do it right, and you’ll not only save water but also create an attractive scene and encourage hummingbirds and pollinator insects. Hardy plants can also be a lower-maintenance choice, and require few to no chemical pesticides or fertilizers, which helps reduce contamination of the water that runs off or soaks in. It’s such a good idea that some years, the water district offers a rebate help defray the costs. If you go that route, be aware that you generally have to have the area inspected before and after the lawn replacement.If you’re up to a DIY project, there are loads of resources to get you started.The Santa Clara County Master Gardeners have a handy page Water Wise Plants (and a phone number, an email address, and various talks and other appearances around the area should you want further assistance). Santa Clara Valley Water has a whole page about landscaping resources, too, including a Landscape Conversion Photo Gallery of area homes that have moved away from lawns. Here’s one I personally like, with a whole palette of blooming natives. The Water District also features a plant of the month in their newsletter.If you’d like more inspiration, visit the annual Going Native Garden Tour. That article is about last year’s, but it’s an annual event and this year’s must be coming right up. (Also coming soon, and good places to ask: the Spring Garden Market and Ulistac Wildflower Day, among others.) You’ll also find various demonstration gardens around, including a new one behind Santa Clara Central Park Library as of last year at about this time. San Jose’s Emma Prusch and Martial Cottle Parks both have active gardening communities, too. The same Zanker Road facility that hauls some of San Jose’s recycling and green waste sells compost, mulch, and cardboard and has put together the Lose Your Lawn Now website, showing materials they offer, as well as techniques and applications.The California Native Plant Society and the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources folks have various books, and you’ll find many of them in the local libraries.Want to hand off the design or the whole project to someone? There are landscape services devoted to that, too. Bay Maples is one I happen to have heard of (but haven’t personally used) in the area. No doubt a request on Nextdoor or a web search on “San Jose native plant landscape service” or similar would turn up more options.Saving water is environmentally friendly in more ways than just saving water. Even before the rain started in winter of 2017, Silicon Valley rose by about 10 feet because conservation meant we weren’t pumping as much water out of the ground. And processing water takes an enormous amount of energy, both to prepare it for drinking and to clean up our sewage before discharging it into the bay. Low-water landscaping is one of the best ways for most residential water users to help save, plus it can have added benefits like reducing runoff and nurturing pollinators. So thanks for asking!

It is extremely bad for a large number of reasons discussed extensively here on Quora already.Social and politicalSocially, the protections and democratic independence that we gained from EU membership is being abruptly terminated. Brexit was promoted by the media moguls and other industry despots because the EU mechanisms were carefully constructed to be beyond the control of lobbyists and media titans. The Murdochs, Dacres and Desmonds of the world hate this, especially Murdoch who was undisputed kingmaker politically in the UK until the EU took that power away and started giving us greater freedoms from those unelected, unaccountable, unchallengable powerbrokers.From titans like genetic engineering and Roundup pushing Monsanto all the way through to the tabloid press, we’re losing our freedom and slipping back under their control. Look at how the Tories have slashed 10 000s job in renewable energy and pushed through fracking against the clear democratic majority opposition to fracking at both local and national level for an indication of how the UK government is merely a puppet on the string of the money men. The EU creators understood this and devised a system beyond their reach.Unfortunately, those who control the media and have the deep pockets keep the lie alive that we are “gaining control”. But it’s the exact opposite and a willful population is choosing to remain ignorant about how democracy within the EU works, is protected and keeps the population and the system free from lobbyists.BTW it’s also why Trump, who is up to his neck with Big Business interests, is so anti-EU. US lobbyists and big business hate the EU legislative independence mechanisms. The software patents issue and GM crops show just how far the US will go to try break the EU defences against unelected, unaccountable influences.Now contrast that with Theresa May walking hand in hand with Donald Trump and Nigel Farage taking selfies in the golden entrance to Trump Towers to see just how much and how far we are walking back into the Lion’s den.EconomicThere are still hardcore Brexiteers who try to claim the we will be “saving on EU contributions” but most sensible people, even those previous very pro-Leave, now realise that we had extremely good value for money from those contributions. It has the Brexit department in a panic as the full scope of the EU benefits to and integration with this country are starting to be revealed.Not only does the access to the single market return many times more trade value to us than we pay out, but we had other value-adds such as the hard-won rebate, the farming subsidies and the shared costs of trade agreements, regulatory bodies, agencies, accounting and a myriad of other such shared departments and enablers of trade, goods, movement, services, R&D, education and business.That is why there has been such a scramble of denial from the Brexit press, leaders and beLeavers. From denying that the vote to leave crashed our currency to attempts to cover up, spin or otherwise deny the ever-increasing other effects, such as the growing inflation, the loss of EU nationals, the implications for the Northern Irish border, the scale of the trade agreements both with the EU and with the rest of the world that will need to be negotiated, the damage socially and politically to our country and many other issues that are surfacing and the increasing number that continue to surface.The government and Brexit press try to limit the perception of damage by limiting discussion to a few isolated items, such as specific issues like inflation, but Brexit has caused a wide range of problems and these not only carry the direct cost (e.g. inflation or loss of trade agreements) but their damage is compounded by the incertainty, reputational damage and risk that they bring.Business hates uncertainty. Brexit has delivered uncertainty if vast amounts and across nearly every segement, sector and economic activity in our society. Even items seemingly immune from Brexit, such as social services, are impacted as economic, spending and staffing uncertainties bear down on an austerity-weakened system.One certainty that we do have is that the true cost of Brexit will never be determined. Right now there is tremendous pressure to deny costs both from government and the majority of the press. However, it has so many direct, indirect and compound costs that the complexity of the calculation increases through the continued number of inputs and variables. We cannot even take a “where are we at and where would we have been at if we had remained” macro calculation because to there are too many unknowns in the calculation for the event that didn’t happen (at this point, remain).Trade agreementsWe have benefited from the vast number of trade agreements, negotiated very cheaply through shared costs and on extremely valuable terms being a part of the biggest trading bloc on the planet. Being a part of the EU, we were a part of a superpower.There are still some who claim “we will be free to trade with the world” but aside from those wilfully ignorant people, it’s now clear to anyone paying attention that we’re losing a massive arsenal of existing trade agreements. It’s unlikely that we will get most of them back and certainly not on the excellent terms that the skilled EU negotiators achieved. It’s simply too expensive and will take up too many people to re-negotiate all of them.So we’re losing a huge array of agreements, not gaining “free to trade”. Quite the opposite, we’re losing a lot of trading freedom.But we can negotiate some new ones that we presently don’t have right?Being a diminished island bobbing on the side of the EU, with a population of just 65million (a tenth the side of the EU) we would not get anywhere near the terms that the EU can get. We’re not very much “just another country”, one that is heading into very serious economic problems.But the EU stopped us trading right?The EU is the biggest exporter on the planet. Germany, France, Italy are all vastly greater exporters than us. The EU has not held us back, we have. If we haven’t been able to trade in the same environment and with the same global agreements that countries vastly more successful than us have been able to thrive in, we’re to blame and burning up existing trade agreements in the hope of replacing them with equivalent agreements will not improve matters.If anything, our ability to trade internationally is going to be seriously damaged by Brexit thanks to fewer trade agreements of inferior quality.International statusThe entire world, other than the short term Trump administration, regards Britiain as committing economic suicide and having taken a xenophobic step backwards. We have suffered serious brand and image damage as a result of the Brexit vote.Where once we were regarded as world leaders in statesmanship, stability, reliability and international diplomacy, we’re now regarded as being hostile, untrustworthy, inward looking, unstable and xenophobic.We have lost much of our international soft power, status and, having ejected ourselves from an economic and political superpower, size and scale.SocialSocially Brexit has been ruinous. Politically it’s incapacitated our government and the enormity of the task has effectively halted all other government, hence leaving us in all practical measures, without government. The Queen’s Speech shows the scale to which “normal” (non-Brexit) activities have been halted.Brexit has ruined friendships, split families, caused 3 separate murders on our streets, damages business relationships and injected a tremendous amount of anger, division and hostility into our society.Even the BBC impartiality has been impacted by dictats from government to be more pro-Brexit, damaging the credibility of stalwart productions such as 5 Live’s “Wake Up To Money”.Perhaps more damaging of all has been the legitimising of the right wing and the normalisation of extremist views and propaganda. Right wing conversations that simply didn’t happen before are now normal. Worse, the opinion bubbles on social media as well as the real world, where conservative and right-leaning people seek out validating opinions and block out other views, aided by the right wing press and online content providers, are fostering an alarming radicalisation of our population.There is also a left equivalent now starting to appear.These are damaging to our society, creating division and sowing the seeds for social unrest. Once this sort of polarisation and radicalisation has happened, it’s extremely difficult to undo it. People who have migrated to the polar opposites in society are a multi-decade problem for rehabilitation and most often remain a problem in society.So Brexit has created a social minefield that will be extremely difficult to defuse and may only be overcome once all the generations alive today have passed away.Throw into this mix the pressures of a collapsing economy, runaway inflation, rising joblessness and we have a potentially severe prospect ahead. A powder keg in the making.FutureNearly everything the Leave campaign promised, from £350 million a week for the NHS to the EU barnstorming us cap in hand to “save German carmakers” has proved wrong. Even the guarantee that “the EU needs our military” is now defunct as the EU is now decisively moving to reduce this dependency from its unreliable UK and US partners.The biggest fail of all was the Leave assertion that the EU would collapse or become weakened without the UK. The exact opposite has happened: The EU has rallied together stronger and more determined to succeed.Freed from our negativity, the EU is already seeing the benefits of a post-UK union.It took us 20 years of begging to be admitted to the EU club. It is extremely unlikely that we will be allowed to rejoin for a very long time.The EU is now closed for new applications. The chances of us being accepted back into the club, at least while the current voting generations are alive, are extremely slim. The EU may not decide to open to new applications for many decades to come as the existing members of the club forge forward stronger and more integrated. If the EU does eventually accept a UK membership application, it would take much longer than the 20 years previously to win a seat back at the table.Thanks to Farage’s little antics in the European Parliament and Boris Johnson’s offensive blunderbustering across the EU landscape, topped off by our horrific, xenophoic, hate-filled press of which the EU nationals are only too aware, the memory of what we are presently doing to the EU will live on fresh in the minds of EU decision makers for many generations.Ironically, we repeatedly stereotype Germans and the French in terms of WW2. Now it will be our turn. It is now permanently written into EU history and will forever be in the minds of those trusted with the EU and its stewardship.While we are about to feel the hammer blow of Brexit, the EU, in contrast, is already flourishing thanks to Brexit. Stronger, freer and more confident.We’re looking at a very long time out in the cold.

[Just heard a lot of talking about renewable energy not really being better than the other forms of energy because of their cost and maintenance and other factors.]Is there any truth in that?NO.The construction of wind turbines and solar panels depends mightily on fossil fuel inputs to make steel and coal to make silicon panels. Further for electric power generation both wind and solar require fossil fuel back up so the lights do not go out when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. This means major use of renewables is tied at the hip with fossil fuels. A real catch 22 is the fact that the greater the percentage of renewables in a power plant the greater the need for more fossil fuels in tandem usually natural gas as back up and the higher the cost.South Australia has the highest investment in renewables for its grid and the highest cost electricity as a result. It is a matter of math renewables demand two producers one unreliable (wind and solar) and one fully reliable (fossil fuels)These graphs tell the story as more renewables go into the grid the price of electricity goes up. Why? Intermittency of wind and solar require backup of fossil fuel reliability.It is a big mistake to look at wind and solar in isolation from their effect on installed power where the intermittency hits the consumer hard with dramatic increased costs.This double costing has been well exposed to environmentalists by the Moore video The Planet of the Humans worth your time reviewing except for the last bit about population control.Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs8,769,628 views•21 Apr 2020Michael MooreMichael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. Donate: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr... (100% of donations go to translation, further articles and viewing & maintaining wide distribution) Interview with Jeff, Michael, and Ozzie (1hr 16min): https://youtu.be/HBGcEK8FD3w Hill TV Response to critics with Jeff, Michael and Ozzie (17min): https://youtu.be/Bop8x24G_o0 FAQ, Discussion Guide, Media: https://planetofthehumans.com/ Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, “green” illusions, that are anything but green, because we’re scared that this is the end—and we’ve pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine"). This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way—before it’s too late. Featuring: Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Richard Branson, Robert F Kennedy Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Vinod Khosla, Koch Brothers, Vandana Shiva, General Motors, 350.org: A global campaign to confront the climate crisis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature Conservancy, Elon Musk, Tesla. Website: https://planetofthehumans.com/The is the headline in BUSINESS DAY a publication in South Africa. Renewable energy’s dreadful costs and awful electricityUnreliable capacity and excessively high costs make renewable energy nothing more than a ‘green’ idealogue’s dream12 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).• Kenny is a professional engineer with degrees in physics, mathematics and mechanical engineering.Renewable energy’s dreadful costs and awful electricityIf Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?Michael 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:o 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;o 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;o over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?Electricity prices increased by 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy.One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.But, again, that’s not what happened.The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.Electricity prices increased 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017.Another hypothesis might be that the closure of nuclear plants resulted in higher energy prices.Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that nuclear energy leaders Illinois, France, Sweden and South Korea enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the world.Since 2010, California closed one nuclear plant (2,140 MW installed capacity) while Germany closed 5 nuclear plants and 4 other reactors at currently-operating plants (10,980 MW in total).Electricity in Illinois is 42 percent cheaper than electricity in California while electricity in France is 45 percent cheaper than electricity in Germany.But this hypothesis is undermined by the fact that the price of the main replacement fuels, natural gas and coal, remained low, despite increased demand for those two fuels in California and Germany.That leaves us with solar and wind as the key suspects behind higher electricity prices. But why would cheaper solar panels and wind turbines make electricity more expensive?The main reason appears to have been predicted by a young German economist in 2013.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.Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind would decline 40% once it reached 30% of electricity, and that the value of solar would drop by 50% when it reached 15% of electricity.In 2017, the share of electricity coming from wind and solar was 53 percent in Denmark, 26 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in California. Denmark and Germany have the first and second most expensive electricity in Europe.By reporting on the declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines but not on how they increase electricity prices, journalists are — intentionally or unintentionally — misleading policymakers and the public about those two technologies.The Los Angeles Times last year reported that California’s electricity prices were rising, but failed to connect the price rise to renewables, provoking a sharp rebuttal from UC Berkeley economist James Bushnell.“The story of how California’s electric system got to its current state is a long and gory one,” Bushnell wrote, but “the dominant policy driver in the electricity sector has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation.”Part of the problem is that many reporters don’t understand electricity. They think of electricity as a commodity when it is, in fact, a service — like eating at a restaurant.The price we pay for the luxury of eating out isn’t just the cost of the ingredients most of which, like solar panels and wind turbines, have declined for decades.Rather, the price of services like eating out and electricity reflect the cost not only of a few ingredients but also their preparation and delivery.This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn’t because they don’t know how to report critically on energy — they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources — but rather because they don’t want to.That could — and should — change. Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.A good start would be for them to investigate why, if solar and wind are so cheap, they are making electricity so expensive.https://climatism.blog/2018/04/25/climate-activist-if-solar-and-wind-are-so-cheap-why-are-they-making-electricity-so-expensive/I have a comment published to the next article.Lawrence 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 ImagesThis is the right photo to understand the problem of renewables. They still need coal or oil in major proportions to service the grid.Lawrence 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 under,Here’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-chanceTHE Insane Result Of The Mad Switch To Costly, Symbolic, Unreliable Energy – Wind and SolarPosted: October 11, 2017 | Author: Jamie Spry |PAYING YOU TO USE LESS OF THE GREEN POWER THEY FORCED YOU TO PAY FORPaying you $36 million to use less, not spending our money instead to provide more:“Few things are so deadly as a misguided sense of compassion.” – Charles ColsonWE really are living in the age of collective, global warming climate change insanity. We will look back on this era of “save the planet” virtue-signalling and wonder what the hell were we thinking…The federal government will pay households and businesses across three states to turn down their air conditioning, furnaces and cool rooms to stave off blackouts during peak demand.Under a $36 million program to be launched today by Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, thousands of households in NSW, Victoria and South Australia will also be ­invited to voluntarily cut their ­energy use in return for incentives such as rebates on power bills.SO they’ve spent your money on subsidising green power, and having run short of electricity will now spend your money to use less of it. Meanwhile your power bills keep rising.AND remember: none of this will cut the world’s temperature. It’s all for nothing.DOESN’T this strike you as stark, staring, raving mad?COMMENTjamesmatkinwritingsDecember 18, 2017 at 5:51 amAs the blackouts increase and heat poverty kill more than road accidents in the UK due to subsidies for renewables the fantasy of the mad switch to renewables at all cost is crumbling – thankfully. The Wall Street Journal published a must-read on this insanity issue –“Recognize and study reality. Dead calms occur frequently when temperatures are at their highest, or their lowest – when families, businesses, hospitals and schools need electricity the most. Clouds can blanket regions for days or weeks on end. Reliance on wind and solar is risky, and reliable backup is essential.The justification for eliminating coal and mandating 50% wind and solar is heavily rooted in fears of catastrophic manmade climate change. But the alleged crisis has no basis in observed evidence. The 18-year pause continues apace, with the El Niño temperature spike of 2015-16 gone … and average global temperatures back down to where they were in March 2015. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts are in line with or below multi-century historic trends and fluctuations and are hardly unprecedented. Greenland just recorded its most frigid July temperature reading in history: -33 C (-27 F).”https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/16/insanity-and-hypocrisy-down-under/THE Insane Result Of The Mad Switch To Costly, Symbolic, Unreliable Energy – Wind and SolarFuel poverty kills more people than road accidentsAT least 2,700 people die every winter because they can’t afford their soaring heating bills.AT least 2,700 people die every winter because they can’t afford their soaring heating bills.More people lose their lives because they are too poor to heat their homes than are killed in road accidents, a Government-commissioned report has revealed.Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics, who led the study, said the figure was a “conservative estimate” and could be much higher.The damning report comes after £30billion profits made by the Big Six power companies over the last five years were exposed. But while the energy companies have been making a fortune, fuel poverty in the UK has soared.In 2004 1.2 million people were living in fuel poverty – defined as where more than 10% of a person’s income is spent on heating their home – but this year the figure has jumped to 4.1million.Between 2004 and 2009, the fuel poverty gap – the extra amount families in badly insulated and poorly heated homes would need to spend to keep warm – increased by 50% from £740million to £1.1billion.Professor Hills said: “The evidence shows how serious the problem of fuel poverty is, increasing health risks and hardship for millions, and hampering urgent action to reduce energy waste and carbon emissions.”Caroline Flint, Labour’s Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, added: “This report lays bare the dire situation facing millions of people this winter, and the urgent need for action on spiralling energy bills.“But this Government is so out of touch and unable to stand up to vested interests in the energy industry that its only answer is to lecture people about shopping around for a better deal and cut help for pensioners.“Warm words will not do. The Tory-led Government needs to get a grip and demand energy companies use their profits to cut bills now.”Sally Copley, Save the Children’s head of UK poverty, urged the Government to deal with the crisis before it is too late.She said: “No parent wants their children doing their homework or going to bed in a freezing cold house, yet this is the reality for many families and it badly affects health and education.“Poorly insulated houses and outdated heating systems mean many families will never be able to afford to keep their homes warm.”And there was an icy blast from the economy last night as Vince Cable admitted that a double-dip recession could not be ruled out. Speaking exactly a year on from George Osborne’s spending review which laid out massive cuts, the Business Secretary said the “brutal reality” was that the economy is in worse shape now.Asked to rule out a slump, he told ITV News: “I can’t do that.”His comments came as a ComRes poll found 67% of people are pessimistic about the future of the economy and almost half (48%) felt their standard of living fell in the last year.Energy Secretary Chris Huhne also appeared to attack the Government when he praised a Labour motion which said: “With a cold winter forecast and Government support cut millions of families will struggle to heat their homes.” Mr Huhne said: “There is nothing we disagree with in the motion.”Britain has had enough of power companies raking in massive profits while the elderly and hard-up struggle to heat their homes.Back our campaign today and send a message to the government and fuel bosses that it is time for a fair price on fuel.1. Pledge to drop bills as soon as wholesale energy prices fall2. Cut gap between standard and other tariffs3. Use cold weather payment data to target rebates at vulnerable households4. Launch Competition Commission inquiry into market5. Limit number of tariffs firms can offer and simplify themhttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/fuel-poverty-kills-more-people-86673imageThe United Nations (U.N.) announced Sunday the electric car boom will result in a number of devastating ecological side effects for the planet.While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment.The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”Several of these raw materials are quite rare and have few or no substitutes and they come from specific areas of the globe. More than half the world’s supply of lithium, for example, a key component of lithium-ion batteries, comes from beneath the salt flats in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.The production of these raw materials “is often associated with undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker protection,” the report asserts.In Chile, for instance, “lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells,” the U.N. notes, because nearly 2 million liters of water are needed to produce a ton of lithium.This has “contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution,” the U.N. states.In its report, UNCTAD estimates that some 23 million electric cars will be sold over the coming decade and as a result the market for rechargeable car batteries is forecast to rise by over 700 percent in just four years, from its current level of $7 billion to $58 billion by 2024.Along with lithium, another key component of electric car batteries is cobalt, and two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), The U.N. observes.The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that about 20 percent of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, “where human rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.”The U.N. also fears that cobalt-copper mines in DRC may contain sulphur minerals that contribute to Acid mine drainage (AMD), a phenomenon that causes pollution or contamination of surface water, thereby increasing the toxicity of rivers and drinking water.“The environmental impacts of graphite mining are very similar to those associated with cobalt mining,” the report adds.Last December, a prominent professor at the Copenhagen Business School said that attempts to rein in global warming by driving electric cars were nothing other than “pointless virtue signaling.”“It is absurd for middle-class citizens in advanced economies to tell themselves that eating less steak or commuting in a Toyota TM-0.18% Prius will rein in rising temperatures,” stated Bjørn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.“Although I am a vegetarian and don’t own a car, I believe we need to be honest about what such choices can achieve,” Lomborg declared.Although electric cars are “branded as environmentally friendly,” the fact is that “generating the electricity they require almost always involves burning fossil fuels,” he stated.“Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars invariably generates significant CO2 emissions,” he wrote, so that electric cars have a huge carbon deficit when they hit the road, and “will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers.”Even if the percentage of electric cars in the world were to rise to 15 times their present numbers, electric cars would only reduce global CO2 emissions by 1 percent, he declared, citing a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).For his part, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that in 2018, electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, sufficient to reduce global temperatures by a mere 0.000018°C — or a little more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius — by the end of the century.“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol said.U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car BoomThe U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”Several of these raw materials are quite rare and have few or no substitutes and they come from specific areas of the globe. More than half the world’s supply of lithium, for example, a key component of lithium-ion batteries, comes from beneath the salt flats in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.The production of these raw materials “is often associated with undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker protection,” the report asserts.In Chile, for instance, “lithium mining uses nearly 65% of the water in the country’s Salar de Atamaca region, one of the driest desert areas in the world, to pump out brines from drilled wells,” the U.N. notes, because nearly 2 million liters of water are needed to produce a ton of lithium.This has “contributed to environment degradation, landscape damage and soil contamination, groundwater depletion and pollution,” the U.N. states.In its report, UNCTAD estimates that some 23 million electric cars will be sold over the coming decade and as a result the market for rechargeable car batteries is forecast to rise by over 700 percent in just four years, from its current level of $7 billion to $58 billion by 2024.Along with lithium, another key component of electric car batteries is cobalt, and two-thirds of all cobalt production happens in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), The U.N. observes.The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports that about 20 percent of cobalt supplied from the DRC comes from artisanal mines, “where human rights abuses have been reported, and up to 40,000 children work in extremely dangerous conditions in the mines for meagre income.”The U.N. also fears that cobalt-copper mines in DRC may contain sulphur minerals that contribute to Acid mine drainage (AMD), a phenomenon that causes pollution or contamination of surface water, thereby increasing the toxicity of rivers and drinking water.“The environmental impacts of graphite mining are very similar to those associated with cobalt mining,” the report adds.Last December, a prominent professor at the Copenhagen Business School said that attempts to rein in global warming by driving electric cars were nothing other than “pointless virtue signaling.”“It is absurd for middle-class citizens in advanced economies to tell themselves that eating less steak or commuting in a Toyota TM-0.18% Prius will rein in rising temperatures,” stated Bjørn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.“Although I am a vegetarian and don’t own a car, I believe we need to be honest about what such choices can achieve,” Lomborg declared.Although electric cars are “branded as environmentally friendly,” the fact is that “generating the electricity they require almost always involves burning fossil fuels,” he stated.“Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars invariably generates significant CO2 emissions,” he wrote, so that electric cars have a huge carbon deficit when they hit the road, and “will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers.”Even if the percentage of electric cars in the world were to rise to 15 times their present numbers, electric cars would only reduce global CO2 emissions by 1 percent, he declared, citing a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).For his part, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said that in 2018, electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, sufficient to reduce global temperatures by a mere 0.000018°C — or a little more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius — by the end of the century.“If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong,” Birol said.U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Side Effects of Electric Car Boom