The Lie of Cheap Renewable Energy

The statement "I told you so" comes to mind.
Regulatory Rebuff Blow to Offshore Wind Projects
Charles Rotter
When the breezy dreams of offshore wind giants met the rocky shores of regulation. . . .

 

Keeping You Up To Date On New York's Progress Toward Green Energy Utopia
October 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Consider Manhattan Contrarian as your go-to source for the latest on New York’s progress toward green energy utopia.
  
  
• Can you remember all the way back to December 19, 2022? That’s the day that New York’s Climate Action Council officially adopted its “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emissions electricity system by 2040. The biggest part of the grand plan consists of some 9,000 MW (nameplate capacity) of offshore wind turbines to be built by 2035. As of the time of the Scoping Plan, the state claimed that some 4,300 MW out of the 9,000 MW of upcoming offshore wind projects were under “active development.”
  
  
• On the very day that the Scoping Plan got finalized, I had a post titled “On To The Great Future Of Offshore Wind Power.” That post noted that even of the 4.300 MW of offshore wind supposedly under “active development,” not one turbine was operating, or even under construction. Several developers had made bids that had been accepted by the state, and some of those developers were getting kind of close to applying for permits. My prediction was: “Expect long delays and demands for lots more money before anything gets built.” Boy, can I call these things.
  
  
• Shall we check back in for the latest information?
  

READ MORE

 

It’s Cold: Germany Fires Up Reserve Coal Plant
Charles Rotter
The success of the Energiewende on full display.

 

More Price Shocks Coming? British Energy CEO: “The costs of [Renewable] projects have gone up … 40%”
Eric Worrall
The UK needs “a power sector two to three times the size of the one today… ” – but who is going to pay for this? . . .

 

“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Marc Andreessen in the energy debate)
Charles Rotter
We believe markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum, not zero sum. . . .

 

The renewable zealots are impervious to data.
The Wind is Always Blowing Somewhere Fallacy
Guest Blogger
The fatal flaw is that New York City requires dedicated resources to replace existing generation when it is needed to keep the lights on. . . . .

 

The Telegraph is Right, Green Energy Will Never be Cheap
ECONOMICS AND POLICY OCTOBER 25, 2023

 

And "Green Energy" will probably never really be "green".

1. https://www.deseret.com › utah › 2021 › 1 › 30 › 22249311 › why-green-energy-isnt-so-green-and-poses-harm-to-the-environment-hazardous-waste-utah-china-solar
   The dark side of 'green energy' and its threat to the environment ...
   The dark side of 'green energy' and its threat to the environment - Deseret News A photovoltaic solar panel installation north of Milford, Beaver County, is pictured on Friday, Jan. 15, 2021.
2. https://blog.constellation.com › 2021 › 04 › 30 › differences-between-green-energy-renewable-energy
   Differences Between Green Energy and Renewable Energy | Constellation
   Updated: January 19, 2022 The Differences Between Green Energy, Renewable Energy and More | Share | Share | Share Fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, have been our country's primary source of power for decades. However, the process of getting fossil fuels out of the ground and into your home creates pollution and damages ecosystems.
3. https://earth.stanford.edu › news › when-100-renewable-energy-doesnt-mean-zero-carbon
   When 100% renewable energy doesn't mean zero carbon - Stanford Earth
   While 160 companies around the world have committed to use "100 percent renewable energy," that does not mean "100 percent carbon-free energy.". The difference will grow as power grids become less reliant on fossil power, according to a new Stanford study published today in Joule. Entities committed to fighting climate change can ...
4. https://www.perchenergy.com › blog › energy › renewable-energy-explained-what-is-green-energy
   What Is Renewable Energy vs. "Green" Energy? | Clean Energy Explained ...
   Jan 21, 2023Biomass: Renewable, but not green. But, for example, biomass energy has enjoyed a reputation of being a clean, renewable energy source. It's renewable, yes. But biomass is not a "green" energy source, and therefore isn't so clean either. Biomass can refer to a broad-ranging, vague list of materials and substances, from organic waste of ...
5. https://www.livescience.com › 4535-study-renewable-energy-green.html
   Study: Renewable Energy Not Green | Live Science
   Ausubel's analysis concludes that other renewable sources such as solar power and biomass are "un-green". According to his findings, to obtain power for a large proportion of the country from...
6. https://earthrights.org › blog › how-green-is-green-energy
   How Green is Green Energy? | EarthRights International
   When policymakers focus single-mindedly on reducing greenhouse gas emissions without taking human rights into consideration, they risk locking us into energy sources that are not actually "green" or sustainable. Using "green minerals" in renewable energy To obtain more electricity from renewable energy means more wind turbines and solar panels.

 

$160,000 worth of wind and solar power with batteries can’t power two homes alone
By Jo Nova

Let’s run an experiment on a whole nation that we can’t even do easily on a single home

Photo | Daily Sceptic,

Imaging scaling this up for a country?

The Daily Sceptic has the story of an Australian farmer in Victoria who has gone off-grid to try to be as self sufficient as he can, not out of ideology, but for pragmatic reasons. He has two 3 bedroom homes, with 30 solar panels and a 1kW wind turbine each. For storage they have about 30 German lead acid batteries which at current prices is about $15,000 of batteries each. But even so, each house still has bottled gas stoves, and a 6 kVA petrol generator. The generators are set to come on when the batteries get too low, which often happens in the evenings of autumn, winter and sometimes in spring. (He estimates about 60 – 100 hours each year). Even above all that equipment that needs gas, fuel and maintenance and cost about $160,000 in total to set up, they still have to grow, cut and collect, ouch, 100 kg of wood (220lbs) per week in winter for each house.

He warns that anyone who thinks the nation can run on wind and solar without fossil fuel or nuclear energy is “totally deluded”. And these are farmhouses on the coast in Victoria — so a milder climate — we’re not talking of snow.

The author was a part time specialist medical practitioner until the government tried to force him into a medical experiment (you know the one) that he didn’t want to take part in. Now he is an anonymous peasant farmer with chicken and sheep. So he’s a bright guy, who had a good income, and the kind of man that can rebuild a 70 year old diesel generator that weighs 1.4 tonnes. How exactly does this kind of system translate into a national energy for people living on high density blocks with no trees, a heat pump and a Tesla they need to plug in?

Living Off-Grid Has Shown Me That Modern Society Cannot Function on Renewable Energy
by Pseudonaja Textilis, Daily Sceptic . . .

 

Wind-power Investors abandon Siemens Energy — another shocking 37% fall, and it’s not alone

Marketing fantasies from the Boom Times of Wind. Who were they kidding? | Siemens Gamesa

By Jo Nova

It’s dire. After suffering a 36% fall in June due to unexpectedly bad maintenance bills, Siemens Energy has lost another 37% on Thursday as it revealed orders and revenue would be even lower than the current subdued expectations. The share that sold for 24 euro in May is now selling for 7.


Frankfurt Borse

Things are so bad Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany has even said Siemens Energy is “very important”. Apparently talks are “intensive”, which presumably means the company is on death’s door and the German government is being asked to help save it.

And so we arrive at a point where a company selling products that depend on government subsidies is now asking to be subsidized itself. And the whole green industry depended on government pumped “science” and artificially low interest rates to exist in the first place. Like a pyramid scheme skiing on a two ponzi scams, sooner or later it has to collapse.

Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge

Siemens Energy Shares Crash 37% As Renewable Bust Sparks ‘Green Panic’
Siemens Energy shares in Germany crashed on Thursday after the company warned its wind turbine business is grappling with quality issues and offshore ramp-up challenges. The company said it’s evaluating various measures to strengthen its balance sheet and is discussing state guarantees with the German government. This comes as a financial crisis in offshore wind energy is brewing.

The word is Siemens Energy is asking for up to 15 billion euros in guarantees.

UPDATE: Siemens Energy is a spin off from the larger separate giant Siemens which has a market cap of 100b Euro and 300,000 employees. The smaller energy division has 90,000 employees and a market cap of only 7b Euro now, but it was 30b a few years ago. Siemens still owns 25% of the spin off energy division. . . .

 

A Do-It-Yourself Demonstration Project Of Wind, Solar And Batteries Comes Nowhere Near Eliminating Fossil Fuels
October 29, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Under the enlightened leadership of our expert bureaucrats in Washington and various state governments, we are embarked on a program to replace our functioning electricity generation system with an alternative system based on wind, solar, and energy storage.
  
  
• We are told that this will be easy, and in fact cheaper than what we currently have.
  
  
• Surely, if that is true for an entire country, it must be equally true for some small place like an island or a small town. Easiest of all for the demonstration would be an individual house, particularly if the house is surrounded by sufficient land to accommodate all the required elements of the system.
  
  
• On October 26, the Daily Sceptic website featured a piece by an anonymous Australian author who has set up his own do-it-yourself wind/solar/storage system to supply electricity to two houses on a plot of land in a rural area of Victoria.
  

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Another one bites the dust.
Ørsted Abandons New Jersey Wind Projects
Charles Rotter
“Macroeconomic factors have changed dramatically over a short period of time, with high inflation, rising interest rates, and supply chain bottlenecks impacting our long-term capital investments,”. . . .

 

A ‘Major Surprise’ Nature Study Finds Phasing Out Fossil Fuels Will Lead To Decades Of Warming
By Kenneth Richard on 2. November 2023

“We would expect from a 100% switchover from fossil fuels to zero-emission renewables…net radiative heating would increase drastically.” – Nair et al., 2023
Using observational data gleaned from COVID-19 lockdowns in South Asia, scientists publishing in a Nature journal (Nair et al., 2023) have now determined the ongoing switch to zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions renewables will subsequently lead to a dramatic reduction in climate-cooling aerosol (pollution) emissions. Because aerosol emissions have a relatively greater climate impact by reflecting shortwave radiation, the net effect of transitioning to renewables will be to “drastically” increase Earth’s temperatures over the coming decades.

“Mitigation strategies focusing on the phase-out of fossil fuels will lead to quick removal of the short-lived aerosols while the longer-lived major greenhouse gases decrease much more slowly, likely resulting in undesired net warming of the climate during a decades-long transition period.”



Image Source: Nair et al., 2023

 

Another rat leaves the ship.
Shell Pulls Out of US Offshore Wind Farm Contract
Guest Blogger
Shell’s finance chief said on Thursday the firm had exited a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the planned SouthCoast windfarm off the coast of Massachusetts, agreeing to pay a penalty…

 

The renewables lie is getting harder to sustain.
The Coming Collapse of Green Energy, and why EVs Will Never Catch On
Anthony Watts
Energy prices are skyrocketing and the “green energy” industry is now demanding even more government handouts – and permission to hike prices even more – to keep the scam going.…

 

This is what happens when governments try to force them down our throats which greatly messes up the markets since the standard cause and effect of markets isn't being allowed to play out normally.

 

The cost of renewable energy can be as high as an entire economy.
Experts Warn German Economic Decline Certain… “We’ll Soon Be Living In Trees Again”
By P Gosselin on 5. November 2023

Even federal economics minister Robert Habeck (Greens) warns of a loss of industry threatening prosperity:

From Blackout News

“Industries are being lost, and that means not only the loss of employers and sectors, but also of an important part of our prosperity,” explained Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck at the presentation of his detailed “industrial strategy”.

As Habeck pushes through his version of the green new deal, spiraling inflation continues to erode wages and new housing construction has plummeted 31.6% in October.

Moreover, Co2 taxes and more highway tolls are going into effect next year and they certainly will not help the inflation situation. Also tsunami of refugees is causing an ever greater demand for affordable housing, which today no longer exists.

Emails show government knew nuclear shutdown would be costly

Blackout News here reports how Germany daily, BILD, “obtained an internal email exchange from 2022 between the press departments of the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Economic Affairs.””It shows that the Ministry of Economic Affairs recognized early on that nuclear power plants would supply cheaper electricity if they continued to operate.” But the information was never made public.

The emails contain the following statement: “The continued operation of the nuclear power plants brings two further advantages in addition to the (small) gas savings: electricity prices fall and grid stability improves. As Neckarwestheim and Isar2 are located in the south of Germany (and are constantly in operation), they significantly reduce grid bottlenecks.”

German nuclear power plants, deemed by the Socialists and Greens as a threat to the environment, were shut down on April 15, 2023, and the country is now importing more expensive nuclear power from abroad. . . .

 

Another great example of the empty "renewables is the true answer"

 

The numbers tell the story.
Czech Physicist: Claims Net Zero Would Be Cheap And Easy Are “Completely Insane”
By P Gosselin on 7. November 2023

In an email, Czech physicist Lubos Motl warned claims of Net Zero being “cheap and easy” are naïve, “insane”.
Globally, the costs would in fact be economically ruinous and explosive in terms of social cohesion.

Here’s the excerpt of what he wrote (edited to remove names):

Some people claim promoting Net Zero would be totally easy and cheap, below $2 trillion (total integrated expenses) – as long as we built a bunch of nuclear power plants. But such claims are completely insane.

All electric cars is basically impossible

First, nuclear power is fine but it is no ‘miracle’ in comparison with coal. Every forcedly shut down power plant – whether it runs on coal or uranium – is a huge waste of money. Equally importantly, for Net Zero, it totally fails to be enough to replace the power plants. You also have cars etc. The replacement of cars by electric vehicles is basically impossible in the decades to come. The market already shows that the demand for EVs has almost evaporated. Instead of the promised exponential growth, the EV makers are probably facing a decline. It is no surprise.

$20 TRILLION every 7 years – just for the cars!

An EV might be said to be comparable to an internal combustion engine (ICE) car when it is running, but to buy it, you still have to pay $15,000 extra above the price of a comparable ICE car. Such an EV must be replaced every 7 years or so because the battery gets problematic and at that moment, the technology is obsolete so a new EV is better than the old one with a new battery. You simply have an extra $15,000 per car and per 7 years. There are 1.5 billion cars in the world. That is already an extra $20 trillion per 7 years just for the type of the cars. These $20 trillion per 7 years, or $3 trillion every year, still doesn’t include the charging infrastructure plus the extra batteries that would have to be placed on the grid to deal with the non-uniform timing of the charging of the cars.

And the costs above are still underestimates because we will run out of some commodities that are needed – even if we find huge new lithium reserves, they will get more expensive to mine because we must dig deeper, and we may run out of copper, cadmium, something else. And it is just cars.

The nonsense is in plain view

Then you have the cows with the methane etc. Can we replace them by a tech fix? There is no acceptable tech fix, a tiny miraculous solution like nuclear power plants that may turn the ultimate pipedream of Net Zero into reality. I can’t believe that any climate crisis skeptic could switch to the opposite camp in this important issue – which is mainly a policy issue but the rational argumentation needed to figure out that Net Zero is insane with nukes or without is really elementary science and economics.

The real battle is against lunatics

The appropriation of science and the ‘science’ brand by climate alarmist crackpots has been a huge blow to the civilization. 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that something like that was going to happen (the world surely looked like becoming a capitalist U.S. 1980s-style, boring utopia for a century or more!) but it simply did happen. We are in a new world which is fighting different battles and the lunatics’ efforts to impose their idiocy and lies on the economic policies are probably the most important part of the climate-related confrontations now. So it may be more important than ever that somewhat sensible people speak a sufficiently united voice when it comes to the policies.

It is BS that the CO2 is behind the bad individual weather events or extremes and pretty much everyone understands that 1-2 deg C of (uniform) warming per century is not a problem by itself, regardless of the causes of this hypothetical change (my certainty that CO2 added less than 1 deg C in a century is not very certain – but I also think it is not a very important question for applications).

Pseudoscientific delusion: CO2 behind weather events What is terrible is that CO2 has been irrationally blamed for storms and other things that have existed on Earth for billions of years, pretty much with the same distribution (but they are much more globally hyped these days than they used to be), and even this higher-hardcoreness crackpottery is becoming rather mainstream. While people ‘blaming’ CO2 for the (surely beneficial if true) warming seems like an irreversible fact (at least up to the hypothetical moment when the warming really switches to cooling, which it surely could, as far as I can say, but I still think that some warming in the next decades is just a bit more likely), the idea that CO2 witches are behind all sorts of catchy weather events is a more idiotic pseudoscientific delusion that could still be disproved in the eyes of the public and policymakers.

So we should still try. The greenhouse effect, even if it is important, is acting almost uniformly across the globe, across the seasons and day cycles. So it cannot really increase the pressure differences and other variables that are igniting dramatic local phenomena like hurricanes. Ideas that some bans on ICE cars or family houses in Europe and North America will reduce the number of destructive weather events is completely wrong and it is important enough to team up with everybody who still understands that this proposed policy is wrong, nutty, and suicidal.”

Luboš Motl is a Czech physicist who was an assistant professor in physics at Harvard University. His scientific publications focused on string theory, and he is currently a visiting scholar at Rutgers.

 

Solar energy is not a good investment.
Solar Stocks crashed in the last quarter too, down 40% so far this year around the world


Jo Nova

It seems people only wanted renewable energy if they got cheap loans
Just as the quarterly reporting season revealed crippling losses for wind power and EV’s, so it is with Solar energy.

The general US S&P shares index gained 15% this year but The Invesco Solar ETF (Fund) which invests in solar energy stocks around the world — fell by a dire 40%. Even the US “Inflation Reduction Act” couldn’t save the solar sector. As finances tighten with rising interest rates, apparently solar panel orders are among the first to be cancelled.

Some of the worst performers in the whole US share market are solar shares, with SolarEdge and Enphase losing 70% each this year. A few weeks ago, the CEO of SolarEdge said revenues this quarter were about half of what was expected. He blamed “unexpected cancellations” from European distributors. But US demand was down too. Indeed, the bad news started in California, the largest market in the US, when the government slashed home solar “net metering” payments in April by about 75%. Suddenly, it was going to take 10 years to pay off the panels. Solar panels were a luxury item.

If only solar panels were cheaper, in tough economic times, everyone would want them. . . .

 

The Germans are destroying their own economy.
Green Economic Collapse: 1/3 Of Germany’s Automotive Suppliers Considering Moving Abroad
By P Gosselin on 8. November 2023

No surprise: despite all the milk-and-honey promises of a green economy, Germany’s blind rush away from fossil fuel and over to “green energies” is turning into a nightmare of inflation and economic decline.

Today Blackout News here reports on how one third of all German automotive suppliers are considering relocating investments abroad. Germany is no longer an attractive place for industry.

The automotive industry, once the backbone of Germany’s prosperity, is now shattering – or more accurately said: is being transplanted abroad. . . .

 

The big lie was the decades of "cheap energy" that led to expensive military adventures to keep the dependence upon petroleum alive. Of course, there was also the resulting massive pollution and deaths. The gargantuan size and weight of vehicles also depended on low-cost oil.
Renewable energy is a good idea and has its place, but it is totally unrealistic to think the current technology involved could maintain today's excesses of energy consumption.

 

“Our supplies of natural resources are not limited in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.”
― Julian L. Simon

 

Less energy, more propaganda.
As The Transition To Green Energy Crumbles, Funding For The Climate Scare Soars
November 08, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  You have likely seen over the course of just the past few months that the supposed green energy transition — widely hyped and massively subsidized for two decades — has suddenly started to crumble on multiple fronts.
  
  
• We are rapidly approaching the green energy wall.
  
  
• And yet at the same time, the promoters of the climate scare are not backing down. Not in the least. To the contrary, the New York Times reports just today that the major environmental NGOs are in a process of cutting their funding for their most basic programs, like dealing with toxic chemicals, in order to double down and focus even more on the one big issue — climate change.
  

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Another one bites the dust.
Europe’s Largest Wind Farm Facing Bankruptcy
Guest Blogger
In other words, the wind farm is obliged to pay the costs of its own intermittency. And, of course, when wind power is low, spot market prices rise. . . .