Energy Policy

Do Bud Light Cans Dream of Electric Sheep?*

Featured image As everyone knows, we’re headed rapidly to an all-electric car future! But apparently no one has told car buyers this news yet: Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots The auto industry is beginning to crank out more electric vehicles (EVs) to challenge Tesla, but there’s one big problem: not enough buyers. The growing mismatch between EV supply and demand is a sign that even though consumers are »

The Folly of Wind

Featured image The U.S., like much of Europe, has supposedly committed itself to replacing fossil fuels with “green” energy, which mostly means wind. This will never happen, and the effort to make it happen will collapse in ignominy and economic and social chaos. The reason is simple: wind turbines, and even more so solar panels, fail to produce electricity a large majority of the time. Just as bad, their failures are unpredictable »

There Is No Transition

Featured image We are told constantly that the world is in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to “green” energy. “News” outlets commonly report this as fact. But in reality, no such transition is underway, nor will it ever be. Robert Bryce, one of the country’s top energy experts, explains; see original for links: [T]he hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review »

Offshore Follies

Featured image There could be a worse way to generate electricity than by implanting giant windmills in the ocean, but it is hard to think what it might be. Not surprisingly, Britain is finding its plans for offshore wind to be illusive: How Britain’s offshore wind industry ran out of puff. Championed by politicians as a controversy-free alternative to onshore wind and solar farms, the Government wants offshore wind capacity to surge »

Why Our Electric Grid Is Threatened

Featured image America used to have stable, cheap electricity. This is really the definition of a first-world country; or it used to be, anyway. Now, for the first time in many years, we can’t safely rely on the electric grid, while at the same time the price of electricity is spiraling upward. This video by Kite & Key Media provides a good, if simple, explanation of why our grid is now under »

This Week in Energy: Virtue Signals vs. Market Signals

Featured image I’ve meant to do at least a weekly item on top energy news, but there is so much that I usually overwhelmed. Let’s look at two news items from just today. It seems that all those grandiose net-zero, climate-friendly pledges that traditional energy companies make are not merely virtue-signaling, but already being thrown over the side in the face of a reality that is biting hard. For example, Royal Dutch »

The Environmental Disaster of “Green” Energy

Featured image Paul Driessen has an excellent piece at Watts Up With That? He discusses the pernicious “sue and settle” practice that left-wing activists and government agencies are pursuing, and argues for venuing climate-related litigation in the federal courts. But I want to focus on his comments on the environmental evils of “green” technologies: he litigants and courts will also encounter the bitter reality that the “fundamental transformation” they so earnestly seek »

The Beach Boys Do Renewable Energy

Featured image Jon Reisman, Professor of Economics & Public Policy Emeritus at the University of Maine, devoted Power Line reader, and self-described “Statler and Waldorf Intern,” passes along this update of the Beach Boys classic tune everyone will recognize from the opening line: California’s Grid With apologies to Brian Wilson, Mike Love and Greta Thunberg Well, East Coast grids are hip I really dig wind mills they wear And the Southern grid, »

Turning America Into a Third-World Country

Featured image The mark of a developed country is reliable, affordable energy. Despite this undeniable fact, the Biden administration and what Robert Bryce calls the anti-industry industry are rushing pell-mell to destabilize our electric grid, while charging Americans more and more for less and less electricity. This impoverishment of ordinary Americans is not an unfortunate by-product of liberal energy policies. Rather, it is the central goal of those policies. Bryce writes at »

Here Come the Blackouts

Featured image You can’t replace reliable energy (coal, nuclear, natural gas) with unreliable energy that most of the time produces nothing (wind and solar). If you do, the electric grid will fail and there will be blackouts. That is the situation we are in today. Isaac Orr writes: On Wednesday, May 17th, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued its 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment. Summarizing the report, Utility Dive noted that »

Meeting Climate Goals, the Hard Way

Featured image South Africa, the world’s 14th-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has good news: it is exceeding its goals for reducing CO2 emissions. The bad news is, the reason is that South Africa is so inept it can’t keep its power plants operating: Blackouts will indeed reduce CO2 emissions, but South Africa isn’t doing it on purpose: “It’s unintentional,” Crispian Olver, the executive director of South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission, said in »

Sheldon Whitehouse plays Elmer Fudd

Featured image Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a fool. He nevertheless thinks extremely highly of himself. His vanity is only one component of his clown show. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” it’s a wonder he still knows how to breathe. Heritage Foundation scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth contributed the latest episode in Whitehouse’s long-running Looney Tunes saga when she testified on Wednesday before the Senate Budget Committee on “the real price »

Save the Whales?

Featured image We are living in the era of stupid energy projects, but offshore wind must be the worst. If there is a dumber way to generate electricity, I don’t know what it might be. The environmental impacts are obvious, which is why well-connected liberals like the Kennedys nix offshore wind projects near where they live. And one can only wonder what will happen as more offshore wind turbines are erected off »

Using Electricity to Redistribute Income

Featured image One of the many problems with “green” energy is that it is ridiculously expensive. Millions of Americans, if they have to pay the cost of wind or solar energy to power their homes, will not be able to afford it, and will have to sell out. Liberals know this, despite their absurd propaganda about wind energy being “cheap.” So what can they do? Follow the usual liberal playbook: make upper-income »

Germans Have Given Up On “Green” Energy

Featured image Not the German government, which continues on a collision course with reality. But Germans have figured out that the green dream is turning into a nightmare. This report is on a survey of Germans done by forsa: An overwhelming majority of the German population is of the opinion that a successful energy transition is not realistic. According to a Forsa survey, 88 percent of respondents share this view. 88 percent! »

Customer care, Xcel style

Featured image After I wrote here yesterday about my frustrations as a victim of one of the thousands of Xcel Energy outages that we experienced following the storm this past weekend, I received a third email from Xcel advising me of the outage — this one posted at 12:23 p.m. Sunday afternoon. I actually had figured as much when the lights went out at 4:45 a.m. Saturday morning, so this only added »

Liberals Try to Make People’s Lives Worse

Featured image What we call liberalism in America is a global philosophy or movement. Thus, what Janet Daley writes in England’s Telegraph applies equally here, and across the West: “The Left now has a demonic new aim: to make ordinary people poorer.” We are living through the most startling political realignment in more than 100 years. Never since the advent of modern socialism in the early 20th century has the Left openly »