Energy Policy

Echoes of American Politics In the Netherlands

Featured image Politics in the Netherlands have been increasingly contentious of late. The most recent coalition government fell earlier this month, and now Finance Minister Sigrid Kaag has not only resigned her post, but says she might be leaving the country. This article in the London Times illustrates how liberal elites see themselves and their opponents. But if you read between the lines, reality begins to glimmer through. Just two years ago, »

Can Doug Burgum Be President?

Featured image The Republican presidential field is crowded, and includes several potentially strong candidates. Most people would not put Doug Burgum, the Governor of North Dakota, on that list, if they are even aware that he is running. Of course it is true that Burgum is a long shot, but there are reasons why he may be worth a closer look. First of all, who is he? Check out this Wall Street »

Bonus Daily Chart: California’s Crazy Grid

Featured image We’re finally having a summer heat wave out in California, after, it should be noted, an extremely cold summer so far, but that won’t slow down the climatistas. The chart below of California electricity sources as of 7:30 pm this evening is a little hard to de-cypher, but if you study it a bit you can see how crazy California’s fetish for wind and solar power is. First, the inverted »

Kerry Comes Clean

Featured image It has been obvious for a long time that the real goal of the “green” movement is to put control over our economy in the hands of government. (Of course, it wasn’t immediately obvious that it would be the Red Chinese government.) What stands in the way of the long-rumored but still far-off green transition? The free enterprise system. John Kerry admitted as much on MSNBC: On Monday’s broadcast of »

Biden Gets Two Black Eyes from the Courts

Featured image The Biden Administration has suffered two setbacks in federal courts this week. Both are significant. The first is the decision released today allowing Microsoft to complete its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the video gaming platform. The Biden Administration, which wants to take us back to 1950s-era antitrust madness, had sought to block the acquisition. The Wall Street Journal reports: Microsoft can close its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a »

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 »