Search Results for: Energy

Exploding the Myths of “Green” Energy

Featured image American Experiment’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling tell you what you need to know to respond to ill-informed advocates for “green” energy. There is much more at the link, but here is an overview: 1. Renewables can’t survive on their own The renewable energy industry is a subsidy-based industry, as wind and solar are largely dependent on lucrative state and federal subsidies. However, renewable advocates justify these perpetual subsidies by »

The Key Idea for Thinking About Energy

Featured image When I teach energy policy, one of the assignments I make to students to to bring to class each week a story about energy in the media and critique it for its incompetence, because about 90 percent of all news articles on energy are incompetent and ignorant. A typical story, irresistible to journalists, is a breathless, gung-ho report on some new energy breakthrough in a lab, like energy from banana »

The Daily Chart: More Red Ink for Green Energy

Featured image Yesterday we noted here the green energy fiasco of Siemens and a couple other renewable energy companies, but it turns out the damage is being seen across the board. Just a couple years ago everyone piled into green energy companies because they were said to be the future, while traditional oil, gas, and coal companies were doomed to long term decline, and who would want to have “stranded investments” in »

The Daily Chart: Green Energy In the Red

Featured image Siemens, one of the premier German manufacturers of wind turbines, saw its stock price crash by nearly 40 percent today, after revealing mounting losses on wind power equipment sales. This, after the stock already crashed over the summer. (See chart below.) Siemens is now begging the German government for more subsidies. Funny—I thought green energy was now cheaper than conventional energy sources (coal, gas) that don’t need subsidies to be »

The Daily Chart: The High Cost of High-Cost Energy

Featured image Everyone knows that Germany was the “first mover” on the net-zero bandwagon, spending more than a trillion Euros over the last 15 years on its “energiewende” (“energy revolution”) only to see their greenhouse gas emissions begin rising again, and last year reviving coal-power to keep the lights on. One thing they did achieve was causing consumer energy prices to roughly double. I guess that “wind-and-solar-are-cheaper” isn’t working out according to »

Wind Energy Will Never Be Affordable

Featured image There is a financial crisis in the wind industry. You can see it in headlines like Support for offshore wind sinks as costs soar, and The ill wind of offshore wind projects. At the Telegraph, Matt Ridley sums up the ineluctable reasons for the current crisis: The MPs who have forced Rishi Sunak into a U-turn on onshore wind power love to repeat the favourite slogan of the wind industry: »

On Energy, Finally Some Good News

Featured image I see that everything I have written today is about energy, which makes sense given that, along with general civilizational collapse, it is the defining issue of our time. So let’s finally have some good news: Duke Energy, one of America’s largest utilities, has announced that it has shifted course and will replace a retiring coal-fired power plant in North Carolina with nuclear energy rather than expensive and unreliable wind »

Wind Energy: A Doomed Industry

Featured image The Wall Street Journal reports that the wind industry has fallen on hard times: The wind business, viewed by governments as key to meeting climate targets and boosting electricity supplies, is facing a dangerous market squall. After months of warnings about rising prices and logistical hiccups, developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions. The setbacks are piling up for both »

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 Daily Chart: The Big Green Energy Lie

Featured image We’re constantly told that renewable energy will be abundant and dispatchable enough such that we can close down nuclear, coal, and gas power plants. And then Germany comes along to admit the nonsense, in this pair of headlines just three months apart: The second great green lie is that renewable energy will be cheaper. Well: [Hat tip: Willis Eschenbach] More here from the Daily Mail: Germany faces electricity shortages that »

The Daily Chart: Energy Starvation & Real Starvation

Featured image The latest thing from the climatistas (John Kerry in particular) is that we have to give up modern agriculture, which has been a disaster in the countries that have tried this like Sri Lanka. Our pal Steve Moore reminds us that at the end of last year the Biden climatistas were claiming climate change would threaten crop yields: Someone at the Department of Agriculture didn’t get the memo. Here’s their »

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, »

The Week in Pictures: No Energy in the Executive Edition

Featured image Another week with more indications that we don’t even have a 9 to 5 commander in chief. More like 10 to 4, if we’re lucky. At least this White House is showing us what a four-day work week will look like when we decide to go Full France. Meanwhile, we hear rumors that Bud Light is plotting its comeback with an ad campaign on Fox News prime time, and they’re »

The Daily Chart: Germany’s Energy Folly

Featured image Germany shut down its last three nuclear power plants last week, and suddenly its carbon footprint is the second-highest in Europe behind only Poland, which proudly continues to burn its own coal and doesn’t care to virtue signal with babble about whatever the Polish language equivalent of energiewende is. Here’s the carbon map and energy breakdown for yesterday: And this is pretty embarrassing: Defenders of Germany’s solar and wind madness »

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! »

The Week in Energy: California Follies, Chapter 12,186

Featured image As everyone knows, California is leading the bandwagon to have an all-electric car and truck fleet as soon as 2035. The assumption is that people will charge up their batteries overnight when electricity demand drops. The defect in this plan is that while electricity demand starts to fall later in the evening (except during heat waves), California’s supply of electricity also falls because it is lopsided toward wind and especially »