Renewable Energy

Left Coast Climate Delusion Ends in Flames

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Satellite images of wildfires burning in Southern California By NBC Staff • Published January 11, 2025

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in Wall Street Journal End of a Climate Delusion.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Amid California’s fires, voters wake up from the dream that green pork is a solution.

CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is rapidly and, for all practical purposes, uniformly distributed around the planet.

I may be stating the obvious but it needs to be pointed out. Voters and even political leaders are surprisingly poorly informed on this point. Emissions cuts in California don’t have any significant effect on California’s climate. They also have no global effect. California’s cuts are too small relative to the global whole; they also are largely illusory.

Emitting industries leave the state. They don’t stop emitting. If California imports Canadian hydro to charge its electric vehicles, consumers elsewhere have to burn more coal and gas. If Californians drive EVs, more gasoline is free to be burned by others, releasing more CO2 that influences climate change in California and everywhere else.

Green-energy subsidies do not reduce emissions. This will be news to millions of California voters. It contradicts a central tenet of state policy. It isn’t news to the actual enactors of these subsidies. A National Research Council study sponsored by congressional Democrats in 2008 concluded that such handouts were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases” and called for carbon taxes instead.

Unfortunately, the incoming Obama administration quickly discovered it favored climate taxes only when Republicans were in charge. Backers would later engage in flagrant lying to promote Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, knowingly citing bogus predictions that its trillion-dollar spending profusion would reduce emissions.

A 2019 University of Oregon study had already revealed the empirical truth: Green energy doesn’t replace fossil fuels, it enables more energy consumption overall. That same year the EPA calculated that the potential emissions savings from subsidizing electric vehicles had been offset five times over by the pickup truck and SUV boom Team Obama facilitated to assure the success of its auto bailout.

American Association for the Advancement of Science study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.

Last year, the premier journal Science put a nail in the question: 96% of policies supported worldwide as “reducing” emissions failed to do so, consisting mostly of handouts to green-energy interests.

And yet certain Journal readers still assail me with the epithet “denier.” They confuse my criticism of Democratic hypocrisy with my imagined views on climate science. As I’ve written back to many, “Don’t think politicians haven’t figured this out about you. That’s why they can give us unsustainable corporate welfare boondoggles and call it climate policy.”

A CNN moderator Saturday urged viewers to vote in an online poll on whether the California disaster should be blamed on climate change or poor leadership. Notice the non sequitur: as if climate change is an excuse for not acting against fire risk.

By all means, let politicians proclaim a “climate crisis” or any other rhetorical flourish if it helps mobilize support for public actions that actually serve a useful purpose. But a prerevolutionary situation has been building in California for two decades, starting with the Third World blackouts in late 2000 not because of any shortage of power but because of large helpings of political cowardice.

A decision in 2019 authorized yet more Third World blackouts instead of reasonably shielding utilities from lawsuit risk over fires their power lines might be accused of contributing to. One result, predictably, has been a proliferation of backyard generators, which increase fire risk.

Californians are stuck adapting in the ways left open to them. Since 2017, half a million have fled Los Angeles County.

Two social technologies might help but the state has been intent on denying itself their advantages. One is a functioning insurance market. If you can’t afford the insurance, you can’t afford the house. Get ready, instead, for a torrent of federal and state money to help residents, some of them wealthy, rebuild in high-risk fire zones.

The other is a functioning market in water. Five gallons to produce a walnut probably isn’t tenable under any realistic system of water pricing. If water were properly valued, municipalities would also rapidly discover the logic of building aquifers to capture seasonal runoff. A thousand things would change if water were priced to flow to its most highly valued uses.

Here’s another concept: Climate change can exist and yet be an insignificant variable.

In Southern California’s Mediterranean climate, anytime 100-mile-an-hour winds start blowing embers toward densely packed housing developments, a conflagration is certain. The only answer then is to have the manpower and resources ready to put fires out as quickly as they start.

I’ve written repeatedly about climate and energy policies in the Western world being a colossal example of “sophisticated state failure,” in which attempts to address complex problems yield only a succession of boondoggles and economic crises. If California voters don’t wise up now, they never will.

 

 

What Keeps “Energy Transition” Going? $ $ $

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Robert Gauthier answered posting on a Quora topic How could we reverse the damage done by the “green energy” global scam that brought less efficient and highly polluting energy producing projects and high energy prices? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Wind and solar power has provided politicians with an excuse to dispense favours—including taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax preferences to a supposedly “green” industry—while appearing to do something for the environment. And yet, despite more than two decades of massive subsidies, tax preferences and purchasing mandates from governments, wind and solar power still represent barely more than a rounding error of global energy production. In jurisdictions where renewables enjoyed strong but ill-considered political support, consumers and taxpayers now face much higher electricity bills and less-reliable power. And despite promises to the contrary, countries such as Germany, which have significantly increased wind and solar electricity production, have seen no meaningful reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Far from being a miracle cure-all for the shortcomings of conventional power generation, wind and solar power exaggerate the symptoms they pretend to address. Added up over the past two decades, the cumulative subsidies across the world for biofuels, wind, and solar approach about $5 trillion, all of that to supply roughly 5% of global energy.

The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the West are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.

In the end, however, politicians cannot defy the laws of physics and economics. The promise of wind and solar power will always clash with the need for electricity that is low cost and reliable. That’s why voters routinely punish politicians who pursue flawed renewable energy policies. Rising electricity costs due to increased wind and solar power damage the economy by making businesses that consume significant volumes of electricity less competitive and by leaving less money in the pockets of consumers.

In Ontario, Canada during the run of the Green Energy Act there which attempted to replace coal and nuclear with wind and solar the upshot was a 138% increase in the price of electricity at the meter for the consumers. This led to the government that brought in this legislation to lose the next election so badly that they were no longer recognized as a party in the legislature. Naturally the government that replaced them killed the program and started refurbishing the nuclear reactor fleet there.

Unfortunately, solar and wind technologies require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, disrupting natural habitats. The real estate that wind and solar energy demand led the Nature Conservancy to issue a report last year critical of “energy sprawl,” including tens of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry electricity from wind and solar installations to distant cities.

Land required for wind farms to power London UK

Building a single 100-MW wind farm—never mind thousands of them—requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of nonrecyclable plastics for the huge blades. With solar hardware, the tonnage in cement, steel, and glass is 150% greater than for wind, for the same energy output

Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves.

And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.

Spend enough time researching this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about green energy shows that at best it’s really a dark shade of brown.

UK Labour Caught in Own Net-Zero Trap

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Rupert Darwall explains how UK Labour ensnared itself in his Spectator article  Labour has walked into a net-zero trap of its own making. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The government’s net-zero noose draws tighter. At energy questions in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the Conservative MP Charlie Dewhirst asked the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband if the recent report by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) projected higher or lower bills under his policies. Miliband replied that Neso forecast lower overall costs. ‘It is completely logical to say that that will lead to a reduction in bills,’ he said.

Logic and historic data point in the opposite direction. Between 2009 and 2020, the average price of electricity sold by the Big Six energy companies rose by 67 per cent from 10.71p per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 17.92p per kWh. This wasn’t caused by any increase in the cost of natural gas. In fact, the average price paid by major power generators fell by 15 per cent over the period. There was, however, a spectacular explosion in the amount of wind and solar on the grid which rose from 4.5 gigawatts (GW) in 2009 to 37.95 GW in 2020.

Source: efficientbuildingsolutions.co.uk

The upward pressure on prices will only increase as Miliband pushes for more offshore wind. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported a senior energy investment banker commenting on the hubris of the offshore wind industry, which has been hit by higher interest rates and supply chain inflation. Renewable energy projects require enormous upfront investment costs. The pay-off, its advocates argue, is that renewables have no fuel input costs. But it would be a mistake to assume they have minimal ongoing costs.

Source: Gordon Hughes See: https://rclutz.com/2024/08/21/the-short-lives-of-wind-turbines/

The North Sea is a harsh environment for wind turbines; fixing a defective wind turbine in the middle of the ocean is no easy matter. A 2020 forensic analysis of wind company accounts by Edinburgh University’s Professor Gordon Hughes found that Year 1 operating costs for deepwater wind projects averaged £44 per megawatt hour (MWh), rising to £82 per MWh in Year 12. Moreover, the output efficiency of wind turbines degrades at a rate of around 4.5 per cent a year. When plotted against the market price obtained for wind output, Hughes concluded:

 ‘a significant portion of wind output is expensive to produce and of no value in terms of its contribution to national wellbeing’.

Renewable subsidies are awarded in allocation rounds. The fifth allocation round (AR5), conducted under the previous government, was a dud because of rising project costs caused by higher interest rates and supply chain inflation. Coming into office, Miliband was determined to make a big splash with AR6. He threw bill payers’ money at it with a record-breaking £1.555 billion subsidy pot. The government accepted bids totalling 9.6 GW, which includes 5.34 GW of offshore wind and 3.29 GW of solar, capacity which is useless when it’s likely to be most needed to meet peak electricity demand on winter evenings.

The government gives successful bidders guaranteed prices, irrespective of how much – or, more often, how little – the market values their output. Consumers are then forced to make up the difference between the market price and the set strike price they bid for. The average strike price for AR6 was very nearly £80 per MWh. Based on Professor Hughes’s analysis of load factor decay and rising maintenance costs, there is a high risk that offshore wind becomes lossmaking well before Year 12. Floating offshore wind, which Miliband says ‘is at the heart of the government’s mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower’, was awarded an eye-watering strike price of £176 per MWh.

Larger subsidies and floating offshore wind are hardly conducive to cutting bills.

Until mid-October, the wholesale price of electricity in 2024 averaged £78.70 per MWh. The more wind and solar added at strike prices above wholesale prices mathematically drives up the amount of subsidy consumers must pay. But the cost of renewables doesn’t stop there. Because wind farms are mostly located hundreds of miles from where electricity is used, when grid connections get congested, wind farms are paid constraint payments not to generate electricity.

Decongesting all the wind power on the grid doesn’t come cheap either. Miliband’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, published earlier this month, envisages building twice as much new transmission infrastructure in the next five years as was built in the past decade. The faster the planned build-out, the higher the cost. It means that renewable strike prices are a floor on which constraint payments and higher network costs are added.

That’s not all. There’s a second net-zero factor driving up energy costs. Net-zero policies have been forcing conventional power stations off the grid. Britain’s dispatchable generating capacity (principally coal, gas and nuclear) peaked in 2010, by 2020 declining by 25.1 GW and shrinking dispatchable capacity by 28.5 per cent. This was mostly because 18.3 GW of coal-fired capacity was retired as Britain demonstrated its green virtue to the world by powering past coal. The problem comes when there’s insufficient wind to power the grid. That’s what happened this autumn. Unseasonably windless conditions saw wholesale electricity prices rise through October and November with a huge spike at the beginning of December.

The latest renewable lobbyist talking point is that gas sets the wholesale electricity price. The implication is that gas prices are driving up the cost of electricity. However, gas prices this year have been lower than they were in 2023. The culprit behind the surging electricity prices is not the price of gas, but politicians kicking coal off the grid and Britain not having sufficient gas-powered generating capacity to meet demand when there’s not enough wind. Vladimir Putin and Qatari gas sheikhs are not to blame for home-grown net zero policies that have left Britain with dangerously inadequate non-weather dependent generating capacity.

In this, Britain is not alone. As other countries are finding out, having more renewables on the grid destabilises the electricity market. Sweden has also had soaring electricity prices, says Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and energy minister. Like Britain, Sweden has an extremely weather-dependant energy system which makes prices highly volatile, worsened by its German neighbour on the other side of Baltic. The need, Busch argues, is for ‘more dispatchable power production’.

This is politically impossible for the Starmer government. Labour is trapped by net zero and decarbonising the grid constitutes its overriding mission. So far, neither the Conservatives or Reform have stepped up. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch calls herself a net-zero sceptic and Reform’s Nigel Farage wants more nuclear. Whatever the merits of nuclear, there is no way in which new nuclear power stations can be built and commissioned fast enough to offset the retirement of Britain’s old ones, let alone substantially increasing the amount of nuclear power. They should be thinking and talking like Ebba Busch: Britain needs an emergency programme to build 20 GW of new gas-fired power stations. If that means suspending net zero, they should make the case that keeping the lights on and electricity bills down is a price worth paying.

 

How To Fix US Energy After Biden Broke It

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The Energy Bad Boys provide a road map at their blog 7 Quick Energy Takeaways from the 2024 Election.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

How a Donald Trump second term could reshape energy policy

Donald Trump’s comeback victory in the presidential election, which included carrying all seven swing states and winning the popular vote, along with Republican majorities in the Senate and potentially the House of Representatives, means big changes are coming to our nation’s energy policies.

Here are 7 quick takeaways for what might change in the next administration.

1. Regulatory Rollback

The incoming Trump administration will take concrete steps to repeal or scale back the regulatory overreach emblematic of the Biden-Harris administration’s energy and environmental policy.

Some of the regulations that could see a repeal or rework under the Trump administration include the tailpipe emission standards (which were effectively an electric vehicle mandate), the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), and of course, the rules on carbon dioxide emissions on power plants. 

The D.C. Circuit Court is set to hear arguments on the Clean Power Plan 2.0—which we determined would leave millions of Americans in the dark—in the coming months.

Capacity shortfall events – or blackouts – in Southwest Power Pool (SPP) when we modeled EPA’s proposal for carbon mandates, stemming from the agency’s use of 80% or higher capacity values for solar energy.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay the rules at this time, so the outcome of the case will likely impact the Trump administration’s strategy in addressing these rules. They may opt to do a scaled-down version of the rules, similar to when they replaced the Clean Power Plan 1.0 with the Affordable Clean Energy rule. Time will tell.

What we know now is this: the Biden Administration’s goal
of imposing carbon dioxide limits on existing
natural gas plants is dead in the water.

2. A Re-emphasis on Federalism

The repeal or reworking of several of the electricity-sector mandates imposed by the Biden-Harris administration will mean states have more say in their energy affairs.

This is both a blessing and a curse, as blue states pursue aggressive renewable buildouts, and utilities in red states attempt to boost their corporate profits by “green plating” their grids. Utilities do this by enacting internal carbon-free goals that are similar to policies in blue states, hoping it goes unchecked by regulators and lawmakers.

Xcel Energy’s profits in Minnesota have been skyrocketing since the state’s first renewable energy mandate, signed into law in 2007.

Policymakers in moderate and conservative states need to understand that the utilities pursuing wind and solar in their resource portfolios are not working in the interest of their constituents, and appropriate market signals are desperately needed through reforms that value reliability and affordability.

This is why we are seeing a groundswell of interest in our “Only Pay for What You Get Act,” where utility companies would only be allowed to charge their customers for the reliable portion of a power plant that will bolster grid reliability while keeping costs as low as possible.

This shows the difference between profits earned by utility companies under normal regulation and what profits would be under Only Pay legislation.

Please feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in learning more about how Always On Energy Research can help policymakers in your state understand the stakes of getting their energy policy correct, and offer forward-looking solutions to the challenges we’ll all face in the coming years.

3. Repeal the IRA?

As we noted in our piece, Grassley v. The Grid, subsidies paid to wind and solar operations are no longer harmless feel-good incentives for alternative energy. Today, these subsidies are actively undermining the reliability of our nation’s electric grid.

IRA subsidies paid to wind and solar developers are used as an excuse by utility companies to justify closing down reliable coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants while pretending that their plans to replace them with wind, solar, and battery storage facilities are better for consumers.

As Travis Fisher has noted at his Substack, he estimates that the IRA will cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years and between $2 trillion and $4 trillion by 2050. These massive subsidies are so lucrative that companies are pursuing projects that only make sense if the subsidies exist, irrespective of whether they make any sense for customers. This is a recipe for enormous malinvestment of taxpayer dollars.

Repealing the investment tax credits and production tax credits for wind and solar facilities will be an indispensable part of reversing this trend and restoring rational market signals to the electricity sector.

4. Keystone Pipeline

During his appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, President Trump said he liked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas on a lot of things, but we were relieved the President said he would need to keep him away from environmental policy decisions because he was hostile to “the black gold.”

Always On Energy Research’s oil and gas analyst, Trevor Lewis, notes that beginning day one, the Trump administration can take several steps to ensure America’s economy will have enough oil and gas to fuel decades of growth.

Restarting construction on the Keystone XL pipeline should be at the top of the list of priorities, which would bring job opportunities and economic activity to countless small towns from North Dakota to Kansas while simultaneously bolstering America’s energy security.

While America has vastly improved its energy independence from the rest of the world, our nation is still importing several million barrels of heavy sour crude from OPEC and other foreign nations. Restarting Keystone will allow American refineries to friend-source crude from Alberta and would, as an added benefit, reduce SO2 emissions from tanker ships, which negatively impact air quality and contribute to ocean acidification.

5. Drill Baby Drill

For domestic production, Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will reverse the Biden Administration’s disastrous drilling policies.

In the first two years of the Biden Administration, total leases offered declined by 70 percent. By 2023, Biden’s BLM leased 95 percent fewer acres than Trump in 2019. Trump’s BLM can reverse this trend and award prime oil-rich lands to eager drillers in Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado. Offering these leases will replenish acreage inventories and reverse the 20-year decline in active acres, and the royalties paid on federal lands will be distributed through BLM’s oil and gas revenue splitting program with state governments and local communities.

Trump will also likely reverse the Biden Administration’s pause on permitting new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities and appoint commissioners to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that will approve the construction of new natural gas pipelines.

6.  Solar and Wind on Federal Lands

In 2023, the Biden Administration’s Department of Interior (DOI) gave renewable energy developers a sweetheart deal slashing the annual lease rate for wind and solar on federal lands by 80 percent. Months later, Biden’s BLM announced the Western Solar plan which will bridle 31 million acres of Federal lands – most of which in Western States thousands of miles from Washington D.C. – with 25 gigawatts of solar power.

Unless reversed by the Trump Administration’s BLM, the Western Solar Plan will erect inefficient solar panels over pristine western landscapes while damaging fragile ecosystems in the process. Worse still, communities would not be compensated for the damages done by these solar developers because, unlike oil and gas leases, BLM does not share the revenues paid by wind and solar lease rents or bonus payments on the Federal lands with local communities.

The revenues communities receive from royalties strengthen local budgets, create jobs, and support the care and maintenance of the local environment, which wind and solar currently don’t contribute to. Trump’s BLM will have an opportunity to end Biden’s free ride for wind and solar developers. President Trump can advocate for western lands and their inhabitants by leveling the playing field by ensuring renewable energy developers pay rates equivalent to those paid by oil and gas producers.

7. Halting Offshore Wind

The Biden Administration has pledged to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030. To meet this target, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) offered 10 offshore wind leases and scheduled auctions for 12 more leases through 2028.

Offshore wind energy is one of the most expensive energy sources on the grid—even before accounting for the hidden costs of maintaining reliability with intermittent electricity generation.

Additionally, offshore wind has been the center of ongoing environmental controversies, from killing whales to the breakdown of blades in the middle of the ocean, only to washup onshore

To prevent another Vineyard wind disaster, in addition to saving consumers from expensive and unreliable energy, Trump should direct the BOEM to terminate the 12 scheduled leases. As for the 10 auctioned leases, Trump could (and should) rescind these leases from offshore developers, in a similar move to Biden rescinding Alaskan oil and gas leases.

French Fishermen Join U.S. Fishermen in Fighting Offshore Wind – IER

Conclusion

Biden Bad, Trump Good.

After 4 years of one of the worst presidencies for reliable and affordable energy, the Trump administration has the opportunity to unleash energy dominance by ensuring a level playing field for all energy resources, ending the subsidies and handouts to renewable and battery developers, repealing egregious regulations aimed at prematurely retiring coal and natural gas plants, and promoting an energy dominant policy which will help end Bidenomic’s policy of energy inflation.

 

 

 

Washington State Votes Against “Electrify Everything”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gas stoves are the thin edge of the wedge.

 

Update November 18, 2024

From the Olympian: WA natural gas measure I-2066 set to pass.

The sponsors of Initiative-2066, the Washington ballot measure that aims to expand access to natural gas in the state, have declared victory as votes have continued to trickle in from last week’s election. Early results showed the ballot measure holding a slim lead, which has slowly grown in the days since the election. As of Monday, Nov. 11, there are 51.64% of votes counted in favor of the measure, compared to 48.36% against it, according to the Secretary of State’s office. With approximately 274,171 votes left to be counted, I-2066 leads by a 112,203 vote margin. In order for the measure to fail, over 70% of the remaining votes would need to go against the initiative, leaving it all-but-guaranteed of a victory.

No on I-2066 has conceded the race, although it’s exploring possible legal challenges to the measure. The campaign claims that I-2066 is misleading, since it implies that Washington has a natural gas ban in place when it doesn’t. Additionally, the campaign said it’s looking into the possibility that the measure violates a section of the state constitution that asserts that “no bill shall embrace more than one subject.”

Results won’t be official until they’re certified by Washington’s 39 counties on Nov. 26 in and are sent to the Secretary of State, who has to certify them by Dec. 5.

Background Post

Megan K. Jacobson explains the fight and what’s at stake at msn A Washington State Revolt Against the Gas-Stove Grabbers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Environmentalists have waged a campaign against natural gas, but users of this efficient, low-emission fuel are fighting back. A wide range of industry groups are backing Washington state’s Initiative 2066 to protect the right to choose natural gas.

By 2030, Washington is supposed to reduce carbon emissions to 45% below 1990 levels—one of its many overlapping climate goals. The state’s most recent energy plan declares that the cheapest route to meeting Olympia’s climate targets is to switch many uses of oil and gas to electric sources. Last year the Building Code Council amended the state energy code to make it prohibitively costly to install gas appliances in new buildings. In March the Legislature passed a law allowing the state’s largest natural-gas and electricity utility, Puget Sound Energy, to pass the costs of going green onto consumers and mandating the utility files a plan “to achieve all cost-effective electrification of end uses currently served by natural gas.”

To the Washington Hospitality Association and the Building
Industry Association of Washington, Initiative 2066’s cosponsors,
this sounded like an economic wrecking ball.

Anthony Anton, CEO of the hospitality association, says 84% of the restaurateurs he represents rely on natural gas. Remodeling to go electric is a “massive cost at a time where operators just can’t afford it,” he says. Some say the quality of their product would suffer, as some cooking methods, such as stir-frying, are difficult to perform on lower-heat electrical stoves. Most of the association’s members are very small businesses with substantial debt from Covid lockdowns.

The building association worries the new energy code will raise the state’s already high housing costs, locking out potential buyers. The code requires that new buildings meet a certain environmental “score.” Without the points from an electric heat pump, a builder will have to make up the difference with other green measures that run between $15,000 and $20,000 in a single-family home. “Every time they raise the price $1,000, it prices out another 500 Washington families,” says Greg Lane, the association’s executive vice president.

Dozens of varied industry groups support Initiative 2066. Each has its own reasons. The Washington Denturist Association worries about the expense of switching from propane- or gas-based equipment and a lack of reliable power. Most members are small businesses and it’s a good path for immigrant dentists whose credentials don’t carry over to the U.S.

The Washington State Tree Fruit Association (of which my paternal grandfather’s company, Apple King, is a member) is concerned about rising costs of refrigeration to keep produce fresh. A sudden power outage could be catastrophic for the state’s apple industry. Trade regulations for its top two export markets require that fruit be constantly refrigerated at a specific temperature for as long as 90 days.

The state’s cheapest energy plan would almost double electricity demand in Washington by 2050, putting an unprecedented strain on the grid. The only real option is to increase wind and solar generation, since the state’s plentiful hydroelectric capacity can’t do more without potentially threatening salmon. Wind and solar tend to falter in Washington in the winter, when energy demand peaks.

Consumers would also suffer in Washington’s green utopia. Everything from a haircut to a ballgame would become more expensive as the price of electricity rises. Climate advocates argue that Washingtonians will recoup their costs over time thanks to efficiency gains. But a 2021 report from Home Innovation Labs estimates that recovering the cost of a heat-pump installation could take 47 to 49 years. It’s worse for existing gas customers. The Building Industry Association of Washington estimates that switching from natural gas to electricity in a single-family home would cost as much as $70,000. Heat pumps also tend to fail in the sort of frigid weather that hits rural Washington in winter.

Proponents of electrification insist that technology will improve over time. But if they’re really confident that green energy will be the best option for consumers and businesses, then Initiative 2066 is no threat. Washington voters should ask why climate advocates still see it as one.

Washington State Revolt Against “Electrify Everything”

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Gas stoves are the thin edge of the wedge.

Megan K. Jacobson explains the fight and what’s at stake at msn A Washington State Revolt Against the Gas-Stove Grabbers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Environmentalists have waged a campaign against natural gas, but users of this efficient, low-emission fuel are fighting back. A wide range of industry groups are backing Washington state’s Initiative 2066 to protect the right to choose natural gas.

By 2030, Washington is supposed to reduce carbon emissions to 45% below 1990 levels—one of its many overlapping climate goals. The state’s most recent energy plan declares that the cheapest route to meeting Olympia’s climate targets is to switch many uses of oil and gas to electric sources. Last year the Building Code Council amended the state energy code to make it prohibitively costly to install gas appliances in new buildings. In March the Legislature passed a law allowing the state’s largest natural-gas and electricity utility, Puget Sound Energy, to pass the costs of going green onto consumers and mandating the utility files a plan “to achieve all cost-effective electrification of end uses currently served by natural gas.”

To the Washington Hospitality Association and the Building
Industry Association of Washington, Initiative 2066’s cosponsors,
this sounded like an economic wrecking ball.

Anthony Anton, CEO of the hospitality association, says 84% of the restaurateurs he represents rely on natural gas. Remodeling to go electric is a “massive cost at a time where operators just can’t afford it,” he says. Some say the quality of their product would suffer, as some cooking methods, such as stir-frying, are difficult to perform on lower-heat electrical stoves. Most of the association’s members are very small businesses with substantial debt from Covid lockdowns.

The building association worries the new energy code will raise the state’s already high housing costs, locking out potential buyers. The code requires that new buildings meet a certain environmental “score.” Without the points from an electric heat pump, a builder will have to make up the difference with other green measures that run between $15,000 and $20,000 in a single-family home. “Every time they raise the price $1,000, it prices out another 500 Washington families,” says Greg Lane, the association’s executive vice president.

Dozens of varied industry groups support Initiative 2066. Each has its own reasons. The Washington Denturist Association worries about the expense of switching from propane- or gas-based equipment and a lack of reliable power. Most members are small businesses and it’s a good path for immigrant dentists whose credentials don’t carry over to the U.S.

The Washington State Tree Fruit Association (of which my paternal grandfather’s company, Apple King, is a member) is concerned about rising costs of refrigeration to keep produce fresh. A sudden power outage could be catastrophic for the state’s apple industry. Trade regulations for its top two export markets require that fruit be constantly refrigerated at a specific temperature for as long as 90 days.

The state’s cheapest energy plan would almost double electricity demand in Washington by 2050, putting an unprecedented strain on the grid. The only real option is to increase wind and solar generation, since the state’s plentiful hydroelectric capacity can’t do more without potentially threatening salmon. Wind and solar tend to falter in Washington in the winter, when energy demand peaks.

Consumers would also suffer in Washington’s green utopia. Everything from a haircut to a ballgame would become more expensive as the price of electricity rises. Climate advocates argue that Washingtonians will recoup their costs over time thanks to efficiency gains. But a 2021 report from Home Innovation Labs estimates that recovering the cost of a heat-pump installation could take 47 to 49 years. It’s worse for existing gas customers. The Building Industry Association of Washington estimates that switching from natural gas to electricity in a single-family home would cost as much as $70,000. Heat pumps also tend to fail in the sort of frigid weather that hits rural Washington in winter.

Proponents of electrification insist that technology will improve over time. But if they’re really confident that green energy will be the best option for consumers and businesses, then Initiative 2066 is no threat. Washington voters should ask why climate advocates still see it as one.

More Political Ignorance on Energy Realities

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Professor Ian Plimer schools a politico climate change “authority” in the above interview aired by Sky News Australia. For those preferring to read, a transcript is below lightly edited from the closed captions.

Climate Change authority Matt Kean, former Liberal treasurer of New South Wales, has lashed out at nuclear energy advocates, accusing them of being delay mongers trying to prevent renewables from succeeding. He labeled the push for nuclear and more gas as quote:

An illiberal drive to intervene in the market-led energy transition.”

Also he went on to say that the delay mongers have latched onto nuclear power despite the overwhelming evidence that it can only drive up energy bills, can only be more expensive and can only take too long to build this. In a cost of living crisis it seems to me that people calling for gas to be included in the capacity investment scheme are trying to stop renewables. Ian, I’m very very interested in your response to Matt K’s claims there.

Well this is just sheer stupidity. Mr Kean should know that when Finland put in its reactors, their latest reactors, the cost of electricity went down. And both the retailer and the wholesaler also had lower costs. So we have evidence very recently. The Page Research Center recently did a study on the cost of energy. This was done by Gerard Holland and he looked at solar and wind, he looked at nuclear, looked at gas and at coal.

By far the most expensive energy in Australia is solar and wind. This is considering the total costs, the land use changes, putting in the new power lines and so forth. Nuclear is quite cheap compared with that, gas is also cheap, as is coal. Coal’s the cheapest and that’s because we already have the infrastructure for coal.

Now what Mr. Kean doesn’t say is that solar and wind are not reliable, whereas nuclear, gas and coal are reliable. He also doesn’t say that solar and wind have a very short life less than 20 years. Whereas nuclear is at least 60 years for a nuclear power plant; more than 40 years for gas; more than 50 years for coal.

Moreover, he doesn’t say that our future demands for energy are going to increase enormously. We’re already using 10% of energy for data centers and with AI it’s going to be a lot higher. His real concern is that the practical economics of the nuclear lobby groups are starting to frighten renewables promoters; the practical economics of the gas groups are starting to frighten the wind and solar people.

These are the cheapest and most reliable and best forms of energy we can have in a country like Australia. And yet we’ve got all these foreign corporations who are running the solar and running the wind projects who are lining up for for their subsidies. And the subsidies make the renewable energy viable and profitable. The subsidies must keep getting renewed and he’s getting worried that that the whistle is going to be blown on this.

Worldwide, nuclear yields slightly more electricity than renewables.

We see around the world that we can have cheap reliable energy for very long periods of time from Nuclear. So I recommend that viewers look at Gerard Holland’s report from the Page Research Center. He aired these findings at the AIC conference on Tuesday, They show that we are going down the wrong path. We’ve got far too many vested interests whispering in Mr Kean’s ear. He doesn’t understand the fundamentals of energy generation and he doesn’t understand the fundamental weaknesses of solo and wind.

And I do love his comment about the illiberal drive to intervene in the market-led energy transition. When there has been so much market manipulation like the subsidies. It’s just wishful thinking to pretend that renewables are being led by the market, as though it were purely organic.

I’ve got an early Lefty losing it for you. It’s from the New Zealand greens:
Coal, don’t dig it, leave it on the ground, get with it.

What do you say to the New Zealand greens Professor Plimer. I think they’ve been taking some of Kamala Harris scripts and talking from them. I have no idea what they’re talking about. But we do know that the New Zealand coals on the west coast of South Island are exceptionally clean with very high calorific value, and very low Ash, They are prized coals.

New Zealand does have energy from other sources; from oil in and gas in the Taranaki Basin and some geothermal energy. But the New Zealand coals are some of the best in the world I have no idea what they’re trying to say except that perhaps they they want New Zealand to become even more backward.

Why They Lie About Nuclear Power

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Cliff Reece reports on the reasons for anti-nuclear distortions in his Spectator Australia article  Australia is already a successful nuclear nation.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T John Ray

ANSTO – the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation – recently celebrated 70 years since Australia’s nuclear age began in Sydney.  ANSTO is the home of Australia’s most significant landmark and national infrastructure for research. Thousands of scientists from industry and academia benefit from gaining access to state-of-the-art instruments every year.

Thousands of visitors, including many schoolchildren, have safely toured the site at Lucas Heights, which is located 40km southwest of the Sydney CBD. They had the opportunity to learn a great deal about nuclear science as a result of that experience.

I recently became one of those visitors when I was invited to a 3-hour escorted tour of their facilities. As former Executive Director of the National Safety Council of Australia (NSW/ACT) I was particularly interested in their WHS procedures as well as the management of waste, as the latter could impact on the wider community if poorly managed.

What impressed me most was seeing just how advanced we are as a nuclear nation. Despite being relatively small in scale compared to a full civil nuclear energy plant, it has much the same range of issues and complexities to deal with. And it certainly appears to successfully do so at both their Sydney and Melbourne campuses.

The obvious question is, why is the Albanese Labor-Greens government, together with the Teals, opposed to extending our obvious expertise into producing nuclear energy on a commercial scale, as proposed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s LNP?

As you’d expect, there are a number of reasons for both their reluctance to accept nuclear despite it being cheap, reliable and emissions-free and their manic obsession with unreliable, hugely expensive, and environmentally/socially disastrous wind, solar, and battery renewables.

Political factors play a major part. The Greens and Teals are
directly opposed to nuclear, but for different reasons.

The Greens have shown beyond doubt that they want to disrupt society across as many issues as possible. They are doing this on a regular basis – even appearing to stand with crowds that hold sympathies toward recognised terrorist groups.

People who think the Greens are still a well-meaning environmental group like they were under Bob Brown are fooling themselves – they are not!

In the case of the Teals, they started life as political entities via funding from Climate 200, whose primary financial supporters are deeply entrenched in the lucrative and heavily taxpayer-subsidised renewables industry.  The Teals are ignorant pawns in the high-stakes game of climate change and the hysterical pursuit of ‘saving the planet’.

There is a lot of money involved in this issue and ordinary Australians are being played by the so-called elites, including left-wing mainstream media such as the ABC.

A good example is the almost total lack of media reporting on the very recent and hugely important US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lift-off Report that includes significant findings:

The system cost of electricity with nuclear and renewables combination is 30 per cent lower than just renewables.

The jobs from nuclear are 50 per cent higher paying than solar or wind.

⁠⁠Nuclear provides the lowest emissions, is the most reliable form of energy production, has the lowest land use requirement, and lowest material usage.

The report also outlines a pathway for the USA to reach their ambition to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050, in direct contradiction of our government’s refusal to even legalise nuclear energy.

It also directly contradicts the policy position of the Albanese government.  The report debunks repeated claims that nuclear is ‘too expensive’ and will ‘increase power bills’ and outlines various other benefits of nuclear energy.

The DoE report could not disagree more with Australian anti-nuclear campaigners and the Albanese Labor-Greens government, Teals, and other sources of ignorance.

Their report also completely debunks the much-criticised report produced by CSIRO GenCost that our Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, refers to constantly as his renewables crusade ‘Bible’.   This is despite the fact that the CSIRO GenCost report totally failed to accurately estimate the likely total cost of renewables compared to nuclear.

It also used in its modelling a 30-year life for a nuclear plant instead of the far more accurate 80 years. This created a false financial outcome by not comparing the total cost of nuclear with renewables over an 80-year period.

It also totally neglected the fact that waste management costs for renewables will be many times greater than for nuclear. There will be the need to replace wind turbines and solar panels three or four times during an 80-year period.  And who is going to be responsible for dismantling and disposing of the millions of components – some of which have toxic ingredients?

Many people, including some of our top scientists and engineers, believe that the CSIRO GenCost report was simply designed to support the Albanese government’s narrative as depicted in their childish three-eyed fish media splash some months ago.

‘Reckless’: Labor’s nuclear memes ‘undermine AUKUS subs deal’ Labor MPs have been accused of undermining the AUKUS submarine deal with ‘reckless’ anti-nuclear propaganda, as the Coalition calls on Anthony Albanese to rule out a scare campaign. Source: The Courier Mail

We need a government that protects our borders, controls immigration, decreases our cost-of-living, and helps young people to buy their own homes.  It’s becoming clearer on a daily basis that none of that will happen under the current Labor-Greens government.

One major impediment to reducing living expenses is the rising cost of energy.  Renewables alone will continue to increase the cost of electricity and that will in turn increase the prices paid at our shops and for commercial or residential electricity usage.

Nuclear energy will add to the range of resources available to us – as it has done in many other countries. Nuclear power plants operate in 32 countries and generate about a tenth of the world’s electricity. Most are in Europe, North America, and East Asia. The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power, at about 70 per cent.

The only way we are going to catch up with the rest of the world in relation to nuclear energy production is to replace our current government with Peter Dutton’s Liberal-National Coalition.  That might be hard to accept for some people – but it’s an undeniable fact.

 

Investors Beware Green Equipment Companies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Steve Goreham explains in his Heartland article Why Are Renewable Equipment Companies Such Poor Investments? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Headlines promote renewable energy equipment companies as part of efforts to transition to Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Wind and solar system providers, electric vehicle manufacturers, green hydrogen producers, and other green equipment firms form a growing share of world industry. But renewable equipment firms suffer poor market returns, so investors should beware.

The Renewable Energy Industrial Index (RENIXX) is a global stock index of the 30 largest renewable energy industrial companies in the world by stock market capitalization. Current RENIXX companies include Enphase Energy, First Solar, Orsted, Plug Power, Tesla, and Vestas.

IWR of Germany established the RENIXX on May 1, 2006, with an initial value of 1,000 points. This month, the RENIXX stood at 1,013 points, essentially zero value growth over the last 18 years. In comparison, the S&P 500 Index more than quadrupled over the same period. The RENIXX is down three years in a row from 2021, losing about half its value.

Wind turbine manufacturers faced serious financial challenges over the last three years, even with rising sales. Rising costs, high interest rates, and project delays continue to impact the profitability of wind projects and equipment suppliers. The stock of Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest supplier, rose only 7% over the last 16 years, and its stock price has fallen 58% from a high in 2021. Vestas struggled to make a profit in 2022 and 2023 and suspended dividends to shareholders.

Other major wind suppliers have also been poor investments for shareholders. The stock of Siemens Gamesa, the number two turbine maker, is down 65% since a peak in 2021. Gamesa reported a loss of €4.4 billion in 2023 and received a €7.5 billion bailout from the German government that same year. Other top wind suppliers suffered major stock price declines since 2021, including Goldwind of China (down 77%) and Nordex of Germany (-36%).

Some 80% of the world’s solar panels are manufactured in China and the top six suppliers reside in China. The solar panel industry is beset by overcapacity and severe competition. Stock prices of the top seven suppliers have all declined by more than 50% since 2021. The stock of U.S. firm First Solar has risen since 2021 but remains below its all-time high price reached in 2008.

Tesla, which was founded in 2003, remained the only pure-play, publicly traded EV stock until 2018. By the end of 2021, Tesla’s value had soared to over $1 Trillion, boasting a market value more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Ford, BMW, and Honda combined. But Tesla is the exception.

But in most cases, electric vehicle (EV) companies have been very poor investments. Between 2020 and 2024, 31 EV companies went public on U.S. stock exchanges. Only one of these 31 companies, the Chinese firm Li Auto, saw its price rise since the initial public offering (IPO). Thirty EV firms saw their stock prices fall, most precipitously.

EV company price declines from the IPO price include Fisker (-99%), Nikola (-94%), NIO (-50%), Lucid Group (-75%), and Rivian (-88%). Six others of the 31 companies went bankrupt. Tesla and Chinese firms BYD and Li Auto are the only EV firms profitable today.

ChargePoint is the world’s largest dedicated EV charger company (behind EV manufacturer Tesla), with over 25,000 charging stations in the U.S. and Canada. ChargePoint went public in 2021 by merging with Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation, valued at $2.4 billion. The firm’s value today is about $585 million, down 76% since 2021.  For fiscal year 2024, ChargePoint lost $458 million on revenue of $507 million.

It’s not clear that any charging company can make money. High-speed, 50-kilowatt EV chargers cost about five times as much as traditional gasoline pumps. Around 80% of EV charging is done at home, reducing the demand for public charging. ChargePoint, EVgo, Wallbox, Allego, and Blink Charging are all valued today at small fractions of their original IPO price. No EV charger firm is profitable, even after continuing to receive large government subsidies.

Plug Power is a leading supplier of hydrogen energy systems, including battery-cells for hydrogen vehicles and electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen fuel. Founded in 1997, the company went public in October 1999 at a split-adjusted price of about $160 per share.

But during its 27-year history, Plug Power has never turned a profit. According to financial reports, the firm lost $1.45 billion in 2024, up from a loss of $43.8 million in 2018. Its current stock price is under two dollars per share.

Traditional established firms are finding that renewable equipment can be poor business. In 2023, Ford lost $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 electric vehicles, or over $40,000 per vehicle. General Electric’s wind turbine business lost $1.1 billion in 2023.

The U.S. federal government provided subsidies to renewable equipment companies of between $7 billion and $16 billion per year between 2010 and 2022. But the Cato Institute estimates that because of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, subsidies will skyrocket to about $80 billion in fiscal year 2025.

EIA

Without the fear of human-caused climate change and
a rising level of government subsidies and mandates,
many of these green companies would not exist.

It’s doubtful that carbon dioxide pipelines, heavy electric trucks, offshore wind systems, green hydrogen fuel equipment, and EV charging stations would be viable businesses in unsubsidized capital markets.

During this last year, leading financial firms pulled back on their climate change pledges. Bank of America, JP Morgan, State Street, and Pimco withdrew from Climate Action 100+, which seeks to force companies and investment funds to address climate issues and adopt environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies.

But it’s difficult to invest in renewable equipment companies
when they are losing money.