Category Archives: Renewable Energy

Skeptics Need a Platform to Spread Their Science


Open Letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy

Your leadership regarding Climate Change is very important.  Your members must weigh in on the nearly a half of trillion dollars of subsidies for the so-called renewable energy projects and directing legislation to stop the urge of the Democrats to rush headlong into unproven schemes to replace fossil fuels.

It looks like you are off to a good start.  Headline on blogs such as thisGOP-Led House Panels Shift Gears, Goes Full Throttle For Domestic Energy Production.”    

Your Email for contributions has a list of your objectives beyond just energy that are things I hope you can obtain though it will be uphill with the Senate and Executive in the hands of the Democrats.  I hope you can find ways to block the Biden Administration’s plans.

This letter is to focus on just one part of the House’s objectives and that is to counter the disinformation that the global warming alarmists have been spewing.  The way things work now are—-Media support the alarmist’s “experts” and they know that there will be no significant effort by skeptics to counter the alarmists. 

Now that you can control the Committee’s agenda, your members should standup to the global warming alarmists.  This will take some courage on everyone’s part because some members are afraid of the media.   Fox’s post titled “Politico Urges readers don’t believe the polls showing sinking levels of trust of media” One of Politico staff protested the results of the Gallup poll.  But the poll says: 

“The recent polling showed only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers with only 11% of Americans having confidence in television. It represented a 5% decrease since 2021 and was also the lowest rating given towards newspapers since Gallup’s original poll back in 1973.

And there is no need not be afraid of the title “skeptic”.  Almost without exception skeptics believe that the globe is warming. 

The skeptics need a microphone that is so big it can work around the media. I think the House of Representatives can do this.

The House could have regular sessions of skeptical testimony. The House should rely on the skeptical experts, of which there are many, to counteract the alarmists. Don’t be afraid to allow the alarmists “experts” to testify, too.  The alarmists usually get beaten in debates with the skeptics. In fact they have a reluctance to debate.  Try getting Al Gore to debate any skeptical expert. No way, he always backs out. You will be doing this to help educate all of the Members of the House of Representatives.   Record all the sessions and publish them on YouTube.

Who are these skeptic experts? You can find them on The Clintel website that has posted “There is No Climate Emergency.”   

The site names 1010 experts listed by country. (The site needs to update the list as it has now grown to 1499 experts.)    

The Skeptical Daily post a summary regarding the skeptics on the lists and some notable quotes. They call the list of the skeptic experts a Declaration.

“The scale of the opposition to modern day ‘settled’ climate science is remarkable, given how difficult it is in academia to raise grants for any climate research that departs from the political orthodoxy.  A lead author of the declaration, Professor Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative “absurd”, but acknowledged that trillions of dollars and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists currently says it is not absurd.

The Declaration is an event of enormous importance, although it will be ignored by the mainstream media. But it is not the first time distinguished scientists have petitioned for more realism in climate science. In Italy, the discoverer of nuclear anti-matter Emeritus Professor Antonino Zichichi recently led 48 local science professors in stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. In their scientific view, “natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850”. Professor Zichichi has signed the WCD.

The Declaration notes that the Earth’s climate has varied for as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm periods. “It is no surprise that we are experiencing a period of warming,” it continues. Climate models have many shortcomings, it says, “and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools”. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, but ignore any beneficial effects. “CO2 is not a pollutant,” it says. “It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth; additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yield of crops worldwide.”

Last year, Steven Koonin, an Under-Secretary of Science in the Obama Administration, published a book titled Unsettled in which he noted that, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what our actions will be.” He also noted that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate change is settled demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, “retarding its progress in these important matters”. In 2020, the long-time green activist Michael Shellenberger wrote a book called Apocalypse Never in which he said he believed the conversation about climate change and the environment had in the last few years “spiraled out of control”. Much of what people are told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, he wrote.

These experts get printed in skeptic websites, but we need to widen the audience.

First and foremost the media, the alarmists and some educators have convinced the young that they may die soon.  This poisoning of our childrens minds must be stopped.

From a November 27, 2022 posting by EuroNews.GreenMore than two thirds of children between the ages of seven and twelve are worried about climate change, a new survey reveals.

The climate crisis can be overwhelming. (Click on that climate link.  See what the kids are being taught.)

Statistics often paint a dire picture of the earth’s trajectory. The UN has warned that existing climate pledges provide ‘no credible pathway’ to preventing temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Deadly floods and fires are on the rise, while global wildlife populations have shrunk 70 per cent since 1970.

Presented with these facts, it’s easy to sink into eco-anxietyPrevious studies have proven that this distress is heightened in children and the new survey confirms this.”

Secondly, the public should know that the basis of the catastrophic climate change is the computer forecasted global temperatures. It goes, things get very hot, glaciers melt, sea level rises, cities are deluged with sea water, crops cannot survive, creatures cannot adapt to temperatures and huge extinctions occur, etc.

The following chart shows that the forecast temperatures by the alarmist are higher than the actual temperature readings and that the forecast temperatures become more ridiculous as time goes by.  These temperatures are the ones They use to forecast catastrophe.

All the squiggly lines are individual computer forecasts. The Red line is the average global warming temperatures predicted by the computers.  The lower Green straight line is the mean of the actual measured temperature for this same period.  Note that as the years go by, the computer forecast gets further away from the actual measured temperature. The actual temperatures noted in the chart are based upon weather balloons and satellite measurements.  The actual temperatures are rising but not at the rate that will cause a catastrophic outcome.  The computer produced temperature forecasts are used to brain wash our children.

Thirdly, faulty pillars of despair that climate change alarmist preach are debunked in the WattsUpWithThat January 19, 2023 posting titled A Critical Examination of the Six Pillars of Climate Change Despair:  From this posting:

“In 2023 it’s hard to avoid seeing images and headlines like these. The result for many is a deep seated fear[5], anxiety[6] [7], and pessimism[8] [9] about the future. The topic of Climate Change (CC) has seeped into nearly every facet of our lives, and never in a positive way. It’s always present as a dark cloud hanging over society; a source of guilt for those who indulge in some of life’s most basic pleasures, the basis of moralistic judgments by those who like to signal their concern, and the cause of nihilism[10] [11] and hopelessness[12] felt by many in the youngest generations.

    Why does CC have such deeply negative connotations and harmful effects on people’s mental well being? Because we are constantly reminded of the six dark and destructive consequences of CC:

      1) heat will cause millions to die or live in misery

      2) tens of millions (some say billions) will be forced to migrate

      3) a million or more species will become extinct in just a few decades

      4) sea level rise will have disastrous world-wide consequences

      5) agricultural production will be devastated, causing widespread famine

      6) humanity will suffer floods, droughts, and other terrible natural disasters

    These are the six pillars of climate change despair that activists and the media obsess over. The activists do it because they think they are saving the planet; the media do it because bad news gets more clicks than good news. Plus, they both do it to appear virtuous. They both keep ramping up the rhetoric so that with each passing year the predictions about each of these consequences become even more frightening and apocalyptic. There are some lesser concerns (eg. Arctic and glacier melting), but these six are the catastrophic ones.

    No wonder so many people are depressed and pessimistic about the future. It shouldn’t be surprising there’s an epidemic of “climate change anxiety”.

    But is it in any way justified?  What is the truth (if any) behind these catastrophic predictions? That’s what I want to examine here. The fact is, every one of these pillars is made of sand, and crumbles apart when subjected to the slightest critical scrutiny.

The author, Doug R Rogers, puts together a comprehensive essay.  Please read it to it end by clicking here.

The Fourth issue is the headlong race to decarbonize the world.  Renewables (mostly wind and solar) are believed to be the future energy sources, leaving fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to be only available chemical feed stocks, for example. Combined with electric vehicles (EV) the globe will be free of carbon dioxide gas vented into the atmosphere they say.

The benefits accrued by fossil fuels are discounted in this rush to decarbonization. The benefits from vented CO2 are enormous.  The greening of the globe has been the result of the vented CO2.  Crops, such as wheat, oats, rice, potatoes, cane, etc. have skyrocketed in quantity feeding billions of new people. 


Renewables are not reliable.  What we know is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather.  No wind, no sun, no renewable produced electrical energy.  No where has a major grid sourced by solely wind and solar been demonstrated.  No plans have been made to prove a grid can actually run solely on wind and solar.  Grids have to be supplied  24/7 with NO interruptions. Yet we find that the politicians, urged on by the media, are willing to build more wind and solar capacity and prematurely shut down fossil fuels before they can prove that renewables can provide 24/7 with no interruptions.

The enormous upset that has occurred in western Europe would not have been so serious if renewable could have done the job.  For example, Germany has renewables with name plate capacity greater than the nation’s electrical needs.  But at times in September ‘22 the wind did not blow, and the sun shined only intermittently.  So no matter what their nameplate capacity was, wind and solar were producing little to no electricity. That happened and they stumbled through, saved by natural gas and coal based production of electricity.  

Obviously, there are many more issues than the several I have mentioned.  I picked them because the first one, traumatizing our children has to be stopped NOW.  The other three go right to the heart of the problem. The experts could line up excellent debates or testimonies at House Committee requests.

Expert testimony by skeptics has been ignored by the media.  So how can we get around that? 

Freelancers Wanted: Help Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine   authored by Matt Taibbi is a plan to create a team to produce a document that knocks out the mainstream Propaganda machine.   Perhaps supporters that could fund similar skeptical teams.  There must be NGOs that are skeptical in their view.  Find them, give them help with finance, programs and topics

Another interesting team is the Center of the American Experiment. The Center of the American Experiment is a Minnesota-based think tank that advocates for conservative and free-market principles.[5] One of their tasks has been to target the objectional courses that public schools in Minnesota are putting into their schooling.  The Center of the American Experiment has people and programs to show what is going on and how to change it. The group will speak to PTAs school boards or other interested groups. This group has been successfully getting schools to drop radical racial material.  This could be a model for another skeptical group to copy.

.   

Work with the local TV stations.  They are often in need of topics to produce for their locality.  Hire people that know how to do communications.  Make sure that Federal Departments that award research money gives skeptics fair treatment. If they don’t, you can have your way with their funding.

I hope that some of the ideas are useful to you.

Good luck

cbdakota  

The Great Reset Demands MONEY


Last week the Great Reset group gathered in Davos Switzerland to continue contriving the destruction of capitalism using global warming as the vehicle. These so-called elites arrived using an alleged 1200 private jets. If they actually believed that carbon dioxide (CO2) is pushing the planet ultimately to an apocalypse, they would do these meetings by Zoom . But instead, they choose to create large amounts of jet engine exhausts of CO2 into the atmosphere. No, they believe that they should govern the planet. To do that they need to spark fear that global warming will bring on extinction. And only these elite can save you by turning governance over to them.

A Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jan/23/editorial-for-select-at-davos-money-is-key-to-stay/?mc_cid=cc44f4808d&mc_eid=557687911 editorial focused the money as follows: (posting is behind a paywall)”

Beware of the individual who refers to his ilk as “we select group of human beings.” It’s the unmistakable mark of the elite who believe their concern for climate can save the world. Mindful that those who guaranteed the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines now associated with disturbing health anomalies derive from the same exclusive class, Americans should regard the purveyors of climate change remedies with studied caution.

The most self-assured of this sort have a habit of showing up for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, which recently concluded in Davos, Switzerland. With his “select group” puffery, President Biden’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, gathered his fellow discussion panelists and audience into a league of their own.

It is all a part of forum founder Klaus Schwab’s plan to “master the future” through climate change activism. Eager to oblige, Mr. Kerry urged all within earshot to rebuff any self-image of “a crazy tree-hugging lefty liberal” and embrace their identity of the “almost extraterrestrial” breed who are “saving the planet.” He made the case that the key to staying cool is “money, money, money, money, money, money, money”: The denizens of Davos want $3 trillion annually to finance greenhouse gas reductions.

By contrast, climate guru and former Vice President Al Gore showed little hesitation in personifying the crazy tree-hugger. Referring to human-caused atmospheric emissions, the Davos forum regular claimed, “That’s what is boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land, creating the droughts and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach one billion in this century.”

All this “settled science” from a self-appointed climate expert who, according to The Washington Post, could not quite manage a gentleman’s C in his Harvard science classes.”

I think that this man-made catastrophe theory will only be abandoned when the cost to fund this program becomes too high for the average citizen and/or explicit examples of failures become so common that people will no longer put up with it.  A major failure would be a long stretch of global cooling.  High priced electricity and frequent black outs will be a trigger too.  And ultimately when it becomes known that renewables are useless without backup nuclear and/or fossil fuels.

When politicians are faced with being voted out, we will be able to drop this crap.

Real science will then out the charlatan’s “settled science” and they will be defamed.  

The average citizen may become distrustful of any scientist, unfortunately because of this.

cbdakota

Renewable Project Rejections by Local Communities are on the Rise


RealClear Energy posted an entry by Robert Bryce titled “Solar Energy Rejections in 2022 that refutes mainstream media’s assertion that the rejections are due to energy companies “misinformation. The following comes from Bryce’s entry:

“You won’t read about this in The New York Times or The New Yorker, but 2022 was a record year for the number of solar energy projects that were rejected by rural communities in the United States. 

As I show in the Renewable Rejection Database, nearly 80 rural governments either banned or restricted solar energy projects last year

In all, more than 40 Ohio townships adopted measures last year that prohibit the construction of large solar or wind projects, or both. Across the U.S., about 106 communities have rejected or restricted solar projects since 2017. The number of wind rejections also jumped last year, with 55 communities enacting ordinances or other measures that prohibit the installation of large wind facilities. Since 2015, about 360 communities across the U.S. have rejected or restricted wind projects. (Note that last year, I published numbers that were slightly higher than that. In my continuing updates to the database, I found some entries that were duplicates and deleted them.) 

To be sure, these facts, and these numbers, don’t fit with the narrative being peddled by legacy media outlets. Last year, National Public Radio ran an article claiming that rural Americans were peddling “misinformation” in their efforts to prevent wind and solar projects from being built in their neighborhoods. Last month, an article published in The New York Times claimed that opposition to wind projects in Michigan included “anti-wind activists with ties to groups backed by Koch Industries.” But the reporter who wrote the article, David Gelles, didn’t provide any proof of any Koch connections. (Gelles did not reply to two emails asking him for substantiation of his claim.) Last month in The New Yorker, climate activist Bill McKibben claimed that “front groups sponsored by the fossil-fuel industry have begun sponsoring efforts to spread misinformation about wind and solar energy.” But like Gelles, McKibben didn’t provide any proof for his claim.

In all of the years I’ve been reporting on these issues, I have seen no evidence of Koch funding or “front groups” sponsored by the hydrocarbon sector. What I have seen is an increasing effort by the wind and solar lobbies and their claqueurs to discredit people who stand in the way of these projects. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Tens of billions of dollars in federal tax credits are at stake. Companies like Apex Clean Energy can’t feed at the federal trough if they don’t build projects.

Land-use conflicts are the binding constraint on the growth of renewables. The fundamental limitation isn’t money, it’s physics. Wind and solar energy have low power density. That means that attempting to use them to displace large quantities of hydrocarbons will require staggering amounts of land. For instance, last year, Jesse Jenkins and several of his colleagues at Princeton University produced a model to predict how much new wind and solar capacity could be built due to the supertanker of cash that Congress earmarked for renewables in the Inflation Reduction Act. In a Q&A published in these pages last year, Jenkins told me that the land required to accommodate the hundreds of megawatts of new wind and solar under the IRA would require a land area about the size of Tennessee. Here’s a newsflash: we don’t have any spare Tennessees lying around. 

Rural Americans are fighting back against wind and solar projects because they want to retain the character of their townships, ranches, farms, and villages. And no amount of spin from The New York Times will change that fact.” 

To read the entire posting click here.

cbdakota

UK Paying An All-Time High of  2,586 Pounds For A Megawatt-Hour


I know that my recent blogs have been centered around Europe’s predicament because of their dependence on wind and solar renewable energy. The blogs may have become boring, but when evidence shows clearly how misguided the Europeans are about renewable energy I just have to pour it on.   The UK newspaper the Guardian, is an unending source of Alarmist propaganda.  Interestingly they just headlined the sky-high price of a Megawatt-hour of electricity.  Here is what the Guardian is reporting:

UK power prices hit record high amid cold snap and lack of wind power

UK power prices have hit record levels as an icy cold snap and a fall in supplies of electricity generated by wind power have combined to push up wholesale costs.

The day-ahead price for power for delivery on Monday reached a record £675 a megawatt-hour on the Epex Spot SE exchange. The price for power at 5-6pm, typically around the time of peak power demand each day, passed an all-time high of £2,586 a megawatt-hour.

The grid that supplies my power here in the USA, uses mostly fossil fuels and nuclear power sources for our electricity.  I just looked at the price from the Electricity Map app and it is $50 a megawatt-hour.

Snow and ice have caused disruption as the cold weather looks set to continue into this week, with snow forecast for parts of east and south-east England, as well as Scotland.

The cold snap, which is expected to last for at least a week, comes as wind speeds reduced sharply, hitting power suppliers.

Live data from the National Grid’s Electricity System Operator showed that wind power was providing just 3% of Great Britain’s electricity generation on Sunday. Gas-fired power stations provided 59%, while nuclear power and electricity imports both accounted for about 15%.

Now comes the Guardian’s cavate it must use when it seems to post data that contradicts the Alarmist’s narrative.

There can be no more hiding, and no more denying. Global heating is supercharging extreme weather at an astonishing speed. Guardian analysis recently revealed how human-caused climate breakdown is accelerating the toll of extreme weather across the planet. People across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and droughts triggered by the climate crisis.

So how can one discuss these issues with Alarmists when global warming causes everything.  Cold and Hot, drought and rain, snow and no snow, etc.

What they have done is to demonize frequent weather patterns by telling us that it has never been like this before. And of course, they know exactly what the perfect climate is. 

cbdakota

Wind and Solar Can Not Save Europe, Now or Ever


Wind and solar in Europe 2 December 2022

European countries have installed wind and solar systems to various degrees. The energy crisis that these countries are encountering is primarily due to a shortage of natural gas. If the Alarmists get their way, no one will be allowed to use natural gas.  How are we to manage without natural gas.  Certainly, the EU nations have thought this through as several EU nations have passed laws that will outlaw natural gas.   Or have they?

In Europe, and perhaps globally, Germany is leading the way to banish fossil fuels. The idea is to install wind and solar electricity generating facilities.  Germany has installed wind and solar facilities that have name plate capacity of 127.4 GWs. That much capacity exceeds their electrical demand by almost double.  So why do they care if the Russians have cut off natural gas?  Name plate capacity for wind and solar over states the actual performance by about 3-fold.  It’s worse than that really but they will be something for latter discussion. There is an app “The ELECTRICITY MAPs” that allows you to look at daily demand for electricity and what systems are creating the electricity.  Not just renewables, but nuclear, natural gas and coal production systems. 

I chose to look at the maps for a number of countries in the EU, on December 2, 2022, at 12 pm.  I assembled a chart that demonstrates the problem by focusing on the rated capacity of wind and solar and their actual performance.  The chart has the nation, the demand for electricity at that hour, the name plate capacity (NPC) combined for wind and solar generators and the actual production (column 4) by those generators.  The last column (5) is the percentage of the electricity demand being supplied by wind and solar.  Great Britain looks odd, but at the time this reading was made could have been windless and overcast.    Because the Alarmist tell us that wind and solar are the least expensive forms of power generation, you would think every country would be maxing out those units. Oh yes, they forgot to tell you that because they are dependent on the weather, they only function, on average, about a 1/3 of the time.

Column1Column2Column3Column4Column5
   EuropeDecember 2, 2022
 12pm
 ElectricityWind and SolarElectricity
        Demand         NPC   Production 
Nation           GW         GW            GW             %
Germany77.3127.417.824
Great Britain30.738.500
France69.432.73.85.5
Italy43.932.61.84.2
Netherlands17.222.25.230
 Belgium14.911.22.416
Poland25.7111.23.9
Denmark6.228.52.845
Slovakia6.16.100
Austria11.660.44
Romania7.884.40.56
Switzerland143.100
Czech Republic12.92.40.040.3
Hungary6.42.10.20.3
Bulgaria7.121.80.169
Spain****28.748.5724

Down at the bottom of the chart is Spain. I forgot Spain on 2 December. So, I looked it up, today the 4th of December. Spain also has put in more wind and solar capacity than the demand requirements. The app said 7 GW were being produced at 10am. 

The chart numbers, in many cases, are rounded off.

Wind and solar are not the answer.

cbdakota

Decarbonation Channel— visualization of Wind, Solar and Nuclear Energy


“Visual Capitalist” is an interesting site.  It provides charts and some dialog on a broad range of topics. A partial list of the categories are Markets, Technology, Money, Health Care, Energy, etc. Often you get a new chart every weekday on some topic or other.   It is easy to subscribe to the site.

Even though it has a man-made global warming bias, its a useful site.  I am providing a link to this site and it will come up with visualizations of Wind, Solar and Nuclear energy.  These topics are covered often, and usually of interest. The site predicts that by the year 2026 wind and solar will produce more electricity than natural gas, coal and nuclear combined. This 8 June 2022 prediction will not be realized.

You can link with the site by clicking here.

cbdakota

Vesta, the World’s Biggest Wind Turbine Maker, Will Have a Negative 5% Profit Margin in 2022


Bloomberg posted “Renewable power’s big mistake was to promise to always get cheaper” because they went too far with the cheap-energy pledge.  Vesta now says that led some people to think “that energy and electricity should become free.”

FOLLOW THE MONEY – saveoursherman (google.com)

Renewable-energy producers have long touted the promise of cheap electricity, an assurance that’s helped them eat into the dominance of fossil fuels. But the pledge has gone too far, according to the world’s biggest wind-turbine maker.

From the Bloomberg’s posting:

“Soaring commodity costs and supply-chain bottlenecks have wiped out profits for much of the wind industry this year. Vestas expects its profit margin to be around -5% in 2022”.

“The output from the turbine has never been more valuable,” Andersen said. “But we are losing money in manufacturing a turbine.” Vestas has raised prices more than 30% in the past year to help stem losses.”

I have said this before—- the parasitic** cost of wind is never used in calculating the cost of wind turbine electricity.   And the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, that is really Green New Deal in disguise, expanded tax credits.  If you use union labor, you probably can qualify for an expanded Investment Tax Credit (ITC) from 6% to 30%.  The ITC is not used cost wise either.

One more time, if wind and solar energy is so cheap, why do they need any incentives? Do the taxpayers know this, especially the rate paying users of renewable energy that see the price of their electricity bill rise?

  **cb-dakota.com/2022/10/31/wind-and-solar-renewable-energy-are-parasites/

cbdakota

Wind and solar renewable energy are Parasites.


I have been trying to define wind and solar renewables in a way that conveys them at the core.  I am looking for a definition that hits home.   “Not dispatchable” provides a feature of those two renewables but it falls short. Some might not even know what that means.

“Free energy” is used by proponents, but it is not free. That is a misrepresentation. The cost of electricity rises as the use of the wind and solar component of the grid supply increases.

I think that they are PARASITES.   Parasites are normally organisms that survive in or on another entity usually at the entity’s expense. The Criterion for electrical Grids is to provide electricity as demanded without interruption at the appropriate frequency 24/7.  Natural gas, coal and nuclear can do that.  Neither wind nor solar renewable energy can. There are no demonstrations that counter that statement. Not only that, if used, they make accomplishing the criteria difficult if not impossible.  They are Parasites.

Parasites cannot live without a host.  In the grid case, natural gas, coal and nuclear are the host. Why then, if they are parasites, are they part of the grid’s sources of electricity. As you know, Its political.

cbdakota

$3.8 Trillion spent on renewables has not made a precipitable change in fossil fuels use


From CNBC Squawk Box Tweet:.

“Economist Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs (Global Head of Commodities Research in the Global Investment Research Division): “Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.” … The net of it is clearly we haven’t made any progress.”

It is hard to get your head around the fact that $3.8 trillion has been spent with so little results.  A lot of that money has been going to Crony Capitalists through subsidies and tax forgiveness.

That they have not made any progress replacing fossil fuels is understandable and that it is unlikely that wind and solar ever will.  Their lack of dispatchability will forever prevent wind and solar from being the main source of power.  Long term, nuclear power will have to be the main source of power with wind and solar playing second fiddle.

cbdakota

Part 2: The Fragile Electric Grid


See the source image

This is part two of Robert Bryce’s testimony to the House Select Committee on The Climate Crisis.

Our electric grid is fragile.  Robert Bryce writes that the Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergence Response illustrates the declining reliability of our grid.  Bryce says:

“In 2002, there were 23 “major disturbances and unusual occurrences” on the domestic electric grid. Those outages were caused by things like ice storms, fires, vandalism, and severe weather. By 2016, the number of disturbances and unusual occurrences had increased six-fold to 141. In 2020, the number of events jumped to 383 – an increase of 270% in just four years.  Even more alarming: through the first two months of 2021, there have been 122 of these outages.”

Bryce says:

Electrifying everything is the opposite of anti-fragile.  Attempting to halt the use of liquid motor fuels and replace them with electricity will make our transportation system more vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, saboteurs, equipment failure, accidents, or human error. Electrifying our transportation system will reduce societal resilience because it will put all our energy eggs in one basket. Electrifying transportation will reduce fuel diversity and concentrate our energy risks on a single grid, the electric grid, which will make it an even-more-appealing target for terrorists or bad actors.

Furthermore, and perhaps most important, attempting to electrify transportation makes little sense given the ongoing fragilization of our electric grid. The closures of our nuclear plants is reducing the reliability and resilience of the electric grid and making it more reliant on gasfired power plants and weather-dependent renewables.”

While skeptics have known for years that the alarmist’s forecasts of doom are not likely to be realized, the alarmists oddly want to shut down all nuke plants. Nuke plants that do not emit their enemy carbon dioxide (CO2).  Bryce notes Congress inaction regarding this issue when he says:

“Instead, Congress is standing idly by as our nuclear plants – our most reliable, safest, and most power-dense form of electricity production – are being shuttered. Nuclear plants are, as writer Emmet Penney recently put it, our “industrial cathedrals.” If policymakers want to decarbonize our transportation system while enhancing the resilience of our society, the best option would be to have a grid that is heavily reliant on nuclear energy.”

Bryce discusses recent issues that demonstrate the gird’s declining reliability in his report.  They can be reviewed by clicking here.

See part two about supply chains and mineral needs.