Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Talking of clowns, maybe Nick Ferrari will treat anything the Met Office with a large pinch of salt in future!
Forecasters are predicting a summer of persistent rain and wet weather for Brits, as global warming continues to result in more erratic conditions.
The Met Office has briefed the Government and transport chiefs to prepare for at least 50 days of rain in the next three months, leading to fears over further flooding in the UK and dashing any hopes of a warm British summer.
Last summer saw 40 days of rain, but the Met Office expects this summer to be even worse, jeopardising popular summer events such as Wimbledon, Trooping of the Colour, Royal Ascot and many festivals including Glastonbury.
To count as a rainy day, there must be a minimum of 2.5mm of rain in a 24 hour period.
The UK’s wettest ever summer in 1912 saw rainfall on more than 55 days.
As I noted at the time, the Met Office’s warning did not even tally with their own 3-Month Outlook, and was clearly designed as pure spin intended to scare the public.
Hmmm, sez I, seems a mite ambitious. Current US grid-connected offshore wind is a mere 0.17 gigawatts … so we’d need to do ~ 175 times as much as we’ve done to date and do it in a short six years.
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@weschenbach on eX-Twitter)
Back on March 29, 2021, the Biden White House took on the following goals:
Hmmm, sez I, seems a mite ambitious. Current US grid-connected offshore wind is a mere 0.17 gigawatts … so we’d need to do ~ 175 times as much as we’ve done to date and do it in a short six years.
So I divided it out. There are 65 months until 2030. Thirty gigawatts is thirty thousand megawatts, less the 174 megawatts in place, that’s 29,826 megawatts more total generating capacity needed.
29,826 megawatts divided by 65 months means we’d have to add offshore wind generation to the tune of 465 additional megawatts of generation capacity per month. Every month. Starting now.
Get real. That’s not remotely possible. The biggest US offshore windfarm just came on line, 132 MW capacity. To reach the White House goal, every month we’d need to build three new windfarms of that size. No way that can happen. It’s just numbers picked out of the air to gain popular support.
Next, I researched the length of time it takes to get an offshore wind farm online. Here’s what ChatGPT sez:
The time from the proposal of an offshore wind farm to its grid connection typically ranges from 7 to 10 years. This timeline can be broken down into several phases:
Pre-development and Planning (1-2 years): This phase involves site identification, feasibility studies, and initial environmental assessments.
Permitting and Approvals (3-5 years): Securing the necessary permits and approvals is often the most time-consuming part of the process. This includes detailed environmental impact assessments, consultations with stakeholders, and obtaining state and federal permits.
Construction (2-3 years): Once all approvals are secured, construction of the wind farm, including the installation of turbines and subsea cables, takes place. This phase also includes the grid connection process.
Commissioning and Testing (several months): After construction, the turbines are tested, and the wind farm is gradually brought online.
Seems unreasonable but likely factual. So what that means is that unless a project is well underway right now, it won’t be online until after 2030.
Under the Biden Administration, there have been nine offshore wind projects approved. These propose building a total of 13 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. However, only two of these projects are actually under construction or completed —Vineyard Wind, located off the coast of Massachusetts, and South Fork Wind, located near the coasts of Rhode Island and New York.
South Fork Wind just came online. This gives us a chance to look at some actual cost figures. It’s the biggest wind farm to date, a 132-megawatt addition to offshore wind. It cost $637 million.
(Note that to reach the 30 GW goal, we’d need no less than 225 wind farms of this size … but I digress)
However, Federal subsidies added $191 million to that, plus another couple of hundred million or so from Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).
Stop and consider. Some private company is building a six-hundred-million-dollar white elephant in the middle of the ocean, and it’s getting paid four hundred million of taxpayer money to do so.
So … what does the New York consumer get for all of this more than generous support?
The consumer gets wind power costing FOUR TIMES AS MUCH as the current cost of power in New York.
Stop and consider. Even when the developer gets two-thirds of the cost paid by the taxpayer, offshore wind power is still four times as expensive.
And of course, that doesn’t even touch the cost of maintaining backup power for the times when there’s no wind … the cartoonist Josh sees that clearly.
Here’s more about the real-world cost of offshore wind power in New York.
What’s next?
Well, I’m sure that what’s next is the Harris/Walz campaign will declare that they are 100% behind expensive, intermittent, unreliable wind power, and will claim that if elected, they’ll do what they already said they’d do when Ms. Harris was last elected, which was to screw the consumer and the taxpayer with the huge subsidies, tax breaks, and electricity costs of offshore wind.
Oh, yeah. They claim that the 30 GW of offshore wind will “avoid 78 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions”. Tens of millions of tonnes, sounds impressive, right?
But IF the IPCC is correct, and that’s a big if, this will reduce the temperature in the year 2050 by …
…
… wait for it …
…
… 0.0016°C. Which is almost three-thousandths of one degree F.
Can we please pass a law saying people proposing any laws or regulations in the name of “climate change” be required to tell us (and show their math) how much actual temperature difference that will make by 2050?
Go ahead. Ask the folks in New York, “Are you willing to pay four times the going rate for electricity for the rest of your life to MAYBE cool the globe by three-thousandths of one degree Fahrenheit a quarter century from now?”
There is NO “progress on climate.” Today we get more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels – which is about exactly where we were five years ago – despite the hundreds of billions spent. …
In 2023 the world burned more fossil fuels than at any other time in history.
There is NO “progress on climate.” Today we get more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels – which is about exactly where we were five years ago – despite the hundreds of billions spent. …
In 2023 the world burned more fossil fuels than at any other time in history. Here are the facts:
Global energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 1.7%, driven by China and India.
Fossil fuel consumption in 2023 reached a record high, rising by 1.5% to 505 exajoules.
China is by far the world’s largest consumer of primary energy, burning 34% of world consumption 170.7.
Almost no country is meeting their UN anti-fossil fuel targets.
It’s entertaining to watch liberal operatives explain why Kamala is suddenly retreating from her radical positions on everything from the border wall, to the Green New Deal, to reparations, to fracking, to taxing unrealized capital gains, to Medicare for all, et al.
She says even though her positions shift with the political winds, “my values haven’t changed.”
But her campaign’s explanation below for why she is now FOR fracking is a non sequitur.
As we’ve noted many times on these pages, there is NO “progress on climate.” Today we get more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels – which is about exactly where we were five years ago – despite the hundreds of billions spent.
As for Kamala’s statement that other nations are reaching their climate targets, that’s a myth too. Actually, in 2023 the world burned more fossil fuels than at any other time in history. Here are the facts:
Global energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 1.7%, driven by China and India.
Fossil fuel consumption in 2023 reached a record high, rising by 1.5% to 505 exajoules.
China is by far the world’s largest consumer of primary energy, burning 34% of world consumption 170.7.
Almost no country is meeting their UN anti-fossil fuel targets.
“These so-called green or ethical solutions aren’t solutions at all. Just very good marketing from the $1.5 trillion a year climate change industry.” A whole heap of inconvenient truths on the corporatist transfer of wealth of net zero. pic.twitter.com/Jr6fy2AY3X — James Melville (@JamesMelville) July 16, 2024 Rachel Mathews:
Bjorn Lomborg: ” The US produces mostly fossil fuel energy (84%). Solar and wind make up just 2.2% of all energy (not just electricity). Over the past decade, solar and wind increased total energy production by 2.1%. Fossil fuels increased energy production by 27.9%.
The US is mostly run on fossil fuels, also in 2023. 82% of all energy (not just electricity) consumed comes from coal, oil and gas. Nuclear is 9%, renewables (mostly biomass) is 9%. Solar and wind contributes 2.5%.
The US, has since 2019, produced more energy than it consumes. And it has never been more energy-independent since WWII. Last time of small energy surpluses was 1957.”
Juice: Why Wind and Solar Make Our Power Grid Less Reliable: Excerpt: “Just to produce one turbine, we have to extract 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of non-renewable plastic. Then we’ve got to transport that and burn fuel, getting it all carried across the world and put up. And none of these things that go into a turbine are renewable.”
h/t michel – Remember when we used to laugh about Soviets queuing for years to purchase a Lada?
Petrol cars ‘rationed to meet eco targets’
Warning comes as consumer demand for expensive electric cars continues to wane
Matt Oliver, INDUSTRY EDITOR 2 September 2024 • 9:32pm
…
Robert Forrester, chief executive of Vertu Motors, said manufacturers were delaying deliveries of cars until next year amid fears they will otherwise breach quotas set for them by the Government.
“It’s almost as if we can’t supply the cars that people want, but we’ve got plenty of the cars that maybe they don’t want.
“They [manufacturers] are trying to avoid the fines. So they’re constraining the ability for us to supply petrol cars in order to try and keep to the government targets.”
Even if people caved to this arrogant government coercion, Britain does not have the spare electricity to charge hundreds of thousands of new EVs.
A home EV fast charger uses around 10Kw. Half a million EVs plugged in at home around dinner time would draw 10Kw x 500,000 = 5,000,000 Kw = an additional 5GW from the grid. Spare generation capacity the UK simply doesn’t have.
UK faces 7.5GW energy generation crunch in 2028
Old resources are retiring, while new resources are slow to arrive
By 2028, the UK will face a power crisis as the grid’s guaranteed capacity will be less than power demands, according to a new report.
The crunch on capacity will be at its tightest in 2028, reaching 7.5GW, because the country is retiring old capacity faster than new resources can be brought online.
The situation is made worse by increasing demand for power, and delays to the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, according to a report from power plant operator Drax.
The burden of this latest green brainstorm will disproportionately affect poor people. It will drive up the cost of older gasoline vehicles, as people hang on to old vehicles longer.
The wealthy will not be impacted by vehicle sale rationing – no automobile dealer in their right mind would turn down a hundred thousand pound profit on the sale of a premium vehicle, if all they have to do to protect themselves from quota penalties is tell an ordinary person their vehicle has been delayed.
A key report published under the auspices of the Royal Society understated the cost of building a Net Zero electricity grid by half a trillion pounds, according to Net Zero Watch, in a post published today on its website.
Economics of alternative energy. Money in front of solar panels and wind turbunes. 3D rendered illustration.
Royal Society understates cost of Net Zero by half a trillion pounds
Net Zero grid will cost at least £38 billion per year to build
Scientists have failed to correct major error
A key report published under the auspices of the Royal Society understated the cost of building a Net Zero electricity grid by half a trillion pounds, according to Net Zero Watch, in a post published today on its website.
According to Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford, the error revolves around how the costs of building wind and solar farms and other equipment will change over the next 25 years. The Royal Society has used Whitehall estimates of the costs for 2040 but has applied them from the start of the build period. Mr Montford said:
“It is simply absurd to use estimated costs for a windfarm in 2040 when calculating the costs of building one today.”
Mr Montford said
“If we assume that costs fall, over 25 years, from the levels seen today to those assumed by the Royal Society, the cost of building the Net Zero grid is around £960 billion rather than the £410 billion claimed by the Royal Society.”
Mr Montford says that there is no doubt about what the Royal Society has done, since the basis of the figure they have calculated is clearly stated in the report. However, although the Royal Society author team has been aware of the problem for several months, they have made no correction.
Mr Montford said:
“If the error is corrected, the cost of decarbonising the grid looks unaffordable. £960 billion is £38 billion per year, at a time when we are cutting winter fuel allowance to save less than £2 billion per year. Setting these painful facts out clearly would certainly be politically inconvenient for the Government.”
One of the North Sea’s biggest oil field developments is in jeopardy after developers put the project on hold following a crackdown by Ed Miliband.
Developer blames tax raid as project plunges into uncertainty
One of the North Sea’s biggest oil field developments is in jeopardy after developers put the project on hold following a crackdown by Ed Miliband.
NEO Energy on Monday announced a slowdown of investment in various UK schemes, including the large Buchan Horst redevelopment, 93 miles off the coast of Aberdeen.The Telegraph has the story.
Buchan is the third-biggest upcoming North Sea project and is conservatively expected to yield about 70m barrels of oil, with peak production likely to hit about 35,000 barrels per day. It was expected to begin production in 2027.
But NEO claimed a tax raid and new consultation launched by the Labour Government had plunged the scheme into uncertainty.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is working with Energy Secretary Mr Miliband to increase the windfall tax on oil and gas businesses.
Mr Miliband’s department is also reviewing the environmental assessment process for North Sea oil and gas developments in a consultation due to run until the spring.
This was announced last month in response to a landmark Supreme Court ruling which said the “scope 3” emissions – those that would indirectly result from a development, such as cars running on petrol – must be taken into account.
Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and Mr Miliband previously vowed not to grant any new oil and gas licences if they won power in July’s election.
The review has prompted the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning, which handles development applications, to impose a temporary moratorium on applications that are already in motion as well, NEO Energy said.
The company said that combined with the harsher tax environment, this had implications for investment.
It added: “Against this uncertain backdrop, NEO and its owner HitecVision have taken the decision to materially slow down investment activities across all development assets in its portfolio.
“In relation to the Buchan Horst project, NEO awaits clarity regarding the UK regulatory and fiscal framework so that the full impact can be assessed.
“This will inevitably delay first oil timing in relation to the project which was previously forecast to be late 2027.”
Offshore Energy UK, which represents developers, has urged ministers to speed up the Energy Department consultation.
In a separate report published on Monday, the lobby group warned Labour’s tax raid on UK oil and gas companies would drive investment overseas and cost the country £13bn.
It said plans to further increase the windfall tax on oil and gas profits and scrap tax breaks would virtually halt all further investment into the North Sea.
New levies drawn up by Ms Reeves and Mr Miliband will result in North Sea oil and gas producers paying 78pc tax on profits from November, the highest rate of any UK industry.
Below I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup and we use a tremendous amount of electricity so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.
Below I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup and we use a tremendous amount of electricity so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.
Here is the basic derivation. It is kept simple and the numbers are all rounded off so they can be remembered. (The U.S. Energy Department should have done a detailed analysis long ago.)
— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil fueled electricity generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000 MWh.
— Assume grid scale battery facilities cost $300,000 per MWh of storage capacity. (Today’s cost is higher.)
— Thus the capital cost of this storage is 75 trillion dollars.
— Spreading this cost over 20 years gives an annual cost of 3.75 trillion dollars.
— U.S. household electricity usage is 1.5 trillion KWh per year.
— Thus the household cost is $2.50 per KWh.
— Average household usage is 10,500 KWh/yr.
— Thus the annual household cost of this storage capacity is $26,250.
— Today’s average annual electric bill is $1,800.
— Thus the electricity cost increase is over 14 times as much.
In short everyone’s electricity bill will be 14 times greater than today if wind and solar replace today’s fossil fuel powered generation under the Green New Deal.
This will be true of industrial and commercial consumers as well which will drive up the cost of virtually all goods and services. This impact is truly inflationary.
But this does not include the electrification of transportation and gas heat which are also part of the Green New Deal. Electrification is often estimated to roughly double the amount of electricity generated.
— Given electrification the cost of electricity might jump a whopping 28 times today’s cost. The Green New Deal causes the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500.
Of course the economy would likely collapse before this happened but this simple analysis is the necessary starting point for thinking about the incredible cost impact of the Green New Deal.
There are lots of technical refinements to be added to this analysis to make it a good engineering cost estimate. Some make the numbers go down others make them go up. I would love to see this done and would happily help.
For example the cost of batteries might go down a lot and there are studies that project this. Given that the material requirements for this vast amount of batteries greatly exceed our present mining and manufacturing capacity this may be unlikely but it is not impossible.
On the other hand this simple analysis assumes batteries charge and discharge from zero to 100% of capacity. If it is actually 10-90 or 20-80 then a great deal more storage capacity will be needed.
Then too the storage requirement can be reduced by overbuilding the wind and solar generating capacity. However this reduction is limited, I have been told to 180 million MWh, because there is still no solar at night and no wind when it does not blow hard enough.
But it is unlikely that these giant batteries have an average full performance life of 20 years.
Note too that this analysis does not include the cost of the enormous amount of wind and solar generating facilities. Nor does it include the cost of borrowing trillions of dollars.
The basic point is that the Green New Deal is impossibly expensive. There is no cure for intermittency.
The Labour Government claimed it would grow the economy, but this crazy policy is having the opposite effect. Car sales are reduced, manufacturers’ and dealers’ profit margins squeezed, while cheap Chinese EVs flood the market.
Car makers are rationing sales of petrol and hybrid vehicles in Britain to avoid hefty net zero fines, according to one of the country’s biggest dealership chains.
Robert Forrester, chief executive of Vertu Motors, said manufacturers were delaying deliveries of cars until next year amid fears they will otherwise breach quotas set for them by the Government.
This means someone ordering a car today at some dealerships will not receive it until February, he said.
At the same time, Mr Forrester warned manufacturers and dealers were grappling with a glut of more expensive electric vehicles (EVs) that are “not easily finding homes”.
“It’s almost as if we can’t supply the cars that people want, but we’ve got plenty of the cars that maybe they don’t want.
“They [manufacturers] are trying to avoid the fines. So they’re constraining the ability for us to supply petrol cars in order to try and keep to the government targets.”
The chief executive blamed the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which requires at least 22pc of cars sold by manufacturers to be electric from this year.
This target will gradually rise each year before reaching 80pc in 2030, with manufacturers made to pay £15,000 for every petrol car that exceeds their quota – unless they have so-called carbon credits to spend.
But the scheme has prompted stark warnings from bosses at major brands, such as Vauxhall owner Stellantis and Ford, which have said they cannot sacrifice profits by selling EVs at large discounts indefinitely.
Instead, they have previously warned they may be forced to restrict petrol car supplies to artificially boost their ZEV mandate performance.
The warning from Vertu is the first confirmation that carmakers have now begun doing so.
Mr Forrester added that although some people might cheer falling electric car prices, supporters of the ZEV mandate in its current form were “economic buffoons, because car manufacturers are being forced to discount EVs to such an extent that they’re making losses… and that is not a good thing for business”.
He said: “What the Government’s actually doing is constraining the new car market, which has a big impact on VAT receipts for them, and creates a business environment in the UK where manufacturers may question whether they want to make cars here.
“As Carlos Tavares [chief executive of Stellantis] has said, why should they sell cars at a loss because of UK government policy?
“The new car market is no longer a market, unfortunately. It’s a state-imposed supply chain.”
His comments came as Vertu said it expected lower first half profits as demand for new cars and more expensive electric vehicles remained under pressure. The group, which has 192 showrooms and after-sales sites across the UK, said new car sales by volume fell 5.8pc in the five months to July 31.
By contrast, Vertu says there is strong demand for used cars with September expected to be a particularly busy month.
Mr Forrester’s warning comes after the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), which represents car makers, slashed its forecast for electric car sales this year amid the ongoing slowdown in demand.
The group now predicts electric vehicles (EVs) will account for 18.5pc of the new car market in 2024, down from an earlier prediction of 19.8pc.
EV registrations surged higher in July but sales to private consumers continued to slump.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the SMMT, said the weakening demand for EVs among private consumers – despite heavy discounting by car makers – remained the industry’s “overriding concern”.
The Labour Government claimed it would grow the economy, but this crazy policy is having the opposite effect. Car sales are reduced, manufacturers’ and dealers’ profit margins squeezed, while cheap Chinese EVs flood the market.
It is time the useless Mike Hawes actually stood up and challenged the whole EV policy, which is doing so much harm to his members.
I have had many posts on the soaring consumer electricity costs suffered by the residents of those jurisdictions that have proceeded furthest down the road to all-renewable power. These are places like Germany, the UK, and California, where consumer electricity prices are double to triple the U.S. average.
I have had many posts on the soaring consumer electricity costs suffered by the residents of those jurisdictions that have proceeded furthest down the road to all-renewable power. These are places like Germany, the UK, and California, where consumer electricity prices are double to triple the U.S. average. But is that difference the result of their race to convert to wind and solar electricity generation, or does it stem instead from “bad luck,” or something else? Even as electricity prices in many of these places soar, advocates of wind and solar generation continue to claim that those resources are cheaper than the hydrocarbon alternatives. Do they have a point?
The latest back-and-forth has played out on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. On August 20, Republican candidate for Vice President J.D. Vance had an op-ed with the online headline “Harris Wages War on U.S. Energy.” He argued:
“The net-zero project is already stifling investment in the coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants that Americans rely on for reliable, affordable ‘base load’ electricity.”
On August 28, the Journal ran a responsive letter to the editor from a guy named Mark Z. Jacobson. Jacobson is a professor at Stanford University, and is perhaps the most prominent advocate of transition to electricity generation from entirely renewable sources, what he calls “WWS” (wind, water, solar), with some sort of energy storage thrown in as back-up. Jacobson broke onto the scene back in 2011 with a paper in an Elsevier publication called Science Direct, and followed that up with a major opus in PNAS in 2015 titled “Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.”The subsequent accumulation of evidence has not at all slowed Jacobson down. For example we have this piece in the Guardian from January 2023, key quote: “The influential academic says renewables alone can halt climate crisis. . . . Wind, water and solar can provide plentiful and cheap power, he argues, ending the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis.” And if I haven’t yet mentioned it, Jacobson is the driving force behind New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, via his acolyte Robert Howarth of Cornell.
So let’s consider Jacobson’s August 28 WSJ letter. Here is the core of it:
South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and North Dakota missed that problem [of expensive renewable power]. They are, aside from Montana, powered primarily by wind and are among the 12 states with the highest percentage of their electricity demand produced by clean, renewable sources. How do the 12 highly renewable states rank in terms of electricity prices? Ten of them are among the 19 states with the lowest electricity prices. Seven are among the 10 states with the lowest prices. South Dakota, with renewables supplying 95% of demand, has the ninth-lowest electricity price. North Dakota (52% renewables) has the lowest. More renewables mean lower prices.
Is there something to that? Well, let’s look at a few states, one at a time.
Jacobson lists South Dakota as his number one example. He says that renewables “supply[] 95% of demand,” yet the state has the “ninth-lowest electricity price.” Do publicly-available data back that up?
The answer is that publicly-available data for South Dakota are quite inconsistent and contradictory, but however you look at it they don’t come close to backing up Jacobson’s claim. Here is a page on South Dakota from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, with an update date of August 15, 2024. The data:
In 2023, wind provided 55% of South Dakota’s total electricity net generation. Wind surpassed the state’s previous leading electricity source, hydroelectric power, for the first time in 2021. Hydropower accounted for 21% of the state’s generation in 2023. . . . Renewable resources generated 77% of South Dakota’s total in-state electricity in 2023, almost all of it from wind and hydroelectric power.
So according to that, “renewables” provided 77% of SD’s generation, not the 95% claimed by Jacobson; and of the 77%, 21% came from hydro from dams on the Missouri River. Sorry if you don’t have a Missouri River running through your state to replicate that. Wind generated just 55%. Yes, that is better than El Hierro does in most years, but a long, long way from zero-emissions generation.
And now let’s take a look at the very different 2023 data from the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. These data are for electricity “consumed” in South Dakota, rather than electricity “generated” in South Dakota, which may or may not explain the gigantic discrepancy. Here is the PUC’s pie graph:
Suddenly coal is by far the largest source, at 36.13%, which puts it at more than the “renewables” wind, solar, and hydro combined (32.35%). Maybe all the rest of that wind generation gets given away to neighboring states at times of excess generation when SD can’t use it. I have no way of figuring that out.
Now, where did our friend Jacobson come up with the statistic that South Dakota supplies “95% of [electricity] demand] from renewables”? I have no idea. Most likely he is relying on the principle that leftists and climate activists don’t get fact-checked.
For what it’s worth, here is EIA’s chart of “average price of electricity to utility customers” for June 2024 (most recent month available). The states are not ranked in price order, but if I’m counting correctly South Dakota has the 16th lowest residential electricity rates among the states, and the 22nd lowest rates for “all sectors” combined. Not bad, but also not close to the “ninth lowest” that Jacobson claims.
Shall we try another state? Next in Jacobson’s list is Montana. Jacobson concedes that Montana is not “powered primarily by wind,” but then he says it is “among the 12 states with the highest percentage of their electricity demand produced by clean, renewable sources.” Take a closer look, and once again it turns out that Montana’s secret is dams on the Missouri River. The EIA (cheerleaders for “renewables” without telling you which one they are talking about) has this to say:
In 2023, Montana ranked among the top 10 states with the largest share of electricity generated from renewables, about 50%. Coal-fired power plants provided the largest share of Montana’s electricity generation in 2023, accounting for 45% of in-state generation.
But how much of that 50% from “renewables” is hydropower from the Missouri River dams, how much is wind, and how much is something else? The best source for that that I can find is this Report from the Montana legislature with an issue date of 2023, but data going only through 2021. A chart on page 24 going to 2021 shows about 40% of electricity generation from coal, another 40% from hydro, and about 10% from wind. There is a substantial unspecified “other” category.
Again, for what it’s worth, on EIA’s June 2024 chart, Montana’s electricity rates appear to be 12th lowest among the states for residential, and 11th lowest for “all sectors.”
So Jacobson’s first two examples don’t come close to supporting his case. Looking at the other states he cites, I think the one that best supports his case is Iowa. So let’s look there.
Iowa, for better or worse, has gone farther than any other state in building wind turbines to supply its electricity. According to the EIA here, wind turbines generated 62% of Iowa’s electricity in 2022, which was the highest percentage of any state. From another EIA page here, Iowans purchased 54,203,955 MWh of electricity in 2022, which would make for average demand of 6188 MW (dividing by 8760). The Iowa Utilities Commission here tells us the generating resources that Iowa has deployed to meet this demand: 12,543 MW of wind capacity, 5543 of coal, 4148 of natural gas, 5253 of petroleum, and small amounts of others. What this tells us is that Iowa had plenty of generation resources to meet demand before it started building any wind turbines. It has more than a two-times overbuild of wind turbines alone as against average demand, and it has more than a four times overbuild if you count everything. Clearly, Iowa has a lot of generation resources sitting idle most of the time. And, whatever its average rates may be, they could be a lot lower if they stopped supporting large amounts of mostly-idle capital.
So where do Iowa’s rates rank nationally? According to that same EIA chart, they are 22nd lowest for residential rates, and 10th lowest for “all sectors.”
Two comments:
(1) At a 2x overbuild of wind turbine capacity and 62% of generation from wind, Iowa has pushed up against the limit of what it can get by just building more wind turbines. As of now, it has barely dipped its toe into the world of energy storage. Going forward, it will quickly find that more wind turbines can only marginally increase the percent of its electricity from wind, and buying batteries is completely uneconomic and not a viable solution.
(2) The prices of electricity from wind are wildly distorted by the myriad of tax benefits and subsidies available to wind turbine developers. Just for starters, there is the federal investment tax credit (30% of the capital value of the investment in wind turbines) and the federal production tax credit (2.75 cents per kWh of electricity produced). Then there is the complete exemption from property taxes for five years from the state of Iowa. There are multiple federal guaranteed loan programs providing subsidized interest rates. There are handouts of every sort from the likes of the Agriculture Department and the Rural Electrification Administration.
Now, how much are all these subsidies and handouts worth in consumer electricity rates? It’s all completely opaque. There’s no way for an informed citizen to figure it out. The subsidies are easily worth 5 cents per kWh, and probably more like 10 or even 15 cents per kWh. Add in the value of the subsidies, and Iowa would not be in the lower ranks for electricity prices, but rather well toward the top.
So when Jacobson recommends building wind turbines to lower electricity prices, he’s not really saying that they are economically cheaper; he’s just saying that sufficient subsidies are available to make the consumer prices appear cheaper. He’s using gkam accounting.
Anyway, we’ll see if Iowa and its co-enthusiasts for wind power can keep marching forward to the 100% zero-emissions future. I will be the first to congratulate them if they can pull it off. But let’s face it — they can’t. And as they start adding storage, their prices are set to go through the roof.
The last time we checked on the nation’s energy industry, the Biden-Harris administration banned drilling for gas and oil on 28 million acres of Alaska (rescinding the order signed by President Donald Trump).
The last time we checked on the nation’s energy industry, the Biden-Harris administration banned drilling for gas and oil on 28 million acres of Alaska (rescinding the order signed by President Donald Trump).
However, there is better news on the nuclear energy front. This is good news given that nuclear energy is the only rival to fossil fuels in efficiency and cost-effectiveness and is worthy of supplying power on a civilization-level.
According to Interesting Engineering, the new Hermes reactor will be the first one built in the United States in 50 years that won’t be cooled by light water. Instead, it will use a system of molten fluoride salt, and a TRISO (tri-structural isotropic particle) fuel pebble bed design will power the generator.
Molten fluoride salts have “excellent chemical stability and tremendous capacity for transferring heat,” per the report, meaning it stays cooler and dissipates heat much faster than the light water that has been used for so long in American reactors.
The fuel bed consists of hundreds of millimeter-sized particles of uranium encased in multiple layers of special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel, per Ultra Safe Nuclear. The ceramic casing is stronger and more resilient than the typical zirconium alloy, meaning it can withstand higher temperatures and neutron bombardment past the failure point of other types of fuel.
On top of that, because each individual piece of fuel is so small, in the event that one fails, the ensuing burst of radiation would be significantly lessened — and less likely to cause further damage, thanks to the coolant system.
Generation IV nuclear power utilizes a system of fuel fabrication plants and reprocessing facilities that together overcome some of the shortcomings of the previous generations of nuclear power plants.
To be classified as Generation IV, a system must meet, or at least have the ability to meet, the following criteria:
(1) it is much more fuel-efficient than current plants;
(2) it is designed in such a way that severe accidents are not possible, that is, plant failure or an external event (such as an earthquake) should not result in radioactive material release to the outside world;
[3] the fuel cycle is designed in such a way that uranium and plutonium are never separated (“diverged”) but only present in a mix and with other elements. This makes it more difficult to create nuclear weapons.
Construction is underway on the new nuclear power plant in Tennessee, in the iconic city of Oak Ridge (famous for its importance in World War Two’s Manhattan Project).
Kairos Power has begun building the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, the first Gen IV reactor approved for construction by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Hermes reactor utilizes a fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor design, differing from conventional light-water reactors.
“Generation IV nuclear power plant designs are revolutionary, in that they are planned to use a very different set of technologies than the reactors we use today,” Ross Peel, a professor with King’s College London’s Centre for Science and Security Studies told Newsweek.
Unfortunately, we are behind China when it comes to the construction. It launched its construction of a Generation IV reactor late last year.
The Shidaowan nuclear power plant, which features the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, started commercial operations on December 6, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the project’s developers, said.
“China’s independently developed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor demonstrator commenced commercial operation,” CNNC said in a statement.
“It signifies that China has completed the world’s first commercially operational modular nuclear power plant with fourth-generation nuclear technology, marking the transition of fourth-generation nuclear technology from experiments to the commercial market.”
Interestingly, more and more countries are rethinking their ban on nuclear energy, likely in light of the realities of “green energy” as well as the improvements being made in the Generation IV systems. Switzerland, for example, has reversed its outright ban of nuclear.
The Swiss government said on Wednesday it plans to overturn a ban on building new power plants to strengthen local energy supply at a time of increased geopolitical tension.
Energy Minister Albert Roesti said the government would submit a proposal to amend nuclear legislation by the end of 2024 so it can be debated in parliament next year.
“Over the long term, new nuclear power plants are one possible way of making our supply more secure in a geopolitically uncertain time,” Roesti told a press conference.
Failure to retain the option could be seen as a betrayal by future generations, Roesti argued.
All of these are positive developments for those of us who enjoy the perks of civilization, such a light at night and heat during the winter.
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