Another Small Dose Of Realism On The Prospects For A 100% Renewable Grid

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As official Manhattan Contrarian April Fool Germany -- not to mention U.S. states like New York and California -- careen toward 100% renewable energy utopia, few stop to ask the question of how this is supposed to work from an engineering perspective.  Is it as simple as just building a bunch more wind turbines and solar panels and assuming that everything will be just fine?  A youngish Stanford professor, Mark Jacobson, puts out a couple of papers saying that he's made a computer model, and all it will take to make a 100% renewable system (solar, wind, water) will be maybe a little new-fangled storage (not yet invented), plus a few extra transmission lines (no costs provided).  Suddenly this guy has a celebrity following ranging from Mark Ruffalo to Leonardo DiCaprio to Governor Jerry Brown of California.  But before we go down the road of covering the landscape with these devices, will anyone address what it will take to make this work as a reliable 24/7 electricity system, and how much that project will cost?

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A Nomination For The Biggest April Fool: Germany!

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I know it's Easter Sunday, and I don't mean to be sacrilegious, but I can't help noticing that it's also April Fool's Day.  Unfortunately, human foolishness is much more of a topic for the Manhattan Contrarian than religion.  Can we come up with a nomination for the biggest April Fool of 2018?  I nominate the country of Germany!

Regular readers will notice that I have returned repeatedly to the subject of Germany's futile and delusional efforts to "save the planet" by replacing energy that works with energy that does not work ("renewables"), while in the process roughly tripling the cost of electricity for German consumers.  A recent post on February 10 was titled "How Self-Delusional Can We Be About The Cost Of Electricity From 'Renewables'?"   Attempting to understand how electricity coming from the seemingly free wind and sun could lead to a tripling of electricity prices, that post noted that Germany -- with peak electricity demand of about 83 GW -- had rushed in recent years to build "renewable" capacity that had reached about 84 GW, theoretically enough to supply all the electricity they would ever need.  But somehow, Germany still had retained fossil fuel generating capacity of about 108 GW, which is about the same fossil fuel capacity you would want to have to supply 83 GW of peak demand if you had no renewable capacity at all.  Despite spending hundreds of billions of euros on the renewable capacity, they had not been able to get rid of any fossil fuel capacity at all!  They still need all the fossil fuel capacity for backup when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.  (The data came from this report from German think tank Agora Energiewende.)

That post inspired a comment from reader BrianE, who asked:

I would be interested in knowing how much less CO2 Germany . . . [is] producing for their 30 cent/kW electricity.

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Things For You To Feel Guilty About Today

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When you get right down to it, the fundamental driver of the progressive/New York mindset is guilt.  By leading your affluent and comfortable life, you have caused great suffering among the downtrodden and oppressed people of the nation and the world!  And now you must atone for your sins!  The atonement shall consist of acquiescing in (and paying for) collective solutions imposed upon you by your moral betters in government and academia.  Of course the solutions will not work -- collective solutions to human problems never work -- but that does not matter.  What matters is that at least some of your feelings of guilt will be alleviated through your submission to the atonement.  Remarkable numbers of people among the educated and affluent actually do feel guilty about their position in life, and therefore are highly vulnerable to this kind of appeal.

If you do not share the propensity to believe that all imperfections in the world have been caused by your sins -- and I, for one, do not share that propensity -- then observing the progressives taking their guilt trips can provide a good deal of entertainment and humor.  How about a couple of examples for today?

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Candidate For Governor Of New York: Cynthia Nixon!

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You can feel the excitement!  Cynthia Nixon has announced that she is running for Governor of New York!  I assume you have heard of her, but if you haven't, she's one of the actresses from Sex and the City.  Could there be a more perfect candidate to represent the super-progressive wing of the progressive New York Democratic Party?  She's famous!  She's gay!  She's beautiful!  She's won more awards than you can count -- Tonys and Grammys and Emmys and Golden Globes and even a Golden Raspberry ("worst actress") for one of the Sex and the City movies!  She has great name recognition!  And she doesn't dissent on a single official position of New York progressive orthodoxy!  

Nixon will run against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary in September.  And, given her "qualifications" (see above) she might even give him a pretty good run for his money.

So shall we take a look at some of her positions on policy issues?  Here's my summary:  Nixon is a total airhead who does little more than parrot the talking points of the special interests, mainly public employee unions, who have captured New York State government.  Go for it, New York progressives!

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New York Taxi Industry Update, And The Problem With Unsustainable Government Giveaways

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New York Taxi Industry Update, And The Problem With Unsustainable Government Giveaways

Way back in August 2015 I wrote a post titled "Uber Shows How To Break Crony Capitalism."  At the time, Uber was just getting going in New York, and the taxi medallion system was just starting to crack.  As recently as the previous year (2014), New York taxi medallions, conveying the exclusive right to pick up passengers on the street, had been going for over $1 million each.  But the decline had begun:

[W]ith the advent of Uber, the value of the medallions has suddenly plummeted.  This article from CNN Money in July reports that the value of a medallion is off by some 40% from its peak just last year. 

The post described how the medallion system imposed large inconveniences on passengers and potential passengers, but had up to then been unbreakable due to vested interests of owners and lenders in the value created by artificial scarcity.  The owners and lenders (mostly the latter) then made massive contributions to local politicians to assure the continuance of the system.  At the time of the post, the taxi industry had just contributed a reported $500,000 to the first (2013) election campaign of supposed "progressive" Bill de Blasio, and, to no one's surprise, de Blasio was making fighting Uber a signature issue of his first term.

Here we now are, only about two and a half years later, and the former medallion taxi industry seems to be in its end game.

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Klimate Kraziness: A California Judge Holds A "Tutorial" On Climate Science

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You may recall that back in January I identified a group of lawsuits filed by municipalities in California (as well as a copycat case filed by the City of New York) as candidates for "the stupidest litigation in the country."    These are the cases that accuse five major oil companies (Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips) of "nuisance" for supposedly causing global warming, that is supposedly causing the sea level to rise, that is supposedly going to cause damage to the California municipalities some time in our great grandchildren's lifetimes, maybe.  I particularly got a good laugh out of the lack of any credible scientific basis for the claims. . . .

[O]n February 27 Judge Alsup ordered the parties to present to him a "tutorial" on climate science, to be held on March 21.  On March 8 the good judge went another step and presented a list of questions that he wanted the parties to answer at the March 21 "tutorial."

If you take a look at the judge's questions, you may immediately note that he starts from a fundamental misapprehension of what "science" is.  Take, for example, his question 8: "What are the main sources of heat that account for the incremental rise in temperature on Earth?"  I guess the idea is that you must address these kinds of questions to "scientists," because after all "scientists" are the true knowers of this kind of a body of esoteric knowledge.

Unfortunately, Judge Alsup did not think to pose the one question that is fundamental to real science, which is that, if you claim that some hypothesis has been established (here, that human CO2 emissions are the principal cause of dangerous global warming), then can you kindly demonstrate that credible empirical data prove that the null hypothesis must be rejected? 

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