June 13, 2022

Hydrogen Is Unlikely Ever To Be A Viable Solution To The Energy Storage Conundrum

June 13, 2022/ Francis Menton

What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production.
These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.
If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts.
The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.
Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity.

June 10, 2022

Do Additional Gun Control Laws Have Much Potential To Reduce Gun Violence?

June 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.
But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

June 07, 2022

June 07, 2022/ Francis Menton

Today is primary day — and recall day — in California. I’m writing this on the East coast before any election returns are in. But there is some modest hope of a slight retreat from the worst excesses of progressivism.
Joel Kotkin — professor at Chapman University out there — weighs in with a June 5 column at Spiked, sounding a small note of optimism. The headline and sub-headline are “America’s great cities are gripped by decline and disorder. Voters have had enough of ‘progressive’ leaders who are presiding over spiralling violence and crime.” Excerpt:
For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
Fair enough. But let’s keep some perspective. These are a few modest gains in a sea of bad news.

June 05, 2022

June 05, 2022/ Francis Menton

It’s official: the world is committed to rapidly reducing CO2 emissions. Just look at the the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or President Biden’s April 22, 2021 press release, or California’s SB 100 climate act, or New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or Germany’s Energiewende, or the UK’s Net Zero pledge, or any of many other such pledges.
And essentially all of woke corporate America is on board with the program. Consider the tidal wave of so-called “ESG” investing, focused on re-organizing corporate activities to reduce carbon emissions. Super-woke banking giant JP Morgan is leading the charge.
And yet, somehow it just doesn’t seem to be happening.

June 03, 2022

June 03, 2022/ Francis Menton

When President Biden talks, there may or may not be any connection between what he says and the real world. Yes, you need to give every politician some leeway, since most of what any politician says will fall in the general realm of political exaggeration or hyperbole. But even within the disreputable category of politicians, Biden can take the lack of connection with reality to a whole new level.
You may have your own favorite among Biden’s preposterous statements. For me, the very most preposterous is one that he has been repeating over and over for the past several months, namely that his energy plans, including expansion of wind and solar electricity generation together with fossil fuel suppression, will save American families the very specific amount of $500 per year each.
This claim has popped up in multiple places and multiple formulations. One example came in the State of the Union speech back in March, where Biden said, “Let’s cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combatting climate change.”
It’s just not possible for anyone who thinks about the subject for even a few minutes to believe that building more and more wind and solar generation facilities as our primary sources of energy will do anything other than vastly increase the costs of energy for the American people.

May 30, 2022

May 30, 2022/ Francis Menton

Last week I had a post titled “A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State.” The post discussed a recent case out of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Jarkesy v. SEC, where the Fifth Circuit ruled that an SEC prosecution of Mr. Jarkesy before its own Administrative Law Judge violated the Constitution for, among other things, denying Mr. Jarkesy his right to a jury trial, and giving the SEC unfettered discretion to decide which of its prosecutions can avoid federal District Court jurisdiction.
In the Jarkesy case, a relatively new organization called the New Civil Liberties Alliance played a significant role as amicus. Founded only five years ago (2017) by Philip Hamburger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School, the NCLA has quickly made a big mark for itself in the field of constitutional litigation.
Hamburger was the author of the 2014 book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, which, although perhaps addressed to a somewhat narrow audience of nerds such as myself, nevertheless has created shock waves in the complacent world of federal bureaucrats who had for decades engaged in rampant unconstitutional practices without effective challenge.