October 17, 2022

They Can't Make Green Energy Using Only Green Energy

October 17, 2022/ Francis Menton

Not being a dope, you likely realized a long time ago that it was going to take a lot of energy to manufacture the components of the future green energy utopia. Wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and so forth — there is lots of steel, other metals, and silica involved that all need to be melted at high temperatures to get formed into the devices. How are they going to achieve that at reasonable cost using just the wind and sun as energy sources?
Up to now, the main strategy has been to buy most of the devices from China, where they are made largely using energy from coal. Out of sight, out of mind.
But both Europe and the U.S. have made an effort to get at least somewhat into the game of making these things.

October 14, 2022

Some Banks And Energy Companies Finally Starting To Get Some Backbone

October 14, 2022/ Francis Menton

There’s nothing like a good energy crisis to bring a dose of reality to climate change and renewable energy fantasies.
It seems like it was barely a few months ago that every big financial institution and every big energy company was completely on board with the crash program to eliminate carbon emissions from the world. In 2021, in the run-up to the Glasgow climate conference, a large group of banks and other financial institutions formed something called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or GFANZ, with the mission of using their financial leverage to force the net zero transition on the world. From the GFANZ website:
GFANZ brings together independent, sector-specific alliances to tackle net-zero transition challenges and connects the financial community to the Race to Zero campaign, climate scientists and experts, and civil society.
All the cool kids raced to join up.

October 11, 2022

October 11, 2022/ Francis Menton

If you read this blog regularly, you likely are a follower of the global warming wars — the ongoing political struggle over government-led efforts in the US and elsewhere to transform the energy economy to get rid of fossil fuels and their associated “carbon emissions.”
Lately, those wars have been focused less on what might be called the “science” of global warming — that is, the extent to which human carbon emissions may be causing atmospheric warming and whether that warming might be dangerous — and more on issues of practicality and cost of the proposed of energy transition. After all, as to the “science” issues, we are instructed endlessly by our politicians and media that the science of global warming is “settled.” So what’s the point of debating that any more?
In the real world, the “science” behind the claim that human carbon emissions are heading us toward some kind of planetary catastrophe is not only not “settled,” but actually non-existent. Nevertheless debating that subject can quickly lead to arguments couched in technical jargon and mathematics that very few people will try to follow. By contrast, almost anybody can quickly grasp why wind and solar electricity generation can’t work to power a modern economy and will multiply electricity bills by an order of magnitude.
But don’t get the idea that everybody has just given up on exposing the fake “science” behind the global warming scare.

October 08, 2022

October 08, 2022/ Francis Menton

Over in Europe, things are looking bad for the economy, largely driven by a rapid increase in household and business energy bills.
In the UK, average household energy bills have recently risen to about triple where they were just a year ago; and Bloomberg reports that “tens of thousands” of UK businesses are at risk of closure due to soaring energy costs. In Germany, KAKE reports on October 7 that energy costs are “savaging German industry,” with natural gas prices in particular up 400% from January to September 2022.

So how did they get into this mess?
You might think, that’s easy to understand. Obviously, they pursued “Net Zero” carbon emissions programs, building weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels that produce nothing most of the time, while closing reliable coal power plants, banning fracking, and otherwise suppressing fossil fuels, with the sole exception of imports of natural gas. When the gas market spiked, they had no other backup for the wind and sun, and their energy prices soared.

October 06, 2022

October 06, 2022/ Francis Menton

At this website, I try to give readers a steady flow of the latest instances of official energy madness, the ongoing efforts of our politicians, bureaucrats, academics and journalists to undermine and destroy the energy infrastructure that is the basis for our prosperity and our comfortable lives.
But if you just read these examples one by one, however outrageous they may be individually, you can lose track of the overall picture. In the big picture, our government, aided and abetted by academics and journalists, is conducting a full scale war on the energy sector of the economy.
Now comes along a guy named Joseph Toomey, who has published a relatively long piece at RealClearEnergy with the title “Energy Inflation Was By Design.”

October 02, 2022

October 02, 2022/ Francis Menton

Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.
But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.
So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.