December 24, 2022

Bring On The Electricity Cost Crisis!

December 24, 2022/ Francis Menton

In a post earlier this week, I celebrated the adoption by New York State of its Scoping Plan that tells us how we are going to accomplish the great transition to 70% “renewable” electricity by 2030 and zero-emissions electricity by 2040.
The summary is: “just build a lot of offshore wind turbines and batteries.” Unfortunately, nobody seems to have done the basic arithmetic to see whether the prospective facilities will suffice to supply enough electricity to meet demand at all times. But then, this Scoping Plan is the product of the Important People, and why do the Important People need to trouble themselves with such minutiae? After all, they have a planet to save.
What that prior post did not consider was the likely cost to New York consumers of trying to buy electricity in a future at times when the wind is calm, the sun is dark, and fossil fuels have been suppressed.
How high might the cost go when everybody has to bid at the same time for the small amounts of hydro or nuclear that may remain?

December 21, 2022

You Must Assume That All Information Put Out By Our Government Is Corrupt

December 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country.
These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.
So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power?

December 19, 2022

December 19, 2022/ Francis Menton

Today was a big day on the way to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The press release has the headline “New York State Climate Action Council Finalizes Scoping Plan to Advance Nation-Leading Climate Law.” Here also is a link to the Scoping Plan itself.
Taking a look at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I find that the two biggest elements in getting to this zero-emissions electricity system are supposedly going to be offshore wind turbines and energy storage. I’ve covered the energy storage issues extensively here.
But how about this offshore wind thing? Surely, to commit New York to transitioning to using offshore wind as the primary source of electricity only seven years from now, they must have a very solid game plan for how it is going to happen.
Actually, as with everything else here, they have no idea.

December 16, 2022

December 16, 2022/ Francis Menton

Yesterday I got two emails from Harvard University, as I presume all other Harvard alumni also did. There’s big news: the Presidential Search Committee has announced who will become the next President of the University. It’s Claudine Gay, currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest constituent piece of the institution. She will become President on July 1, 2023, when current President Larry Bacow steps down (after only five years).
Have I heard of this person before? . . .
The picture emerges of Gay as the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.

December 13, 2022

December 13, 2022/ Francis Menton

It occurs to me that before moving on from my obsession with energy storage and and its manifest limitations, I should address the policy implications of this situation.
I apologize if these implications may seem terribly obvious to regular readers, or for that matter to people who have just thought about these issues for, say, five minutes. Unfortunately, our powers-that-be don’t seem to have those five minutes to figure out the obvious, so we’ll just have to bash them over the head with it.
Here are the three most obvious policy implications that nobody in power seems to have figured out:

December 10, 2022

December 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

As my last post reported, the Official Party Line from our government holds that we have this “100% Clean Electricity” thing about 90% solved. As the government-funded NREL put it in their August 30, 2022 press release, “[a] growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible.”
But then they admit that that statement does not cover what they call the "last 10% challenge” — providing for the worst seasonal droughts of sun and wind, that result in periods when there is no renewable power to meet around 10% of annual electricity demand.
That last 10%, says NREL, will require one or more “technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale.”
But hey, we’ve got 90% of this renewable transition thing solved. How hard could figuring out that last 10% really be?