April 01, 2023

Important New Report Explores The Futility Of Wind Power

April 01, 2023/ Francis Menton

A reader named Bill Ponton has just produced an important new Report that explores the effects and costs of continuing increases in generation of electricity from wind.
The Report has the title “The Cost of Increasing UK Wind Power Capacity: A Reality Check.”
Ponton’s Report follows and builds on prior work of Roger Andrews and Ken Gregory that has previously been featured at this site.
The idea of each of these researchers has been to use publicly available data from some jurisdiction as to electricity consumption, and as to electricity generation from each source — natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, coal, hydro, etc. — to build a spreadsheet that can then be manipulated to investigate what happens on changing various assumptions going forward.

March 28, 2023

Litigating The Government's Metastasizing Censorship Regime

March 28, 2023/ Francis Menton

For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please.
Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation.
The result has been the Twitter Files, an ongoing series of Twitter threads laying bare the coordination between pre-Musk Twitter and dozens of government actors to suppress disfavored speech. The most recent nineteenth segment of the Twitter Files series was published on March 20 by Matt Taibbi.
Now that it is clear that the systematic censorship of conservative voices is very real and has been largely directed and coordinated by the government itself behind the scenes, is there anything that can be done about that through litigation?

March 26, 2023

March 26, 2023/ Jane Menton

There are different ways of looking at the issue of human inequality.
The modern Left obsesses about inequality as measured in dollars of income. But if one measures inequality based on quality-of-life, it quickly becomes clear that we have achieved great progress toward equality on the things that really count.
Much of that progress is at risk of reversal from imposition of the green dream.

March 23, 2023

March 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

It’s budget time in Albany. In recent years, the custom has come to be that most if not all important policy issues for the year get considered as part of the annual budget, even if they aren’t germane to that subject. So everything is on the table.
The Governor and Legislature, both in control of progressive Democrats, are competing to see who can come up with the most destructive proposals to add to the mix. The basic mind-set of all the elected officials is that if only we raise enough tax money and spend it on enough handouts to favored constituencies, we can shortly achieve nirvana and utopia.
There is exactly one conservative-side think tank in New York State, known as the Empire Center, that makes a systematic effort to put forth a contrary agenda. The Empire Center is just out with a big Report called Next New York, with a series of chapters setting out counter-proposals in the major policy areas: public safety, K-12 education, Medicaid and healthcare, energy, transportation and transit, housing, and so forth. Today the Empire Center held a conference, which I attended, in connection with the release of the Report.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to cover several of the subjects from the Report. For today, I’ll start with my favorite, energy policy.

March 20, 2023

March 20, 2023/ Francis Menton

Over the weekend of March 11-12, Silicon Valley Bank got taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the U.S., with total assets of over $200 billion. Depositors were withdrawing their deposits at a rapid pace, and the bank was quickly running out of liquidity to meet the demands.
And then over this most recent weekend, it was Credit Suisse, suddenly forced by Swiss regulators into a shotgun wedding with its larger Swiss rival UBS. CS was a much older and larger player than SVB, founded in 1856, with over $500 billion of assets (down from over $800 billion as recently as 2021), and some 50,000 employees to SVB’s 8,500.
Both institutions fell victim to some combination of the usual financial risks that are endemic to the banking business. But if you had looked at the information they were putting out as recently as a month ago, you would have had to conclude that their corporate focus was entirely on the latest political fads that have little to nothing to do with the real risks facing them.

March 18, 2023

March 18, 2023/ Francis Menton

Every place that tries increasing the percentage of electricity generation that comes from wind and sun then experiences rapidly rising consumer electricity costs.
The reasons why this happens are not complicated. Even at relatively low levels of wind and solar penetration, backup fossil fuel or other generation cannot be closed, so consumers must pay for two duplicate generation systems. At higher levels of wind/solar penetration, things like overbuilding, curtailment, and hugely expensive grid-scale energy storage come into play.
In my post of February 8, 2023, I asked “Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?”
And yet it is an endlessly-repeated mantra of wind/solar advocates that generating electricity from those sources is “cheaper” than generating the same electricity from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.
In this post I will make a proposal for a way to definitively expose the falsity of the claims that wind and solar are “cheaper” than fossil fuels for electricity generation.