April 06, 2023

British Climate Activist Responds To Ponton's UK Wind Power "Reality Check"

April 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?
After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.
So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.

April 03, 2023

Bill Ponton's "Reality Check" On UK Wind Power: The Issue Of Energy Storage

April 03, 2023/ Francis Menton

Bill Ponton’s new Report, “The Cost of Increasing Wind Power: A Reality Check,” contains a short but pithy section addressing the question of energy storage.
Here’s the question to be addressed: If after the first round of overbuilding, adding new wind generation resources adds little useful energy and most of the added generation ends up getting “curtailed,” then why not just add some batteries or other energy storage to the system? Wind energy advocates suggest that some form of batteries can store the excess electricity production until it is needed, and everything will then just balance out in perfect equilibrium.
Is there any problem here?
Ponton does the simple calculations with his UK 2022 spreadsheet to derive how much storage in GWh will be needed, and what its functional characteristics must be.

April 01, 2023

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

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.