Free Republic

It’s bad enough that American taxpayers have been repeatedly fleeced by President Obama’s many failed “green” projects, now the commander-in-chief is dedicating an extra $2 billion—on top of $2 billion already dispersed in 2011—to make federal buildings in the United States energy efficient. It’s a necessary expense to protect the planet, according to the global warming movement spearheaded—and largely funded—by the U.S. government and much of the international community. This particular investment will cut carbon pollution by more than 380 million metric tons, according to a White House announcement. That’s equivalent to removing 80 million cars from roads for a...

Ethiopia's bold decision to pay for a huge dam itself has overturned generations of Egyptian control over the Nile's waters, and may help transform one of the world's poorest countries into a regional hydropower hub. By spurning an offer from Cairo for help financing the project, Addis Ababa has ensured it controls the construction of the Renaissance Dam on a Nile tributary. The electricity it will generate - enough to power a giant rich-world city like New York - can be exported across a power-hungry region. But the decision to fund the huge project itself also carries the risk of...

The American coal industry is accusing the Obama administration of using the Environmental Protection Agency to end the use of coal despite the president's claim of having an "all of the above" energy policy. ... the EPA's MATS rules, which go into effect in January 2016, will devastate coal production in America and .. about 60 gigawatts of coal-fired generation coming off-line .. One of Monseu’s issues is the way she said the administration is targeting coal, which currently fuels around 40 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. "Increasingly we face a situation where policy is dictated not...

Dallas-based Energy Future Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early today after reaching a deal with creditors that calls for breaking off its power generation and retail arms in exchange for reducing debt. The bankruptcy petition was filed in Delaware. The state’s largest power company, formed in 2007 with the $45 billion buyout of the former TXU Corp. led by KKR, Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs, has been struggling under the weight of $40 billion in debt as its revenues have plunged with lower prices for natural gas and electricity. Under terms of the proposed restructuring agreement, Texas...

Experts warn of a growing fragility as coal-fired plants are shut down, nuclear power is reduced and consumers switch to renewable energy.As temperatures plunged to 16 below zero in Chicago in early January and set record lows across the eastern U.S., electrical system managers implored the public to turn off stoves, dryers and even lights or risk blackouts. A fifth of all power-generating capacity in a grid serving 60 million people went suddenly offline, as coal piles froze, sensitive electrical equipment went haywire and utility operators had trouble finding enough natural gas to keep power plants running. The wholesale price...

(Phys.org) —Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new and unconventional battery chemistry aimed at producing batteries that last longer than previously thought possible. In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ORNL researchers challenged a long-held assumption that a battery's three main components—the positive cathode, negative anode and ion-conducting electrolyte—can play only one role in the device. The electrolyte in the team's new battery design has dual functions: it serves not only as an ion conductor but also as a cathode supplement. This cooperative chemistry, enabled by the use...

SALEM, Oregon, April 24, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Marion County Board of Commissioners announced late Wednesday that they are putting a stop to a waste-to-energy facility’s program that was incinerating aborted babies to produce electricity. The B.C. Catholic’s Steve Weatherbe revealed April 21 that the British Columbia government was sending fetal remains to the Covanta Marion waste-to-energy facility to be burned along with other medical waste. The story made national news after LifeSiteNews reported on the revelation Wednesday afternoon. “We are outraged and disgusted that this material could be included in medical waste received at the facility,” said Commissioner Janet...

An Oregon county commission has ordered an incinerator to stop accepting boxed medical waste to generate electricity after learning the waste it’s been burning may include tissue from aborted fetuses from British Columbia. Sam Brentano, chairman of the Marion County board of commissioners, said late Wednesday the board is taking immediate action to prohibit human tissue from future deliveries at the plant that has been turning waste into energy since 1987. “We provide an important service to the people of this state and it would be a travesty if this program is jeopardized due to this finding,” he said in...

British Columbia authorities admit that they are sending the remains of aborted babies to Oregon so that they can be burned to generate electricity.LifeSite News: British Columbia, April 23, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The British Columbia Health Ministry has admitted that the remains of babies destroyed by abortion in B.C. facilities are ending up in a waste-to-power facility in the United States, providing electricity for residents of Oregon. The province’s Health Ministry said in an email to the B.C. Catholic that “biomedical waste” shipped to the U.S. to be incinerated includes “human tissue, such as surgically removed cancerous tissue, amputated limbs,...

It could mean the end of the daily hunt for power cables. Korean researchers have unveiled an experimental wireless recharging system that could top up the mobile of everyone in the office wirelessly. The system can transmit power up to 5 metres, and charge up to 40 phones at a time - and is even powerful enough to power a TV.

~snip~ "Let there be light," said the Lord. And there was light and there was energy, and there was solar energy for all of us. You and I are born equal under the sun, with equal rights to the use of our sun's energy. Unless the path in the delivery of solar energy changes, some of us will be making rent payments to some of our neighbors for the use of solar electricity for the rest of our lives, making the wealth divide even more isolating. This article attempts to throw some light on this reality. The fossil fuels that...

The average price for a kilowatthour (KWH) of electricity hit a March record of 13.5 cents, according data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was up about 5.5 percent from 12.8 cents per KWH in March 2013. ... The BLS’s seasonally adjusted electricity price index rose to 209.341 this March, the highest it has ever been, up 10.537 points—or 5.3 percent--from 198.804 in March 2013. ... per capita electricity production peaked in the United States in 2007.

Natural gas-fired power plants accounted for just over 50% of new utility-scale generating capacity added in 2013. Solar provided nearly 22%, a jump up from less than 6% in 2012. Coal provided 11% and wind nearly 8%. Almost half of all capacity added in 2013 was located in California. In total, a little over 13,500 megawatts (MW) of new capacity was added in 2013, less than half the capacity added in 2012. Natural gas. Natural gas capacity additions were less than in 2012, as 6,861 MW were added in 2013, compared to 9,210 MW in 2012. The capacity additions came...

What would you do if the Internet or the power grid went down for over a year? Our key infrastructure, including the Internet and the power grid, is far more vulnerable than most people would dare to imagine. These days, most people simply take for granted that the lights will always be on and that the Internet will always function properly. But what if all that changed someday in the blink of an eye? According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, all it would take to plunge the entire nation into darkness for more than a year...

New West Texas transmission lines helped Lone Star wind power reach new gusty heights, hitting a record of more than 10,000 megawatts of generation late Wednesday night. The new West Texas transmission lines – with the unwieldy name of Competitive Renewable Energy Zone lines – cost the state almost $7 billion by the time they were completed last December, but are expected to earn their keep, giving the state the ability to nearly double its use of wind energy. “These Texas wind records were made possible by the completion of the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone transmission lines earlier this year,”...

The Obama administration’s War on Carbon rages, but the good news is the incandescent light bulb still lives. For the third year in a row, the federal ban on the popular incandescent light bulb — the choice of most Americans — was postponed by Republican House intervention that defunded EPA enforcement of the law. “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used . . . to implement or enforce the standards with respect to incandescent reflector lamps,” reads section 322 of the $1.1 trillion budget signed by the president in January. The language was cheered by...

Development of the Johan Sverdrup oilfield in the North Sea may be delayed by a year and cost more than planned if Norway's parliament insists on having it be powered from shore, the Dagens Naeringsliv daily newspaper reported on Wednesday. The biggest North Sea field find in decades, it has reserves of up to 2.9 billion barrels of oil equivalent and is expected to start production in 2019 at an initial cost estimated at 100 billion to 120 billion crowns ($16.4 billion-$19.7 billion). Statoil has committed to power the first phase from shore, a move in line with the government's...

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Roger Bezdek.Government agencies are forcing us to spend countless billions on illusory risks and anti-fossil fuel mandates, while ignoring real threats to our livelihoods, living standards and lives. America runs on electricity. Our lights, refrigerators, air conditioners and furnace controls, computers and internet, social media, radios and televisions, banks and ATMs, cell phone chargers and transmitters, electric cars and gasoline pumps, hospitals and schools, offices, factories, refineries, farms and water purification systems – all run on electricity. 68% is generated by fossil fuels, 20% by nuclear and 7% by hydropower. Electricity reaches...

Among the many dumb and harmful things Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has voted for over the decades -- and there are some doozies, for example, adding trillions to the national debt, creating the unneeded and unaffordable Medicare Part D prescription drug entitlement (2003, Roll Call Vote 457), and, even more outrageously, funding Obamacare (2013, RCV 206) -- one of the dumbest has to be the light-bulb ban (2007, RCV 430). The bill Senator McConnell voted for contained a federally mandated phase-out out of the traditional incandescent light bulb in favor of those annoying folded-tube fluorescents. Compact fluorescents, as...

Electric grid compounds across the country have faced an uptick in unauthorized intrusions by unknown individuals, causing concern that the U.S. grid is “inherently vulnerable” to widespread sabotage, according to a recent oversight report issued by New Jersey’s Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC), which monitors the threat level. Following at least eight “reports of intrusions at electrical grid facilities in New Jersey” from October 2013 until January 2014, the ROIC’s Intelligence & Analysis Threat Unit issued a report warning that the U.S. electrical grid is “inherently vulnerable” to attacks that could wipe out power across large swaths of the country.