Free Republic

"Wind Droughts": A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total.. Last month, multiple news outlets reported on the record-smashing year the wind industry had in 2023. The Global Wind Energy Council released its latest report showing the world installed 117 gigawatts of capacity. The Associated Press called 2023 a “record year for wind installations,” and Reuters noted that the U.S. was among the top five markets for wind installations. The U.S. Energy Information Administration...

The Biden Administration’s regulations are coming so fast and furious that it’s hard even to keep track, but we’re trying. On Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its latest doozy—rules that will effectively force coal plants to shut down while banning new natural-gas plants. “With the announcement today, the power sector can make planning decisions with a full array of information,” EPA’s press release declares. Translation: Get moving with the green-energy transition because we’re determined to eliminate fossil-fuel power. Barack Obama’s regulation spurred a wave of coal plant closures. Now President Biden is trying to finish the job by tightening...

Authoritarian climate crusaders most likely regard themselves as too enlightened, important and virtuous to heed cautionary tales about green energy. For everyone else, however, those tales remind us why we did not trust the crusaders in the first place. According to ABC13 in Houston, a violent hailstorm on March 16 caused significant damage to the 3,300-acre Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, prompting fears of possible leaking chemicals. Local resident Nick Kaminski described the golf ball-sized hail, accompanied by heavy wind and rain.

Renewable energy is the alternative that Democrats and other environmental nuts want to replace reliable oil, gas and coal. But time and time again, people who rely on wind and solar power have had to learn the tough lesson that such alternatives are both undependable and susceptible to the same elements they are supposed to harness. Nowhere was that more true than in Nebraska, where a thunderstorm dumped baseball-sized hail on a solar farm on Friday at a speed of 150 mph — destroying the facility in just a few minutes. Cowboy State Daily reported a storm moved east out...

After weeks of local speculation, the purchasers of 55,000 acres of northern California land have been revealed. The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Their goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy. The land bought by the firm encircles Travis air force base in Fairfield, a city of about 120,000 residents and home to the...

Earlier this week Texas grid operator ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) asked residents to reduce energy usage amid a sweltering heat wave to avoid rolling blackouts. ERCOT manages electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers and represents 90% of the state’s electric load, according to the company. Temperatures soared to 115+ degrees with the heat index in parts of Texas on Thursday amid an excessive heat warning. ERCOT issued the voluntary conservation notice due to extreme temperatures, forecasted high demand and lower reserves due to low wind generation. ... The wind turbines aren’t producing enough energy. Texas...

New York spent nearly $1 billion over the past decade on Elon Musk’s ambitious plan for what was supposed to be the largest solar-panel factory in the Western Hemisphere, one of the largest-ever public cash outlays of its kind. “You almost have to pinch yourself, right?” New York’s then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a construction ceremony for the factory in 2015. “That this is too good to be true.” Eight years later, that looks like a pretty good assessment. New York state paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space, which it now owns...

Shortly after President Joe Biden offered tax credits to anyone buying solar panels, a Colorado homeowner named Stacie took out loans to install $30,000 worth of panels on her roof. Nearly six months later, however, those panels sat unused, generating no power. The problem seemed to have a simple fix: Stacie's energy provider merely needed to hook the panels up to its power grid—but there's no room. Increased demand driven by Biden's green subsidies, combined with inadequate power grid capacity, has left thousands of green energy projects like Stacie's without power, rendering them useless. "When you put out $30,000, you...

KEY POINTS: * Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday plans to announce a commitment between South Korean solar cell manufacturer Qcells and Virginia-based Summit Ridge Energy to deploy 1.2 gigawatts of community solar power. * Harris will make the announcement during a trip to the Qcells facility in Dalton, Georgia as part of the White House’s “Invest in America” tour. * The deal would be the largest community solar order in U.S. history and require the manufacturing of 2.5 million solar panels, Biden administration officials said.

Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but, says Siddharth Kara, their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kara, a fellow at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at the Kennedy School, has been researching modern-day slavery, human trafficking and child labor for two decades. He says that although the DRC has more cobalt reserves than the rest of the planet combined, there's no such thing as a "clean" supply chain of cobalt from the country. In his new...

Vanity, European governments have had decades to construct and deploy solar panels and windmills, and didn't (at least not enough to at least supply enough power for home electric heaters). Yet they went ahead with Electric Vehicle mandates, which are powered by (mostly) fossil fuels.

Mark Schein sings from the back row, aware that many of the people in the other pews view him as their enemy. His wife, Toni, stands by his side, but the rows around them are all empty. The hymn at this May service, backed by a pipe organ, is “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,” about perseverance in the face of great challenges. Mark is a retired farmer, a parent, a grandparent and part of a family that has attended this church, Williamsport United Methodist, since its construction in 1900. His offense in the eyes of many in this community...

While budgets should have been getting tighter for years now, some states, at least, are finally awakening to the need to watch their spending. Well, better late than never, right? One example of this newfound awareness is the effort of some to reconsider our generous subsidies for solar panels, particularly the rooftop panels that one sees high atop single family homes across otherwise reasonable suburbs. Mississippi, Florida, and other states are in the news right now as they debate the question of rethinking the levels at which the taxpayer ought to subsidize the homeowner for this choice of dubious economic...

Among Governor Glenn Youngkin’s first actions was Executive Order #9 initiating Virginia’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Northeastern U.S. “carbon market” that sets and enforces emission limits for coal and gas power plants. RGGI also lets utilities buy “carbon credits” when emissions exceed those limits, passing costs on to families, businesses, hospitals and schools. Special interests will contest withdrawal, but the EO sets the proper tone for reforming Virginia’s energy system. Meanwhile, though, the 2020 “Virginia Clean Economy Act” still requires that utility companies close all fossil fuel generating plants – and replace them with wind and...

The California Public Utilities Commission is poised to kill off much of the rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) industry in California, which will result in the use of more polluting natural gas and biomass electricity as well as dirty electricity imported from out of state. The use of the new dirty electricity will raise air pollution death rates in California above the 12,000 per year who perish in the state already. Most of these additional deaths will be in poor communities in the Los Angeles basin and Central Valley, where pollution levels are already the highest in the state. Roof PV...

How close would a solar and wind-dependent power grid have come to giving us the electricity we needed during the three-week freeze in Alberta where the average temperature was -22 C from Dec. 15 to Jan. 9?... Alberta needs a supply of about 10,500 MW (megawatts) on average, said Mackay. If they are running at maximum capacity, solar can provide 736 MW and wind 2,269 MW.... If we had been reliant on far more solar and wind, how would we have done? “You’d have to start with rolling blackouts or brownouts,” Mackay said. “If we lost the bulk of our...

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci has addressed attacks made on his career and reputation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last month released the book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” Speaking to Yahoo News, the director of the NIAID said, “it really is a shame that he is attacking me in my career,” when asked about RFK’s book not being “a flattering portrait of” his career. “I think if you look at my career there are not a lot of people that would be attacking my career,...

Musk's finally ready to admit that government subsidies distort markets and that government actors are terrible at capital allocation."Say tomorrow, you get a phone call from Joe Biden," asked Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern to Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a Monday night forum. "And he asks: What are your needs from this [$2 trillion spending] bill? How do you answer him?" "We don't think about it at all, really," Musk said, channeling Don Draper to the tune of the audience's uneasy laughter. "It might be better if the bill doesn't pass," Musk added. "The federal budget deficit...

Biden administration climate czar John Kerry holds $1 million stake in Chinese private equity fund, Hillhouse China Value Fund, tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses and major shareholder of solar panel firm connected to Uyghurs labor abuses. Human rights groups and U.S. lawmakers have accused LONGi of sourcing raw materials from companies using forced labor in Xinjiang, a region the Chinese government abusing the Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities. Hillhouse is also a funder of a tech firm connected to Beijing’s surveillance of Uyghurs, a revelation last week leading Republican senators urging Biden to fire Kerry over ethics...

Heavy reliance on wind power, coupled with a shortage of natural gas, has led to a spike in energy prices Natural gas and electricity markets were already surging in Europe when a fresh catalyst emerged: The wind in the stormy North Sea stopped blowing. The sudden slowdown in wind-driven electricity production off the coast of the U.K. in recent weeks whipsawed through regional energy markets. Gas and coal-fired electricity plants were called in to make up the shortfall from wind. Natural-gas prices, already boosted by the pandemic recovery and a lack of fuel in storage caverns and tanks, hit all-time...