Free Republic

The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers. Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work,...

If you have been following this blog closely, you know that I have been participating, along with two excellent colleagues, in the rate proceeding of our local utility, Con Edison. A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers. Our purpose in the proceeding has been to object to and disrupt having the ratepayers charged for the building of infrastructure in pursuit of the futile and infeasible “climate” goals of our deluded politicians. One of the rules...

It was less than three years ago — early 2023 — that I was writing about the then-universal government and industry line that electric vehicles (EVs) would soon be taking over the American car market. In April 2022 the Biden Administration had adopted aggressive vehicle mileage standards intended to be achievable only through rapid transition to EVs. Our “climate leader” states, California and New York, had then adopted regulations in August and September 2022, respectively, mandating a phase-out of sales of combustion vehicles, to culminate in 2035, after which only EVs would be allowed. In a post in January 2023,...

I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up...

While Europe freezes under net-zero dogma, Norway drills, profits, and keeps the lights on—funding EV virtue with oil and gas while the EU chooses ideology over arithmetic.While the rest of Europe shivers under the self-imposed austerity of net zero mandates, Norway in the frozen north is keeping the lights on and the bank vaults full as it avoids the “green” ideological quicksand that has defined the continent’s energy policy. Despite pressures to decarbonize, Norway has increased efforts to exploit oil and natural gas reserves. The crown jewel of this fossil fuel renaissance is the Johan Castberg field. Located in the...

After years of being scorned, derided and shrunk, the nuclear power industry is getting a boost from the Trump administration. Faced with rapidly growing demand for energy to supply a growing U.S. economy and booming AI sector, President Donald Trump’s Energy Department says it will help finance up to 10 new nuclear power plants – a huge reversal of decades of anti-nuclear sentiment and excessive regulation by the U.S. government. You might be tempted to think: Oh, boy, another big government boondoggle. Nope. This is mainly reviving an industry that has languished largely due to excessive regulations and active...

Today I spent the day with my excellent collaborator Richard Ellenbogen cross-examining witnesses at the New York Public Service Commission’s hearing on whether the pending rate increase request of our utility Con Edison should be approved. We had a lot of fun. Although the hearing was theoretically open to the public, they had no live video feed, and you had to register in advance to attend in person. It looked like everybody there was an interested party. At the close of the hearing, we were invited (along with everybody else) to file a post-hearing brief by next Friday, December 12....

In my last post I linked to, and quoted portions of, the objection submitted by myself and two colleagues to the pending settlement of the rate increase request of our local utility, Con Edison. The gist of our objection is that the ratepayers should not be forced to pay to build infrastructure for delivery of “renewable” electricity that does not exist. Our objection was filed on the day before Thanksgiving, November 26. That day had been set as the due date for all statements either in support or opposed to the pending settlement, which is referred to as the Joint...

As I have mentioned here on a couple of occasions, I have joined with two colleagues to intervene in the regulatory proceeding where our local electric utility, Con Edison, has made its most recent request for a large rate increase. My colleagues in this enterprise are Roger Caiazza, who blogs as the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, and Richard Ellenbogen, a Cornell-trained engineer who as his day job runs a factory in Westchester County. After a “deregulation” that took place in the 1990s, Con Edison almost entirely got out of the business of generating electricity, so this case is about...

The climate creed that once ruled unquestioned is cracking as energy needs, geopolitical reality, and basic science force the West to admit carbon isn’t dying anytime soon. For decades, the monolithic and sacrosanct international climate change hierarchy went unquestioned. Western nations in particular spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century to subsidize expensive but erratic wind and solar energy while demonizing carbon fuels as toxic threats to the planet. Like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion dogma, climate change orthodoxy was embedded into every aspect of Western culture, from the corporate boardroom to the university campus. Question whether man-made global warming...

Desperate to stay relevant, climate activists now claim they can trace individual heat waves to specific oil companies—just as Washington steps away from their agenda. In the wake of a federal government no longer serving as its obedient lapdog, the desperate lengths to which the climate cult goes to maintain its standing are increasingly imaginative. Case in point: CNN recently reported that “for the first time, scientists have quantified the causal links between worsening heat waves and global warming pollution from individual fossil fuel and cement companies, pushing the boundaries of extreme weather event research in multiple surprising ways.” In...

Here in the U.S., ever since the push to “de-carbonize” the energy system to “save the planet” from global warming got going in a big way 20 or so years ago, there has always been a critical mass of skeptics strongly pushing back. I count myself among them. Another prominent example is the CO2 Coalition, an organization of about 200 scientists and intellectuals who dissent from the climate orthodoxy. Large portions of our Republican Party — recently approaching near unanimity — have also joined the dissent from climate orthodoxy. But over in Europe, the same has not been true at...

When did the Wall Street Journal give up on making coherent arguments? It certainly seems to be the case with a recent WSJ article entitled, “The U.S. Is Forfeiting the Clean-Energy Race to China”. The premise of the article, as you might have guessed, is that the U.S. will lose out to China if it does not match China’s level of subsidization of clean energy. No where in the article did the authors ask, “Is it a race worth winning?” I contend that it isn’t. The authors start out by asserting that, “The rapid pace of EV adoption in China...

The first eight months of the second Trump administration have seen a sea change in energy policy. Previously, under Biden, the federal government had undertaken a blowout of hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and incentives for so-called “renewable” energy sources, while simultaneously implementing dozens of regulations and restrictions to suppress the production and use of fossil fuels. President Trump has now reversed all of that. However, please take note of an important distinction: although Trump and Congress have zeroed out nearly all subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar generation and for grid-scale batteries, they have not...

I saw this a couple of days ago, and it was so intriguing, I had to hang on to it, figuring there would be a time it would come in handy.Little did I know our president would go into the United Nations General Assembly today with a flamethrower and give me the perfect opportunity to illustrate one of the scorched remnants of European superiority he left smoking on the expensive carpet in that room.When the man told them that their countries were going to fail.IF YOU DON'T GET AWAY FROM THE GREEN ENERGY SCAM, YOUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO FAILIF...

Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009. The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century. The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives...

Turns out, as much money as those Biden bozos blew through, prepaying for electric buses up front that were never and will never now be delivered?EPA head Lee Zeldin says the Biden administraiton sent $160 million dollars to a Canadian electric vehicles company.... which then pocketed the money, didn’t send the school buses promised and then declared bankruptcy!“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric… pic.twitter.com/hANBqhFPfm— Mike Netter (@nettermike) August 16, 2025...“There was $160 million that went to a Canadian electric vehicle bus manufacturer. The Biden administration sent all of the money — They gave all the money...

The US power grid is under significant stress due to rapidly increasing electricity demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles, coupled with the retirement of traditional power plants.The grid faces mounting vulnerabilities from extreme weather events, cybersecurity threats, and physical sabotage, while policy gridlock and infrastructure delays hinder necessary upgrades.Despite challenges, the situation presents investment opportunities in grid modernization, diversified generation, and solutions for energy storage and load management.America’s power grid is straining under the weight of a fast-changing energy landscape. Beyond the usual summer hum of air conditioners, power demand is surging from electric vehicle chargers and sprawling...

As I have written many times, with New York’s fantasy “net zero” energy plans, it is not a question of whether they will fail, but only when and how. The Democrats, who dominate state politics, and their environmentalist allies, are firmly committed to the impossible. Thus, they are caught in a trap of their own making, and from which there is no good escape. The fact that they are caught in this trap is obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skills, but almost all of our politicians and environmentalists lack those. However, a small handful of them are starting to...

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040. Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources...