Free Republic

Among all the crazy ways that humanity is supposed to “save the planet” by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, offshore wind electricity generation has to be about the craziest. Between the expense of building and integrating the facilities and the intermittency of the output, the build-out of offshore wind infrastructure has threatened large and accelerating increases in consumer electricity bills. Despite lack of any demonstration of feasibility or cost of running the grid on offshore wind, the Biden administration (with support from Congress) threw tens and hundreds of billions of taxpayer funds into the industry in the form of open-ended...

Two articles from the New York Times in the past couple of days describe the widening divergence between the approaches taken by the U.S. and China on the subject of wind energy. I apologize that these pieces are behind the Times’s paywall, but remember that I subscribe there so that you don’t have to. On Monday (May 4) the article was about the status of wind energy development in the U.S., with the headline “More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays Reviews.” Tuesday’s (May 5) piece covered the same subject in China, headline “China’s Big Bet on Wind...

Honda's failed bet on electric vehicles means the Japanese auto giant will have to stretch the lifecycles of five top-selling vehicles "in some cases to more than a decade," according to a supplier memo seen by Automotive News.The company will continue selling existing versions of the Odyssey, Accord, and HR-V, as well as the Acura MDX and Integra, after writing down up to $15.8 billion worth of investments in EVs, including eliminating three new EV models for the U.S. market. Car and Driver said the 2023-issue Accord "won't be redesigned until at least early 2030," while "the Odyssey minivan isn't...

Co-op City, located (like the Yankees) in the New York City borough known as The Bronx, is the largest co-op apartment community in the City, and indeed in the United States. Built in the 1960s and 70s, it has more than 15,000 residential units in some 35 high-rise buildings, plus a smaller number of townhouses. Here is an aerial picture of about a quarter of the complex that appeared in today’s New York Post: Co-op City has now suddenly become ground zero in the clash between energy fantasy and reality that is starting to come into focus as the deadlines...

We’re now more than three weeks past the mandatory April 1 deadline for New York’s annual state budget. So far, few details have emerged about the reasons for the delay. Negotiations are supposedly taking place among the Governor and the leaders of the two houses of the State Legislature. But what are the sticking points? It is likely that by far the biggest, if not the only significant sticking point is what to do about the impending deadlines of the troublesome Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, or CLCPA. This Act sets required “renewable” energy and emissions reductions...

It’s the feel-good story of the week, if you don’t mind taking joy from others’ misfortunes. When it comes to the wind and solar energy grifters, I don’t mind a bit taking joy from their misfortunes. The last few days bring the news that apparently the majority of the remaining wind and solar electricity projects still in development in New York State are under imminent threat of cancelation. At this point the details are sketchy, and nobody is attributing the news to any named source as far as I can find. Nevertheless, the story is sufficiently widely-reported from normally reliable...

In New York State, the annual budget is due by April 1. Here we are on April 7, and no budget has yet emerged. Word is that the Governor and legislative leaders are hidden away behind closed doors hammering out the details. Word also is that somewhere in this “budget” process, the seemingly unrelated matter of the deadlines of the Climate Act (for starters, 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030) are about to get extended. When the Climate Act (officially “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act,” or CLCPA) was enacted back in 2019, the deadlines, beginning in 2030, seemed...

Below is the transcript of a speech I gave at a Net Zero Watch event in Edinburgh on 9 March 2026: . Good evening, and thank you for inviting me to speak today. Scotland is often described as an electricity superpower. Not only is that not true, the Scottish grid is actually extremely vulnerable, being held together by just two power stations: Peterhead and Torness. So critical is this dependence that the National Energy System Operator, NESO, will not allow both to go on maintenance at the same time. Yet within the next 5-6 years both could close. Today I’m...

An outspoken global actor in the grand theater of climate policy, New York has long insisted the transition to green energy would be cheap and straightforward. For years, state leaders have promised aggressive emissions cuts at little cost. Now, reality is crashing the party, and the state has been caught out in that fib. Facing a court-imposed Friday deadline, New York has effectively conceded that its green goals would pose “costs consumers simply cannot bear.” This admission exposes the gaps between lofty ambition and the harsh economic realities of rapid decarbonization. The state’s 2019 climate legislation made grand, sweeping promises....

When it comes to using government coercion to force a multi-trillion dollar “net zero” energy transition upon the world, many things can go wrong. At this website I have focused on multiple potential calamities likely to flow from this effort: things like whether the proposed “renewable” wind and solar generators can actually work, whether they can produce sufficient electricity and at the right times, how much energy storage would be needed, the risk of blackouts, and how much all of this would inevitably cost. My list of potential calamities is far from comprehensive. Here is a huge issue that I...

Here in the U.S., the second Trump administration has largely pulled the plug on the suite of crazy energy policies marching under the banner of “fighting climate change.” But the same is not true in many other advanced-economy countries, for example Germany, Australia and the UK. Consider the UK. In the 2024 election the voters gave a large parliamentary majority to the left-wing Labour Party. The resulting government has doubled down on the policies of Net Zero, fossil fuel suppression, and generating energy from “renewables.” Convinced of their own correctness, and indeed righteousness, the government seeks to silence all dissent...

In 2018 New York’s voters suddenly elected a far more left-wing legislature than we had previously had, particularly the State Senate (the Assembly having already been deep in the progressive camp). Taking office in 2019, the new legislators quickly got to work seeing how much destruction they could wreak in a short period of time. One product of their efforts was what we call the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), enacted in July 2019. The point of the CLCPA was to have New York State rescue the climate and save the planet, which supposedly was going to be...

The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more. We’re talking here about something that all of the right people had agreed for decades was an “existential” threat to humanity. It was supposedly the single most important thing that we all needed to focus on and transform our lives to stop. We only had ten years to “save the planet”; or maybe it was only five. If we failed, we would shortly be inundated by sea level rise, or maybe devastated by floods and droughts, or...

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....