Free Republic

LISBON — Following massive power grid failures that plunged multiple countries into blackouts, Europe promised its citizens it would get electricity back up as soon as possible so everyone would be able to hear the Muslim call to prayer over the loudspeakers. Officials said they were aware that essential staples of European life, like pausing to pray in the direction of Mecca and asking Allah to grant them bloody victories against the infidels, had been disrupted by the blackouts, but assured everyone the normalcy of assaults and stabbings could resume very soon. "Our way of fundamental Islamic life will continue...

"Spain's power grid ran entirely on renewable energy".. Spain was supposed to be Europe’s Green Energy success story. With massive amounts of renewables in the power grid, Spain was going to save the planet. Here’s Red Electrica, Spain’s state-owned power company, last year bragging about its renewables. “Renewable energies generated 56% of Spain’s electricity mix in 2024 Renewable generation increased by almost 11% in a record-breaking year on two fronts: achieving the highest renewable electricity generation ever recorded and capturing its largest share since records began.” Now, Red Electrica is trying to explain why all the lights went out. Spain...

Today there have been widespread electricity blackouts across Europe, beginning in Spain and Portugal in the early afternoon (local time), and then spreading to other countries including France, Andorra, Belgium and the Netherlands. Is this related to the increasing penetration of intermittent generation from wind and solar facilities? For years, many in the climate skeptic community have warned that expansion of intermittent renewable electricity generation on the grid will, sooner or later, lead to frequent blackouts. The reason for the warning is easy to understand: The grid has some rather exacting operational requirements that the intermittent renewable generation technologies cannot...

Spain and Portugal achieved net zero on Monday, but not the way anyone would want to achieve net zero: By going back to the cavepeople times with no electricity. According to the New York Times:A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday afternoon, abruptly shutting down daily activities, halting trains and subways, cutting off traffic lights, closing stores and canceling or delaying some flights.Hours after the power shut off around 12:30 p.m. Central European time, stranding tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula, officials remained at a loss as to the cause, though several denied any...

Fighting against the wishes of their voters is a classic Republican pastime — and this week is no different.When they apparently thought nobody was looking, a cabal of GOP senators comprised of Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Utah’s John Curtis, Kansas’ Jerry Moran, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — who’s up for reelection next year — quietly sent a letter on Wednesday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune regarding ongoing negotiations over the party’s reconciliation package.Their concern? That the final version of the legislation containing priorities backed by President Trump (tax cuts and border security) will also include provisions fully repealing President...

Large-scale solar farms, wind turbines, and associated infrastructure are touted as solutions to the climate crisis, but their development comes at the cost of native forests and critical habitats.” “Until conservation charities disentangle themselves from government funding and corporate influence, they risk becoming complicit in the very destruction they were created to prevent.” ... One of the great ironies of our age is the double standard of Big Environmentalism toward wind and solar, which commit numerous eco-sins that would not be tolerated otherwise. Dilute, intermittent, and thus inefficient? Yes. Energy sprawl requiring service roads and transmission lines in the wild?...

Despite a tenacious narrative, history shows the Green New Deal vision is not inevitable—it’s impossible. In his March 4 address to Congress, President Trump proclaimed that he had “terminated the ridiculous Green New Scam,” referring to assorted Biden-era Green New Deal policies directed at an “energy transition.” The weekend before, the Wall Street Journal featured a lengthy essay with a title seemingly calibrated to pre-bunk Trump’s expected remarks: “The Clean Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable.” The authors, two Oxford professors, asserted that the “clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop,”...

Many political jurisdictions claim to be on a path to eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide from their energy systems. Notable examples include California and New York in the U.S., and the UK and Germany in Europe. The Biden administration during its term in office even claimed to have set the entire U.S. onto a path toward what they called “net zero.” But so far none of these places has gotten anywhere near the goal. Indeed, as of today, many hundreds of billions of dollars into the effort, not one of them has even issued a detailed engineering plan of how...

In a post in December 2021, I first asked which state or country would be the first to hit the “Renewable Energy Wall” — described as “a situation where the electricity system stops functioning, or the price goes through the roof,” or some other aspects of impossibility become so unavoidable that the zero carbon fantasy must be abandoned. In subsequent posts I have explored various ways that the Wall was starting to manifest — for example, cancellation of offshore wind energy developments, and abandonment of large investments in producing so-called “green hydrogen.” Although the coming of the Wall has been...

President Joe Biden’s staff continue trumpeting the president’s legislative victories but have allowed the president to disappear into his August vacation. Earlier this week, Biden appeared at the White House briefly to sign his massive green energy and health care bill but has not taken questions from reporters at the White House or appeared for any interviews to promote his agenda.

Back at the beginning of the year, I had a post titled “New York On The March To Climate Utopia.” The post took note that everything about New York State’s vision for a zero-emissions economy and for “climate leadership” was in the process of falling apart. Its contracts for vast off-shore wind farms to replace fossil fuel generation had either been completely canceled (the majority) or rebid at much higher and uneconomic prices (the minority). Its two contracted facilities to produce “green” hydrogen to back up the intermittent wind and solar had run into financial difficulties and were likely to...

Donald Trump has all sorts of odd grievances. He’s complained about low water pressure and toilets, magnetic elevators, a lack of Christmas cheer in advertisements, tiny windows, tiny fish, Abraham Lincoln’s negotiation skills, “the world” generally, and more. But perhaps his favorite thing to hate? Wind turbines. In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a...

Yes, that’s the sound of Trump directing the EPA and Department of Energy to reverse nearly every Biden regulation on home appliances and fixtures – everything from toilets to lawnmowers – in one big beautiful executive order that he signed on Day One, and reminded his EPA administrator yesterday to move quickly to implement:Now you only have to flush once. Now you can take a real shower and not wait to trickle down.No longer will the nanny state tell you what kind of car you can put in your garage. What kind of lawn mower, weed wacker, or sprinkler you...

President Donald Trump is waging war against former President Joe Biden’s green energy regulations on Americans’ household appliances.Trump made the announcement in a social media post at 5:57 a.m. on Tuesday and said he was instructing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Lee Zeldin to oversee the matter, Fox News reported.The president wrote in his post:I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standards and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOILETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards...

For all the fretting, teeth gnashing, and howling at the moon here over the disruption in the Green Grift that is the wind industry and offshore wind particularly, nothing is quite as satisfying as watching the original practitioners of the fraud - the Europeans, fall on their dull, unrecyclable turbine blades.A couple of things have happened recently that signal tough times are ahead - a dunkelflaute or 'dark doldrums' - for the European wind industry and those governments that have gulped the green Kool-Ade to the very last drop in the pitcher, foisting the unreliable on their citizens even as...

What was once the world's largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises. The Ivanpah solar power plant formally opened in 2014 on roughly 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border. Though it was hailed at the time as a breakthrough moment for clean energy, its power has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies. Pacific Gas & Electric said in a statement it had...

Shell announced its withdrawal from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm project in the US, resulting in a write-off of nearly $1 billion. The decision was disclosed in the company's quarterly earnings report on Thursday, marking another setback for the American offshore wind industry. Shell's decision to exit the project comes as the industry faces challenges from President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at halting its development. This is a significant shift from the support the industry enjoyed under Joe Biden, despite the recent increase in costs. Shell's Chief Financial Officer, Sinead Gorman, explained the decision during a call with...

As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders — the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” — directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.” Since the EF is...

We are now in the last hours of the Biden Administration. Today the Bidenauts complete four full years in office. And as we all know, their number one priority from the day they took office was to address what they called the “climate crisis” (or sometimes, the “profound climate crisis”). Famously, after lavishly promising on the campaign trail to address and solve the crisis, newly-installed President Biden then issued multiple Executive Orders on the subject in his early days in office, most notably this one from January 27, 2021. He promised an “all of government” approach, with every department and...

The mistakes of the U.K. and Germany this winter serve as a wakeup call for policymakers worldwide as they consider their own energy policies. The winter of 2025 has been brutal for Europe, exposing the severe flaws of its over-reliance on wind and solar energy. As temperatures plummeted, countries grappled with electricity shortages, soaring energy prices, and the grim specter of blackouts. In the United Kingdom and Germany, two countries that have positioned themselves as global leaders in the adoption of “renewable” energy, the dangerous gamble of prioritizing wind and solar power over reliable energy sources is leaving millions vulnerable...