Free Republic

New York State has officially ordained the destruction of its electricity system and its economy with a mad dash to energy utopia, as prescribed by a 2019 statute called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The Climate Act mandates a completely unachievable 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, with even more draconian mandates following in quick succession thereafter. New York City has piled on with its own fantasy energy statute called Local Law 97, mandating, among other things, forced conversion to electric heat by 2030 of most residential buildings over 25,000 square feet. A so-called...

On Thursday (May 22) the House of Representatives passed, by a narrow margin of 215-214, what is referred to as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — a massive compendium of taxing and spending measures that can now seek to avoid the filibuster in the Senate on grounds of being a “budget reconciliation.” The BBB is well over a thousand pages long (go here for full text), and covers a huge range of subjects. Most summaries of the BBB that I have seen never get to the important subject of subsidies for so-called “green” energy — wind turbines, solar arrays, grid-scale batteries,...

Home | Politics Tags: trump | nuclear | license Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency (AP) Friday, 23 May 2025 02:57 PM EDT Comment| Print| A A President Donald Trump ordered the nation's independent nuclear regulatory commission to cut down on regulations and fast-track new licenses for reactors and power plants on Friday, seeking to shrink a multi-year process down to 18 months. The requirement was part of a batch of executive orders signed by Trump on Friday that aim to boost U.S. nuclear energy production amid a...

Over at the New York Times today, print edition, there is a big front page article documenting how their side is losing the latest battle in the climate wars. The headline is “U.S. Embraces Climate Denial In Science Cuts.” (online headline somewhat different). Also in the Times today (online version) is a feature called “Quote of the Day.” Today’s “quote of the day,” as selected by the Times, is taken from the “climate denial” article just previously linked. Here it is: “It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages.”This quote is attributed to one Rachel Cleetus, identified as senior policy...

After four years of energy chaos, President Trump is rebuilding America’s strength by unleashing domestic production and reversing Biden’s global strategic blunders. When Donald J. Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he inherited a shattered energy policy—and a nation paying the price for four years of willful decline. The American energy sector, which had once been the envy of the world, was left throttled by bureaucracy, sabotaged by ideology, and entangled in a geopolitical trap of our own making. The good news? The war on American energy is over. The bad news? The damage is already...

Brief represents the first time the Trump administration has weighed in on green investing issues.. The Federal Trade Commission is throwing its weight behind a high-profile federal lawsuit led by 12 Republican-led states accusing three of the world's largest asset managers—BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard—of artificially constricting the coal market in violation of U.S. antitrust laws, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. The filing in the case is a remarkable move that represents the first time the Trump administration has waded directly into an issue or case related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies. Led by powerful asset managers...

At this site, when I have written about countries and states seeking to be among the leaders in eliminating fossil fuels from their electricity supply, I have generally focused on the larger jurisdictions, like Germany and the UK in Europe, and California and New York in the U.S. But there is one much smaller country that puts all of those bigger ones to shame: Denmark. With a population of only about 6 million, Denmark has pushed the “renewable” electricity generation thing well beyond what others have been able to accomplish. According to its official statistics, in 2024 Denmark got some...

Congressional Republicans are making a last-ditch effort to gut the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) green energy subsidies via President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.” The House Ways and Means Committee unveiled a draft bill Monday afternoon to repeal several IRA subsidies including those for electric vehicles and so-called clean hydrogen while preserving tax credits for carbon sequestration, biofuels and advanced manufacturing, which primarily benefit solar and battery storage projects. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma’s Energy Freedom Act would take an even more aggressive approach by proposing a...

The energy company behind a partially completed wind farm off Long Island’s coast warned it will scrap the project “within days” if it’s kept in limbo by the Trump administration. Norwegian-based Equinor said it’s losing a whopping $50 million a week since Trump’s Department of the Interior halted construction on the controversial project that is expected to deliver energy to 500,000 homes in New York City, its leaders told The Post. “We will have to terminate the program within days if we don’t have a resolution with the federal government,” said Molly Morris, Equinor’s president of Renewables in America. “This...

The Texas Senate passed a bill Thursday that leading business interests fear would lead to an age of expensive power and rolling blackouts. If passed by the House, state S.B. 715 would require all renewable projects — even existing ones — to buy backup power, largely from coal or gas plants. This would require solar plants in particular to buy backup power to “match their output at night — a time when no one expects them to produce energy and when demand is typically at its lowest anyway,” consultant and energy expert Doug Lewin wrote in an April analysis. The...

Last Monday, the Iberian grid suffered a disturbance in the south-west at 12:33. In 3.5 seconds this worsened and the interconnection to France disconnected. All renewable generation then went off-line, followed by disconnection of all rotating generation plant. The Iberian blackout was complete within a few seconds. At the time the grid was producing 28.4 GW of power, of which 79 per cent was solar and wind. This was a problematic situation as solar and wind plants have another, not widely known, downside – one quite apart from their intermittency and expense.This is the fact that they do not supply...

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...