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Talk about making friends and influencing people. Duke Energy, one of the main power providers for the Carolinas, really stepped in it over the Christmas weekend. For the first time in the energy company’s history, they were forced to institute rolling blackouts and beg their customers to conserve power…in the middle of a ferocious winter storm on Christmas Eve. For the first time in the company’s history, Duke Energy enacted rolling blackouts on Christmas Eve amid freezing temperatures. The move left half a million customers without power. And on Tuesday, the company issued an apology, attributing several compounding factors as...

Xcel appears to have directed its own natural gas supply to meet reserve requirements rather than generate power during 2021 storm. ... Four Colorado electric cooperatives that buy wholesale power from Xcel Energy have filed a complaint with federal regulators contending the state’s largest electricity provider mismanaged its natural gas supplies during a severe 2021 winter storm. The co-ops maintain that Xcel Energy was “imprudent” by failing to follow its own supply plans leading to the utility having to buy high-priced gas on the spot market during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021. The four — Core Electric Cooperative, Holy...

Northern India is experiencing a cold wave, with a surfeit of glib press claims about global warming. At 39 degrees Fahrenheit, India’s ordinarily sweltering capital of Delhi experienced one of the coldest winter nights this year on Dec. 27. Its region is home to 32 million people, with millions of them having no access to heating in their homes. Neighboring states recorded below-freezing temperatures. In contrast, nearly all of metro New York’s population of 18 million has home heating. Delhi’s situation would be considered a humanitarian crisis in the U.S. The Indian media’s attitude generally is to shrug off such...

Big government loves to trod on the little guy, the citizen, the tax slave. As history would show, economic collapse ushers in absolute tyranny; no wonder "they" can barely hide their agenda for financial ruin. Just take a look at this breakdown of Rand Paul’s Festivus report which details nearly half a trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt because people like Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney remain beholden to self and special interests using our money.Enter the newest EPA “regulations” — what a nice euphemism for the illegality of the Fourth Branch of bureaucrats making de facto...

On the menu today: I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it appears someone is attacking the electrical power grid of the Seattle area, which comes after a series of similar incidents elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest as well as in Florida. And the FBI never caught the guy who attacked the electrical grid down in North Carolina earlier this month. Shooting up a power substation is apparently the latest fad. Electric BoogalooPicture it: It’s Christmas, you’re about to prepare a big meal for the whole family, and the power...

Thanks to the TVA (“Tennessee Valley Authority,” electricity had been abundant and inexpensive for Tennessee and six surrounding states for most of the past century. Coal, hydro, nuclear, and natural gas were the fuels that electrified Appalachia. But anti-carbon leftists have infiltrated the organization, and its future is now geared toward renewables and “sustainability.” In other words, scarcity is the future of electricity in the TVA service area. The extreme cold snap this past weekend was not common, but neither was it unprecedented. But what was unprecedented is that the TVA is no longer able to reliably provide electricity in...

.... may you be forced to live outdoors in -20F weather as just punishment for what you have imposed on others, and which you claimed would not result in us having what amounts to a third-world electrical system when under stress.These idiots keep think the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to "special people." Sorry, they apply to everyone, all the time, every time, and there is nothing you can do about it. The facts are: In the winter the time of worst possible load for any electrical based heat system is before the sun contributes anything in the early morning...

In a post earlier this week, I celebrated the adoption by New York State of its Scoping Plan that tells us how we are going to accomplish the great transition to 70% “renewable” electricity by 2030 and zero-emissions electricity by 2040. The summary is: “just build a lot of offshore wind turbines and batteries.” Unfortunately, nobody seems to have done the basic arithmetic to see whether the prospective facilities will suffice to supply enough electricity to meet demand at all times. But then, this Scoping Plan is the product of the Important People, and why do the Important People need...

As it turns out, not freezing to death and not murdering the economy is actually more important than meeting “climate goals.” This is weird…. After “leading the way” for the climate communists, Germany now faces a freezing winter and ballooning energy crises — they’re at the precipice of an economic meltdown, so they’re bringing back their coal. See what Bloomberg had to say: Germany is set to boost its reliance on coal as it battles an unprecedented energy crisis — even at the expense of its ambitious climate goals. …coal is making a comeback as countries seek to prevent soaring...

Commissioners promise to 'scrutinize this to a degree we've never done before' ... DENVER — State regulators with the Public Utilities Commission questioned Xcel's proposal for an electric rate hike in Wednesday's meeting, following "unprecedented" comments objecting to the proposed increase. Xcel has proposed a $312.2 million revenue increase, which would result in an 8.2% increase ($7.33/month) for the average residential customer. The commission has suspended the effected date of the higher rates, while the case was scheduled to be taken up again to set procedures in early February. Commissioner John Gavan called for the commission to "scrutinize this to...

Today was a big day on the way to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The press release has the headline “New York State Climate Action Council Finalizes Scoping Plan to Advance Nation-Leading Climate Law.” Here also is a link to the Scoping Plan itself. Taking a look at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I find that the two biggest...

EXCERPT: BIDEN: “These MCC investments are part of the work we’re doing worldwide through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. I proposed this initiative together with the rest of the G7 to help fill the need for quality high-standard infrastructure in Africa and the low-income and middle-income countries around the world. At the G-7 meeting earlier this year, we announced our intention to collectively mobilize $600 billion in the next five years. Today’s announcement joined a portfolio of Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment projects already underway in Africa, including mobilizing $8 billion in public and private finance to help...

It occurs to me that before moving on from my obsession with energy storage and and its manifest limitations, I should address the policy implications of this situation. I apologize if these implications may seem terribly obvious to regular readers, or for that matter to people who have just thought about these issues for, say, five minutes. Unfortunately, our powers-that-be don’t seem to have those five minutes to figure out the obvious, so we’ll just have to bash them over the head with it. Here are the three most obvious policy implications that nobody in power seems to have figured...

Politico Europe, a publication marinated in green politics, has named Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of its "power players of the year" -- for, in the publication's words, "advancing Europe's green agenda." "By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not -- clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security," the news outlet explained approvingly. It went on to note that Putin "invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions...

As my last post reported, the Official Party Line from our government holds that we have this “100% Clean Electricity” thing about 90% solved. As the government-funded NREL put it in their August 30, 2022 press release, “[a] growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible.” But then they admit that that statement does not cover what they call the "last 10% challenge” — providing for the worst seasonal droughts of sun and wind, that result in periods when there is no renewable power to meet around 10% of annual electricity demand. That last 10%,...

If you’ve read my energy storage report, or just the summaries of parts of it that have appeared on this blog, you have probably thought: this stuff is kind of obvious. Surely the powers that be must have thought of at least some of these issues, and there must be some kind of official position on the responses out there somewhere. So I thought to look around for the closest thing I could find to the Official Party Line on how the U.S. is supposedly going to get to Net Zero emissions from the electricity sector by some early date....

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory recently released a study titled, “Assessment of Light-Duty Plug-in Electric Vehicles in the United States, 2010 – 2021,” which shows that in 2021, privately-owned plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) “saved about 690 million gallons of gasoline.”However, that is a huge exaggeration because fossil fuels provide 61 percent of the electricity in the United States. This means we have to include the inefficiency of burning coal or natural gas to make electricity (around 45 percent), transmission losses (about 5 percent), and losses in the inverter to charge the battery (another...

Climate lockdowns incoming: only “three years” to flatten the emissions curve. The writing was on the wall as soon as the “experts” declared “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Some of us saw right through the scheme, while the less-astute did not. We recognized the move was one against freedom and prosperity rather than for our welfare, and knew it was not only for two weeks. We knew that if the ruling class was allowed to follow through with their “lockdown” agenda — the forced closure of private businesses, dictating who was “essential” and who was “non-essential” — then greater...

So what does "American-made" mean to the Biden administration as it hands out huge chunks of "free" taxpayer cash for its "green" infrastructure schemes?As Donald Trump used to say: "Chiii-na."According to Alana Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon:President Joe Biden's Department of Energy is touting a grant to a lithium battery company as a move that would help herald the shift to green energy and ensure the United States is cultivating domestic sources of energy. It did not say, however, that the Texas company receiving the grant operates primarily from China and is under scrutiny from American financial regulators.The DOE...

As mentioned in the last post, my new energy storage report, The Energy Storage Conundrum, mostly deals with issues that have previously been discussed on this blog; but the Report goes into considerable further detail on some of them. One issue where the Report contains much additional detail is the issue of hydrogen as an alternative to batteries as the medium of energy storage. For examples of previous discussion on this blog of hydrogen as the medium of storage to back up an electrical grid see, for example, “The Idiot’s Answer To Global Warming: Hydrogen” from August 12, 2021, and...