Free Republic

There is a cynical reason why Democrat leaders keep illegal aliens in the country. It is not for humanitarian reasons. The net effect of increases in both legal and illegal immigration in the 2020 Census shifted 17 House seats and 17 Electoral College votes. It resulted in a net gain of 14 seats in blue states. Ten seats shifted from red states and four from battleground states. It’s partly due to districts with high percentages of noncitizens who lean heavily Democrat. “Of the 24 districts where one in five adults is not an American citizen, twenty were won by a...

Residents of a small town in Ohio are furious that the state has approved a power plant that would generate more than a million pounds of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions daily, according to documents reviewed by the Daily Mail. Hilliard, a town of nearly 39,000 people, will soon be home to a 73-megawatt natural gas fuel cell system that will power a fleet of data centers for Amazon Web Services. The company said the fuel cells are needed to sustain electricity consumption for planned expansions to these data centers. Fuel cells convert the methane in natural gas into electricity without...

Sometimes the debate over U.S. energy policy feels more like a shouting match, instead of a factual discussion about how to meet the nation’s rapidly growing needs. In one corner, there’s the push for 100% renewables. In the other corner, it’s almost all about oil and gas. But outside the competing echo chambers on the left and the right, a quiet success story is unfolding in America’s rural – and yes, more politically conservative – communities. It turns out that keeping the lights on isn’t about picking a side. It’s about picking all the energy sources that can deliver affordable...

Every time I write about this subject it has gotten yet a little more ridiculous. The background is that back in 2019 New York, both State and City, set themselves targets for “emissions” reductions and energy transformation that are quite literally impossible as a matter of physics, thermodynamics, and cost. And then, just to show who is the boss here, they made the impossible targets mandatory by statute. In the case of New York State, the statute in question is the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA or Climate Act). Among the many requirements of that statute, the most...

The Trump administration and several state governors on Friday urged the largest electricity grid in the U.S. to make the big technology companies pay for new power plants. Electricity prices have exploded in recent years on PJM Interconnection due in part to the data centers that tech companies are building to train and power artificial intelligence. The PJM grid serves more than 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. Its service area includes northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world. The Trump administration and several states signed a pact that calls for tech companies to...

An apparently homeless thief was electrocuted to death while trying to steal copper wiring from a California construction site — as power was knocked out to 2,500 homes, reports said. The unidentified man was killed Sunday in a vacant strip mall that’s in the process of being demolished, with witnesses saying they heard a loud explosion at around 2 p.m. before electricity went out for several hours, police told CBS News. The explosion is believed to be a transformer that blew up, knocking out power for several hours, Pomona police said. One neighbor rushed to the scene where a woman...

Weeks after the Trump Media and Technology Group announced a merger with nuclear power company TAE Technologies, the new organization has unveiled plans for a fusion plant in the US — aiming to make it the biggest power generation site in the world. On Tuesday morning, the company unveiled criteria for selecting the building site of the new project. CEO Devin Nunes tells me they are accepting applications from state and local governments — much like Amazon HQ did — and will make a decision within weeks, with construction to begin later this year. And Nunes is clear about one...

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term in office was marked by the rapid implementation of his far-right program. From ICE to DOGE, from anti-DEI to anti-antifa, and from bombing boats to $400 million bribes, Trump’s regime has turned out even more extreme than feared after he was elected to a second term in November 2024. His words and actions as president have been covered extensively over the past year, as have those of a number of internal advisers and outside confidants, like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. However, the grassroots far right, and its influence over the administration,...

We’ve seen plenty of leftist violence in America in recent times, but we are hardly immune. Across the Pond, in Berlin, Germany, they’re finding out just how damaging crazed anarchists can be when they put their minds to it. To wit, a far-left pro-environmental organization called the Vulkan group claimed responsibility for an attack on the power grid that has left thousands of residents without electricity for days — even as freezing temperatures engulf the region.According to the newspaper Berlin Zeitung, the group posted a 4,163-word letter saying they did it to protest the energy industry, adding that they targeted...

n Monday, Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) initiated an overhaul of the country’s constitution that will codify the rule of longtime dictator Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, as “co-presidents.” The reform follows an escalating campaign of persecution against the Catholic Church, the last bastion of opposition against the Ortegas, who nonetheless claim that their regime is a beacon of “Christian socialism.” Days prior, they had celebrated the New Year by expelling all Catholic nuns from the country. Nicaragua’s attacks on the Church and broader descent into tyranny culminates the stunning fall from grace of an erstwhile...

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,...

Japan is restarting the world's largest nuclear power plant, after a 15-year shutdown following the Fukushima disaster. Nuclear power used to account for over 30% of Japan's national electricity, so seeing these reactors come back online restores a key pillar of Japan's energy system. Japan's mountainous terrain forced each region to establish large, redundant energy systems; therefore, the return of nuclear power gives Japan surplus capacity and flexibility in an otherwise stagnant environment. With the global energy trade growing more unreliable by the day, Japan is now better positioned than most to weather the storm.

Problems in the last 24 hours in Morgan Hill, California The chart below shows the number of PG&E reports we have received in the last 24 hours from users in Morgan Hill and surrounding areas December 25: Problems at PG&E PG&E is having issues since 09:20 AM EST.

Power was restored Sunday morning to the bulk of the 130,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco impacted by a massive outage on Saturday that caused major disruptions in the city. Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s outage map showed more than 20,000 customers still remained without electricity as of 5 a.m. PST, while crews worked to fully restore service. The outage, which occurred shortly after 1 p.m. on Saturday, left a large swath of the northern part of the city without power that began to grow in size. At its peak, the outage represented roughly one-third of the utility company’s...

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would not be releasing the full Epstein files to Congress on Friday as required under new legislation, instead sending over a partial batch. Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department would release “several hundred thousand” documents on Friday, “and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.” Blanche attributed the delay to the need to redact any names or identifying information about witnesses, but failing to turn over the full unclassified files could run afoul of the law, which gave the department 30 days to...

A major power outage in Central America cut electricity to some 15 million residents on Wednesday, with the worst impact felt in Honduras and Nicaragua. The two most-affected countries saw power for nearly all residents “practically go down to zero volts,” siad EOR communications head Evelyn Flores. The grid operator said the outage began at 1 p.m. (1900 GMT) but the cause and specific origin of the massive loss of power still being determined. Energy use fell from 8,300 megawatts to just 2,400 megawatts across the region with the exception of Panama and Costa Rica, which were mostly unaffected, EOR...

America's electricity supply is becoming increasingly strained... As of March, the U.S. has 5,426 artificial intelligence ("AI") data centers. That's up from about 1,000 in 2018. As you're probably aware, data centers are gluttons for energy. In 2022, they consumed about 17 gigawatts ("GW") of power. (For reference, the Hoover Dam only produces about 2 GW per year.) But the power has to come from somewhere. Today, it's being pulled from American homes. Last year, a study by Bloomberg and Whisker Labs found that U.S. power supplies are being "distorted" by electricity-hungry data centers. It sounds like the plot of...

And deserves to get it good and hard.Last night was the (well, not mid-term elections — those are next year — “quarter-term” elections?) and the areas that thought that Kamala Harris was a damned fine pick for POTUS last cycle stayed Blue. That should not have been a big surprise to anyone with a licence to adult..In Newt Yack City, a CAIR1-funded communist Democratic Socialist is now mayor.Whee. As long-time readers of my little scribblings have probably already figured out, I doubt that Mamdani will be as bad as his detractors say; but I damned sure don’t think he’s going...

A shuttered plant is reimagined as Manresa Wilds, an example of an old facility repurposed to solve a new century’s problems. The hike up to the roof involved Escher-like flights of metal stairs and grated catwalks like high wires, dangling above a spectacular abyss of rusted machinery. The ’60s-era control room, straight out of “Apollo 13,” opened onto a turbine hall the size of the concourse at Grand Central.I was blown away. The plant has been shuttered since 2013 and parts of it look like workers walked out one day and left everything as it was. Suburban Connecticut is not...

In 2020, California imported about 25% of its demand for electricity from Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona due to the capacity limitations of the three utilities that serve the State (Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric). These capacity limitations resulted from the closure of fossil fuel plants and environmental restrictions imposed by regulatory authorities in California to meet climate change standards. New England, New Jersey, and New York combined imported about 30% of their demand from either neighboring states or Canada. Many utilities in PJM and MISO import electricity from TVA and the...