Free Republic

Earlier this week, he called for stopping windmill operations due to an energy crunch. President Donald Trump on Wednesday vowed that his administration would not approve wind or solar projects, calling the alternative energy sources part of the "scam of the century!"Trump has long criticized the alternative energy forms, notably pointing to the impact of wind turbines on the bird population. Earlier this week, he called for stopping windmill operations due to an energy crunch."Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS," Trump posted on...

When my friend Rebecca in Highland Park, NJ, opened her PSE&G gas and electric bill last month, she almost fell out of her seat: It had tripled. It’s now costing her more than $1,000 a month to keep her modest home running. “It’s been creeping up for months, in spite of the fact that nothing about our house has changed,” she told me. “In years past, it was averaging about $300 a month.” “I don’t know how we’re expected to absorb these new bills,” she posted on Facebook. Her neighbor Felix Urman wondered the same as he ticked off his...

Forced electric load reduction and possible rolling blackouts in Maryland. Electric system in crisis. Got Coal?

Ireland’s 40-year-long era of burning coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel imaginable — to generate electricity came to an end in June. That was when ESB announced it had ceased burning coal at its Moneypoint power station in County Clare, six months ahead of schedule. Throughout those 40 years, the coal was transferred on noisy conveyer belts through what must surely have been the longest, ugliest, sequence of brown tunnels in the country. They ran from the jetty at Moneypoint, where the coal ships pulled up, to a huge coal storage yard and then right into the powerplant and furnaces...

Thomas Kolbe has written about the collapse of the German economy, something pretty shocking to those of us who remember when the German economy seemed unstoppable. What’s slammed the brakes on that juggernaut is central planning that revolves around the whole Green New Deal theory. Other European countries are doing the same. Spain and Portugal had a catastrophic power outage thanks to their green energy policies, and, in England, people are getting cold and dirty in a very 19th-century way because of the UK’s drive for “Net Zero.” Had Kamala been elected last year, America would almost certainly have gone...

If finalized, the move would escalate the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back billions of dollars in climate grants awarded under President Biden.The Trump administration is preparing to terminate $7 billion in federal grants intended to help low- and moderate-income families install solar panels on their homes, according to two people briefed on the matter.The Environmental Protection Agency is drafting termination letters to the 60 nonprofit groups and state agencies that received the grants under the “Solar for All” program, with the goal of sending the letters by the end of this week, according to the two people, who spoke...

I keep reading how big batteries are all it takes to make wind and solar reliable as the sole grid electricity source. The reality is that making wind and solar work at all requires a fantastic amount of battery backup, far more than is possible. Below is an example using the PJM grid. PJM is America’s biggest grid operator, with a territory covering the Mid-Atlantic and points west. Their territory includes the Washington, DC metro area, where all the federal bigwigs live, making it a good place to start. I also live there. We are quantifying a fantasy, so let’s...

What does the future hold as to large additions to heavily subsidized wind and solar electricity generation capacity in the U.S.? For those paying attention, the legislative back-and-forth of the One Big Beautiful Bill, as it made its way through Congress, has been something of a roller coaster ride. At this point, I am betting that the utility-scale wind and solar industries are near the end of their line. This post reports on the latest development, which is an Executive Order signed by President Trump on July 7. But count on the wind and solar subsidy farmers to keep fighting...

Rapper Akon has revealed plans for a futuristic $6 billion city in his Senegal homeland modelled on Black Panther's Wakanda. The R&B star, who boasts two multi-platinum albums, told a news conference on Monday he had laid the first stone for the city in the Atlantic Ocean village of Mbodiene, around 60 miles south of the capital Dakar. The solar-powered Akon City will offer hotels, a university, hospitals, business and leisure centres including a casino, as well as movie studios, all featuring futuristic designs by architect Hussein Bakri, with African sculptures for inspiration.

Spain and Morocco want to build an ambitious crossing over, or under, the Strait of Gibraltar by the beginning of the next decade. In this video, we'll explore the possibility of building a bridge or a tunnel between Europe and Africa and why the 2030 World Cup could be the spark that sets everything in motion.0:00 Strait of Gibraltar Crossing0:32 History of the Strait of Gibraltar 2:37 Why Building a Crossing Makes Sense3:29 Could a Bridge Actually Work?4:31 The Greatest Challenge8:04 An Insane Proposal for a Gibraltar Bridge8:40 A Tunnel Between Continents10:17 Gibraltar's New 2030 TunnelGibraltar's Insane $10B Tunnel to...

Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar inverters Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries U.S. says continually assesses risk with emerging technology U.S. working to integrate 'trusted equipment' into the grid LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said. Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are...

This summer, solar power generation globally could exceed electricity from nuclear power plants for the first time ever, as solar capacity soars and sunlight and daylight hours are long in the northern hemisphere. Global solar power generation jumped by 34% in the first quarter of 2025 from the same period in 2024, according to data from Ember cited by Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire. If the pace of growth is sustained though June, July, and August, solar output is set to top 260 terawatt hours (TWh) in the summer months. This would beat the average 223 TWh of global nuclear power...

Solar stocks plunged on Thursday after House Republicans passed a tax bill that terminates key clean energy credits. Residential solar installer Sunrun plummeted more than 35%. The legislation ends tax credits for installers like Sunrun that lease equipment to customers. The GOP bill is a “worse than feared” scenario for clean energy, as it takes a “sledgehammer” to the Inflation Reduction Act, Jefferies analysts led by Julien Dumoulin-Smith told clients in a note. Some 70% of the rooftop solar industry now uses lease arrangements, making the bill disastrous for companies like Sunrun, Guggenheim analyst Joseph Osha told clients. Enphase and...

Solar stocks were plummeting as President Donald Trump’s tax-and-spending bill narrowly passed in the House of Representatives early Thursday, threatening the huge tax benefits granted to clean-energy companies during the Biden-era. Clean-energy producers like solar companies have worried that the Trump administration will cut back or completely overhaul tax credits introduced by former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act from 2022. Those credits can be of up to 50% of a project’s value. “[The] latest draft represents among the most restrictive interpretations we have heard speculated and the closest to ‘complete’ gutting of [the] bill we’ve ever seen,” Jefferies analyst Julien...

Undisclosed communication devices reportedly discovered in Chinese-manufactured solar panels and related equipment have sparked concerns among U.S. officials about the vulnerability of the nation’s power grid, according to a Reuters report. These “rogue” devices, found over the past nine months, could potentially destabilize energy infrastructure and trigger widespread blackouts, sources familiar with the matter told the outlet. The undocumented devices, including cellular radios, were identified in solar power inverters, batteries, electric vehicle chargers, and heat pumps produced by several Chinese suppliers. ... The U.S. has found Trojan horse communication devices in Chinese-made solar power inverters. They are used to connect...

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 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...

Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle increasingly advocate for affordable, reliable, and clean energy. This is for good reason – modern society requires energy that is affordable and available on demand. Environmental concerns are also very important. Together, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness form the three pillars of ideal energy policy. Two new analyses evaluate competing electrical power sources and produce an affordable, reliable, and clean scorecard. The two analyses – one published by Northwood University and the Mackinac Center, and the other published by my public policy organization, The Heartland Institute – independently reach near-identical findings. Both analyses...

The thought of Earth’s final day may seem distant, even unreal, but we know it will inevitably happen. Now a group of scientists working for NASA together with researchers from the University of Tōhō in Japan have calculated a timeline for the complete extinction of all life on Earth. According to this calculations – which have been made possible by advanced mathematical models powered by supercomputers -, survival on planet Earth will be impossible in about 1 billion years, when conditions become too extreme for life as we know it. So yes, we still have a few more years to...