Free Republic

Michigan’s electric utilities gamble that the reliability of service won’t collapse. Consumers Energy would have to double the number of wind turbines currently operating in this state to replace the electricity produced by just one of the coal- and gas-fired power plants it intends to close as part of its plans to rely more on renewable sources. The problem, however, is that those additional turbines only spin about one-third of the time, leaving a big energy gap for the households and businesses that rely on the company for their electricity. .. regulated utilities and their vendors operate 1,107 industrial wind...

Centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., on Monday blasted former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to shut down all coal plants in the U.S. in 11 years -- saying it would “devastate” communities in his state.

Representative K.C. Becker and Senator Faith Winter have introduced legislation that would give Xcel Energy a green light and blank check to prematurely close existing power plants, replace them with expensive, intermittent resources, and then force captive electric ratepayers to pick up the tab with interest for the massive fuel switching scheme and workforce transition plans. ... Colorado Energy Plan (CEP) .. The monopoly utility is more than willing to build and build and build so it can fuel switch to utility-scale wind, solar, and batteries (which don’t really exist yet) at the expense of Colorado ratepayers. Instead of saving...

The Environmental Protection Agency acted again Thursday to ease rules on the sagging U.S. coal industry, this time scaling back what would have been a tough control on climate-changing emissions from any new coal plants. The latest Trump administration targeting of legacy Obama administration efforts to slow climate change comes in the wake of multiplying warnings from the agency’s scientists and others about the accelerating pace of global warming. In a ceremony Thursday at the agency, acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a proposal to dismantle a 2015 rule that any new coal power plants include cutting-edge techniques to capture...

Eskom’s warning that the country was threatened by months of rotating blackouts became a reality in less than 24 hours. The state-owned company, which produces most of South Africa’s power, said on Wednesday that controlled blackouts could return and last throughout the year. Even more concerning is that the company expects energy availability of the system will keep declining into early next year and probably only recover to current levels in six months. By Thursday, Eskom announced it was cutting 1GW from the grid. It doubled that amount on Friday in an outage that’s scheduled to last 13 hours. For...

Under banners: “Without good work, no good climate! We are speaking out for our jobs,” as many as 20,000 mine workers took part in demonstrations organized by the IG BCE and Verdi trade unions on Wednesday in Bergheim near Cologne, Germany. IG BCE President Michael Vassiliadis has been a member of the coal commission since the summer. He called for a more respectful approach toward mine workers, akin to the attitude shown environmentalists campaigning to save the ancient Hambach forest. “The actions of forest conservationists are given maximum understanding,” Vassiliadis told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “But employees’ concerns are often...

When the Colorado Public Utilities Commission recently approved Xcel Energy’s Colorado Energy Plan, the commissioners made a highly politicized decision that ignored economic reality, bypassed the state legislature and allowed the company to break its promise to save customers money. Coloradans should be troubled not just by the plan itself, but by how it won approval through an end-run of the democratic process. In August 2017, Xcel unveiled the Colorado Energy Plan .. The plan’s cheerleaders, including Gov. John Hickenlooper and state agencies, celebrated the monopoly utility’s proposal to spend $2.5 billion on fuel switching ... Earlier in 2017, Xcel...

Xcel again proved its preeminent power over every crack and crevasse of state government when the governor’s appointed Public Utilities Commission approved Xcel’s plan to close two state-of-the-art power plants a decade before they’re supposed to. At the same time the PUC acknowledges Xcel was lying when they said the move would save us money. ... The public relations spin on this corporate heist is glorious. Even though the coal-fired power plants, Comanche 1 and 2, are the most clean-burning that modern technology allows, making them the cleanest in the nation, they still use vilified coal, so this move looks...

U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) sent a letter to Bank of the West President and Chief Executive Officer Nandita Bakhshi pushing back on the bank’s decision to no longer conduct business with companies engaged in the exploration and production of coal, oil and natural gas. Bank of the West, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, has 23 branches with dedicated employees who work hard to serve communities and families across Wyoming. In his letter, Barrasso condemned the San Francisco headquarter’s attack on Wyoming’s communities and businesses that depend on fossil fuels for energy security, jobs and economic growth. “This misguided and...

Coal has become the enemy of city-dwelling, affluent believers in global warming. Yet it continues to be cheap and available for many countries, especially China and India, that want to expand their power grids to raise their standards of living to a level approaching that of the warmists who insist that doom awaits if atmospheric CO2 levels rise. So how can the poorer countries in the world, whose governments insist on improving their citizens' lives with electricity now and worries about hypothetical assertions based solely on computer models later, be forced to comply with the elites' desires? The warmists have...

When the Commission to Assess the Threat from Electromagnetic Pulse [EMP] Attack published its report in 2004, coal accounted for roughly half of all power produced in the United States. Today, only a third of US electricity comes from coal, according to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA). This is good news for both environmentalists and natural gascompanies. The formers’ long term dream of a more sustainable source of power is being realized, while the latters’ business is booming. According to the EIA report, natural gas now makes up a third of all power produced – with nuclear and renewables...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans on repealing an Obama-era requirement effectively mandating all new coal-fired power plants be outfitted with unproven emissions technology, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. EPA will modify the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for power plants as part of its effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan (CPP) — the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s climate agenda. EPA will drop the de facto requirement that new coal plants install carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology Obama administration critics said would make it nearly impossible to build new coal plants. “It’s fantastic that the...

You may have thought the push for All Renwable Energy All The Time went out the window with the departure of Barack Obama and his control of the EPA but you would be mistaken. The 100% renewable crowd is still in action and they’ve been gradually enlisting a number of major tech sector corporations into their ranks. The website The Energy Collective ran a feature this week touting the progress that many of the nation’s largest companies have made along these lines.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has proposed to end the longstanding EPA practice of using secretive, often questionable, questionable, even deceptive science to support agency policy and regulatory initiatives. His proposed rules will ensure that any science underlying agency actions is transparent and publicly available for independent experts to examine and validate – or point out its flaws. It also responds to growing concerns that extensive scientific research in environmental, medical and other arenas cannot be replicated by other scientists, or is compromised by cherry-picked data, poor research design, sloppy analysis or biased researchers. The situation has led to...

Rural residents turn to cheap heating fuel ... Monte Miller shovels a load of coal into a bucket and makes the short journey from his storage shed to his home on the edge of Bayfield, joking aloud that his wife likes to keep the temperature at a steady 75 degrees. “But we don’t have any problem doing that with coal,” Miller and his wife, Marsha, have been using coal as their main source of fuel since they moved to their home in 2000. Each year, the couple uses about 2 tons of coal to keep their 2,500-square-foot house warm throughout...

Climate scare must be debunked if coal is to recover It is very appropriate that President Donald Trump virtually ignored climate change in his National Security Strategy (NSS). Recent climate change has been unremarkable and clearly does not constitute a national security threat in comparison with concerns such as terrorism and inadequate border controls. What does constitute a threat, however, is a lack of affordable, reliable energy to power the nation and export into world markets. So, as a citizen of Canada, a nation dependent on a prosperous U.S. for our defence and much of our economy, I am very...

WASHINGTON, DC, Oct 13 – “The ‘climate changers’ came out in full force when the EPA announced earlier this week that it was ending the Obama-era war on coal by scrapping Mr. Obama’s Clean Power Plan. But, America has the world’s largest reserves of coal—an asset that should not be dismissed out of hand for a variety of reasons, according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC].Weber says that extreme restrictions on the use of coal to generate electricity “acted like a national energy tax. They minimized the positive impact of our lowest cost and...

In 2001, Colorado electricity consumers enjoyed some of the lowest electric rates in the country. The 15 years since haven’t been so kind to ratepayers. For more than a decade, elected officials, PUC commissioners, industry and advocates have told Colorado ratepayers that they could transform the state’s electricity generation away from coal and toward industrial wind, solar and natural gas with little cost to ratepayers. However, the actual numbers tell a much different story. Colorado electricity rates have risen sharply – 62.1 percent – across residential, commercial and industrial sectors, despite a slight decrease in recent years. Colorado electricity rates...

Turns out if you look close you find out two things. First, in 1990, 88 percent of the world’s energy came from fossil fuels. After more than 25 years and over a trillion dollars in subsidies for “renewable” energy, in 2015 the world’s share of energy from fossil fuels was . . . 86 percent. (See figure immediately below.) At this rate, it will take 150 years to get fossil fuel energy down to 75 percent of the world’s total energy supply. I’m sure just $200 trillion in subsidies will do the trick.

Judicial Watch Sues VA Again for Docs About Misuse of a Veterans’ Facility Judicial Watch Sues for Info on Obama’s War on Coal EPA Breaks Law on Taxpayer-Funded Propaganda? Judicial Watch to Trump Administration: End Congress’s Obamacare Exemption! Judicial Watch Sues VA Again for Docs About Misuse of a Veterans’ Facility As you may know, Judicial Watch has taken the lead in trying to highlight the government’s misconduct and misuse of a 388-acre parcel of land in Los Angeles, originally intended to serve the needs of veterans. In fact, we just filed a second Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)...