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For all the money the Biden administration has been frantically shoveling into the wind sector - I'm praying this is a last-minute, panicked gambit on their part because November looks dicey - it's all coming to late to help out some of the biggest names in wind turbine development. Siemens Gamesa, the Spanish renewable spin-off of German parent Siemens Energy (and one of my favorite villains in the wind farm wars, although no one tops Ørsted) says it's going to lay off up to 4100 people in their turbine divisions across three countries in part of a "restructuring" move.Siemens Gamesa...

“We’re facing an unfunded, $1 trillion mandate that carries enormous consequences for the American consumer.” At least that’s what Chris Spear, American Trucking Associations President and CEO has to say about one D.C. diktat coming down from on high in particular, and that is the one mandating that the American trucking industry bend to EPA rules requiring all electric fleets and production lines.Here’s the context, from March of this year:On March 29, 2024, Good Friday, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rolled out its new electric truck mandate, which will require that electric semi-trucks make up an increasing share of manufacturer...

Murphy’s Law, or anything that can go wrong will go wrong, certainly sounds like it’s at play with all things “green” agenda. Think you’ve seen the extent of the damage? Well think again, because things seem to always just go from bad to worse. According to a new study out of the United Kingdom, drivers behind the wheel of electric vehicles/hybrid-electric (“E-HE”) vehicles prove to be more than twice as likely to hit a pedestrian than drivers behind the wheel of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, overall. But, when in urban settings, E-HE vehicles were “three times more dangerous” than...

It's not a laptop in first class or a cheap Chinese scooter smoking ominously in the plane's cargo hold. Nor is it a massive commercial ship packed to the gills with cars being transported across an ocean that has had one of the EVs parked onboard light off, and now the whole vessel is hopelessly ablaze. It's not another fiery EV in a driveway or garage or the solar panels on a rooftop, even though I have covered all of those. Comments regular Global Traveler turned me on to an ongoing drama in, of all places, San Diego County that...

On the one hand, William McGuire, an Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, says "the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate. It looked like the coronavirus pandemic might do the trick, but its lethality was way over hyped by the World Health Organization. Maybe a breakthrough in ongoing gain-of-function bioweapons research can boost the death toll from the next pandemic to the 90% fatality rate that is...

Coal and natural gas plants provide 60% of the U.S.’ affordable, reliable, and baseload power. In a time of increased electricity demand, America needs to double down on harnessing these sources—not abandon them.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s recently finalized Clean Power Plan 2.0 (CPP) rule, however, takes the country in the wrong direction. Under this regulation, one that is arguably illegal, existing coal and new natural gas power plants will be mandated to install emissions control technologies that aren’t yet commercially viable. Plants that don’t comply risk permanent closure. This unrealistic mandate is advanced under the guise of reducing greenhouse...

Europe is saying goodbye to natural gas for good with a superturbine that will produce the substitute energy. Although demand for natural gas has fallen in recent years, the continent remains dependent on it as an alternative to coal, a fossil fuel it wants to replace with pure hydrogen. However, to achieve this, a combustion system must first emerge that can work efficiently with any concentration of H mix, including 100%. Different nations aim to achieve decarbonization through a gradual energy transition. In this search for new alternatives to fossil fuels, hydrogen has many possibilities. Its production for energy purposes...

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Surveillance,” Bloomberg columnist, economist, President of Queens’ College, Allianz Chief Economic Adviser, and former Obama Global Development Council Chair Dr. Mohamed El-Erian stated that the “sustainable energy” transition has helped create “a world that’s subject to higher inflation” than the world we had before.

We are fast approaching something I have called the “Green Energy Wall.” The “Wall” consists of some combination of real-world obstacles, partly cost and partly physics, that will inevitably end the quest for emissions-free “net zero” electricity generation well before the goal of zero emissions is reached. I first identified the approaching Wall in this post in December 2021, and remarked that it was “gradually coming into focus” in this follow-up post in November 2023. Everyone who pays attention and is capable of doing basic arithmetic knows that the we are approaching this Wall, some jurisdictions much faster than others....

California Democrats are frustrated by many of their consumers. No matter how much they plead, whine, and cajole, people simply aren't buying electric vehicles in the numbers the state is demanding. And progress in getting charging stations up and running is far behind schedule. Also, all of the electrical power being flushed into these systems is expensive. But don't worry about any of that. Gavin Newsom and the Democrats have a plan to address all of these woes. In order to subsidize the cost of electric vehicles and encourage more people to buy them, they're going to tack on a...

Ford reported losing over $100,000 per electric vehicle sold in the first quarter of 2022, with its electric vehicle division posting a $1.3 billion loss. Electric vehicle sales volumes dropped 20% as Ford was forced to slash prices due to weak industry demand. “Americans don’t want EVs at levels Biden’s climate hysteria require,” businessman Andrew Puzder wrote on X. “Ford’s EV Q1 losses soared to $1.3 billion — a ridiculous $132,000 per EV sold. All Ford’s profits came from combustion engine vehicle sales. Collectivist policies destroy prosperity.” The company expects $5 billion in electric vehicle losses for the year, up...

Forty-two was the mystical number that explained “life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’ comic novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Today, another mystical number, the so-called social cost of carbon (SSC), is providing the excuse for the Environmental Protection Agency and green-energy-enamored state regulators to enact crippling energy policies.The SCC is the thumb on the scale that can justify virtually any policy aimed at eliminating fossil fuels. When the EPA first proposed its rule to reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, the agency’s cost-benefit analysis determined the benefits would be minuscule. Any putative benefits, it turns...

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has made some questionable remarks regarding China in recent years, including applauding the country for allegedly using threats of prison or organ harvesting as a means to meet its green energy goals, according to unearthed comments reviewed by Fox News Digital. "They take this very seriously," Kennedy said in 2014, speaking of China and its clean energy agreement that year. "I don’t know whether… the guy ends up in prison with his, you know, organs harvested or what. But they are very, very dead serious." Kennedy’s comments, made on "The Ring Of Fire" radio...

For two decades and more, the political position of the climate alarm cult in the U.S. and Europe has only seemed to strengthen with time. In the U.S., the Obama and Biden Administrations have both pushed huge regulatory initiatives to restrict use of fossil fuels (with only some modest roll-backs during Trump’s four years); some of the most sweeping restrictions got pushed through just a week ago. Meanwhile, blue states like California and New York have enacted ever-more-extreme restrictions by statute. In Europe, there has been a near all-party political consensus in favor of the “net zero” agenda, notably including...

Back in 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), mandating environmental reviews for all major projects to determine their environment impact and allowing for periods of public comment. This has generally been beneficial, but it opens the door to lengthy lawsuits from environmental activists that can tie projects up in the courts for years. There may be some significant changes coming to the process, however, but only for certain types of projects. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) has just finished what's being described as a "rule change" that will remove many delays and "streamline" the...

There is a famous story about Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman walking down the street with a friend. The friend stopped and said, “Hey, there is a $20 bill on the sidewalk.” The economist turned to him and replied, “There can’t be. If there were a $20 bill on the sidewalk, somebody would have picked it up.” Friedman often taught that if something were in people’s best interest, they would discover and put it to use without having to be told or forced to do so. A Forbes economic writer named Tilak Doshi, a long-time energy economics analyst, wrote a...

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiative in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkable stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming...

In my self-designated role critiquing various schemes for total transformation of the world energy system, I get to review large amounts of poor, shoddy, and incompetent work. When people get into advocating for this “energy transition,” the stars regularly align to bring forth the most extreme levels of ineptitude. Start with the fact that the “smartest” people are filled with arrogance and hubris, but are not actually very smart. Add that many innumerate Politics and English majors have flooded into a field that cries out for engineering calculations. Add too that groupthink and orthodoxy enforcement prevent anyone from pointing out...

In sunny California, solar panels are everywhere. They sit in dry, desert landscapes in the Central Valley and are scattered over rooftops in Los Angeles’s urban center. By last count, the state had nearly 47 gigawatts of solar power installed — enough to power 13.9 million homes and provide over a quarter of the Golden State’s electricity. But now, the state and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” —...

There are many myths about energy and the economy. In this post I explore the situation surrounding some of these myths.My analysis strongly suggests that the transition to a new Green Economy is not progressing as well as hoped.Green energy planners have missed the point that our physics-based economy favors low-cost producers.In fact, the US and EU may not be far from an economic downturn because subsidized green approaches are not truly low-cost.[1] The Chinese people have long believed that the safest place to store savings is in empty condominium apartments, but this approach is no longer working.The focus on...