Free Republic

It’s not rocket science. If energy costs more, that means we have to make do with less of it, or make do with less of something else. Thus if the government forces everyone to pay more for electricity, companies have less spare cash to employ people. Their margins are tighter, they can’t make and sell as many products. So when we are told the clean energy revolution is creating jobs, is it virtually self-evident that’s a mythical fairy claim.I say “virtually”, because it is theoretical possible it could work, but only if this green power provided some productivity or...

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world. Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand. By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We...

Never underestimate the sneakiness when you’re dealing with The Most Transparent Administration, Evah‘s tortured internal conflict between pretending to heed the voices calling for pragmatic economic growth and appeasing the vociferous green interests nipping at their heels. The Obama administration just threw a major bone to said interests with a reevaluation that’s going to come in particularly handy in producing very official- and serious-sounding studies and reports, but it was carried out in a very quiet maneuver that I’m sure they’re hoping will pass by the public eye generally unnoticed. The Obama administration uses their “social cost of carbon” estimate...

North Carolina is joining a growing number of states exploring new fees for hybrid and electric car owners to help make up for revenue those drivers aren’t paying in gas taxes on their fuel-efficient vehicles. The proposal strikes many owners of alternative-fuel vehicles and some advocacy groups as a wrong-headed approach to balancing priorities of promoting U.S. energy independence with sustainable infrastructure funding. But policymakers and some experts argue taxing hybrid and electric vehicle owners is a matter of making sure all drivers help maintain the roads they use and construct new ones.

China launched an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy probe in European wine on Wednesday in response to the European Union’s decision to impose duties on imports of Chinese solar panels, as tensions increased between two of the world’s biggest trading blocs. The EU will impose duties on imports of Chinese solar panels from Thursday, but announced a dramatically reduced initial rate after pressure from some large member states in the hope of reaching a negotiated settlement with Beijing. China’s Commerce Ministry said the EU’s duties were imposed despite China making great efforts and showing enormous sincerity in trying to resolve the matter...

Experts with the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne estimate that [German] consumers will have to pay more than €100 billion by 2022 for renewable energy facilities that have already been installed. Of the 28 cents household customers pay per kilowatt-hour of electricity today, 5.28 cents already applies to the [Renewable Energies Act] levy, and that figure is growing. There are many reasons for the cost explosion. Contrary to earlier forecasts, solar and wind farms are a long way from being able to produce energy at the prices possible in coal-fired or nuclear power plants. There are...

LOS ANGELES — The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail. Coatings that protect the panels disintegrated while other defects caused two fires that took the system offline for two years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues.

<p>If a hunter kills a bald eagle, he can get a year in prison and a $100,000 fine. Likewise, oil companies are liable for tens of millions for any spill that harms our wildlife. But what happens when a green-energy wind turbine slashes a bird to bits?</p> <p>Absolutely nothing.</p>

Israeli electric car firm Better Place, which hoped to revolutionize driving habits in Israel and worldwide, will file for bankruptcy in the coming week. The trailblazing firm sought to accelerate a world motoring shift away from gas-guzzling cars to electric, battery-powered vehicles. But “the company was not well-served by having things it thought would happen over a decade happen within a year,” a source familiar with the company’s financial woes told Fortune on Friday. snip It also touted partnerships developing in France and the US, harboring particular hopes of an electric car revolution pushed by the Obama administration. snip

When Webster Groves High School purchased solar panels to put on the roof of the school, no one told them they could catch on fire! The fire department was called on Saturday to put out the flames ... Plumes of black smoke could be seen coming from the roof at Webster Groves High School Saturday. Firefighters say solar panels caught fire around 2:00pm. Nearby residents noticed the smoke and called the fire department. The panels are above the new science wing.

Remember This Moment (The 'Black Swans' Have Had Their Necks Broken) Joshua M Brown May 16th, 2013 “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” - Jean-Paul Sartre It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia." -Frank Zappa I want to you stop, take a breath and consider this moment we're in. Because you will look back on it and realize how amazing it was - how amazing it is! The Black Swans we'd been guessing at have had their...

It happens about once a month here, on the barren foothills of one of America's green-energy boomtowns: A soaring golden eagle slams into a wind farm's spinning turbine and falls, mangled and lifeless, to the ground. Killing these iconic birds is not just an irreplaceable loss for a vulnerable species. It's also a federal crime, a charge that the Obama administration has used to prosecute oil companies when birds drown in their waste pits, and power companies when birds are electrocuted by their power lines.

A leading venture capital firm gets taken to the clean energy cleaners. The story in the New York Times says Kleiner Perkins has been “humbled” by the past decade’s performance. That seems appropriate. The nation’s most famous venture capital firm had a stunning 35.7 percent annual rate of return in the decade of the 1990s. That was before they met Al Gore. Somewhere around the time Gore had won his Academy Award for warning the world about global warming, the former Vice President was hired on as a senior partner at KPCB. Fortune wrote an article describing Gore sitting in...

I’d like to bring some points to the attention of your readers that were raised in an article in the Independent published on 11th May 2013 It would appear to indicate a major shift in the UK’s government attitude to climate change. “The Government is facing an exodus of senior energy and climate change advisers amid growing concerns that decisive action to tackle global warming is falling victim to Treasury intransigence.” … “A Government offshore energy industrial strategy document, due to have been published this month, is understood to have been delayed after Treasury objections. At the same time as...

“Without much fanfare, the Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website,” the Institute for Energy Research noticed on Wednesday. ”Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches.” Uh-oh. Why weren’t there any celebrations? President Obama loves a good celebration. Why, we just found out about the super-secret star-studded bash he held after his inauguration. Maybe it’s because the IER divided the $26 billion spent on “green jobs” by the...

Another one of the Energy Department’s taxpayer-financed “investments” just went belly-up. This one died very quietly, without making a formal announcement, but USA Today noticed: A Michigan maker of vans for the disabled that received a $50-million Energy Department loan has quietly ceased operation and laid off its staff. Vehicle Production Group, or VPG, stopped operations after finances dipped below the minimum threshold required by the government as a condition of the loan, says its former CEO, John Walsh. Though about 100 staff were laid off and its offices shuttered, it has not filed for bankruptcy reorganization. For a change,...

If Europe thought it had a crisis on its hands in the eurozone, it’s nothing compared to the crisis a lack of oil would inflict. Thanks to the EU’s disastrous energy policies, while the world is proving to be awash with black gold in one form or another, Europe is fast losing the security of its oil supply. And, just for good measure, a UK House of Lords report recently published concludes that the EU will need a trillion euros of new investment if it is to stave off an energy crisis – investment its “muddled” policies are currently failing...

From the UK’s BBC comes this news item: Trillion-euro shortfall facing EU energy sector – Lords Committee Under the obligatory photo of chimneys spewing steam, is a totally uncritical article on the final report from an eight-month inquiry by the UK’s House of Lords into the EU power sector. The report accuses the EU of having a muddled energy policy, but the horribly disturbing aspect of this report is that their lordships are the ones that are muddled. For example, they say that a muddled Brussels energy policy is putting off big investors. Well, they really got that wrong. Brussels’...

I have made an 82% correlation between the sunspot cycle and the Global Temperature Anomaly. The correlation is obtained through a non linear time series summation of NASA monthly sunspot data to the NOAA monthly Global Temperature Anomaly.

Oregon officials are preparing to foreclose on SoloPower Inc. after the government-backed startup missed a loan payment this week in the latest setback for the state's reeling green-energy sector. SoloPower, which is still scrambling to revive its struggling North Portland plant, missed a $50,800 payment Wednesday on a $10 million loan from the Oregon Energy Department, an agency spokeswoman said Friday. If the San Jose, Calif., company defaults, Portland taxpayers could be out $5 million, because the city guaranteed half the loan last year in wooing the plant away from Wilsonville. Already the state of Oregon is out $20 million...