Free Republic

There is never a good time for bad public policy. For few policies is this more evident than renewable energy mandates (REM), variously known as renewable portfolio standards, alternative energy standards and renewable energy standards. The first renewable energy mandate was adopted in 1983, but most states did not impose these mandates until the 2000s. Though the details vary from state to state, in general, renewable energy mandates require utilities to provide a certain percentage of the electric power they supply from “renewable” sources, notably wind and solar, with the required percentages rising over time. At the height of the...

A solar-power project set to open next month in Nevada has fried 130 birds during tests and will soon join another solar farm in California in avian incineration. If as many birds being burned by solar power farms built in the U.S. were to wash up on our beaches soaked in crude oil from a leaking offshore well, the outrage would be deafening. But as with the wind turbines that now cover acre upon acre of former "pristine" countryside, what amount to avian Cuisinarts slicing and dicing everything that flies, including endangered species, only the crickets are chirping. House Minority...

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced major new regulations on the emissions of methane into the air from oil and gas production. It calls methane a “potent” pollutant and its new rules would require a 45 percent reduction by 2025 from 2012 levels. Most Americans support these new rules, according to polling from environmental groups. This isn’t surprising. Methane sounds like a dirty and dangerous pollutant and even deadly if leaked into water or the air. However, methane is just another term for the main component of natural gas. Drillers have a powerful motive to stop leakage on...

A couple of months ago, effective in November, National Grid, one of Massachusetts’ two dominant utilities, announced rate increases of a “whopping” 37 percent over last year. Other utilities in the region are expected to follow suit. It’s dramatic headlines like these that make rooftop solar sound so attractive to people wanting to save money. In fact, embedded within the online version of the Boston Globe story: “Electric rates in Mass. set to spike this winter,” is a link to another article: “How to install solar power and save.” The solar story points out: “By now everyone knows that solar...

Google is literally and figuratively pulling the plug on its investment in renewable energy because the technology doesn't work. Will its flop persuade the feds to stop dumping billions down this rat hole? Back in 2007 Google commanded star-spangled headlines with its new high-tech venture to go all in on the next big thing in technology: green renewable energy. The tech giant was saluted as a good corporate citizen for its initiative to help combat global warming. In launching the project, company executives boasted they would prove that wind and solar power were not just good for the environment, but...

Demonstrators gathered outside the Public Service Commission to protest against a requested rate structure change by the local utility company, Madison Gas and Electric (MG&E). During the protest, they decried the use of "dirty coal" and called for more renewable energy. To make their point, they had a blow-up coal power plant that was running on a fan powered by wind and solar charged batteries. Before the protest was over, however, the batteries died and their solar panel could not produce enough energy to keep the power plant standing upright.

Subtitle: the umpteenth confirmation that governments shouldn't be entrusted with our money. This was reported last July, but I've only learned about it now. It's got to be covered, it's too absurd to miss. On 10 July 2014, the Daily Mail reported the planned axing of a wind turbine built with taxpayers' money - almost £50,000 - and generating only an average of £5 of electricity a month. It was calculated that it would have required 757 years before its cost was offset. I'm tempted to say that this must be the most absurd wind turbine ever but, given...

Renewable energy has become a potent rallying cry uniting Hollywood and the Beltway. “We can move our economy town by town, state by state to renewable energy and a sustainable future,” Leonardo DiCaprio says in his eight-minute climate movie Carbon, released in August. In his fiscal-showdown speech during his first term, in April 2011, President Obama put Paul Ryan’s proposals for a 70 percent cut in clean energy at the top of his list of reprehensible and unnecessary reductions. “These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings...

Renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, continues to set records for electicity generation and installed capacity in many parts of the world, and as shown in Figure 1 wind and solar growth in recent years has indeed been quite spectacular:~~snip~~If decarbonization is to be achieved by expanding renewables the expansion will have to come in wind, solar and biomass. So let’s take hydro out and see how far growth in wind, solar and biomass has carried us along the decarbonization path so far:Clearly they still have a long way to go.

Junk Science: How can a company as smart as Apple be so dumb about the environment? That's worth asking now that CEO Tim Cook has embarked on a massive push to make the company more "green." On Earth Day, Apple ran a full-page ad about how it has "set some pretty ambitious goals for reducing our impact on climate change ... and conserving our planet's limited resources." Apple's website features a field of solar panels and the promise to "leave the world better than we found it." But amid all this bragging about Apple's green credentials, nowhere is it mentioned...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration's conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.</p>

The global energy outlook has changed radically in just six years. President Obama was elected in 2008 by voters who believed we were running out of oil and gas, that climate change needed to be halted, and that renewables were the energy source of the near future. But an unexpected transformation of energy markets and politics may instead make 2014 the year of peak renewables.

Europe’s electricity system is not living up to its promises, according to a French advisory body to the prime minister, which published a report on Tuesday (28 January) largely blaming renewable energy subsidies for this failure. The EU’s energy policy hinges mostly on power management. However, the European electricity system does not function, according to a French government advisory body, the General Commission for Strategy and Forecasting (Commissariat général à la stratégie et à la prospective—CGSP), which presented the findings of the study on 28 January. …

The Obama administration is about to approve a rule that will ensure the death of golden and bald eagles for the next 30 more years. Hundreds of thousands of birds die each year flying into the deadly turbine blades atop the soaring towers that compose wind farms. The rule will give wind farms thirty year permits for the “non purposeful take of eagles-that is where the take is associated with but not the purpose of, the activity.’’ The take of eagles is also a euphemism for the slaughter of them.

Governments around the world have agreed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That would require an 80 percent reduction in energy sources like coal, oil and natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide into the air. Nations are far from that ambitious path. There are big political and economic challenges. But technologists do see a way — at least for the United States — to achieve that goal. Nowhere is that aspiration clearer than at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It sits on a hill overlooking Golden, Colo., and suburbs that sprawl all the way to...

Britain could be hit by power cuts next winter because the electricity supply is already “close to its limits”, experts warn. Capacity is so stretched that a cold spell, combined with routine problems at one or more plants, could overwhelm the system and see blackouts in 2014-15, their damning report claims. A major pressure on the National Grid is the forced closure of coal-fired power stations to meet European green directives, the Royal Academy of Engineering says. …

Renewable energy is blamed for jeopardizing Europe’s energy security this winter, a new study has found. EurActiv France reports. The French multinational company Cap Gemini warned in their European Observatory of Energy Markets that energy security in Europe was under threat and that the region could soon be exposed to massive power outages during the winter, due to a lack of production capacity. They blame wind turbines. …

Romney Marsh Wind Farm, Kent/East Sussex * Why do Britons pay much higher electricity prices than before? Because, by government decision, as consumers they have to subsidize low-carbon methods of energy generation, in particular wind farms. There are 4 words that best describe wind turbines for energy production: inefficient, unreliable, very expensive. Wind power is the most costly form of electricity generation. Many British households, no less than 1 in 4, are already suffering from a newly-labelled condition, "fuel poverty", in which energy bills expenditure makes up 10% or more of the household's net income. We've got to the...

Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has called for development banks with a combined annual lending pot of €130 billion ($170 billion) to end support for fossil fuels in their energy lending policy reviews. “I am particularly keen to see three international financial institutions—the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank—join with their EU and OECD partners to take a lead role in eliminating public support for fossil fuels,” she said in the foreword to a report on bank lending policies in the Western Balkans, published on 25 June. Although all three banks...

As America's debt rises to unsustainable levels, the U.S. government is losing billions every year on energy tax subsidies that do little to combat climate change. That's according to a tough report released this week by the National Research Council. The non-partisan academic report concluded that current tax policies are a "poor tool" for addressing climate change -- and a costly one. It found energy subsidies in 2011 and 2012 cost $48 billion, with limited results. "Very little if any GHG (greenhouse gas) reductions are achieved at substantial cost with these provisions," the report concluded. The report coincided with a...