Free Republic

California residents are still braced for rolling blackouts this week ... and puts a power grid made fragile by renewables in jeopardy of failure. Electric car owners now might not be able to drive the high-priced vehicles Democrats demanded they buy. On Tuesday, state officials said California faces its greatest threat of blackouts this year, with power demand likely to eclipse 51,000 megawatts setting a new high. “As people crank up their air conditioners, the state forecasted record levels of energy use, said Elliot Mainzer, president of California Independent System Operators, which runs the state’s electrical grid,” the Associated Press...

This past week, the Senate passed the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” which includes $368 billion for green energy spending targeted to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 percent by 2030, a move that will almost certainly increase inflation. In a repeat of the renewable energy project failures that the Obama administration financed with federal grants and tax breaks, the Biden administration is betting more potentially inflationary deficit spending against the odds that renewable energy will be profitable this time. Ironically, on September 4, 2009, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the one who announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) had...

It’s been stupidly hot here in Texas lately and as you’ve likely heard, the state’s power grid is straining to meet record-high electricity demand. Twice in mid-July, ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, was forced to ask the state’s consumers to reduce their power use. On the afternoon of July 13, the system had less than 3,000 megawatts of spare capacity as demand hit nearly 80,000 megawatts. That’s not nearly enough reserve capacity. Since February 2021, when the Texas grid nearly collapsed during Winter Storm Uri, scads of reports and opinion pieces have been written to explain why the electric grid...

CROWELL, Texas - A North Texas wind farm is one turbine down thanks to what officials believe was a devastating lightning strike to one of the massive structures on Friday afternoon. Videos from witnesses and firefighters showed the wind turbine generator ablaze and disintegrate in the sky over Crowell, Texas. Doppler radar indicated there was plenty of lightning strikes around the Foard City wind facility before firefighters received the call about the high-altitude fire. Crews with the Crowell Volunteer Fire Department responded, but Fire Chief Perry Shaw said there was little his firefighters could do to put the fire out....

... Though biofuels have been touted for their ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, assessing the environmental impact of bioethanol requires including greenhouse gas emissions related to the crops needed for its production. And "the carbon balance of ethanol relative to gasoline isn't as good as it was originally anticipated," Tyler Lark, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told AFP. In 2005, Congress passed a "Renewable Fuel Standard," which required transportation fuel to include a volume of biofuel that increased over time. The law was further expanded in 2007. As a result, 2.8 million additional hectares of corn were...

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they had sentenced ESI Energy for a “blatant disregard” of federal wildlife laws of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). In their guilty plea to multiple violations, ESI admitted to the killing of at least 150 bald and golden eagles across 50 of its wind-energy facilities since 2012. Nearly all died of blunt force trauma attributable to being struck by a wind-turbine blade. The so-called “clean” energy company — a subsidiary of NextEra Energy — was fined $8 million, or about $53,300 per carcass. It turns out that the fine...

A U.S. wind power developer pleaded guilty to multiple violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act after its wind turbine blades allegedly killed more than 135 bald and golden eagles across the country. The company, ESI Energy, pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of violations in the form of golden eagle deaths. Prosecutors said the birds were documented to have been killed by blunt force trauma after being struck by its wind turbine blades at its facilities in Wyoming or New Mexico, where ESI had not applied for the necessary permits. As part of the settlement, ESI “acknowledged that at...

Proprietors of a series of green energy wind farms have been placed on probation and ordered to pay $8 million in fines and restitution after pleading guilty to killing upwards of 150 eagles across the past decade in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. The criminal case was decided against the backdrop of President Joe Biden pushing for more onshore and offshore renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources, as Breitbart News reported. It’s illegal to kill or harm eagles under U.S. federal law. AP reports NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy pleaded guilty to three counts of violating...

President Joe Biden should prioritize American energy independence and end reliance on adversaries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, 27 state financial officers say in a letter Tuesday to the president. In their letter, they urge Biden to consider the consequences of foreign energy dependence for U.S. businesses and consumers. “Policies implemented during the last year thwart the vitality of American energy production,” the financial officers’ letter to Biden reads. “The rising cost of fuel, coupled with precipitous inflation has, and will, continue to result in dire consequences for working-class families.” The 27 state-level officials are part of the State...

TransAlta Renewables Inc. has to replace foundations of 50 wind turbines at Kent Hills wind farm.. An investigation into what caused the collapse of a wind turbine at New Brunswick's largest wind farm has revealed serious structural issues that affect not only the turbine that fell, but dozens of others in the area as well. According to TransAlta Renewables Inc., the Alberta-based company that owns and operates the Kent Hills wind farm, the cracks formed because of "deficiencies in the original design of the foundations." This caused a 100-metre-tall turbine to collapse in the fall of 2021. Now the company...

Public Service Company of New Mexico consumers will likely face blackouts this summer and in summer 2023 unless the utility and state regulators find emergency solutions to cover expected shortages during peak demand, officials say. PNM and some commissioners say extending operations for a few months at the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station, scheduled to shut down in June, could resolve immediate problems facing the utility and consumers this summer. But PNM executives say the utility will almost certainly face critical shortages again in summer 2023 because the PRC has yet to approve new resources to replace some of the...

Between 2017 and 2021, Environmental Progress and I researched and published dozens of articles, testified before Congress, and authored a book, Apocalypse Never, arguing that weather-dependent renewables were making electricity increasingly unreliable and expensive, and making the United States, Europe, and Asia, dangerously dependent on natural gas.In response, there was an organized and somewhat successful effort by progressive climate-renewables activists to cut off our funding, censor us on Facebook, and prevent me from testifying before Congress.But now, one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas...

The British Columbia government is rationing gasoline and restricting travel on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, southwestern parts of the province and the Sunshine Coast after this week’s unprecedented storm severed highways and cut supply lines. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said a limit of 30 litres of fuel per visit to a gas station is an important step to maintaining the supply as the province works to bring in more gas by truck and barge from Alberta, Washington state, Oregon and California. He said the order would apply for 10 to 11 days and he trusts that people won’t...

If you ever needed any proof for your left-wing friends that the current administration or, for that matter, progressives in general care nothing for anyone but themselves, look no further than the latest potential move by the Biden administration to rob Americans of their ability to heat their homes or run their cars this coming winter. The administration (and I use that term loosely) is mulling shutting down an oil pipeline in Michigan as the Midwest moves into the coldest time of the year. I grew up in Ohio and did my undergrad work in Michigan and I can tell...

In 1862 we got the Gettysburg Address, in 1941 it was Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy and in 1983 it was Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech. This year it appears we’ll have to settle for Greta Thunberg’s “Blah, Blah, Blah!” keynote speech at the youth climate summit in Milan.As bad as it was on the merits, it certainly suffers from bad timing. Europe has just started paying a huge price in part for caving in on the sorts of environmentalist demands that Miss Thunberg says are being ignored. Indeed, Europe is suddenly stocking up on all three fossil fuels, and paying...

On Tuesday, August 10, AD 2021, the U.S. Senate passed an “infrastructure” bill, of which less than half was actually infrastructure, and which contains a siphon clause that enables the administration to largely disregard the law entirely and spend the money on whatever it wants to. It is less a spending bill than a blank check bill. But the part of this operation that may need the most comment is the aspect that furthers the so-called Green New Deal, both in this bill and a follow-up spending bill, also inaccurately being passed off as an infrastructure bill. The issue at...

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) argue in an op-ed published on Thursday that a global transition to renewable energy would be beneficial to the U.S.'s national security efforts. In their piece published in Time, the senators, who both sit on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, say that transitioning to renewable energy sources would siphon off power from oil-rich countries and "Americans would instantly be safer."

More than half of the people currently employed in the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry could by 2030 be working on low-carbon energy projects, research from Robert Gordon University in Scotland has suggested. According to the research, the great majority of these jobs will go from oil and gas into offshore wind farms. The British offshore wind energy is the largest in the world, the report noted, and could employ up to 90,000 people by 2030. Another 40,000 jobs will be created in other low-carbon energy segments of the industry, including hydrogen production as well as carbon capture and...

Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.hen the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid.This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed almost 60 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power—natural gas, coal, and nuclear—due to a reluctance to spend...

Proven technologies for a net-zero energy system already largely exist today, according to a report published Tuesday by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). The report predicts that renewable power, green hydrogen and modern bioenergy will shape the way we power the world in 2050. Adopting such solutions would set world leaders on track to meet their target of keeping the planet from heating by more than 1.5 degree Celsius above preindustrial levels this century, according to the World Energy Transitions Outlook report. The UN had warned in November that pledges to meet this goal were so far “woefully inadequate.”...