Free Republic

If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition. A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that. Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces. Wind and solar are now...

Renewable energy is the alternative that Democrats and other environmental nuts want to replace reliable oil, gas and coal. But time and time again, people who rely on wind and solar power have had to learn the tough lesson that such alternatives are both undependable and susceptible to the same elements they are supposed to harness. Nowhere was that more true than in Nebraska, where a thunderstorm dumped baseball-sized hail on a solar farm on Friday at a speed of 150 mph — destroying the facility in just a few minutes. Cowboy State Daily reported a storm moved east out...

In my Tim Allen voice: The next total solar eclipse to visit North America will be April 8, 2024. The duration of totality will be up to 4 minutes and 27 seconds, almost double that of The Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017. The 2017 total solar eclipse was witnessed by about 20 million people from Oregon to South Carolina, and the upcoming 2024 Great American Eclipse is sure to be witnessed by many millions more.

A wind turbine at a northern Colorado wind farm folded in half and caught fire Thursday morning, startling neighbors who heard banging noises prior to the collapse. The incident was reported at 8 a.m. No injuries were reported. Oil and grease from the generator caught fire after the tower's collapse. ... Personnel from the Peetz and Crook all-volunteer fire departments responded. Employees from Invenergy - a Chicago-based company which first owned the wind turbine field and now operates it for the current owner, ClearWay Energy - were already at the site when firefighters arrived, according to Peetz Fire Protction District...

(NEXSTAR) — A massive solar flare — the largest in years — was spotted on the sun on New Year’s Eve, sparking a warning to some high-frequency radio users. In an update Sunday evening, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released an image of the flare, which appeared as a large, glowing spot on the sun. You can see that image below. “A flare is an eruption of energy from the sun that generally lasts minutes to hours,” the SWPC explains. This one in particular, which peaked just before 5 p.m. ET on Sunday, was categorized as an X5 flare....

We have a solar array where I work..it's in a college setting..but image this being EVERYDAY in the UPPER MIDWEST.. SNOW on the panel...ZERO energy being "created"

Planning permission has been granted for a solar farm spanning nearly 250 hectares in County Kildare. The facility in the east of Kildare will have an operational lifespan of 40 years and have a maximum export capacity of around 210 megawatts of electricity. The estimated construction value of the project is €197 million, according to the Construction Information Services database. The facility is being developed by Dublin-based firm Delamain Solar Farm Limited, which was established last year. […] The solar farm will consist of solar photovoltaic panels with a surface area of 1,130,000 square meters on ground-mounted frames. …

The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work. So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this...

While it’s been a disaster in the wind industry lately (and fun as the dickens to cover) (Did I tell you Ørsted’s CFO and COO got the boot?), I hadn’t really had a chance to check in with the solar half of the big Green dream. You know, see if things are shaking out or just shaky?A quick glance around recent news reports is pointing to an industry wobbling like a bowl of Jello.Although I do like “clubbed like a baby seal” – that’s pretty descriptive.And it’s once again all based on the fantasy that the Green energy sector is...

Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said Tuesday that clean energy funds and stocks are dropping because investors realized that clean energy companies can not make a profit. Several stocks and exchange-traded funds in the “clean energy” sector, including Enphase Energy, the Invesco Solar ETF, the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF and the First Trust Global Wind Energy ETF have seen substantial drops in their share prices in the last year. .. Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, spends $370 billion to combat climate change and is loaded with green energy provisions, including a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles,...

Travis Air Force Base and surrounding land in Solano County, Calif. Image: Google Maps Since 2017, a shadowy Silicon Valley company has bought up 52,000 acres of farmland around Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Calif., totaling about $800 million.Flannery Associates is a company run by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader. Beyond that, nothing much is known of the company except that some of the most famous names in Silicon Valley have invested in a project being promoted by Flannery. Some backers include Marc Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid...

Under the enlightened leadership of our expert bureaucrats in Washington and various state governments, we are embarked on a program to replace our functioning electricity generation system with an alternative system based on wind, solar, and energy storage. We are told that this will be easy, and in fact cheaper than what we currently have. Surely, if that is true for an entire country, it must be equally true for some small place like an island or a small town. Easiest of all for the demonstration would be an individual house, particularly if the house is surrounded by sufficient land...

Wind and solar are both terrible methods of generating electricity, both expensive and unreliable. The one thing that can make the situation worse is the drive to electrify everything, including motor vehicles. The impracticality of this “green” vision has become blindingly obvious, and the “green” movement has begun to fall apart. Steve noted this afternoon the collapsing share prices of renewable energy companies. Here are some more indications that the “green” movement is spiraling downward: From the Telegraph: “Electricity prices ‘must rise by 70pc to pay for more wind farms.’” No new wind farms will be built off Britain’s shores...

It’s not quite a replacement for diesel RVs, but the latest all-electric camper van from Grounded is getting there. The G2 claims a fully loaded range of 250 miles from its 165kWh vehicle battery, which easily trumps the Grounded G1’s range of 108 miles. It can be configured with up to 640W of rooftop solar and a hefty 10kWh house battery that can be charged from the main battery. It’s not cheap, with a starting price of $195,000, but living in the future never is. “The G2 is radically different from any other offering on the market,” said Grounded CEO...

Four headlines struck me, over my morning coffee, this week. They are headlines that I think will change forever our understanding of energy sources. From Germany comes “Wide-Scale Bankruptcies in the EU’s Solar Sector Now Seem Likely” and “Germany to Fire up ‘Brown Coal’ Power Plants because of Fears of Energy Shortage.” From Sweden, “Sweden Embraces Nuclear Energy,” and from France, “Nuclear energy now non-negotiable.” All four headlines are courtesy of the E.U.’s disastrous missteps in solar — and successes in nuclear. The disasters are the result of what I call “the seven dirty secrets of solar.” Germany has led...

The annular solar eclipse will be visible from eight states in the U.S. Southwest. On Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023, an annular solar eclipse will come to North America. We have summarized how you can watch the annular solar eclipse 2023 online and NASA has also released an interactive map where you can track the Oct. 14 annular solar eclipse down to the last second. The 'ring of fire' is not to be missed! Roughly 11 years after the same type of solar eclipse crossed the U.S. Southwest on May 20, 2012, this one will be visible from a similar region,...

New Jersey's Canoe Brook Water Treatment plant produces 14 millions gallons of drinking water a day. Each one of those gallons weighs around 8 pounds , so it's quickly apparent that a large amount of energy is needed to move water from a reservoir to the treatment plant and into the 84,000 homes and businesses that the New Jersey American Water Company serves in the area. So the water utility partnered with NJR Clean Energy Ventures, the renewable energy subsidiary of the natural gas firm New Jersey Resources, for a solution

Solar should be competing for sales in the marketplace, not for subsidies in Washington,' ... The Biden administration quietly issued a 59-page report outlining the current scope of federal energy-related subsidies revealed that the renewable energy sector enjoys significantly larger taxpayer backing than the fossil fuel industry. The report — authored by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) and published in August — represents the first of its kind since 2018. The EIA analyzed data from 2016 through 2022, and determined that, during that time period, the federal government doled out $183.3 billion in direct and mainly indirect...

This year, during the heat of summer, when temperatures in New York surpassed 90°F, the 22 solar panels on the roof of my house were doing absolutely nothing. This is not something I learned until September, four months after my husband and I bought this house with a purportedly functional leased solar system in upstate New York, months after logging into a website that inaccurately told us that the panels were working, months after we forked over $6,000 to prepay the remainder of the 20-year lease to the company supposed to be maintaining the solar panels, Spruce Power, which happens...

Pepsico explained how it uses its fleet of Tesla Semi electric trucks in a fascinating video that gives us a glimpse at the future of trucking. Tesla has only delivered a limited number of its electric semitrucks, and most of them are believed to be in operation in Pepsico’s fleet – primarily in its Sacramento facility, which has been completely electrified and is solar-powered. . Pepsico explained that it uses most of its 21 Tesla Semi electric trucks for deliveries within 100 miles with several stops. They operate for up to 12 hours a day. Dejan Antunovic, electrification program manager...