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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...

Like more Baltimore-style bridge-ship collisions? According to a news nugget buried deep in a long Washington Post investigative report, ships losing propulsion is shockingly common and can lead to ships running aground or colliding with bridges and other structures. A look at Coast Guard records showed that more than 100 incidents involved huge container ships. One of the reasons they happen is because of greenie fuel mandates.The story is actually very good and very long, giving the reader a feel for what drives how ports operate.But that tiny item about greenie environmental regulations forcing ships to change fuel after they...

President Joe Biden keeps lecturing corporate America to “pay your fair share” of taxes. It turns out he’s right that some companies really are getting away scot-free from paying taxes.But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.The culprits here are the very companies that President Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.It turns out that despite all the promises over the past decade about how renewable energy is the future of power production in America, by far the biggest tax...

When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.” In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the...

A semiconductor company whose president was head of the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar energy company stands to receive $6.6 billion in funding from the Biden administration. Under a preliminary agreement, according to CNBC, a subsidiary of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in Arizona will receive the funding under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. The company’s president is Brian Harrison. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Harrison was CEO of Solyndra, which in the early 2000s was involved in the manufacturing of solar panels and considered at the forefront of the sustainable energy industry.

For decades, scientists and inventors have flirted with the concept of a water engine, but their attempts often hit insurmountable roadblocks. However, Elon Musk, known for pushing the boundaries of technology, has provided a fascinating insight. His revelation might just revolutionize the transportation industry at all levels. But people are asking exciting questions. Is water a viable source of fuel? What other innovative solutions are available for transportation problems? Join us as we unravel how Elon Musk went public with the new engine that changes everything. Transcript Follow along using the transcript. Show transcript

Throughout the West, the cult of fossil fuel suppression presents itself as an orthodoxy from which no dissent is permitted. In the U.S., there has been substantial and growing resistance to the enforcement of that orthodoxy, among Republicans in general and particularly from red and energy-producing states. By contrast, in Europe, there has been little push-back. Somewhere along the line, in country after country, the drive for Net Zero carbon emissions got the backing of an effective all-political-party consensus. In a gigantic political miscalculation, many mainstream center-right conservative parties got fully on board. That mistake now looks to destroy several...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that a key plank of President Joe Biden’s agenda to lower costs is by “creating incentives to dramatically improve the use of clean energy in the United States” and “over time, this will help lower household energy costs.” Host Andrea Mitchell asked, “[H]ow can you — I know you’re in Georgia today — help get the message to people that the economy is better and improve it even more, get those grocery prices down, help bring down the prices that people are feeling at their kitchen table?”

The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time. Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to...

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates. Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real? No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is...

There's not enough power to flood the roads with electric vehicles, but DemocRATs don't and probably are counting on it. In perfect Democratic Party form, the Biden administration has dropped another government burden on the private sector. Two days ago, the White House rolled out “the toughest-ever” automobile emissions standards. The objective, of course, is to force Americans to buy the cars that the ruling class wants them to drive. There’s a big problem here, though – the grid won’t be up to the task of keeping tens of millions of electric vehicles charged. The headline from a Bloomberg story...

Japan is stepping up efforts to have local authorities approve the restart of the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility north of Tokyo... Next week, Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Ken Saito, is expected to ask the local governor of the Niigata prefecture to approve the restart of the power plant.. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Japan closed all its nuclear power plants that underwent rigorous safety checks and inspections. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa has been offline since 2012, while the Nuclear Regulation Authority in 2021 barred the plant’s operator, utility Tepco, from operating the...

Olympic athletes are going to be on the hot seat this summer in Paris. Not just metaphorically; the Paris Olympic Committee wants this Olympics to be the greenest ever (take that, Classical Greeks!), and one of the measures they have taken is to build the Olympic village without any air conditioning. There will be no air conditioning in athletes' rooms at #Paris2024, which pledged to host the ‘greenest ever’ Olympic Games. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo spoke to @Reuters about the city's plans to keep athletes cool https://t.co/Js9skXtWoF pic.twitter.com/uVBMusztdi— Reuters (@Reuters) March 14, 2024I think this is one virtue signal that...

Electric vehicle start-up Fisker is exploring bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Fisker’s stock plunged this week as investors worry about the company’s ability to survive amid a cash crunch. The auto company also said it would slash 15% of its workforce. The Wall Street Journal reported: Electric-vehicle startup Fisker FSR -55.88%decrease; red down pointing triangle has hired restructuring advisers to assist with a possible bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter. Fisker, which recently warned that it risked running out of cash this year, hired financial adviser FTI Consulting and the law firm Davis Polk...

A foundry in Hibbing, Minn., is closing, citing rising electricity rates as the primary reason. Northern Foundry in northeast Minnesota, the Star Tribune reports, will be shutting down and laying off 91 employees. “Minnesota Power's repeated electricity rate increases ... mean Northern Foundry pays substantially more per kilowatt hour than MTI's other facilities,” the foundry’s parent company, Metal Technologies Inc., said in a statement, according to the Star Tribune. Minnesota has been pursuing an aggressive effort to transition its electrical grid away from fossil fuels, and last year, the state passed a law committing to 100% renewable energy by 2040....

For a number of years, I’ve been observing demands of activists and promises of politicians that we transition our electrical grid to being supplied mainly by the intermittent renewables, wind and solar, with all large dispatchable sources (fossil fuel and nuclear) banished. Early on, I thought it was obvious that such a transition would inevitably mean that the only way to make the grid function full-time would be energy storage — on a vast scale never before contemplated or attempted. How much storage, and at what potential cost? This is actually an arithmetic problem, somewhat cumbersome but conceptually very elementary,...

There’s no such thing as a wind or solar ‘farm’, just an ugly industrial siteIn a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions. After setting the stage by parroting the Biden administration goals of “100 per cent clean energy by 2035, a goal that depends on the building of large-scale solar and wind,” USA Today points to the reality that such big, intrusive, ugly, and destructive industrial sites have been...

Another Biden program bites the dust, this time his big push to encourage everyone to buy an electric vehicle (EV). Meanwhile, Biden keeps going on vacation (as if he REALLY cares about middle America). Cars and light trucks are seeing declining YoY sales in January (-0.7%) as M2 Money growth remains negative. Automotive News was the first to report Ford Motor Co. halted shipments of all 2024 F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks for an undisclosed quality control issue just weeks after slashing production volumes for the EV model due to sliding demand. Last month, Ford announced plans to slash the...

By commissioning expensive and inefficient wind and solar electric generating facilities, India may have dug the grave of its own efforts to save the critically endangered great Indian bustard. Erected to avert a faux climate crisis, the so-called renewable machines and their attendant transmission lines are helping to drive one of Earth’s largest flying birds to the brink of extinction. Avian aficionados such as myself have long bemoaned prioritizing wind and solar technologies at the expense of endangered species. Yet, the relentless push for needless climate solutions seems to ignore this as “green energy” installations and avian fatalities increase in...