ENERGY POVERTY UPDATE : Wind & Solar Obsession Causing Skyrocketing Power Prices & Frozen Grannies

“ELDERLY people are dying in their cold homes or being rushed to hospital because they can’t afford to put the heater on.
MORE than 130 people were admitted to NSW emergency departments last winter with cold-related problems including hypothermia, a 34 per cent increase from 10 years ago.
Over the same period power prices have increased by 117 per cent.”

ENOUGH said.

WAKE-UP politicians, addicted to UNreliables to feather their ‘green’ credentials. Enough is enough. @sussanley

STOP THESE THINGS

Australia’s wind and solar obsession has driven power prices through the roof and the poor and elderly to early graves. Staying warm in the depth of winter is no longer just a matter of turning up the dial on the AC, for the poorest and most vulnerable it’s a daily battle for survival.

In the space of a decade, power prices have doubled and so too the number of households disconnected from the grid; because they can no longer afford to pay their bills.

A generation ago, Australians enjoyed the world’s cheapest power prices; thanks to its suicidal renewable energy policies, they now suffer among the highest.

That all of this was perfectly predictable, and perfectly avoidable, makes it all the more outrageous. Here’s Peta Credlin expressing just that.

‘What a joke’ that Australians are ‘too frightened to turn on appliances’
Sky news
Peta Credlin, Luke Grant and Jeremy Cordeaux

View original post 1,282 more words


DRACONIAN CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA : Back To The Medieval Green World


Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun
.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University/Royal Society fellow

Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

***

GEOLOGIST Viv Forbes on what life would look like under the eco-totalitarian control of ‘zero-emissions’ zealots…

CAREFUL what you wish for!

*

MAY 10, 2019

via Friends of Science Calgary

Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil and natural gas. They need to think what they wish for.

First there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore. People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted. Coal saved the forests from this fate.

We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons and with ingenuity we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead and tin and alloys like brass and bronze. But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminium, refined metals, plastics, nylons, synthetics, petro-chemicals and poly pipes would be impossible.

Making wind turbines and solar panels would also be impossible without fossil fuels. A wind turbine needs lots of steel plus concrete, carbon fibre and glass polymers as well as many other refined metals – copper, aluminium, rare earths, zinc and molybdenum. Solar panels and batteries need high-purity ingredients – silicon, lead, lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, silver, manganese and graphite – all hard to make in backyard charcoal-fired furnaces. Transporting, erecting and maintaining wind and solar farms plus their roads and transmission lines needs many pieces of diesel-powered machinery.

Every machine on earth needs hydro-carbons for engine oil, gear oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, hydraulic oil and grease. We could of course use oils from, seals, beeswax and whales for lubrication – the discovery of petroleum saved the whales from this fate.

Roads would be a challenge without oil-based bitumen. The Romans made pretty good roads out of cobble-stones (this would ease unemployment). But hard labour would not sit well with aging baby-boomers or electronic-era Millenniums.

Cars, railways, motor launches, aeroplanes, I-Phones, TV and cat-scans would be out. Horses, oxen, sulkies, wooden rowing boats, sailing ships, herbal medicine and semaphore would have a huge revival. Some wood-burning steam tractors may still work and wood-gas generators may replace petrol in some old cars.

This is the return to the “zero-emissions” world that Green extremists have planned for us.

But modern life cannot not be supported by a pre-coal/oil economy. Without reliable electricity and diesel-powered farm machinery and transport trucks, cities are un-sustainable. In Green-topia 90% of us people will need to go.

But Greens should not expect us to go quietly.

(Climatism bolds and links)

***

MORE Viv Forbes :

SEE also : 

ENEGRY POVERTY Related :

STATE Of The Climate Report :

IPCC Extreme Weather Report 2018 SR15 :

EXTREME WEATHER Related :

TEMPERATURE Related :

ORIGINS Of The Global Warming Scam :

•••

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(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.

Thanks to all those who have donated. Your support and faith in Climatism is highly motivating and greatly appreciated!

Citizen journalists can’t rely on mastheads, rather private donations and honest content. Every pledge helps!

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WHY “Green” Energy Is Futile, In One Lesson

Greening The Land (high res) - Cartoons By Josh

Greening The Land | Cartoons By Josh


“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

***

H/t @FriendsOScience

A MUST READ for all policy makers if they have any respect for the families, workers and the most vulnerable in their communities whose lives are being broken as a consequence of the mad rush into feel-good UNreliables – wind and solar ‘power’…


WHY “GREEN” ENERGY IS FUTILE, IN ONE LESSON

POSTED ON BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ENERGY POLICY, ENVIRONMENT

Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of the state. Yesterday central Minnesota experienced a natural gas “brownout,” as Xcel Energy advised customers to turn thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using hot water. Xcel put up some customers in hotels. Why?

Because the wind wasn’t blowing. Utilities pair natural gas plants with wind farms, in order to burn gas, which can be ramped up and down more quickly than coal, when the wind isn’t blowing.

Which raises the question: since natural gas is reliable, why do we need the wind farms? The answer is, we don’t. When the wind isn’t blowing–as it wasn’t yesterday–natural gas supplies the electricity. It also heats homes, and with bitter cold temperatures and no wind, there wasn’t enough natural gas to go around. The resulting “brownout” has been a political shock in Minnesota.

Isaac Orr, a leading energy expert who is my colleague at Center of the American Experiment, explains this phenomenon in detail:

[W]ind is producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part.

While that’s not good, what’s worse is wind is only utilizing 24 percent of its installed capacity, and who knows how this will fluctuate throughout the course of the day.

Coal, on the other hand, is churning out 45 percent of our power, nuclear is providing 13 percent, and natural gas is providing 26 percent of our electricity.

This is exactly why the renewable energy lobby’s dream of shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and “replacing” them with wind and solar is a fairy tale. It simply cannot happen, because we never know if and when the wind will blow or the sun will shine when we need it most.

“But the wind is always blowing somewhere” ~ a renewable energy lobbyist

Renewable energy apologists often argue that although the wind may not be blowing in your neighborhood, it’s blowing, somewhere. All we have to do, they argue, is build wind turbines and transmission lines all over the country so we can have renewable energy everywhere. It turns out this old chestnut is also completely wrong.

For example, the wind isn’t blowing in North Dakota or South Dakota, where more than 1,800 MW (a massive amount) of wind projects are operating or planned, at massive cost, by Minnesota electric companies.

In fact, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere.

Just look at California, the state that is consistently the most self-congratulating about how “green” they are. Wind is operating a 3 percent of installed capacity, solar is operating at 12 percent, natural gas is running wide open, and California is importing a whopping 27 percent of its electricity from Nevada and Arizona.
***
Days like today perfectly illustrate why intermittent, unreliable sources of energy like wind and solar would have no place in our energy system if they were not mandated by politicians, showered with federal subsidies, and lining the pockets of regulated utilities that are guaranteed to profit off wind and solar farms whether they are generating electricity, or not.

Isaac’s real-world message is starting to break through, at least here in Minnesota. Tomorrow morning the Star Tribune is running Isaac’s op-ed headlined “Bitter cold shows reliable energy sources are critical.”

Lawmakers considering doubling Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent by 2030 should use this week’s weather as a moment to reconsider their plans to lean so heavily on wind and solar.
***
[C]oal-fired power plants provided 45 percent of MISO’s power and nuclear provided 13 percent — most of this from Minnesota’s Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants (which we should keep open, by the way). Natural gas provided 26 percent of our electricity use at that time, and the remainder was imported from Canada and other U.S. states.

Natural gas also heated the homes of approximately 66 percent of Minnesotans this week, by far the most for any home heating fuel, but there wasn’t enough gas to combat the frigid temperatures.

Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.

This week’s urgent notice from Xcel to conserve natural gas shows there is real danger in putting all of our eggs into the renewables-plus-natural gas basket. At a minimum, pursuing a grid powered entirely by solar, wind and natural gas would require more natural gas pipeline capacity, which is likely to be opposed by the factions that are currently challenging the replacement of the Line 3 pipeline.
***
If Minnesota lawmakers are sincere in their belief that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible, they must lift Minnesota’s ban on new nuclear power plants, which has been in place since 1994.

Not only would nuclear power plants be essentially guaranteed to run in minus-24-degree weather, but a forthcoming study by American Experiment has found that new nuclear power plants could not only achieve a lower emissions rate by 2030, but also save Minnesota $30.2 billion through 2050.

Stay tuned. We will release that report in two weeks. I think it will be a bombshell, not only in Minnesota but in other states that are fecklessly mandating ever-higher utilization of intermittent, unreliable, inefficient “green” energy.

•••

UNreliables related :

Read the rest of this entry »


GREEN ‘ENERGY’ FAIL : Victorian’s Sweat Through A Great Green Hoax

green energy fail - vic blackouts - climatism

UNreliables – F A I L


“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

***

VICTORIA and South Australia, the two southern Australian states who have taken the most ambitious reckless and ruinous position on UNreliables – wind and solar – were put to the test yesterday as temperatures soared into the 40’s. The result was a perfect failure on the two basic metrics of ‘1st-world’ energy supply – cost and reliability.

VICTORIAN wholesale prices surged to $14,500 per megawatt hour, where prices used to average less than $40 per megawatt hour…

*

SOME 200,000 Victorian’s didn’t have the ‘pleasure’ of paying $14,500 / MWh, instead they were supplied blackouts, brownouts and load-shedding as the chronic undersupply of ‘real’ power – fossil fuels – was realised…

“More than 200,000 Victorian households had their power cut off yesterday in a bid to protect the state’s energy system from shutting down, as the Andrews government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand in sweltering summer heat.”

200,000 homes go dark as heat rises, electricity cut off | The Australian

*

AFTER tens of $BILLIONS spent on symbolic ‘green energy’ – wind only managed to supply a pathetic 4.2% and solar (on a hot, sunny day) 11.4% of demand at 1:30PM as temperatures peaked at 42.8C…

*

ANDREWS government was forced to admit there was not enough power to keep up with soaring demand…

1500 MW of vital coal-fired baseload power unable to be called upon when needed most after the energy-vandals of the current Labor (socialist) government forced the shut-down of the Hazlewood coal-fired power plant in 2017.

SEE : Victorian power bills soar after Hazelwood coal plant closure | SMH

*

“DIRTY” Fossil Fuels (Diesel And Gas) To The Rescue, Again!

ONE of the twisted ironies of the insane ‘green’ energy revolution is that it’s always “dirty” fossil fuels that come to the rescue of weather-dependent UNreliables.

MORE wind and solar doesn’t fix the fatal dependency on intermittent sunshine and breezes, rather the exact thing that they are designed to replace does – “dirty” coal and gas!

“South Australia’s controversial diesel generators – introduced by former Premier Jay Weatherill as a response to the state’s 2016 blackout – were also called on for the first time. Power was initially sent to supply-short Victoria, as the grid struggled to cope following the loss of over 1500 megawatts of baseload coal and gas generation from some of the nation’s largest suppliers this week.”

AEMO taps emergency energy powers after a unit at AGL’s Liddell coal-fired power plant fails | The Australian

SEE : DIESEL – Keeping South Australia’s Lights On Til The Next Election! | Climatism

*

UNRELIABLES advocates bang-on on about “wind and solar now cheaper than fossil fuels”. This may be true when they are generating at full capacity, when the wind is blowing just right and the sun is shining. But, as the old sailors say “the wind is free, but everything else costs money.”

“EVERYTHING else” being the energy duplication and 24/7/365 backup costs associated with hydrocarbon energy – coal and gas. Dispatchable energy that is either supplying baseload or idling while wind and sun conditions are favourable for supply. And of course the massive cost to the consumer of green energy subsidies that are necessary to keep wind and solar competitive.

*

MOTHER NATURE To The Rescue!

Mother Nature stepped in where the UNreliables-obsessed Labor government’s failed ‘green’ energy could not…

“A cool change that swept across Melbourne about 2pm dropped the temperature 12C in 30 minutes, easing demand for power and bringing an end to load-shedding outages in the ensuing hour.”

200,000 homes go dark as heat rises, electricity cut off | The Australian

***

ANDREW BOLT on yesterdays green ‘energy’ fiasco – a taste of things to come as global warming theory-obsessed Australian governments pander the U.N. climate gods and install more economy, grid and job destroying UNreliables…

VICTORIANS SWEAT THROUGH A GREAT GREEN HOAX

 

Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s warmist Minister for Energy, in 2017 claimed Labor was helping to “deliver affordable, sustainable and renewable energy”.

All three promises were broken yesterday.

Affordable? Victoria actually had wholesale power prices hit $14,500 per megawatt hour – when prices used to average less than $40.

Sustainable? Wind power generators on Thursday delivered a feeble 3.8 per cent of the state’s power, thanks to fickle winds. They could not deliver when needed most.

Reliable? Victoria – which helped drive the giant Hazelwood coal-fired generator out of business – ran short of electricity in the heat wave, and suffered blackouts that hit 200,000 homes and premises, even after it ordered big power users like the Portland smelter to shut down.

Why does Victoria, sitting on hundreds of years of supply of coal and big gas reserves, have an electricity system that can no longer deliver enough electricity?

Why? Because it bought the great global warming scare, and spent billions on unreliable green power instead of on a steady generator that would pump out all the power we need – and when we need it. It made coal-fired generators unprofitable, and told vast untruths about the great future of green power.

And for what? For pure symbolism. No cuts Australia makes to emissions will affect global warming, which has turned out to be nothing like the catastrophe that was predicted.

Global warming politicians are causing far more damage than global warming is every likely to. Yet who dares call them out?

VICTORIANS SWEAT THROUGH A GREAT GREEN HOAX | Herald Sun

***

“For forty years Australia had cheaper and more reliable energy than this, and it was powered by what four letter word?” –JoanneNova

BUT, here is the ultimate craziness – all the money, all the wrecking of views, all the lost jobs through higher electricity prices and all the blackouts – all the pain for nothing. The apparent effect on global temperatures so incredibly small, nobody would notice.

INSANITY on stilts.

H/t @LaborFAIL

•••

SEE also: 

U.N. Energy Poverty / Climate Hoax related :

UNRELIABLES related :

ENERGY POVERTY related :

STATE Of The Climate Reports :

IPCC Extreme Weather Report 2018 SR15 :

CLIMATISM Hot Links :

TEMPERATURE Related :

ORIGINS Of The Global Warming Scam :

•••

THE Climatism Tip Jar – Help Keep The Good Fight Alive!

(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.

Thanks to all those who have donated and continue on a monthly cycle! Your support and faith in Climatism is highly motivating and greatly appreciated!

Citizen journalists can’t rely on mastheads, rather private donations and honest content. Every pledge helps!

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Thank You! Jamie.

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NOTE TO POLICY MAKERS : 41 Reasons Why Wind ‘Power’ Can Not Replace Fossil Fuels

INDUTSRIAL WIND TURBINES - THE FLAWS

INDUSTRIAL Wind Turbines Are Neither “Clean, Green or Renewable” | CLIMATISM


Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

***

WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous and costly obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. ‘UNreliables‘ that repeatedly fail the environment, communities and economies wherever installed.

ENERGY poverty, blackouts, skyrocketing power bills, grid instability and the destruction of pristine landscapes, (flora and fauna) among the many deleterious effects of low energy-density, weather and fossil-fuel dependent windmills and solar panels.

ALICE Friedemann of ‘Energy Skeptic‘ meticulously lays out 41 reasons that expose the colossal flaws of the mad rush into wind ‘power’ as a genuine replacement for fossil fuels and/or nuclear power. Economy and job-destroying, anti-energy policy initiatives undertaken by all-too-many in our current ruling class that defy all logic, reason and common sense based on easily verifiable data and on-the-ground evidence.

*

41 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable.  Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will crush it and permeate it with toxic chemicals to extract the metal from the ore, the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the topics covered below in this long post:

  1. Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
  2. SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
  3. SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
  4. Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
  5. Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
  6. Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind
  7. When too much wind is blowing for the grid to handle, it has to be curtailed and/or drives electricity prices to zero, driving natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants out of business
  8. The best wind areas will never be developed
  9. The Grid Can’t Handle Wind Power without natural gas, which is finite
  10. The role of the grid is to keep the supply of power steady and predictable. Wind does the opposite, at some point of penetration it may become impossible to keep the grid from crashing.
  11. The grid blacks out when the supply of power varies too much. Eventually too much wind penetration will crash the grid.
  12. Windmills wouldn’t be built without huge subsidies and tax breaks
  13. Tremendous environmental damage from mining material for windmills
  14. Not enough time to scale wind up
  15. The best wind is too high or remote to capture
  16. Too many turbines could affect Earth’s climate negatively
  17. Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant global warming. A Harvard study raises questions about just how much wind should be part of a climate solution
    Less wind can be captured than thought (see Max Planck Society)
  18. Wind is only strong enough to justify windmills in a few regions
  19. The electric grid needs to be much larger than it is now
  20. Wind blows the strongest when customer demand is the weakest
  21. No utility scale energy storage in sight
  22. Wind Power surges harm industrial customers
  23. Energy returned on Energy Invested is negative
  24. Windmills take up too much space
  25. Wind Turbines break down too often
  26. Large-scale wind energy slows down winds and reduces turbine efficiencies
  27. Offshore Wind Farms likely to be destroyed by Hurricanes
  28. The costs of lightning damage are too high
  29. Wind doesn’t reduce CO2
  30. Turbines increase the cost of farming
  31. Offshore Windmills battered by waves, wind, ice, corrosion, a hazard to ships and ecosystems
  32. Wind turbines are far more expensive than they appear to be
  33. Wind turbines are already going out of business and fewer built in Europe
  34. TRANSPORTATION LIMITATIONS: Windmills are so huge they’ve reached the limits of land transportation by truck or rail
  35. Windmills may only last 12 to 15 years, or at best 20 years
  36. Not In My Back Yard – NIMBYism
  37. Lack of a skilled and technical workforce
  38. Wind only produces electricity, what we face is a liquid fuels crisis
  39. Wind has a low capacity Factor
  40. Dead bugs and salt reduce wind power generation by 20 to 30%
  41. Small windmills too expensive, too noisy, unreliable, and height restricted

Alice Friedemann :  www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

41 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels | Peak Energy & Resources, Climate Change, and the Preservation of Knowledge

CLICK here for detailed expansion of each of the 41 points…

***

SEE also :

Read the rest of this entry »


GREEN Energy Is The Perfect Scam

GREEN Energy Is The Perfect Scam - CLIMATISM

‘Green’ Energy Is The Perfect Scam


Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

***

WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. Unreliables that fail dismally wherever installed.

ENERGY poverty, blackouts, sky rocketing power bills, grid instability and the destruction of pristine landscapes, flora and fauna among the many costs of low energy-density, weather dependent windmills and solar panels.

THIS article out of American Thinker brutally exposes the vast scam that allows these symbolic gestures to the folly of green madness to thrive and somehow survive.

*

Green Energy is the Perfect Scam

November 12, 2018

Green energy is an incredible money-making scam. The promoters of green energy make billions of dollars promoting dumb energy schemes that are completely useless.

What makes the scam extremely clever is that the scammers have convinced the public that the purpose of their scam is to improve the environment. The scammers pretend to be earnest environmental advocates.

Any really good scam needs endorsements from authoritative-sounding sources. In the case of green energy, the authoritative sources are in on the scam. The beneficiaries of the green energy scam go way beyond the wind and solar industries.

Non-profit environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, need to be seen as fighting against an urgent looming catastrophe. If they don’t have something dreadful to fight against, no one is going to join their organizations or give them money.

Global warming, allegedly caused by carbon dioxide, is the looming catastrophe and green energy is the solution. When the globe failed to warm they renamed the looming catastrophic climate change in place of global warming.

Now they blame every instance of bad weather on climate change created by burning coal and oil. What were formerly acts of God are now the fault of the oil and coal companies.

Scientists are a special interest group largely financed by the federal government. Global warming is a magnificent gift to the science industry.

The industry has been corrupted by pathological science that is primarily intended to increase the flow of money from Washington. Science directed toward discovering the truth is out of fashion.

The many scientists that are global warming skeptics don’t exist as far as the science industry is concerned.

Government agencies, and the politicians that give the agencies money, have embraced the threat of climate change.

It gives them something to do that is more noble, even romantic than highways and making the trains run on time. The government spends billions on subsidizing wind and solar energy.

Ironically, electric utility companies love wind and solar green energy. They know perfectly well that wind and solar are useless because wind and solar generate electricity erratically and have to be backed up by reliable conventional electric generating plants.

The only economic benefit is the fuel saved in the backup plants when wind or solar is actually generating electricity. But the cost of the wind or solar electricity is much higher than the benefit of fuel saved.

Thus, the more wind or solar that you have, the more money you lose. But, electric utilities are regulated by public utility commissions. The amount of profit they are allowed is calculated as a fraction of the utilities’ capital investment.

So, the utilities want to make capital investments, even if those investments are wind and solar plants that waste money on a grand scale. The electricity consumers bear the cost and the utilities are allowed a larger profit.

In some parts of the country rooftop solar is fashionable. Homeowners who install rooftop solar often save money because the reduction in the cost of electricity from the utility is greater than the cost of solar electricity.

These homeowners brag to their friends about how clever they are, and the purveyors of rooftop solar place advertisements claiming that rooftop solar is cheaper than buying electricity from the electric company.

This is part of the scam. Rooftop solar is profitable because it is heavily subsidized and because the electric utility is forced, by the governmental authorities, to provide a connection to back up the solar without compensating remuneration.

The real cost of rooftop solar electricity, exclusive of subsidies, is around 30-cents per kilowatt-hour and the real benefit is around two cents per kilowatt hour from fuel saved in the utility’s backup plants.

The subsidy, financed by taxpayers and electricity consumers, is greater than ninety percent.

Hundreds of thousands of homeowners, under the delusion that they have discovered cheaper electricity, are walking and talking advertisements for solar energy.

The biggest victim of the green energy scam is the public in general. Everybody pays more taxes and pays more for energy as a consequence of the scam.

But the waste of billions of dollars may not be noticeable when spread over the 320 million Americans.

The public has been exposed to relentless propaganda promoting green energy as beneficial and less expensive.

The public is the greatest victim, but most people don’t know that they are being victimized, so there is little incentive to organize against the scam.

There are certain other victims such as the coal industry and coal miners. But these groups mostly don’t understand that they are victimized by a scam.

Due to the propaganda, they may actually believe that burning coal is undesirable and dangerous. Thus, they lack a clear mandate to organize against the scam. (Modern coal generating plants are environmentally clean.)

The manufacturers of fossil fuel generating plants are beneficiaries, not victims. Wind and solar don’t reduce the demand for fossil fuel plants because wind and solar have to be backed up by traditional plants.

A campaign against coal, by the Sierra Club, has resulted in the closing of many coal plants. The closed plants are typically replaced by new natural gas plants.

Due to the strain imposed on the electric grid by erratic wind and solar, there are many commercial opportunities for upgrading the traditional components of the electricity grid.

Rather than hurting the manufacturers of fossil fuel generating equipment, the green energy movement actually helps them.

The green energy scam is the perfect scam because the beneficiaries include many influential individuals and institutions, while the victims are dispersed among large numbers of unorganized people.

The few concentrated groups of victims, like coal miners, are psychologically handicapped by propaganda that has convinced them that they, rather than the scammers, are at fault.

Wind and solar are truly useless, like having a 6th toe or an appendix. A detailed exposition on the uselessness of wind and solar is given in my book – Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.

Green energy is often justified on the grounds that it reduces carbon dioxide emissions and thus prevents global warming. Of course, global warming, now called climate change, is itself a scam.

The science on which the predictions of global warming doom are based is incredibly weak. But, the weak science is presented as if it is reliable by self-interested parties.

In any case, wind and solar are very expensive methods of reducing CO2 emissions. Other, far more practical, strategies for reducing CO2 emissions are available.

Anyone who criticizes the green energy scam is ruthlessly attacked. Critics are often accused of being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies are too timid to risk the wrath of the green movement, so they hardly ever give money to the critics of the green movement.

A favorite line of attack is to accuse the critics of using tobacco company tactics to cover up the danger from using fossil fuels.

Critics are often depicted as being mental cases, as when Al Gore said that critics of his global warming promotions were like people who think the moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio or think that the Earth is flat.

James Hansen, often considered that father of the global warming movement suggested that executives of fossil fuel companies should be sent to jail for crimes against humanity.

Green energy is the perfect scam because it is disguised as a do-good movement and the victims are dispersed, unorganized and disarmed by propaganda.

Green energy is endorsed by government agencies, environmental non-profits, and scientific groups.

These are people that are often seen as sources of reliable information but that, in reality, work to promote their own parochial interests. This is a scam that needs to be exposed.

Norman Rogers is the author of the book Dumb Energy and writes often about political and environmental issues.

Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

Green Energy is the Perfect Scam | American Thinker

H/t Climate Change Dispatch

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SA Labor Government’s Wind Power Obsession Generates Crippling $815m Bill for Taxpayers

“IN the summer-time lead up to the state election in March this year, Jay Weatherill shipped in 276 MW diesel-fuelled Open Cycle Turbines (that chew up 80,000 litres of diesel every hour).

“Over $815,000,000 was squandered in all: $610,000,000 on Jay’s jets and a large chunk of the balance on Elon Musk’s 100 MW mega-battery (at the time our insiders told us the full cost was over $150,000,000, now it looks like being closer to $200m).

With the highest power prices in the world, South Australia’s economic fortunes look more like a train wreck than anything worth writing home about. Its unemployment rate is rising and already tops the nation.”

WELCOME to the world of energy poverty, care of #unreliables – wind and solar ‘power’…

STOP THESE THINGS

Jay’s jets: generate whopping $610,000,000 bill for SA’s taxpayers.

South Australians can thank their former Labor government’s obsession with wind and solar power for their status as an international joke.

Paying the highest retail power prices in the world (with worse to come), routine load shedding and statewide blackouts, and a grid on the brink of collapse, is all the inevitable consequence of attempting to run an economy on sunshine and breezes.

One of the reasons things got this way (and it happened in a bit over 16 years) is the manner in which the useful idiots in the mainstream press pumped wind power, as if it was a sacred gift delivered by some magical and benevolent deity.

In South Australia, the wind cult kicked off around 2002 when its then Labor Premier, Mike Rann started tilting at windmills – encouraged by the boys from Babcock & Brown…

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DEUTSCHLAND’S Delusion: Unreliable Energy ‘Transition’ in Tatters – CO2 Targets Missed as Power Prices Spiral Out of Control

AFTER nearly a €TRILLION Euros of taxpayer’s hard-earned money spent, Germany’s #Energiewende program exposed as a catastrophic failure.

WHEN will this ideological push for symbolic, costly, unreliable, unwanted, economically and environmentally destructive ‘energy’ end?

STOP THESE THINGS

Destroyer of worlds: wrecking villages and an entire economy.

Germany has a history of clinging to lost causes: its ‘inevitable’ transition to wind and solar is just the latest example. As Berlin was overrun by the Red Army in April 1945, Hitler and his loyal aides and commanders kidded themselves that the Reich might soon ride again.

The Fuhrer and his newly wedded wife, Eva literally went out in a blaze of glory, rather than face capture and humiliation of the kind dished out to his Italian mate Mussolini. (There’s always something a little poetic about captains going down with sinking ships, even if the captain in question was a deranged monster, responsible for destroying Europe and tens of millions of innocent lives.)

A few generations on, Germans are watching history repeat.

This time it’s their position as Europe’s industrial and manufacturing superpower that’s facing, deliberate and self-inflicted annihilation. Germany’s…

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FRENCH Kiss of Death: Paris Obsession Driving Australian Power Prices Through the Roof

Australian Power Project chief executive Nathan Vass said taxpayers would be forced to effectively “pay twice” for the program — once when they pay their electricity bill and again through government support of the companies running the solar and wind farms. “Australian industry won’t get much of a benefit from this deal,” Mr Vass told The Australian. “This will only help manufacturing jobs in China, Europe or the US where most wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers are based.”

Foreign Wind Companies Vs One Australian!

NOT only are jobs, industry and “emissions” going offshore thanks to skyrocketing ‘green’ energy bills, but now income from energy bills will be going to overseas multi-nationals who build and control Australia’s planned mega wind parks.

JUST when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse! Insanity on steroids….

STOP THESE THINGS

For Australian households and businesses being crushed by out-of-control power prices the Paris Climate Agreement is a maniac’s suicide note.

With nothing else to justify the $60 billion being thrown in subsidies at chaotically intermittent wind and solar, renewable energy rent seekers are clinging to the notion that the deal done in the City of Light will forever hold them harmless from both political and commercial reality.

The more insane aspects of the Paris agreement are yet to bite in Australia: agriculture and transport will eventually suffer the same self-inflicted destruction that has been meted out in the power generation sector.

Australia’s cattle and sheep herds currently number in the tens of millions: 26 million beef cattle and 2.8 million milkers; sheep number around 74 million. Under the Paris deal sheep and cattle numbers will need to be slashed by more than 26% to meet its target for…

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‘GREEN’ ENERGY POVERTY: Volunteer Knitters In High Demand As Soaring Power Prices Leave People Cold


“WE were the cheapest electricity market in the world, and now we’re one of the dearest. It’s insanity that this has occurred in a market that is so well-blessed in resources.”
― Alan John Moran (Australian columnist and Economist)

“WE have some of the highest power prices in the world. It would be like the Eskimos having some of the most expensive ice per kilo bag at the service station, ridiculous. Like the Saudis having the world’s most expensive petrol, ridiculous. And here we are in Australia…” – STOP THESE THINGS

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AUSTRALIA’S once key economic advantage and proud boast of having the cheapest power prices in the world has been sacrificed at the altar of global warming climate change by its politicians’s obsession with global warming theory. An anti-coal agenda, coupled with a mad rush into large-scale UNreliable ‘energy’ sources – wind and solar – punctuating the dilemma.

POLITICAL and bipartisan appeasement to the UN-climate-gods, over its own citizens, has come at a major cost to Australian businesses and households now exposed to some of the highest power prices in the world – South Australia – officially the highest

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MASSIVE subsidies afforded to unreliables via the $3BILLION per annum RET have driven cheap coal-fired power out of business and made electricity a luxury the very poor cannot afford in winter – and all this sacrifice will make zero difference to the climate.

AUSTRALIA’S Chief Scientist, and warming enthusiast, Alan Finkel admitted in 2017

Even if Australia ended all emissions from cars, power stations, factories and cows, the difference to the climate would be virtually nothing.

But, damage to the economy would be devastating.

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AUSTRALIAN ENERGY SUBSIDIES 2015/16 – LRET (Large Scale Renewable Energy Target)

BAEeconomics : MCA-renewables-subsidies-8Jan2017-2

Takeouts…

Fossil Fuel Subsidies:

  • $63 Million (2% of subsidy share)
  • FF’s supply ~80% of Australia’s electricity requirements.

Unreliables Subsidies (Wind and Solar):

  • $2.9 BILLION (98% of subsidy share)
  • Unreliables supply max ~10% of Australia’s electricity requirements, depending on weather conditions.

BAEeconomics : MCA-renewables-subsidies-8Jan2017-2

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ENERGY POVERTY

SEE now what their panic-making has inspired – symbolic global warming schemes that have hurt us infinitely more than any slight, and most probably beneficial, global warming ever could…

Volunteer knitters in high demand as soaring power prices leave people cold

PHOTO- Knit One Give One founder Ros Rogers at their sorting centre in Caulfield. (ABC News- Nicole Mills)

PHOTO: Knit One Give One founder Ros Rogers at their sorting centre in Caulfield. (ABC News: Nicole Mills)

Updated

A national army of knitters is in desperate need of more volunteers to help them meet the growing demand for winter woollies.

Knit One Give One (KOGO) founder Ros Rogers said the organisation has already donated more than 55,000 items this year.

“The need has gone up, definitely,” she said.

“This year we’re having trouble keeping up with the demand for two reasons; we’re becoming better known so people are asking for us, but the other thing is that there’s just more demand.

“We’re not even talking necessarily about the homeless, or people sleeping rough — we’re talking about families who can’t afford to run their heating.”

Knitters benefit as much as recipients

The group, which started in 2004, has more than 5,000 knitters on their database, but some of those are knitting groups — meaning the number of individual knitters is estimated to be much higher.

Ms Rogers said they get feedback from volunteers and recipients who both benefit from the process.

“That’s one of the things that I love about KOGO, it gives a lot of people a way to give back to the community, people who wouldn’t otherwise, so the knitters get as much out of it,” she said.

“Occasionally we’ve had a letter from a homeless person.

“We got one email from a homeless lady which was very heart-wrenching, telling us how difficult her situation was and how a blanket from us was so heartwarming, not just the actual physical warmth, but the emotional warmth.”

PHOTO- Beautiful buttons show the effort many volunteers go to. (ABC News- Nicole Mills)

PHOTO: Beautiful buttons show the effort many volunteers go to. (ABC News: Nicole Mills)

“Even if people have got heating, they can’t afford to run it, so they need the warm clothes or the blankets.”

Volunteer knitters in high demand as soaring power prices leave people cold – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

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MEANWHILE

AS unreliable-energy-obsessed Australian State governments cheer as they blow up their last remaining coal-fired power stations, the rest of the sane/smart World secures its real-energy future with a massive ramping up of cheap, efficient baseload coal-fired power technology…

SEE :

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CONCLUSION

THIS is the grim reality of what life looks like under the totalitarian rule of the feel-good ‘Greens’. The “zero-emissions” zealots who want to force us backwards down the energy ladder to the days of back-breaking human, animal and solar power.

JUST as socialist central planning failed miserably before it was replaced by free market economies, green central planning will have to be discarded before Australia will see a return to energy security and competitive pricing.

H/t @MRobertsQLD

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