Remember – as the cost of conventional fuel rises, these projects will become cost competitive!

Court documents confirm Toronto-based KPMG has been appointed as the receiver for Great Lakes Biodiesel (GLB), along with associated companies Einer Canada and Bioversel Trading.
It’s the latest chapter in the rocky history of Great Lakes Biodiesel, which opened the production facility in Welland at the end of 2012 to convert canola and soybean oil into biodiesel.
Luxembourg-based investment company Heridge SARL launched the court case because it says it was only repaid half of a $20-million loan used to get GLB’s Welland plant off the ground.

h/t John Galt

Investors Business Daily: Back in the good old days when President Obama didn’t have so many dings on his record, he promised that by 2015 there’d be more than 1 million electric cars on the road. Well, with just days to go, he’s only about 826,000 or so cars short of that goal.

Ultimately, a resource is just matter and energy transformed via human ingenuity to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100% matter and energy, 100% potential resource for energy and anything else we would want. To say we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years, and by then, hopefully, we’ll have fusion (a potential, far superior form of nuclear power) or even some hyper-efficient form of solar power.
The amount of raw matter and energy on this planet is so incomprehensibly vast that it is nonsensical to speculate about running out of it. Telling us that there is only so much matter and energy to create resources from is like telling us that there is only so much galaxy to visit for the first time. True, but irrelevant.

h/t Rob

Lured by subsidies, [German] power companies went green. But to keep the lights on they have to burn coal. (h/t Kevin B)

All illustrated in magnificent detail;

A wind turbine project life cycle consists of the following 13 phases:
Engineering,
Procurement,
Fabrication,
Manufacturing,
Construction,
Assembly,
Installation ,
Erection,
Commissioning,
Handover to Operation;
operation,
maintenance;
Disposal.
All the 13 phases would be absolutely impossible to achieve without burning fuel. Fuel used for making of materials, transportations, movement of personnel working on the job, lighting of offices etc. The wind turbine projects have high FUEL COST; & high Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) cost.
In return for al above wind turbine as a device for Electric Power Generation has love availability; reliability; maintainability as defined in IEC 50 (191).

Bookmark this one, and send to every politician on your list. Check out the main page, too. (Just a heads up – he doesn’t like capitalism very much).

American Interest;

A Portland-based wind energy company is appealing to a U.S. district court to stop the Department of the Interior from releasing information about birds killed by wind turbines that would, the suit claims, cause “irreparable harm” to Pacificorp, which operates more than a dozen wind farms.

Google Engineers Explain Why They Stopped R&D in Renewable Energy;

“Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach,” wrote Google’s Ross Koningstein and David Fork in a piece published yesterday in IEEE’s Spectrum.
It’s a striking admission from a company that has relentlessly supported the growth of renewable energy.
When Google first set out on its mission, the REC team was convinced that existing renewables (or those close to commercialization) could reduce emissions enough to avoid the worst climate change scenarios. But by 2011, when engineers realized that their investments were not playing out as expected, they ditched the program and set out to rethink its goals.

Oh no! Who could have seen this coming?

Solar farms will still be reliant on subsidies for up to another 14 years, the trade body for the industry has admitted – despite previously claiming the technology could be subsidy-free by 2020.
Most solar panels installed in the UK to date have been heavily subsidised and new solar farm projects are currently paid more than twice the market price of power for every unit of electricity they generate.
The subsidies, running to tens of millions of pounds each year, are paid for through levies on consumer energy bills.

I remember when these experts were too unfashionable for respectable print: Wind farms causing thousands of bats to die of collapsed lungs annually in Alberta.

Via No Tricks Zone;

The only German plant that produces battery cells for electric cars will be closed. The company Li-Tec in the German state of Saxony will produce batteries only for one more year. Daimler Manager Harald Kroger told Spiegel that the current production numbers make it far too expensive to produce the batteries.

GERMANY: Costs related to faulty wind turbines have hit Siemens’ results, forcing the wind division into a loss for both the fourth quarter and 2014.
The German manufacturer said it was impacted by EUR 223 million in charges for inspecting and replacing main bearings in onshore turbines, as well as repairing blades on both onshore and offshore turbines.
Head of the Siemens energy business Lisa Davis said: “The charge is related to inspecting and replacing bearings due to the early degredation in certain turbine models. We believe this is related to recent batches of bearings and we are in discussions with the supplier.”
[…]
In addition to the write down due to turbine faults in the latest quarter, the wind division’s performance was adversely affected by a lower profit contribution from the higher margin offshore business. The division’s margin slumped from 11.1% to negative 4% in the latest quarter.

The report is prefaced by an entertaining feature article on Aussie warmonger Tim Flannery.

(Web designers, take note. The page linked is virtually unreadable due to the faddish use of light grey text, and I’ve told them so.)

Via Gateway Pundit;

After already receiving a controversial $1.6 billion construction loan from U.S. taxpayers, the wealthy investors of a California solar power plant now want a $539 million federal grant to pay off their federal loan. […]
The Ivanpah solar electric generating plant is owned by Google and renewable energy giant NRG, which are responsible for paying off their federal loan.

The Duck Curve.

The Hill: Groups press new GOP majority to reject wind tax credits

Seriously if I were able to hack into the server to put out the worst possible report that people believed came from $TSLA, this would be it

— Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) November 5, 2014

Wind turbine blade separated, crashed to ground on Sunday.