Category: Alternative Subsidy

We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars

CNN;

General Motors announced Tuesday that it will knock $5,000 off the sticker price of a new Chevy Volt, making it the latest electric car to be steeply discounted as automakers battle for buyers.
Customers will be able to get the discount on 2014 Volts, reducing the car’s starting price from $40,000 to $35,000. Government tax rebates can bring the price down as low as $27,495, GM says.
Pricing and incentives on electric cars have been getting more aggressive recently as automakers try to improve sales.
GM (GM, Fortune 500) has already offered steep rebates on the 2012 and 2013 editions of the Volt. In similar fashion, Nissan and Honda have offered aggressive discounts on their Leaf and Fit EV electric cars.

Via

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Oops.

Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, has lost patience with its CEO after Peter Loescher’s expansion into green energy and expensive acquisitions led to a fifth profit-forecast cut.
Supervisory board officials have asked for the 55-year-old Austrian native to be ousted. A key element of Loescher’s growth strategy was the 2009 announcement that he would transform Siemens into a “green infrastructure giant”, heralding a drive into solar technology to promote Siemens as a partner for companies and governments keen to use more renewable energies. At the 2010 annual general meeting, he wore a green tie and called for a “green revolution.” Since Loescher took over in July 2007, the shares have declined 22 percent.

Carbon Credits: “An Unprecedented Freeze”

Sounds like they’re working! Oh, wait…

Not a single UN Certified Emission Reduction, or CER, changed hands on July 22 and July 23, according to data from ICE Futures Europe, keeping the market on course for the lowest monthly aggregate volume since March 2008. The 14.3 million tons of offsets bought and sold this month compares with the record 211 million tons traded in October and an average 52 million over the past 12 months.
The collapse shows factories, power stations and airlines in the European Union have already bought most of the 1.7 billion tons of UN credits they can use to offset domestic emissions through 2020. That threatens to undo a market formed under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as a way for richer nations to help developing countries limit greenhouse-gas output.

h/t Ed S.

We Don’t Need No Stinking French Fry Grease


As a result of the 2005 Clean Air Act,

… refiners need to blend a certain amount of ethanol into gasoline every year, and every year the amount they blend in goes higher and higher,” Lutz told the investment reporting firm Breakout. It’s not that expensive to comply with the mandate when consumption of gas is high, but when it goes down, the cost of compliance soars. Lutz estimates that half the current price spike can be attributed directly to compliance with the ethanol mandate.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars

National Post;

Those who like pointing to Tesla’s success as the harbinger of the electrical revolution would be well advised, however, to read Green Car Reports‘ “Honda, Fiat Stick To Minimal Numbers Of Popular Electric Cars,” which basically states that many automakers — Honda and Fiat, at the very least — are only producing the minimum number of EVs to satisfy statutory regulations.
According to author John Voelcker, “Each of these cars [Fiat’s 500e and the Honda Fit EV] is a compliance car — a vehicle built and sold only in California (and a handful of other states) in just enough volume to meet its zero-emission vehicle requirements, which started in 2012.”

More: “Unclean at any speed”.
h/t KevinB

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

India threatens Wind farms with fines;

The intermittent power of wind towers plays havoc with electricity grids. Power black outs in India are so bad, they cut off the supply to 600 million or so people for two days last year. To make the grid more stable, an official somewhere decided it would help to have at least one day’s warning of how much electricity will flow from those towers. (Why not two days I say?)

“A directive took effect this week ordering wind farms with a capacity of 10 megawatts or more to forecast their generation in 15-minute blocks for the following day. ”

To put some perspective on this, here is what 7000 wind turbines across Northern Europe (between the North sea, the Baltic Sea and the Austrian-Swiss border) produced in 2004.

h/t pkuster

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Forbes;

The pain in Spain cannot be sustained. That’s the conclusion of the Spanish government, which is slashing its subsidies for wind power and other renewable energy as part of a deficit-fighting move. Spain is the latest European country to cut subsidies for clean energy — following similar moves in the U.K., Germany and Italy — because they’re driving up costs for consumers.
Power companies decried the elimination of the subsidies, which will cost them an estimated $3.5 billion. The government will absorb another $1.2 billion or so.
It’s a sad end for a program once heralded as a model by the Obama administration for its own renewables initiative. Yet it’s also not a surprising one. Despite its promise, wind energy has struggled to overcome economic barriers. Without government subsidies, it simply isn’t a viable business.

Why, a thought just occurred to me! Brad Wall may not know about this!
h/t Maz2

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Mutiny in the Land of Wind Turbines;

The question is: How many forests must be sacrificed, how many horizons dotted with wind turbines, to meet Germany’s new energy targets? Where is the line between thoughtful activism and excessive zeal? At what point is taxpayer money simply being thrown away?
The wrangling over these issues has led many in Germany’s Green Party to question what their party really stands for. Enoch zu Guttenberg, a founding member of Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), noisily left the association last year because of its support for wind power. Since then, he has felt a “panicky need” to warn humanity about the “giant totems of the cult of unlimited energy.”
[…]
These disputes come at a very awkward time for the wind-power industry. The country is expecting to see many thousands of new wind turbines up and running in the near future. But, at the moment, orders are few and far between.
For a long time, the companies grew fat on feed-in tariffs, which provide guaranteed prices for green energy at above-market prices subsidized by the government via surcharges on consumers’ power bills. Indeed, an entire industrial sector developed into a subsidy giant. The result? Bloated firms with excess capacity.
International markets are also collapsing, which makes things even worse for the industry. The two most important countries for wind power have both reigned in further construction projects. The United States is instead going for cheaper “fracking,” the controversial method of using hydraulic fracturing to extract shale gas. China, on the other hand, has problems with its power grids, which is dampening its enthusiasm for wind turbines.
Stephan Weil, the governor of the northwestern state of Lower Saxony, recently warned that 10,000 jobs in the state’s wind industry were at risk. The Danish manufacturer Vestas has already been forced to cut some 1,400 positions.
The mood is correspondingly tense. The CEO of WeserWind says that a “regulating hand” is nowhere to be found, leaving everything in “total chaos.”

It’s a long piece. Forward it to your MP and MLA. (h/t Bob H)

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

“The wheels are falling off of Germany’s green energy bandwagon.”

While Germans gleefully embraced the “Nuclear Power? No Thanks!” movement and global greens pointed to Germany as the future of the Green Economy, the sheen is starting to come off the German revolution. The last few months have been a slaughter for the German solar energy. Amid talk of a trade war with China over cheap imported solar panels, the giant German engineering firm Siemens shuttered its solar division after hemorrhaging more than a billion dollars in just two years.
Now Forbes reports that the rest of the German solar industry isn’t following far behind: two of the country’s biggest solar firms, Conenergy and Gehrlicher Solar, both filed for insolvency last week. Another engineering titan, Bosch, has also decided to get out of the solar market.
[…]
German consumers haven’t been happy with their skyrocketing energy rates, while German industries have struggled to remain competitive while paying much more for electricity than overseas competition. As green jobs have been disappearing in Germany–employment in the solar sector fell to 87,000 in 2012 from 110,900 a year earlier–German leaders have slashed many of its flagship green programs.

Let them burn wood.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in the USA;

The problem with wind farms when they are abandoned is getting the turbines removed, as usual there are no Green environmentalists to be seen. The City of Palm Springs was forced to enact an ordinance requiring their removal from San Gorgonio. But California’s Kern County, encompassing the Tehachapi area, has no such law. Imagine the outraged Green chorus if those turbines were abandoned oil drilling rigs.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Economist;

The technology for building and operating this sort of transmission system in the howling gales of the German Bight is largely untried. And once the cables reach shore they will have to pass through populated areas on their way to connect with Germany’s central power grid. To appease NIMBYs (those who reflexively say “not in my backyard”) some of the lines may have to be buried, at further great expense: perhaps 25 times the cost of stringing the cables on pylons. As the project keeps slipping behind schedule the combined cost of the platforms and cables, most recently put at €8 billion ($10.4 billion), looks like rising further. […]
But there remains a danger that, even if no further technical hitches arise, the enormous project will end up being a white elephant. Investors have gone cool on building windmills in German waters because of their costs and doubts over future electricity rates. A study, commissioned from an independent consultant by TenneT, reckons that less than 6GW of the planned 14GW of turbines are likely to be built by 2023. If so, laments VZBV, a consumer body, Germans will end up paying heavily for a lot of useless transmission gear out at sea.

Related: Mafia turning to wind farms to launder money. Reader Steve emails: “Organized crime meets organized crime”
h/t Mark C, Maz2

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