Category: Alternative Subsidy

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Bjørn Lomborg: Wind power is the path to poverty

Over the past five years, heating a UK home has become 63% more expensive, while real wages have declined. Some 17% of households are now energy poor – that is, they have to spend more than 10% of their income on energy; and, because elderly people are typically poorer, about a quarter of their households are energy poor. Deprived pensioners burn old books to keep warm, because they are cheaper than coal, they ride on heated buses all day, and a third leave part of their homes cold.
In Germany, where green subsidies will cost €23.6 billion this year, household electricity prices have increased by 80% since 2000, causing 6.9 million households to live in energy poverty. Wealthy homeowners in Bavaria can feel good about their inefficient solar panels, receiving lavish subsidies essentially paid by poor tenants in the Ruhr, who cannot afford their own solar panels but still have to pay higher electricity costs.
[…]
The rich world gets just 1.2% of its energy from hugely expensive solar and wind technologies, and we would never accept having power only when the wind was blowing. Over the next two years, Germany will build ten new coal-fired power plants to keep the lights on.
In 1971, 40% of China’s energy came from renewables. Since then, it has powered its explosive economic growth almost exclusively with highly polluting coal, lifting 680 million people out of poverty. Today, China gets a trifling 0.23% of its energy from wind and solar. By contrast, Africa gets 50% of its energy today from renewables – and remains poor.

These intended consequences of renewable energy should be rich electoral fodder for conservative politicians – like cancelled health care plans, an unaffordable electric bill is something the average voter can hold in her hand. Or it might have been, had they not been sitting alongside their enemies on the green manure wagon for the last decade.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Solar and Wind Power Losing Worldwide Support:“Despite years of favorable public policy, including renewable power mandates and billions in subsidies, solar power still produces only about 0.2 percent of the nation’s electricity. The National Conference of State Legislatures says power from most large, utility-scaled solar installations still costs about 35 percent more than electricity from natural gas plants; many other experts estimate the levelized cost is even higher.”

Ontariowe: Province Of Anorexia Envirosa

Going green, turning blue;

“One thousand bucks is just insane, it’s more than my paycheque in a week by a few hundred bucks,” Joe Hebert said Tuesday of the sky-high electric bills that are arriving in this neighbourhood formerly known as The Villages, where 900 families have no choice but to heat their homes electrically.
“We just don’t know what to do,” Hebert said of the monthly bills that are hundreds of dollars higher than in previous winters due to rising electric rates and the coldest temperatures in 36 years.
[…]
They’ve already put extra insulation in the attic of their two-storey home that totals about 1,000 square feet. They don’t heat their basement and turn off the heat entirely overnight, meaning the wakeup temperature is around 12C. Hebert and his neighbours say the conservation measures suggested, such as putting in new windows and doors, don’t seem to help much.

h/t kcdist

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Wind farms vs wildlife;

I’m a lecturer in biological and human sciences at Oxford university. I trained as a zoologist, I’ve worked as an environmental consultant — conducting impact assessments on projects like the Folkestone-to-London rail link — and I now teach ecology and conservation. Though I started out neutral on renewable energy, I’ve since seen the havoc wreaked on wildlife by wind power, hydro power, biofuels and tidal barrages. The environmentalists who support such projects do so for ideological reasons. What few of them have in their heads, though, is the consolation of science.
My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.

h/t Ken (Kulak)

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Confessions of a landowner;

I signed up with a wind farm developer in 1997 to host wind turbines on my farm. I thought it was good for the planet and as I was getting on a bit in years, it would be a nice supplement to my retirement income. I was so convinced that it was a good idea that I also convinced my neighbours and my brother (who was vehemently against anyone tampering with his land) to sign up to an option to lease to host wind turbines. The option to lease was a binding document that prevented us in any way from backing out of the deal. I had no concerns with the document because I was informed confidently by the developer that I would not hear the turbines above the ambient noise level. That subsequently proved to be very much a lie.

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Corruption at The Washington Post

So the Post could have written a very different story about the Keystone Pipeline. The Post could have written that opposition to the pipeline is being funded in large part by [billionaire Tom Steyer] who has a personal financial interest in the pipeline not being built. And that’s not all! The billionaire is a political crony who has used his connections in Washington to get rich and to fleece consumers and taxpayers. Now, with Keystone, he is doing it again! How is that for a story that would “stir and inflame public debate in this election year?”
[…]
So we have a contrast that couldn’t be clearer: the Washington Post published a false story about support for Keystone because it fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. It covered up a similar, but true story about opposition to the pipeline (and about “green” politics in general) because that, too, fit the Democratic Party’s agenda. I don’t think we need to look any further to connect the dots.
And yet, a still deeper level of corruption is on display here. Juliet Eilperin is a reporter for the Washington Post who covers, among other things, environmental politics. As I wrote in my prior post, she is married to Andrew Light. Light writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress, a far-left organization that has carried on a years-long vendetta against Charles and David Koch on its web site, Think Progress. Light is also a member of the Obama administration, as Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the Department of State. The Center for American Progress is headed by John Podesta, who chaired Barack Obama’s transition team and is now listed as a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. Note that Ms. Eilperin quoted Podesta, her husband’s boss, in her puff piece on Tom Steyer.
Oh, yes-one more thing. Guess who sits on the board of the Center for American Progress? Yup. Tom Steyer.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

E.O. 13514:Agencies Leading by Example.”

A 600-kilowatt wind turbine — some 245 foot tall — stands on the wintry VA grounds, frozen in time and temperature, essentially inoperable for the past 1 1/2 years. No one is working to fix it, though many attempts were made to repair the turbine, once billed as a model green energy project.
“The St. Cloud VA is a hospital, and our focus is on our patients and we like to think that we treat our veterans very well here,” said Barry Venable, a public affairs officer for the VA in St. Cloud. “We’re embarrassed that this turbine does not operate as advertised.”
That’s quite the about-face from the buildup in December 2009 over the announcement of the central Minnesota turbine, the lone Department of Veterans Affairs project included in the White House document touting President Obama’s executive order for federal agencies to lead the way on renewable energy.

We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars

FP:

As more environmentally conscious Americans do their bit to help clear the air by paying up for an eco-friendly Prius or a sporty Tesla, a damaging form of polluted rain is falling in China.
The link is graphite, a vital component in batteries used in Tesla’s Model S, Toyota’s plug-in Prius and other electric cars, as well as in electronic gadgets including iPhones. It’s mostly mined and processed in China where graphite pollution has fouled air and water, damaged crops and raised health concerns. Now, in response, Chinese authorities are closing dozens of graphite mines and processors in a bid for cleaner air even as global demand for the commodity is surging.

h/t Kevin B

We Don’t Need No…

Har.

The European Renewable Energy Council (EREC), the main lobby group for renewable energy in the European Union, has gone into voluntary liquidation. This development will leave the sector without a main co-ordinator for lobbying at a time when the European Commission has proposed to scrap nationally binding renewable energy targets after 2020.
EREC, which operated as a non-profit organisation, had incurred major debts from its lease on the ‘Renewable Energy House’ in Brussels, which also hosted other renewable energy associations.

We Don’t Need No…

“Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane.”*

The largest coal generation plant in the UK is transforming itself by converting half of its coal burning generation units into biomass (wood pellets) by 2016.
By that time Drax Group PLC will have three of their six, 660 MW units, converted to biomass and will require 7 million tons of wood pellets annually for fuel. To put a context around the latter number, the information available through research on the Internet indicates it takes approximately 2 ½ tons of forest to produce one ton of wood pellets. One acre of mature forest contains approximately 4 tons of wood, meaning to produce 7 million tons would require about 4,375,000 acres or 6,800 square miles of forest. That amount is equal to clear cutting mature forests 10 times the size of Toronto each year.

h/t James Mac.

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