“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Warren Buffett told Fortune recently. “For example, on wind energy, 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.”
Buffett’s evaluation is being borne out dramatically as the wind construction industry collapses without the tax subsidy. Congress failed to renew the production tax credit in 2013 and the installation of new windmills plummeted from 8,385 megawatts in the 4th quarter of 2012 to 1.6 in the first quarter of 2013. The huge run-up at the end of 2012, of course, was driven by developers getting things into the ground to qualify before the credit expired. A similar blip occurred in the 4th quarter of 2013 when there was speculation that the tax credit might be renewed. This time the blip only amounted to 1,016 MW.
Related: energiewende kaput?
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne has a request for potential buyers of the automaker’s Fiat 500e electric car: Don’t buy it. He’s tired of losing money.
Speaking at a conference in Washington on Wednesday, Marchionne said Tesla Motors Inc was the only company making money on electric cars and that was because of the higher price point for its Model S sedan. Decrying the federal and state mandates that push manufacturers to build electric cars, Marchionne said he hoped to sell the minimum number of 500e cars possible.
“I hope you don’t buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000,” he said to the audience at the Brookings Institution about the 500e. “I’m honest enough to tell you that.”
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/fiat-chrysler-ceo-please-dont-buy-fiat-500e-202018995–sector.html
Compare and contrast Warren Buffett THE EXECUTIVE with Warren Buffett THE PUNDIT: “But I think that people at the high end – people like myself – should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.”
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne says don’t buy. Well then he is an idiot if he can’t figure how to work the grants and subsidies. Or are people catching on to the eco-green commies?
Got a little drunk tonight and decided to challenge
the idiots.
I am still pissing my pants laughing at the people who believe that a modern industrial
economy can be powered by Unicorn farts. Now, imagine a wind farm. Wind turbines
range from 1 to 3 MW outputs, and require about 50 acres per MW. The number of
homes that can be powered by 1 MW is somewhere between 240 to 400. The total
percentage of wind power in America: 1 percent. Try doing the math on this one!
Add to this, the fact that one gas fired GE turbo fan from a 747 can generate near
30MW in less than an acre. And this was not a combined cycle installation. I know,
unlike other people on this site, I swapped out the engine twice while working on the
CoGen at an L.A. Paper mill.
Modern turbo fan engines are so much more efficient today, that they can exceed 100
MW in a conbined cycle application.
Now, let us look at solar (PV) panels: The Obama White House just installed 500
Sq/Ft of solar panels, about the average residential installation. This means that
at 10 Watts per Sq/Ft, they get to power (6) 50 Watt light bulbs about 20 hours a
day. Peak PV efficiency is about 5 hours a day. The overhead necessary to power
power these Canadian space heaters for 20 hours involves lead acid or Li-Ion
batteries and a DC to AC inverter, just to keep (6) 50 Watt light bulbs burning!
If you spend 30 or 40 thousand dolars in order to power (6) light bulbs, you
deserve the ass reaming you got when you bought the system!
A 360 Sq/Ft system puts out some 6,500 KWH annually. So, you are
stupid enough to spend tens of thousands on a 500 Sq/Ft array that will power
your 1,800 to 2,000 Square Foot house for less than a week in order to power
a small number of light bulbs!
There are three kinds of people in this world; Those who have PV panels,
Hybred cars and electric cars, but are too embarassed to admit it. Then, there
are those who claim to have these items, but do not! There is one scientifically
illiterate individual on this Blog who falls into this category. And then, there are
people who understand the concept of science.
Link jumping from the German side brought me here.
Good read.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/05/19/german-govt-falsifies-climate-report
Investing in wind power is a mistake. Wind farms all over the world are not meeting expectations. Very few are actually producing more than 20% of their installed capacity. As well, they are extremely high maintenance and the useful lifetime falls short of expectations. The high-tech materials used to make them produce a lot of pollution during manufacturing and cannot be recycled. The concrete foundations are very carbon intensive.
PV Solar is only viable in small-scale off-grid locations where it can directly displace expensive fossil fuels. However, PV solar can be as dirty or perhaps even dirtier than the oil sands. It’s not economically feasible to produce PV solar in North America or Europe. The labor costs are prohibitively expensive and the environmental regulations which keep our air, water and land from being heavily polluted don’t exist in Asia, so nearly all of the PV production is over there where they can pollute and keep their production costs low. The electricity to run their PV solar factories comes from dirty coal and the factories dump pollution into the environment. The same goes for their wind turbines.
Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, perhaps the most successful businessman of our time:
… “on wind energy, 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.”
Isn’t that just about as understandable an indictment of the wind and solar scam that can be made?
Spending 30 to 40 grand to power 6 light bulbs with a
break even point nearly 20 years down the line is not
alternative energy, it is an alternative TO energy.
OK, 6 light bulbs in some remote rural application is
better than nothing, but millions of city folk are being
sucked into this con job! They are getting hosed just
like the homeowners who bought the solar thermal systems
a few decades back. I knew a few who went bankrupt paying
for a system that did not live up to the salesman’s con.
The term fossil fuel is as stupid as the CO2 scare. Oil
is so Goddamn plentiful that the world will not run out
in 10,000 years! And even then, more will be found. So
even if you live in Northern Canada, if fuel oil or gas
is sitting at 60 cents a gallon, all it takes is a properly
sized generator.
One question, if you are living in the boondocks, how is it
that you can even connect to the Internet?
I have been working in energy intensive industries for 4
decades. Our decline is based on the false premise that
we are running out of conventional sources of energy. This
is not only an outright lie, it is the solution to our
problems.
Michael Fumento, a nationally syndicated science writer responded to an E-mail I sent him. It was right after the
first Gulf War. I told him that projections were that 500
years of known oil reserves were untapped. I stated that
by the time we ran out of oil, we would all be flying around
in cold fusion powered cars like in the Jetson’s cartoons.
He responded that I was absolutely correct!
We do not need “renewable energy” (Oxymoron,) we need to
exploit the resources we have on hand. This means oil,
coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. Every
dollar spent on solar and wind is a grotesque joke!
Leonard, I would go even further.
Every Dollar Spent on so called “ALTERNATIVE” Energy is a Fracking Joke…no pun intended..
NONE of it is cost effective….WITHOUT Taxpayer dollars going in to support it. The Feed In Tariff’s that Buffet collects (his tax break) are paid for by all of us…not the utility. One only need look at the criminality of McGuintys F****ING Disaster of now paying out $0.42/kwhr to the producer and then because there is no way to store said little energy produced – when we don’t need it, it gets sold the to US at $0.02 per kwhr. Taxpayers pay the difference.
In my mind this guy deserves a blind fold and a nicely centred 30-06. compete BS…and financial rape of Ontarians…yes they voted him in, but i continue to promote an end to Political Immunity…same for REDFRAUD. But I digress..
If there is a real need for a sustainable energy source, and I believe there is, then it MUST be NUCLEAR…not necessarily the fision type as we have now, but a return to an old (early ’40’s), and proven technology…Liquid Salt Reactors using Thorium as a fuel. That has excellent promise. worth looking into by all.
in the meantime, I’ll continue my career in the oil sands because oil will NEVER go away….simply too much of our global economy is dependant on fossil fuels.
I would however like to see a return of paper based packaging. I simply get pissed when I buy something that is literally entombed in un-openable thermo-sealed plastic coffin weighing often more than the product inside…a complete waste of resources in my opinion. StyroFoam packing material – another complete waste of petrochemical resources … things like that, I have no issue with.
Banning incandescent lights…however is a TOTAL (_i_)hole idea.! Like really, are you kidding me.?? They will just sell them as “warming lamps” anyway and besides, in ten years LED’s will have overtaken that market completely…way way cheaper to run and prices dropping as we speak.
Yews, I am with you on stupidity,,,everything from David the Pervert Suzuki, asinine wind tower systems, Al Gore & Large scale solar etc.
But If I ever get a chance at an acre of land with a small little brook (+water rights), in a relatively windy area at 75′ Above the ground near a lake within driving distance to the Okanagan…I’m in with micro hydro set-up, a pair of 10-12′ windmills and 3-4KW of solar charging 24 Trojan T 125 batteries or dumping into a 5000 gal cistern…..and then zee UTILITIES CAN BLOW Me..!!
other power.com is an awesome site to check out: the “Leading edge of Low Tech.!
stk