h/t Mike

@elonmusk @Tesla what's wrong with my Tesla Model S pic.twitter.com/uGQG5kSpXy

— derrickyau9 (@derrickyau9) June 26, 2019

At Forbes;

Solar panels and wind turbines are making electricity significantly more expensive, a major new study by a team of economists from the University of Chicago finds.
 
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) “significantly increase average retail electricity prices, with prices increasing by 11% (1.3 cents per kWh) seven years after the policy’s passage into law and 17% (2 cents per kWh) twelve years afterward,” the economists write.
 
The study, which has yet to go through peer-review, was done by Michael Greenstone, Richard McDowell, and Ishan Nath. It compared states with and without an RPS. It did so using what the economists say is “the most comprehensive state-level dataset ever compiled” which covered 1990 to 2015.
 
The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy,” they write.

TruthAboutCars;

A Tesla Model S suffered a total meltdown after being connected to one of the company’s proprietary Supercharger stations in Antwerp, Belgium. While details are scant, local reports state the driver simply went to charge his automobile and returned to a burning wreck a short time later.

NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS.

The southern Alberta city of Medicine Hat is pulling the plug on a $13-million concentrated solar power facility after operating it for about five years.
 
The project’s goal was to test whether the technology was a feasible way to employ the sun’s heat to replace some of the natural gas used to make steam at the city-owned power plant, said Coun. Phil Turnbull, chairman of the city’s utility committee.
 
The answer, unfortunately, was no, as the project’s small and unreliable contribution to the community’s power needs didn’t justify the cost of maintaining its rows of mirrors and pipes through snowy winters and dusty summer days, he said.
 
“I think people sometimes look at what we did and say, ’What a waste of money.’ But it wouldn’t have been a waste if it had been successful in taking it to the next step,” Turnbull said Thursday.

It was a waste of money, Phil.

h/t Bob

Bill Gates: “Do you guys on Wall Street have something in your desks that makes steel? Where is fertilizer, cement, plastic going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put in a spreadsheet?”#auspol #ClimateChange
H/T @JWSpry pic.twitter.com/bZmH12QQ3H

— Seeker 🌐 (@seeker401) May 21, 2019

Update: You can watch the full interview here.

Miracle in Puerto Rico;

It looks like something out a brochure advertising what renewable energy could offer a remote, storm-ravaged island.
 
Electrical lines still hang perilously from poles across the street, but inside the mint-green, one-story Ciudad Dorada senior center, fans blow cool air and refrigerators stocked with insulin and other medicines run cold even as the noon sun broils in a cloudless Caribbean sky. On its roof are a set of Tesla photovoltaic solar panels, attached via cable to a pair of Tesla batteries hitched to the wall beneath.
 
And yet, a diesel generator growls on full blast behind the center.
 
Workers from Tesla, billionaire Elon Musk’s electric car and solar energy giant, arrived on Vieques just weeks after hurricanes Irma and María crippled the aging electrical grid and severed the transmission cable that connected this island to the Puerto Rico mainland seven miles west. The company selected the senior center as one of 11 sites on the darkened island that it would equip with power-producing panels and batteries.
 
Constructing the system was simple. But when workers attached the panels and batteries to the old electrical wiring in the former schoolhouse, the batteries blew out.
 
“It doesn’t work,” a nurse at the senior center said in Spanish during a HuffPost visit in late February. “It never has.”

Via @MarkBSpiegel — “In other words, Musk was about as useful to Puerto Rico as he was to the kids trapped in the cave… With Fraud-Boy, it’s all about grabbing fraudulent headlines.”

Daily Caller;

When the CO2 emissions from battery production is included, electric cars, like Teslas, are “in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine, and are otherwise much higher,” reads a release from the German think tank IFO.

And that’s before they explode into flames.

Remember Solyndra?

Holy flaming pinwheels, Batman!

A towering wind turbine went up in flames Friday at a wind farm located at the edge of a southern Nova Scotia community. […] The tower, which he estimated at over 90 metres tall, was “all aflame.””It was something we’d never seen, for sure. And we couldn’t get near it,” he said.
 
Firefighters were unable to get close enough to put the fire out directly because of the turbine’s height and movement of the blades — and it couldn’t be turned off with the gearbox on fire.
 
“It was too dangerous to get close to it,” Amiro said. “Because of the length of the blades and the blades were turning, you didn’t know where they were going to go when they fell.”

h/t Captain Obvious