Well explained and well argued, a good video to share into virgin territory. (h/t Martin)
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
For most of the month of February the Northwest’s only nuclear power plant has been under a “no touch” order to help keep the heat on across the region.
The Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the electricity produced at the nuclear plant near Richland, asked for the restriction during an unusually cold February across the state that increased the demand for electricity.
The policy limits any maintenance activity that would either require a reduction in power or would pose a risk to sustaining 100 percent production, said Mike Paoli, spokesman for Energy Northwest. […]
The cold snap comes as water flows that spin dam turbines are low and wind generation is not at peak production.
h/t TH
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
As for house cats, they don’t kill big, rare, threatened birds. What house cats kill are small, common birds, like sparrows, robins and jays. What kills big, threatened, and endangered birds—birds that could go extinct—like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors, are wind turbines.
In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.
Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.
In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.
As we were learning of these impacts, it gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Victim of Road Range: A probationer who led Riverside police officers on a dangerous, high-speed pursuit in a luxury electric sports car was arrested after the plug-in car’s batteries died…
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Tesla slams into tree in Florida, bursting into flames and killing driver before reigniting in tow yard.
But wait! There’s more!
“Police say officers tried to save the driver but couldn’t open the door because there was not a handle.”
h/t EMS
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Consumer Reports pulls the plug on Subsidy Fraud Boy’s car;
“When we look at the Model 3 lot of the issues are the electronics,” Jake Fisher, the senior director of automotive testing at Consumer Reports, told CNBC. “There are some issues replacing the (navigation/infotainment) screens, for instance, but we’ve seen other issues in terms of the trim breaking and the glass.”
Fisher noted that CR’s reliability metrics are based on long-term reports from vehicle owners as well as its own evaluations and vehicle crash performance. In this case, the feedback from owners has reflected general concerns about how well the Model 3 was assembled. Fisher also noted that even the test vehicle CR purchased (the company buys all of its cars) had a small stress fracture in one rear window.
Only a year behind the Tesla Owners Forum.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Australians have the most expensive electricity in the world for a reason. Somehow Chinese hackers or a renewables marketing team must have snuck into the ANU to write most of the report. Of the six summary conclusions, the first two are obvious and the last four are fantasy. They are only “straight-forward” or “sustainable” if you have $10 trillion dollars to spare and you can’t think of anything better to do with it.
We Don’t Need No Frozen Sparky Cars
A new AAA study finds that when the thermometer dropped to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, [EV] range fell by an average of 41 percent on the five models it tested.
“We found that the impact of temperature on EVs is significantly more than we expected,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering.
Some EV drivers — including this correspondent — recently found that range can drop by half when the mercury tumbles into negative territory. The AAA study appears to be the first to have used standard, repeatable methodology to confirm the problem and compare the effect of winter temperatures on different models.
Except for, eh, almost everybody.
We Don’t Need No Frozen Sparky Cars
IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD WARNED THEM.
“My biggest concern is the cold weather drained my battery 20 to 25 miles overnight and an extra five to ten miles on my drive to work. I paid $60,000 to not drain my battery so quickly,”
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Montreal’s all-electric, app-based taxi service, Téo Taxi, has reached the end of the road. After a failed cash call last week, and suspicions that Taxelco (Téo Taxi’s parent company) would be placing itself under protection of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, Téo has finally announced that it will cease its operations. François Bonnardel, Quebec’s Transport Minister, has called the Téo Taxi business model “broken,” according to the Gazette.
With Taxelco remaining tight-lipped about the situation, many are left wondering how the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and tech millionaire Alexandre Taillefer failed, despite benefiting from sizable provincial grants and support as well as several rounds of funding from seasoned investment firms.
h/t foobert
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors
Found on Facebook.
What could Possibly Go Wrong?
South Australia’s green politicians recently demolished their last coal plant.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
We Don’t Need No Frozen Sparky Cars
More: The cold weather and snow couldn’t have come at a worse time for $TSLA. Facebook groups are getting flooded with frozen door handle and charge port complaints.
h/t KP
We Don’t Need No Stinking Bike Lanes*
SEATTLE IS one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the United States — by one reckoning, the most bicycle-friendly. It’s also a city in which bike commuting is rapidly losing its appeal. In 2017, according to recent Census Bureau data, a mere 2.8 percent of Seattle’s workforce commuted to work by bicycle. That was down from 3.5 percent in 2016, and from 4 percent in 2015.
Related.
*typo corrected.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
A decade-old goal to get at least half a million electric cars on Canada’s roads by the end of 2018 appears to have missed the mark by more than 400,000.
The 2009 Electric Vehicle Technology Road Map for Canada, produced by a panel of experts in part for the Department of Natural Resources, aimed for 500,000 cars with the hope of galvanizing industry to make and sell them and government to encourage people to buy them.
[…]
The Liberals in 2016 promised a national strategy for electric vehicles by the end of 2018. Thus far they haven’t delivered and a spokeswoman for Transport Minister Marc Garneau says she can’t say when it will come.
In the last three years the federal government has spent $182 million to buy and install more vehicle-charging stations.
Falling 80% short of their targets didn’t stop their pimps in media from torquing the headlines.
h/t Ottawa MJ
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
All wind farms operating today in Poland will be scrapped by 2035, with no new turbines built to replace them, stipulates draft “Energy Policy of Poland until 2040” presented by Ministry of Energy on Friday.
We Don’t Need No Energizer Fraud Boyz
This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions—assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs. […]
The researchers found that the only way to reliably decrease emissions using batteries is if utilities incorporate a “Social Cost of Carbon” into their pricing schemes—that is, charging people extra for using electricity during carbon-heavy periods of generation. This helps bring batteries into the emissions-reducing fold. Unfortunately, including a cost for carbon dioxide emissions has proven politically difficult.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
“…what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river?”
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
In the financial pages, as the National Post’s ruinous editorial policy continues to bury the lead stories.
StatCan’s green-economy accounts include everything from hydro and nuclear power to services such as waste management to manufacturing clean-energy goods such as wind turbines. StatCan does not yet document the subsidies supporting these various activities. Environmental and clean-technology industries accounted for a puny 3.1 per cent of Canada’s GDP in 2017. More importantly, StatCan noted that this ratio has remained relatively stable since 2007 when the data began. The green economy’s share of GDP stagnated for 10 of the biggest years for pro-green policies and hefty government support, and against historically slow growth in the rest of the economy. If the green economy cannot flourish in these circumstances, it is doubtful it ever will.
The green economy is even less important for jobs, contributing only 1.6 per cent of total employment. If clean-tech and green-tech are the jobs of tomorrow, as their boosters tirelessly claim, then our job prospects are bleak indeed. This reflects that green energy, like all energy sources, uses more capital than labour.