U.S. wind power company seeks $475M in NAFTA claim

Canadian taxpayers are facing a $475-million free-trade claim from an American company that alleges the Ontario government invented scientific pretexts to stop wind farms in the Great Lakes.
That’s on top of a $500-million lawsuit against the province by Ontario-based Trillium Power Wind Corp. over the same “temporary” ban (now five years old and counting), and an Ontario Provincial Police investigation into whether government officials destroyed emails and documents that should have been kept as evidence.
[…]
Those filings include extracts from numerous emails government officials sent each other, complaining about how frustrating it was to try to come up with scientific explanations for things the politicians had chosen to do for political reasons.
The emails were obtained by Windstream through access to information and during the course of document production as part of the legal proceedings.

We get letters…

SK Power is pushing wind power and I want farmers to know there can be problems with allowing the ass backward things on their land if they do not get good legal advice.  US farmers and Ont. farmers are experiencing what happens when the bloody things crash and burn.
The story: “Huron East farmers hit with $32 million liens by wind turbine construction”.  
Sask Power seems to be wanting to get this through ASAP but farmers need to be aware of what is happening and what the consequences can be. The bureaucrats don’t give a damn what happens and you are such a good voice for the oppressed maybe we can get SK Power to step back. 

Wake up, SaskParty. Bring your crown corporation to heel. These are the sort of issues that build to break popular governments.
Spread the word.

This is the new “skyline” near Pincher Creek.

Via Energy Matters (where there’s more).

Germany;

Slated to enter into effect on January 1, 2017, pending government approval, EEG 2016 will abolish feed-in tariffs as the primary policy instrument to incentivize renewable energy development. Instead, the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy will establish an auction system, designed to provide market-based renewables support while making it easier to control development within a broader network of associated infrastructure.
Three pilot tenders for large-scale PV installations were held last year, producing rather mixed results – hopes for a more diverse pool of bidders and lower prices were largely unmet…

Via @CountCarbon

Energy Matters; EU primary energy consumption peaked at 1839 Mtoe in 2006 and since then has fallen by 11.8% to 2014. Many countries display this type of pattern and it is pertinent to ask why decades of energy and economic growth has turned into a decade of energy decline and economic stagnation? There are a number of factors that may explain this but a prime candidate is the energy price inflation that took place in the period 2002 to 2008 that culminated in the finance crash. The earlier spike in oil price back in 1980 produced a similar though more short-lived effect. It is also pertinent to ask to what extent on-going high energy prices are caused by EU energy policy that targets CO2 emissions? Other factors include the ongoing € crisis and unsustainable levels of debt.

Daily Caller;

Germany plans to stop building new wind farms by 2019, gradually turning away from its $1.1 trillion wind power program, according to a Thursday report in Berliner Zeitung.
The government plans to cap the total amount of wind energy at 40 to 45 percent of national capacity, according to the report. By 2019, this policy would cause a massive reduction of 6,000 megawatts of wind power capacity compared to the end of 2015’s capacity.
“The domestic market for many [wind turbine] manufacturers collapses completely,” Julia Verlinden, a spokesperson for the German Green Party, told Berliner Zeitung. “With their plan, the federal government is killing the wind companies.” Verlinden goes on to blame the political influence of “old, fossil fuel power plants.”

h/t TimR

Ivanpah Solar Plant May Be Forced to Shut Down: A federally backed, $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert isn’t producing the electricity it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp., which says the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a break Thursday from state regulators…

Phys.Org;

A team of researchers, led by Prof. Mahesh M. Bandi of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) wanted to explore some of these scientific problems involved in the fluctuations of renewable energy and how to better predict energy outputs. The team recently published their results in the New Journal of Physics.
“A fluctuating power source threatens the even distribution of power in the electrical grid,” Bandi said. “That makes it difficult to balance the fluctuating power output with the fluctuating consumer demand.”

Imagine a world in which politicians rewrite cancer treatment protocols. This is what they’re doing to electrical generation.

Bjorn Lomborg;

With formidable doublespeak, Greenpeace tries to square this circle by saying that renewables are both competitive and need subsidies for many years after 2020: “Wind and solar energy are at the point of becoming really competitive with fossil fuels, but failure to support them for another few years will result in huge losses of potential jobs.”
That is a claim we’ve heard many times since the 1970s – just a few more years of subsidies, and we’ll be off. In 1976 Lovins told us that “a largely or wholly solar economy can be constructed in the United States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated and now economic or nearly economic.” And it still isn’t.
Truth is, wind and solar PV will be trivial contributions to global energy for the next quarter century. The International Energy Agency estimates that today just about 0.5 per cent of global energy comes from solar and wind (see graphic below). Even in 2040, even if everyone does everything they’ve promised at the Paris climate summit, the world will get just 2.4% of its energy from solar and wind.

Think globally, inform locally;

“In Alberta, we have the capacity for 1,463 Mw of wind, and we gather that over a huge area,” he said, noting wind energy production is gathered from an area the size of The Netherlands in southern Alberta.
Often, wind generation is only able to hit an average of 30 per cent of capacity due to periods where it slips below the five per cent threshold (considered to be zero output). That instability in power levels is a major issue for supplying power to Albertans.
In contrast, the Sheerness generating station near Hanna has a capacity of 780 Mw.
“It provides more electricity than all the wind turbines in Alberta,” Schaupmeyer said, adding coal generation also has stable output.

Good work CAS.

The only renewable that matters: the Taxpayer.

Aussie Greens are lamenting that banks are still unwilling to lend to green projects, because they are worried about the reliability of political support, and the continuity of the generous government subsidies which make green projects possible.

And even that is unreliable.

The only renewable that matters: the Taxpayer.

Aussie Greens are lamenting that banks are still unwilling to lend to green projects, because they are worried about the reliability of political support, and the continuity of the generous government subsidies which make green projects possible.