Germany’s wind power chaos;

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).
Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe, the picture that Germany presents is, on paper, almost everything the most rabid greenie could want. Last year, its wind turbines already had 29GW of capacity, equivalent to a quarter of Germany’s average electricity demand. But because these turbines are even less efficient than our own, their actual output averaged only 5GW, and most of the rest had to come from grown-up power stations, ready to supply up to 29GW at any time and then switch off as the wind picked up again.

SDA: always ahead of the curve…

…cutbacks are happening throughout the American wind sector, which includes hundreds of manufacturers, from multinationals that make giant windmills to smaller local manufacturers that supply specialty steel or bolts. In recent months, companies have announced almost 1,700 layoffs.
At its peak in 2008 and 2009, the industry employed about 85,000 people, according to the American Wind Energy Association, the industry’s principal trade group.
About 10,000 of those jobs have disappeared since, according to the association, as wind companies have been buffeted by weak demand for electricity, stiff competition from cheap natural gas and cheaper options from Asian competitors. Chinese manufacturers, who can often underprice goods because of generous state subsidies, have moved into the American market and have become an issue in the larger trade tensions between the two countries. In July, the United States Commerce Department imposed tariffs on steel turbine towers from China after finding that manufacturers had been selling them for less than the cost of production.
And now, on top of the business challenges, the industry is facing a big political problem in Washington: the Dec. 31 expiration of a federal tax credit that makes wind power more competitive with other sources of electricity.

Think of the money Saskatchewan residents could save if only there was some way to transmit news of this and other wind failures to our own provincial premier.

Duke Energy and green payola…

“Duke Energy did not pay $10 million of the [DNC convention] shortfall. You and I did. In 2011 alone, Jim Rogers and Duke Energy received at least $224 million in Federal taxpayer subsidies for ‘green energy projects.’ ‘Green energy’ meaning that the money is gone into Democrat donor pockets. This is just payoff to the Democrats. The $10 million loan is not to start being repaid until 2013. If Obama wins, the Federal government will cover it with another subsidy. If he loses, it will be forgiven.”

Nobody saw this coming – “China’s push into solar energy was supposed to be a proud example of how the country was advancing into hi-tech manufacturing. But now the whole sector is on the brink of bankruptcy.”
h/t ES

Another day, another wind-power let down in Ontario;

Right now, two-thirty p.m. on Wednesday August 29 2012, the provincial wind fleet is letting its hair down, enjoying the productivity equivalent of a glass of vino in the middle of the afternoon. That is to say, the wind fleet is not producing very much at this moment, even though it is continually touted as the energy of the future. […] Though theoretically capable of generating around 1700 megawatts at this moment, the wind fleet is actually generating only 84 MW.

h/t Rob

QOTW;

You can think of the Volt as the ultimate in flex-fuel. It runs 30% on coal, 40% on natural gas, 9% each for nuclear and hydropower. Of course, the overhead losses in generation, distribution, conversion, and storage are immense.
It is also worth noting that the current Administration is against coal, natural gas, nuclear power and dams.

h/t Maz2

Truth About Cars;

The Vauxhall Ampera, a rebadged Chevrolet Volt that is sold in the rest of Europe as the Opel Ampera, technically has a 360 mile range on electricity, but only when the gasoline motor is running. The Volt technically saves a shitload of money, but only if you disregard the price of the car, and only if you don’t take it farther than the grocery store. GM technically repaid the $7 billion loan part of the government’s $50 billion investment, but forgets the $43 billion balance, and ignores that the equity part today translates into “an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion” …

Via

There’s a certain symmetry in the action of transforming useless waste from a failed industry into worthless art.

When Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last year, thousands of employees were let go, dozens of vendors were left high and dry, hundreds of millions of dollars were lost — and millions of glass tubes were abandoned in a San Jose warehouse.
Now some of those tubes, a signature design element of the company’s cylindrical solar panels, have found a second life as modern art.

If by “symmetry”, you mean “screwing over the taxpayer and small business in equal measure”.
h/t Nicholas

Well, at least they’re admitting it: Wind energy company requests permission to kill endangered species

Beech Ridge Energy has applied to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for an incidental take permit addressing impacts to endangered bats at the company/s wind energy project in Greenbrier and Nicholas counties, West Virginia. The 25-year permit for the Beech Ridge Energy project would cover take of Virginia big-eared and Indiana bats during operation of 67 existing turbines and construction of an additional 33 turbines.

So long as it’s not ducks.

“I have had to spend over $500 to even out the power supply at SuperDoc’s. Renewables blew the grid voltage. I put a monitor on it and just watched the incoming voltage flicker. It’s so bad now that it is going to blow out his AC unit if he’s not careful. The thing has begun tripping and going offline due to the fluctuations.”

CBS News;

With unemployment peaking above 20 percent, Elkhart, Indiana was at the white-hot center of the economic meltdown, and a natural launch point for President Obama’s electric vehicle initiative.
” So that’s why I’m here today,” the president said three years ago. “To announce $2.4 billion in highly competitive grants.”
[…]
Everybody hoped that by this time there would be more than 400 workers inside a bustling plant. Instead, today, there are just two workers at Think City. Rodney and Josh are slowly finishing assembly on a few dozen 2011 models shipped in from Norway.
We were able to drive a Think City car around the empty space where investors once envisioned an assembly line churning out 20,000 vehicles a year.

Meanwhile….

…things for the company that has so far received $529 million in federal subsidies are so bad that also last week Fisker announced its third CEO hire in the past year (when in a supremely ironic move it hired the former head of the Chevy Volt program Tony Posawatz). As of last night things just went from bad to even worse, following the inevitable next step: a total recall of all Karmas currently on the road. Oh well: nothing that burning, quite literally, several hundred more million in taxpayer funding won’t solve.

To protect ethanol, Obama seeks to inflate meat prices

President Obama announced yet another government spending program — this time designed to inflate meat prices in Midwest swing states. “Today the Department of Agriculture announced that it will buy up to $100 million worth of pork products, $50 million worth of chicken, and $20 million worth of lamb and farm-raised catfish,” Obama explained to reporters in front of a drought-stricken cornfield.
“Prices are low, farmers and ranchers need help, so it makes sense,” Obama explained. “It makes sense for farmers who get to sell more of their product, and it makes sense for taxpayers who will save money because we’re getting food we would have bought anyway at a better price.”

Related – Pressure Grows on EPA to Suspend Ethanol Mandate

Via Truth About Cars. (h/t Xiat)

California Flex Alert in effect now!

“Well as you know, wind has to blow for wind power to be effective.“

h/t Paul

Hey, Akin – how did you manage to write this without using the word “ethanol”?

Maxed Out Mama;

One interesting trucking note that you probably didn’t know, because you are not the kind of idiotic nerd that reads trucking news – our supremely wise government is paying outfits to buy electric trucks and covering the costs.

Via Truth About Cars;

“Nissan and GE have completed their investigation into the instances of Nissan LEAFs experiencing on-board charging (OBC) issues when using certain EV chargers. Nissan has traced the root cause of the issue to the LEAFs OBC software that can allow damage to occur to its OBC components while using certain chargers and in certain instances, such as when a brief under voltage or blackout condition occurs. Nissan is working to address this issue as quickly as possible, and in the meantime is advising customers to avoid charging during times when brownouts or momentary power dips may be likely, such as during electrical storms or high power usage on the grid.”

h/t Xiat

U.S. ag companies are importing corn.

NEI Nuclear Notes;

Germany wants to put one million electric cars on the road by 2020 but is falling a wee bit short – to date there are about 4500 such cars clogging up the autobahns. And maybe that’s a good thing….

h/t Rob

G&M;

Royal Dutch Shell PLC RDS.B-N and Iogen Corp. have killed a plan to build a next-generation biofuel plant in Canada, and the Ottawa-based technology company is laying off 150 people.

Imagine that, in a country floating on conventional? But not all is lost – where there’s government mandate, there’s hope!

In a release Monday, the two partners said they will continue with a smaller-scale research project to development cellulosic ethanol from agricultural waste.

h/t Maz2