Your “safe, renewable power” Quote of the Week;
“All staff vacate wind farms when wind speeds exceed 55mph and therefore no one was present on site at the time of this incident.”
Related: “When Europe is fighting just to stay afloat, and tea party style balanced budget amendments are being imposed on every country in the eurozone, emptying government coffers to raise the price of energy is not exactly an attractive proposal.”
Background: Another sparky car bites the dust.
h/t Instapundit
If only there existed a technology to transmit news of this most recent in a long line of green energy failures to our own Saskatchewan energy minister … some sort of long wire with a speaker at each end ?
In one of the most scathing indictments of government mismanagement we have ever witnessed, Ontario Auditor-General Jim McCarter reported Monday that Mr. McGuinty’s green dream has rapidly become an $8-billion nightmare for Ontario taxpayers and electricity users. Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.
Over the past year, the McGuinty Liberals have been forced to conduct a series of embarrassing climbdowns from their grand promises about the benefits that would flow from the switch from carbon fuels to renewables.
[…]
While it’s too late for Ontario to avoid these costly mistakes, other provinces can still learn from them. Other provincial governments may be tempted to consider similar green-energy programs, either for environmental reasons or in the hopes of establishing a productive, lucrative and morally pure industry by the magic of government fiat and wishful thinking. Let Mr. McCarter’s findings be a warning for them: Don’t copy the McGuinty example. It is good for neither the environment nor for consumers.
Health Canada and the Electrical Safety Authority report of a recall involving Luminus 13W, Compact Fluorescent Lamps. The lamp may overheat and melt the enclosure exposing live parts, posing a risk of fire and/or electric shock.
h/t Tim
Chevrolet Volt Battery Issues Growing, Safety Findings May Have Been Suppressed
Joan Claybrook, a former adminstrator at [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] believes part of the reason for the delay was the “fragility of Volt sales.”
Had there only been more government oversight…
So sayeth the Duke;
In a withering assault on the onshore wind turbine industry, the [Duke of Edinburgh] said the farms were “a disgrace”.
He also criticised the industry’s reliance on subsidies from electricity customers, claimed wind farms would “never work” and accused people who support them of believing in a “fairy tale”.
No need to tell the Dutch;
[F]ve years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour — some 4.5 billion euros last year.
The government now plans to transfer the financial burden to households and industrial consumers in order to secure the funds for wind power and try to attract private sector investment.
It will start billing consumers and companies in January 2013 and simultaneously launch a system under which investors will be able to apply to participate in renewable energy projects.
But the new billing system will reap only a third of what was previously available to the industry in subsidies — the government forecasts 1.5 billion euros every year — while the pricing scale of the investment plan makes it more likely that interested parties will choose less expensive technologies[…]
When the money runs out – 14,000 abandoned wind turbines.
But not everyone involved in this scam is going broke: The growing James Hansen scandal. Of course, he’s one of the scam’s chief architects. That’s how scams work.
Has anyone asked Bill Boyd what newspapers he reads?
Government by Harry Potter;
Washington’s press corps this afternoon dutifully parroted the White House announcement that by 2025, cars must get 54.5 mpg. And we’ll put humans on Neptune.
The EPA said the new 900-page regulation will require a 5 percent gain in fuel efficiency per year, will save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump, and will provide “net societal benefits of $420 billion,” whatever that means. These are carnival-barker numbers. “Drink our serum and you’ll be a foot taller!”
But for harder numbers, how are the automakers doing on the more immediate EPA mandate of 35.5 mpg by 2015? They’re not even close.
SDA – always ahead of the curve (November 2009) – “Accounts of western governments (from the local to the federal) kneecapping the very infrastructure upon which modern metropolitan life depends – including reliable electricity, food production, and the transport of essential goods – are so routine now, one can hardly keep track”
WSJ, November 2011;
Some 830,000 Connecticut customers are only now having their power restored after a snowstorm knocked out the state’s grid last month—but the Environmental Protection Agency continues to claim that its regulatory agenda won’t degrade U.S. electric reliability. The reality is that the EPA’s own staffers are—or used to be—worried, and their political superiors have erased the warnings.
In recent months, concerns have been growing that the agency’s torrent of new air-pollution rules will lead to blackouts or to the rolling outages that crisscrossed California and Arizona in September. Yet the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has continued its “who’s on first” routine to avoid its mandate to protect electric grid reliability, while the EPA is trying to rush out a new utility rule that on paper will reduce mercury and other emissions but is really designed to close coal-fired power plants.
Related. No point waiting around while your biggest customer contemplates suicide.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says [Duke Energy] ceased night operations immediately after finding the carcass. It reported the dead bat to the service the next morning. The service examined the carcass and determined it was an Indiana bat. […]
Efthimiou says the company is currently losing power production time by turning the turbines off at night, but he calls it “the price of doing the right thing.”
Well, there’s always solar.
The Norwegian company Aker Clean Carbon may be closed. Its value is set to zero. The market for carbon capture and storage is dead according to their CEO.
h/t ron in kelowna
That may go horribly wrong…
“This was the moment that the rise of the oceans began to slow…”
The White House is facing fresh political headaches over energy loans as a second Energy Department-backed company goes bankrupt and Republicans prepare to subpoena White House internal communications on the failed solar company Solyndra.
Beacon Power Corp., the energy storage company that received a $43 million Energy Department (DOE) loan guarantee last year, filed for bankruptcy over the weekend, prompting a fresh wave of GOP criticism of the embattled DOE loan program.
Meanwhile, across the pond…
“They have effectively bankrupted thousands of companies, including 25,000 jobs,” he said. “Most of them will be gone before Christmas. We built a business on the back of David Cameron’s promises. He has betrayed us twice. Anybody thinking of investing in government-sponsored green opportunities, I would advise them to run away.
“All my business will stop with immediate effect if this goes through. It’s an extremely black day.”
You know, if I were running NDP strategy, I’d be carpet bombing Bill Boyd’s oil-rich Kindersley constituency with pamphlets detailing these billion dollar international boondoggles, with a focus on the SaskPower wind projects.
On the other hand, if I were running Bill Boyd’s office, I’d get him an internet connection so he can learn about about them for himself.
The average U.K. household bill is a tad under $200 per month, and so the thermostat goes down. It’s pretty chilly there for much of the year, and a cold house has consequences. A study just came out today on the health costs of what they call “fuel poverty”, commissioned by the Energy and Climate Change Secretary (don’t we need one of those?), Chris Huhne. Bottom line: the chill from green taxes is now killing more Brits per year than car crashes.
London has suddenly awoken to the costs of indiscriminate greenness and is proposing to reduce the solar subsidies and — this is big — now threatens the multibillion dollar subsidies for its massive (and massively ugly) wind power scam.
If only some sort of technology existed that could carry information from across the Atlantic to our own provincial energy minister.
Related: Lie back and think of the Queen.
“So yesterday we paid the wind turbine operators $4,229,280 ($135 per MWh) to produce their record 31,328 MWh and exported it at an average price of $21 per MWh generating about $650,000 in revenue for a net cost of approximately $3.6 million. We also paid Bruce $931,000 ($65 per MWH) for steaming off (using your comparative drop from same day last year) the 14,325 MWh of nuclear so the net cost to produce the 31,328 MWh from wind fully costed was $4.5 million or $143 per MWh for power we didn’t even use! “
I’m a Chevrolet dealer… we have a Chevy Volt on the lot, it’s been there now for four weeks. We’ve had one person come in to look at it, just to see what it actually looks like… Here’s a car that costs $45,763. I can stock that car for probably a year and then have to sell it at some ridiculous price. By the way, I just received some additional information from Chevrolet: in addition to the $7,500 [federal] tax credit, Pennsylvania is going to throw another $3,500 to anybody foolish enough to buy one of these cars, somehow giving them $11,000 of taxpayer money to buy this Volt.
When you look at this, it makes absolutely no sense. I can stock a Chevy Cruze, which is about a $17,500 car and turns every 30 to 40 days out of inventory… or I can have a Volt, which never turns and creates nothing for me on the lot except interest costs… So a lot of these things that we’re seeing going on have a tremendous economic impact on people who are being asked to stock them and sell them. There is no market for this car. I do have some friends who have sold them, and they’re mostly to people who have an academic interest in it, or municipalities who are asking to buy these cars.
h/t
Related! You’ll get a charge out of this.
Solar-power equipment manufacturer Stirling Energy Systems Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, adding to a wave of troubles in the solar industry amid soft demand, falling prices and difficulty raising money. [… ] Both [of the company’s plants] were sited on public land in California and obtained fast-track construction pemits from the Obama administration.
Mead notes …
But there’s another factor behind the failure of so many Obama administration initiatives in this field. Because alternative energy generation is expensive and inefficient, it requires some combination of subsidies, high energy prices and forced purchases to make these investments pay off.
I remember the days when SDA was a lonely incandescent bulb of green energy truth, lighting a path through the blogosphere wilderness. Nowadays, it seems everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon. Still, when you read the word “investments” in a sentence like that above, one realizes there’s still work to be done. (h/t Instapundit)
Simple math, as the president would say, gives us a grand total of $1.074 billion spent to create, according to the DOE, just 45 permanent jobs. That’s about $24 million spent for every permanent job created.
World’s largest renewable diesel refiner says cost of fuel is way more than anticipated.
Good question! Why California Democrats would be creditor to a company that received more than a half-billion dollars in federal loans to build a solar-panel plant isn’t clear. Even party officials say they’re not sure.
More here and here on the Solyndra scandal.
h/t Fred
