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.

Charlotte Business Journal;

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.

Via WUWT;

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.

Forbes;

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! “

Via Truth About Cars;

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.

Via Walter Russell Mead;

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

h/t Ken Kulak

From Ed Morrissey:

Breaking: FBI raids Solyndra
…
And coincidentally… [the] company made a lot of visits to the White House over a two-year period while getting the taxpayer subsidies, too…

The company:

…
Latest News
Solyndra Suspends Operations to Evaluate Reorganization Options
September 6, 2011

Here’s an earlier post from Kate.

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
August 15th, 2011 – Discover Sustainable Business Practices and Tour Solyndra!
August 31, 2011 – Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.
Related: “Is it possible that the Obama administration can’t even do crony capitalism right?”

Just saying.

A wind farm slated to be built south of Montreal has been cancelled after popular opposition and an unfavourable environmental review persuaded the provincial government to kill the plan.

That’s English for “they were looking for an excuse”.

If you can’t sell stupid to Californians, well….

“We were early supporters of electric cars, going back as far as 15 years. But nobody ever uses them,” said Dennis Hoover, the general manager for Costco in northern California, in a telephone interview. “At our Folsom store, the manager said he hadn’t seen anybody using the E.V. charging in a full year. At our store in Vacaville, where we had six chargers, one person plugged in once a week.”

They can’t pay them to keep the things.

The Costco outlets are also outdated by current standards, but a state-supported program stands ready to upgrade them at no cost to Costco.
That was one impetus for a $2.3 million program supported by the California Energy Commission and overseen by the charging companies Clipper Creek and EV Connect, which would have 600 to 650 so-called legacy E.V. chargers upgraded. According to Will Barrett, a Clipper Creek program manager, 30 new chargers have been installed since the program began operations in July. Mr. Barrett said that Costco decided not to participate in the state program last March.
Mr. Hoover said the company was aware of the state-funded upgrade program, but did not see a compelling reason to take advantage of it.
“Why should we have anybody spend money on a program that nobody’s thought through?” he said.

Related – Throughout July, a whopping 125 Chevy Volts were sold, making the seemingly low 281 units sold in February a groundbreaking month.

Last person leaving the Chicago Climate Exchange, please turn out the lights.