Over the past few years, Texas has spent about $17 billion on wind turbines. And that doesn’t include the transmission lines.

Consider the afternoon of August 2, when electricity demand hit 67,929 megawatts. Although electricity demand and prices were peaking, output from the state’s wind turbines was just 1,500 megawatts, or about 15 percent of their total nameplate capacity. Put another way, wind energy was able to provide only about 2.2 percent of the total power demand even though the installed capacity of Texas’s wind turbines theoretically equals nearly 15 percent of peak demand. This was no anomaly. On four days in August 2010, when electricity demand set records, wind energy was able to contribute just 1, 2, 1, and 1 percent, respectively, of total demand.

The real tragedy? There are no telephones in Texas, dashing hopes that someone might call our own energy minister to warn him.

The Extraordinary Collapse of Jatropha as a Global Biofuel;

By 2008, Jatropha had already been planted over an estimated 900000 ha globally of which an overwhelming 85% was in Asia, 13% in Africa and the rest in Latin America, and by 2015 Jatropha is expected to be planted on 12.8 million ha worldwide.
[…]
It appears to be an extreme case of a well intentioned top down climate mitigation approach, undertaken without adequate preparation and ignoring conflict of interest, and adopted in good faith by other countries, gone awry bringing misery to millions of poorest people across the world. And it happened because the principle of “due diligence” before taking up large ventures was ignored everywhere.

But wait! There’s more!

As an immediate step an international body like the FAO may have to intervene…

In other words, someone to finish the job.

Today, I filled in a Green Energy grant application. I’m going to manufacture Green Renewable Energy Extension Devices.

At 100 km long, they will enable sparky cars…

…to plug into giant fans.

Thus completing the renewable energy cycle, enabling taxpayer funds to flow uninterrupted into the great flaming money pit of idiotic, left-wing public policy.
(Related).

h/t Ron in Kelowna

Via the Corner;

Eating up just a tenth of the corn crop as recently as 2004, ethanol was turbocharged by legislation in 2005 and 2007 that set specific requirements for its use in gasoline, mandating steep rises from year to year. Yet another government bureaucracy was born to enforce the quotas.
To ease the pain, Congress threw in a 45-cents-a-gallon subsidy ($6 billion a year); to add another layer of protection, it imposed a tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents a gallon. That successfully shut off cheap imports, produced more efficiently from sugar cane, principally from Brazil.
Here is perhaps the most incredible part: Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.

California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.

h/t Dale

They’re winning;

THE LOCAL authority has forced Scottish and Southern Electricity to shut down a Sutherland wind farm after the company breached planning controls by failing to deal with excessive noise from the development.
People living close to the Achany wind farm near Rosehall are claiming their lives are being made a misery by the constant noise, and are angry that their complaints are being ignored.
In an unprecedented move, Highland Council issued a temporary stop notice on the 23-turbine wind farm at 3pm on Monday.

Daily Mail:

Scores of the protected birds have been dying each year after colliding with the blades of about 5,000 wind turbines. […]
‘It would take 167 pairs of local nesting golden eagles to produce enough young to compensate for their mortality rate related to wind energy production,’ field biologist Doug Bell, manager of East Bay Regional Park District’s wildlife programme, told the Los Angeles Times. ‘We only have 60 pairs,’ he added. […]
Nationwide, about 440,000 birds are said to be accidentally killed at wind farms each year, as well as thousands more bats. With the government pushing for more wind energy farms, that statistic is likely to rise. […]

Danger Captain Journalist, danger! Math overload!

… the moves have done little to protect the golden eagles, which weigh about 14 pounds and stand up to 409 inches tall.

Getting their skinny little heads lopped off, they is.

In a blow to clean energy advocates throughout the Northeast, Gov. Chris Christie said this morning that the state will pull out of the region’s “gimmicky” cap-and-trade program by the end of the year.

I love the smell of majority in the morning.

The Conservative government wants to postpone pulling the plug on incandescent light bulbs, saying it needs more time to allow for technological innovations and to deal with concerns about compact fluorescent lamps.

h/t Ross M.

Rebel yell!

The Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act, which unanimously passed South Carolina’s Senate panel, would allow South Carolina manufacturers to continue to sell incandescent bulbs so long as they have “Made in South Carolina” on them and are sold only within the state.

I’d prefer an Act announcing secession from the Union, but it’s a start.

Ed Driscoll;

Today in Scotland, as the Great Recession rolls on, and as newly reprimitivized “wind farms” replace more tried and true — and apparently predictable – methods of electricity generation, history rhymes rather nicely. The BBC reports, “Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged.

Unfortunately, Scotland is cut off from the western world that there’s virtually no chance that details of this most recent wind farm insanity will find its way to our own provincial policy makers.
Related waste.

Alternative energy investors run for the exits.

Via Tim Blair;

After suffering seven straight quarters of losses, today the merchandise giant Wal-Mart will announce that it is “going back to basics,” ending its era of high-end organic foods, going “green,” and the remainder of its appeal to the upscale market. Next month the company will launch an “It’s Back” campaign to woo the millions of customers who have fled the store.

(Settle down. You had to know I was going there eventually.)
Related – “A bitter harvest”.

The Register;

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.
The report (28-page PDF/944 KB) was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.
[…]
It gets worse, too, as wind power frequently drops to almost nothing. It tends to do this quite often just when demand is at its early-evening peak:

At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.

And unfortunately the average capacity over time is pulled up significantly by brief windy periods. Wind output is actually below 20 per cent of maximum most of the time; it is below 10 per cent fully one-third of the time. Wind power needs a lot of thermal backup running most of the time to keep the lights on, but it also needs that backup to go away rapidly whenever the wind blows hard, or it won’t deliver even 25 per cent of capacity.

Do they have telephones yet in the UK? There must be some way to get word to our own politicians.
h/t TimR

And neither do the Chinese;

Shares of American Superconductor Corp (NasdaqGS:AMSC – News) plunged 41 percent in pre-market trade on Wednesday, a day after the maker of electrical systems for wind farms said it expected to post a loss for the fourth quarter as its largest customer refused to accept ready shipments.
Late on Tuesday, AMSC said Sinovel Wind (Shanghai:601558.SS – News), which accounts for about 75 percent of AMSC’s revenue, refused to accept March shipments, due to the slowdown in China’s wind power market.

h/t Dave

“Never in my wildest nightmares did I ever think that a micro solar facility would be an acceptable thing to be built in my neighbouring backyard,”

*

Oh, darn.

A plan by Saskatchewan and Montana to clean up the air by pumping carbon dioxide emissions underground has been buried.
Saskatchewan Innovation Minister Rob Norris admitted Thursday that talks on the proposed $270-million carbon capture and storage project quietly ended late last fall.
“That chapter has come to a close. Those talks have been discontinued,” Norris said at the provincial legislature in Regina.”
[…]
Saskatchewan was prepared to provide up to $50 million for the project and asked the Canadian government to pitch in $100 million. Montana wanted about $100 million from a U.S. federal stimulus package.
But federal money never came in either country.