Just think of it as practice.

Related… “Twenty thousand dollars invested in solar panels produces about $100 of energy per year.”
(Heh – “$20,000 invested in Canadian Oil Sands Trust returned $1480 a year.”)

Just think of it as practice.

That is all.

“…and we’re putting in more government to run things.”
h/t Sounder

Wind generation for Ontario in June… “In fact, there was a period of two hours where not one MW was recorded as being produced.”

Small wonder Britain is nearly bankrupt;

Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
[…]
The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.
Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.

…’cause that ain’t how they do things in Texas!

During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.
Infrequently, a power plant might choose to bid below the short term marginal price in order to stay in the market and avoid shutting down. It can be economically rational for operators of less responsive generation units to offer negative prices in order for it to avoid the costs of shutting down for just a few hours and then start up again when load increases – think coal-fueled or natural gas steam turbine. When energy load is very low, near zero or negative prices can result.
This isn’t the cast in West Texas. Instead, the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation. Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.

The world is being run by crazy people.
h/t Larry

“How many golf carts will it take to dependably replicate the performance of one Mack truck?”

Show your math.

Lee Matthews, via email;

Workers are installing nearly 100 solar panels this week on the roof of a Snohomish County administration building in Everett….
At an installed cost of merely $4500.
Per solar panel.
In an area where hydroelectric power costs around 6 cents per kWh.
And the cloudiest place on Earth: the infamous Puget Sound Convergence Zone.

Disabusing Saskatoonians of the theory that local politicians are more grounded in reality than their provincial and federal counterparts: “The project marks the first time in more than 80 years the city has attempted to generate its own power.”
A reader sends this helpful note;

So that’s $5-mill for 1.5 to 2.0 megawatts of capacity (I am assuming capacity, but that is always how these projects are presented). Given Saskatoon is in a far-worse wind zone than the existing wind park near Swift Current, let’s use the low-end of the out-put at 1.5 megawatts, but let’s run it at 40% capacity like the Swift Current region turbines (which is being generous). That is therefore $5-mill for .6 megawatts of power. So the cost is $8.33 million per mega-watt.
A reactor complex can do 3,500 megawatts but at 90% capacity = 3,150 megawatts. Given the wind costs, the reactor should have a budget of: 3,150 megawatts x’s $8.33 million per mega watt = $26,239.5 million.
So, to be competitive with wind, the reactor complex needs to be built for less than $26-billion. With that budget, a few could be built, even with the largest cost over-runs in reactor construction history.

You can contact Don Atchison here to congratulate him on his impeccable oversight of Saskatoon taxpayer dollars.

Dan Gardner gets it half right;

By September, if the new law comes into force, an average of five per cent of the fuel content of gasoline will have to come from renewable fuels made from corn or wheat. Long discussed, the government formally announced at the beginning of April that it would go ahead with the regulation.
Why wouldn’t they? Environmentalists love it because it will reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. In combination with other regulatory changes, the reductions will be “up to about four megatonnes per year,” a government press release says, which is “the equivalent of taking one million vehicles off the road.”
Farmers and agri-business love the regulation, too. Mandatory biofuel content means a huge volume of guaranteed sales. That’s big money.
So the Conservative government wins praise from across the political spectrum. And, just as importantly, the Tories get to say they’ve done something big to fight climate change. What’s not to love? Group hug!
But then reality barges in and spoils the moment.
A week after the politicians in charge of the government announced the regulation was going ahead, civil servants working for that same government quietly published the results of a cost-benefit analysis of the regulation. By assigning a reasonable price of $25 per tonne of emissions, the analysts concluded the regulation would deliver $580 million worth of reductions over 25 years. On the cost side, the regulation will not only raise the price of gasoline, but it will also require the construction of new plants and infrastructure. Total bill: $3.2 billion.
So it will deliver $1 in benefits for every $5.50 it costs. Impressive, isn’t it?

And we don’t need no stinking carbon tax, either, Dan.
But that’s not all! Let’s flashback…

Trouble is, a gallon of ethanol is 30 percent less efficient than a gallon of gas meaning that the more ethanol you mix in, the worse your gas mileage. Department of Energy studies show steadily decreasing fuel economy as ethanol blends rise from so-called E10 (fuel composed of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gas) up through E15 and E20 — with E20 suffering a 7.7 percent fuel efficiency loss.
Yet DOE’s green-zealot-in-chief Steven Chu still favors an increased mix of ethanol. So while automakers are sweating under the federal gun to make increasingly fuel-efficient engines, the government is mandating they do it with less-efficient fuel.

Not content with putting car companies out of business? Wait until you find out what our trusty governments are doing to your local auto body repair shop. Or shall we say – the one you used to have. More on that later.

Most folks leave things they don’t understand alone—they don’t try and turn the house upside down hoping it all comes out right. But that isn’t how McGuinty rolls—at least on this file.
Instead he is placing billions of your tax dollars and your children’s tax dollars on a bet that a mix of unproven wind, solar and other exotic means of electricity generation will one day put a meaningful dent into Ontario’s supply of energy. It is a high-stakes gamble—with about the same odds as winning the lottery.
Nevertheless, McGuinty last week announced his government was offering contracts for 184 renewable energy contracts. By some estimates this converts into an $8 billion investment. This is on top of billions more spent through at least four other outlandishly rich contracts designed to attract investors.
Whom has the province attracted? Well, they include such corporate luminaries as 2225054 Ontario Limited and 6718710 Canada Corporation. Others such as Zep Wind Farm LP signify that these outfits are organized as limited partnerships which means the investors who anted up the money to make the FIT application were able to write off at least part of their investment on their personal taxes. So as a taxpayer you are an enabler of this bit of speculation.
Most of these companies didn’t exist five years ago. Many likely formed just to apply for the FIT contracts. This is the cast of characters to whom McGuinty has decided to hitch Ontario’s energy future.

h/t Manotick

Margaret Wente keeps stealing all my best topics;

So who are the winners? The companies that harvest the subsidies. They’re flocking to Ontario like fruit flies to a bowl of overripe peaches. The government is trying to create a feel-good story by showcasing the little guys – such as schools that want to install solar roofs, and native-run wind companies with names such as Mother Earth (despite the fact that little guys are the most inefficient operators of all). But it’s the big guys who are the biggest winners – multinational corporations such as the Korean giant Samsung, with which Mr. McGuinty struck a $7-billion deal, and Brookfield Renewable Power, which plans to generate more power than all the little guys put together.

But wait, there’s more!

The government will pay Mr. Creeggan and other solar producers around 80 cents a kilowatt hour for the power they sell back to the grid. That’s about 15 times more than the current spot price that consumers now pay for power.

This helpful tip for Mr. Creeggan, straight from the SDA Suggestion Box – “…just hook up the AC into the output circuit of the solar panels.”

Not just synonyms anymore!

After press reports, it was established during inspections that several solar power plants were generating current and feeding it into the net at night. To simulate a larger installation capacity, the operators connected diesel generators.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one industry expert to the newspaper “El Mundo”, which brought the scandal to light. If solar systems apparently produce current in the dark, will be noticed sooner or later. However, if electricity generators were connected during daytime, the swindle would hardly be noticed.

Meanwhile, if a giant fan falls into the sea, and no one can pay for the the splash….
h/t jcl and Ron in Kelowna

More people have been killed by Oregon’s windmills than died at Three Mile Island;

Today, 20 percent of America’s electricity, and 69 percent of its carbon-free generation of electricity, is from nuclear plants. But it has been 30 years since America began construction on a new nuclear reactor.
France gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; China is starting construction of a new reactor every three months. Meanwhile, America, which pioneered nuclear power, is squandering money on wind power, which provides 1.3 percent of the nation’s electricity: it is slurping up $30 billion of tax breaks and other subsidies amounting to $18.82 per megawatt-hour, 25 times as much per megawatt-hour as the combined subsidies for all other forms of electricity production.
Wind power involves gargantuan “energy sprawl.” To produce 20 percent of America’s power by wind, which the Obama administration dreamily proposes, would require 186,000 tall turbines—40 stories tall, their flashing lights can be seen for 20 miles—covering an area the size of West Virginia. The amount of electricity that would be produced by wind turbines extending the entire 2,178 miles of the Appalachian Trail can be produced by four reactors occupying four square miles of land.

Amen.
h/t Eric Anderson

Harvesting the taxpayer;

What hasn’t received national attention is the stunning taxpayer subsidized profits the developer is expecting to reap from the [Cape Cod] project. A study by the Massachusetts based Beacon Hill Institute found that the proposed $1 billion dollars in subsidies from the project would contribute to a nearly 25% return on equity by investors – more than twice the average historical for return for all corporations. Add taxpayers to that list of groups opposed to the project.

h/t Manotick

The high price of magical thinking;

The Danish study finds that the energy technology sector in Denmark from 1999 to 2006 underperformed the broader manufacturing sector in Denmark by an average of 13% in terms of value added, reducing Danish GDP by approximately $270-million compared to what it would have been if the wind sector workforce was employed elsewhere. The Danish Economic Council concluded in a report in 2006: “The wind power expansion in the 1990s is an example of a policy that was unprofitable from society’s point of view, even taking the economic advantages that the wind business enjoyed into consideration.” The Centre for Policy Studies study concludes: “Denmark needs a proper debate and a thorough reappraisal of the technologies that need to be invented, developed, and costed before forcing the country into a venture that shows a high risk of turning into an economic black hole.”

h/t Manotick

With just five words quietly slipped into legislation…

Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy…

Wait for the howler…

“This is the sort of cynical legislative maneuvering that makes people question the credibility of our elected officials…

Via Tim Blair.

Not just synonyms anymore!

Europe’s emissions trading system was in uproar yesterday amid a mounting scandal over “recycled” carbon permits.
Two carbon exchanges were forced to suspend trading as panic hit investors fearful that they had bought invalid permits.
BlueNext and Nord Pool, the French and Nordic exchanges, suspended trading in certificates of emission reduction (CERs) when it emerged that some had been illegally reused.
[…]
The double counting is threatening confidence in the ETS, according to staff at one energy consultancy. Icis Heren said: “For companies obliged by law to buy carbon credits … government-led carbon credit recycling means they risk buying a worthless asset.”

More…

The question seems to be whether it is the solar collectors that are saving the environment from natural gas or the natural gas that is saving the environment from being blanketed with hundreds of acres of solar collectors.

Chicago Boyz;

Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:
There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.
Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.
Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.

It’s the math, stupid.