We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Alternative Subsidy 13 Comments

Wind power in Nome is taking a slight decline after a wind turbine at the Banner Wind Farm toppled this weekend.
At Tuesday’s Nome Joint Utility meeting, Utility Manager John Handeland said the welding anchoring a tower failed, and the 50 kilo-watt unit was destroyed.
That leaves 15 of the original 18 wind turbines at the Banner Wind Farm still standing.
Handeland explained, “One was destroyed during first the winter. One had delaminated blades. A then a third one was taken down and used for parts. And now this one.”

2009: Entegrity turbines fail in Nome Alaska

UKIP Gains Seats In English elections

Political Animal 24 Comments


BBC: The surge in support for UKIP, which comes on top of big gains at last year’s local elections, has sent shockwaves through the main parties at Westminster.
The Guardian: …first tremors of the Ukip political earthquake
Updated results here.

Welcome Back, Khadr

Terrorism 35 Comments

The American victims of convicted terrorist Omar Khadr are suing him for $42.5 million.
The suit was filed in a Utah court Wednesday, on behalf of Christopher Speer, the U.S. Army combat medic killed by Khadr in 2002, as well as his wife and young children, and another soldier, Layne Morris, who was injured and blinded by a grenade thrown by Khadr in Afghanistan.

Good.

Nigel Farage’s Britain

Political Animal 33 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, Mohammed packs your school lunch, and all the right people are utterly terrified;

The British media spent 20 years laughing at UKIP. But they’re not laughing now — not when one in four electors takes them seriously enough to vote for them. So, having dismissed him as a joke, Fleet Street now warns that Farage uses his famous sense of humor as a sly cover for his dark totalitarian agenda — the same well-trod path to power used by other famous quipsters and gag-merchants such as Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg open-mike nights were legendary. “Nigel Farage is easy to laugh at . . . that means he’s dangerous,” declared the Independent. The Mirror warned of an “unfulfilled capacity for evil.” “Stop laughing,” ordered Jemma Wayne in the British edition of the Huffington Post.
[…]
Farage is a close student of the near-total collapse of the intellectually bankrupt Canadian Conservative party in the early Nineties, and its split into various factions. The western-based Reform party could not get elected nationwide, but they kept certain political ideas in play, which moved the governing Liberals to the right, and eventually enabled them to engineer a reverse takeover of the Tory party. UKIP, likewise, is keeping certain important, indeed existential questions in play, and it’s not inconceivable that Farage, who regards himself as a member of “the Tory family,” could yet engineer a reverse takeover of whatever post-Cameron husk remains half a decade down the road.

But that’s just a sliver, so read the whole thing.

This Is Awkward

Roadkill 22 Comments

Aware that France’s provincial stations came in various shapes and sizes, SNCF had asked RFF to work out the right measurements for the new trains.
After being advised that station widths varied by around 10 centimetres in all, SNCF concluded the new trains could be 20cm wider than their predecessors.
However, in an oversight that would cost it dearly, the operator forgot to factor in some 1,300 stations built more than 50 years ago that are far narrower than today’s norms.
“SNCF’s wise engineers forgot to verify the reality in the field,” wrote Le Canard.

h/t peterj

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Alternative Subsidy 9 Comments

Real Clear Energy;

“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Warren Buffett told Fortune recently. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
Buffett’s evaluation is being borne out dramatically as the wind construction industry collapses without the tax subsidy. Congress failed to renew the production tax credit in 2013 and the installation of new windmills plummeted from 8,385 megawatts in the 4th quarter of 2012 to 1.6 in the first quarter of 2013. The huge run-up at the end of 2012, of course, was driven by developers getting things into the ground to qualify before the credit expired. A similar blip occurred in the 4th quarter of 2013 when there was speculation that the tax credit might be renewed. This time the blip only amounted to 1,016 MW.

Related: energiewende kaput?

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