How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/solar-farms-took-over-california-100025850.html
How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’
By Oliver Wainwright
May 21, 2023
Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.
But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.
“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”
Over the last few years, this swathe of desert has been steadily carpeted with one of the world’s largest concentrations of solar power plants, forming a sprawling photovoltaic sea. On the ground, the scale is almost incomprehensible. The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone – the ground zero of California’s solar energy boom – stretches for 150,000 acres, making it 10 times the size of Manhattan.
It is a crucial component of the United States’ green energy revolution. Solar makes up about 3% of the US electricity supply, but the Biden administration hopes it will reach 45% by 2050, primarily by building more huge plants like this across the country’s flat, empty plains.
But there’s one thing that the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – the agency tasked with facilitating these projects on public land – doesn’t seem to have fully taken into account: the desert isn’t quite as empty as it thought. It might look like a barren wilderness, but this stretch of the Mojave is a rich and fragile habitat for endangered species and home to thousand-year-old carbon-capturing woodlands, ancient Indigenous cultural sites – and hundreds of people’s homes.
Residents have watched ruefully for years as solar plants crept over the horizon, bringing noise and pollution that’s eroding a way of life in their desert refuge.
“We feel like we’ve been sacrificed,” says Mark Carrington, who, like Sneddon, lives in the Lake Tamarisk resort, a community for over-55s near Desert Center, which is increasingly surrounded by solar farms. “We’re a senior community, and half of us now have breathing difficulties because of all the dust churned up by the construction. I moved here for the clean air, but some days I have to go outside wearing goggles. What was an oasis has become a little island in a dead solar sea.”
Concerns have intensified following the recent news of a project, called Easley, that would see the panels come just 200 metres from their backyards. Residents claim that excessive water use by solar plants has contributed to the drying up of two local wells, while their property values have been hit hard, with several now struggling to sell their homes.
“It has been psychologically gruelling,” says Teresa Pierce, who moved here six years ago. “From the constant pounding of the metal posts to the endless dust storms. I now have allergies that I’d never had before – my arms burn all day long and my nose is always running. I feel like a prisoner in my own home.”
Elizabeth Knowles, director of community engagement for Intersect Power, the company behind the Easley project, said it knew of residents’ concerns and was exploring how to move the project further from the community. “Since being made aware of their concerns, we have been in regular contact with residents to listen to their concerns and incorporate their feedback into our planning efforts.”
‘90% of the story is underground’
The mostly flat expanse south-east of Joshua Tree national park was originally identified as a prime site for industrial-scale solar power under the Obama administration, which fast-tracked the first project, Desert Sunlight, in 2011. It was the largest solar plant in the world at the time of completion, in 2015, covering an area of almost 4,000 acres, and it opened the floodgates for more. Since then, 15 projects have been completed or are under construction, with momentous mythological names like Athos and Oberon. Ultimately, if built to full capacity, this shimmering patchwork quilt could generate 24 gigawatts, enough energy to power 7m homes.
But as the pace of construction has ramped up, so have voices questioning the cumulative impact of these projects on the desert’s populations – both human and non-human.
Kevin Emmerich worked for the National Park Service for over 20 years before setting up Basin & Range Watch in 2008, a non-profit that campaigns to conserve desert life. He says solar plants create myriad environmental problems, including habitat destruction and “lethal death traps” for birds, which dive at the panels, mistaking them for water.
He says one project bulldozed 600 acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered desert tortoise, while populations of Mojave fringe-toed lizards and bighorn sheep have also been afflicted. “We’re trying to solve one environmental problem by creating so many others.”
Such adverse impacts are supposed to be prevented by the desert renewable energy conservation plan (DRECP), which was approved in 2016 after years of consultation and covers almost 11m acres of California. But Emmerich and others think the process is flawed, allowing streamlined environmental reviews and continual amendments that they say trample conservationists’ concerns.
“The plan talks about the importance of making sure there’s enough room between the solar projects to preserve wildlife routes,” says Chris Clarke of the National Parks Conservation Association. “But the individual assessments for each project do not take into account the cumulative impact. The solar plants are blocking endangered species’ natural transport corridors across the desert.”
Much of the critical habitat in question is dry wash woodland, made up of “microphyll” shrubs and trees like palo verde, ironwood, catclaw and honey mesquite, which grow in a network of green veins across the desert. But, compared with old-growth forests of giant redwoods, or expanses of venerable Joshua trees, the significance of these small desert shrubs can be hard for the untrained eye to appreciate.
“When people look across the desert, they just see scrubby little plants that look dead half the time,” says Robin Kobaly, a botanist who worked at the BLM for over 20 years as a wildlife biologist before founding the Summertree Institute, an environmental education non-profit. “But they are missing 90% of the story – which is underground.”
Her book, The Desert Underground, features illustrated cross-sections that reveal the hidden universe of roots extended up to 150ft below the surface, supported by branching networks of fungal mycelium. “This is how we need to look at the desert,” she says, turning a diagram from her book upside-down. “It’s an underground forest – just as majestic and important as a giant redwood forest, but we can’t see it.”
The reason this root network is so valuable, she argues, because it operates as an enormous “carbon sink” where plants breathe in carbon dioxide at the surface and out underground, forming layers of sedimentary rock known as caliche. “If left undisturbed, the carbon can remain stored for thousands of years,’” she says.
Desert plants are some of the oldest carbon-capturers around: Mojave yuccas can be up to 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants’ roots, thought to store a third of the world’s soil carbon. “By digging these plants up,” says Kobaly, “we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet – and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are replacing them with have a lifespan of around 25 years.”
For Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, the unstoppable march of desert solar represents an existential threat of a different kind. As a descendant of the Chemehuevi and Yaqui nations, he has watched as what he says are numerous sacred Indigenous sites have been bulldozed.
“The history of the world is told by these sites,” he says, “by geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pictographs. Yet the government has chosen to ignore and push aside the creation story in the name of progress.”
His organisation, La Cuna de Aztlan, acts as custodian of over 300 such sites in the Lower Colorado River Basin, many of which, he says, have already been damaged beyond repair. He claims that a 200ft-long geoglyph of Kokopelli, a flute-playing god, was destroyed by a new road to one of the solar plants, while an image of Cicimitl, an Aztec spirit said to guide souls to the afterlife, is also threatened. “The solar projects cannot destroy just one sacred site without destroying the sacredness of the entire area,” he adds. “They are all connected.”
He cites a 2010 report by the California Energy Commission, which includes testimony from the heritage experts Dr Elizabeth Bagwell and Beverly E Bastian stating that “more than 800 sites within the I-10 Corridor and 17,000 sites within the Southern California Desert Region will potentially be destroyed”, and that “mitigation can reduce the impact of the destruction, but not to a less-than-significant level”.
The Bureau of Land Management declined a request for an interview. In an emailed statement, its public affairs officer, Michelle Van Der Linden, did not directly address questions about solar plants’ water use, health issues, or ecological and archeological impacts, but said the agency operated within the applicable laws and acts. “The DRECP effort was a multiple-year collaborative discussion resulting in an agreement reached between the BLM, numerous environmental groups, partners and stakeholders, in regards to the application and decision process related to renewable energy projects. Project issues were and continue to be identified and addressed through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which includes the opportunity for public engagement and input and also addresses many of the cumulative impacts and additional environmental, social and economic concerns mentioned.”
‘So many other places we should put solar’
But a more fundamental question remains: why build in the desert, when thousands of acres of rooftops in urban areas lie empty across California?
“There are so many other places we should be putting solar,” says Clarke, of the National Parks Conservation Association, from homes to warehouses to parking lots and industrial zones. He describes the current model of large-scale, centralised power generation, hundreds of miles from where the power is actually needed, as “a 20th-century business plan for a 21st-century problem”.
“The conversion of intact wildlife habitat should be the absolute last resort, but it’s become our first resort – just because it’s the easy fix.”
Vincent Battaglia, founder of Renova Energy, a rooftop solar company based in Palm Desert, agrees. “We’ve been led to believe that all solar is good solar,” he says. “But it’s not when it molests pristine land, requires hundreds of millions of dollars to transmit to city centres, and loses so much power along the way. It is simply preserving the monopoly of the big energy companies.”
California recently reduced the incentive for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels after it slashed the amount that they can earn from feeding power back into the grid by about 75%. Forecasters suggest that, after doubling in size from 2020 to 2022, the market for residential solar installations is expected to decrease by nearly 40% by 2024 as a result.
Battaglia is optimistic that home energy storage is the answer. “Batteries are the future,” he says. “With solar panels on rooftops and batteries in homes, we’ll finally be able to cut the cord from the big utility companies. Soon, those fields of desert solar farms will be defunct – left as rusting relics of another age.”
Back in Lake Tamarisk, the residents are preparing for the long battle ahead. “They picked on a little town and thought they could wipe us out,” says Sneddon. “But they can’t just mow us over like they did the desert tortoises.
“They thought we were a bunch of uneducated redneck hicks living out here in the desert,” says Pierce. “We’re going to show them they were wrong.”
Finland just began operating a brand new nuclear reactor
Electricity prices in Finland flipped negative – a huge oversupply of clean, hydroelectric power meant suppliers were almost giving it away
By Marianne Guenot
May 25, 2023
The Olkiluoto-3 nuclear power plant in Eurajoki, Finland.
Finland’s renewable power strategy is paying off as its energy has fallen into negative prices.
A new nuclear reactor, as well as unexpected floods, are leading to a glut of clean energy.
It is a striking reversal from last year, when Finns slashed their usage after cutting ties with Russia.
Finland was dealing with an unusual problem on Wednesday: clean electricity that was so abundant it sent energy prices into the negative.
While much of Europe was facing an energy crisis, the Nordic country reported that its spot energy prices dropped below zero before noon.
This meant that the average energy price for the day was “slightly” below zero, Jukka Ruusunen, the CEO of Finland’s grid operator, Fingrid, told the Finnish public broadcaster Yle.
In practice, it doesn’t appear any ordinary Finns are being paid to consume electricity. People pay a markup on the electricity, and often pay agreed rates for power instead of the raw market price.
The price drop was driven by an unexpected glut of renewable energy and Finns cutting back on energy use because of the crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Now there is enough electricity, and it is almost emission-free,” Ruusunen told Yle, adding that Finns could “feel good about using electricity.”
Finland went from energy poverty to glut in just a few months
The news is a remarkable turnaround for a country that only a few months ago told its people to watch their energy consumption.
“Last winter, the only thing people could talk about was where to get more electricity. Now we are thinking hard about how to limit production. We have gone from one extreme to another,” Ruusunen told Yle.
The country faced an energy crisis after it banned energy imports from its neighbor Russia as part of the global backlash after it invaded Ukraine.
But a new nuclear reactor was brought online in April this year and provided a significant new stream of power for Finland’s population, around 5.5 million people.
Olkiluoto 3, the first new nuclear reactor to be opened in Europe in more than 15 years, brought the price of electricity in Finland down by 75%, from 245.98 euros per megawatt-hour in December to 60.55 euros per megawatt-hour in April, according to The National.
The country aims to become carbon neutral by 2035 and has been pushing to introduce renewable energy solutions. Ruusunen told the National that Finland wanted wind to become its primary power source by 2027.
This is also contributing to the drop in energy prices. Excessive meltwater — which has caused flood warnings in several northern European countries — is pushing Finland’s hydroelectric plants into overdrive and giving plentiful electricity.
“During spring floods, there is often this kind of forced production because production cannot be slowed down. Due to the huge amount of water, hydropower often has a poor capacity to regulate in spring,” Ruusunen said.
Finland is now dealing with energy prices being too low
Finland is now dealing with the opposite problem of poor energy supply: energy operators may no longer be able to operate normally if the electricity is worth less than the cost of producing it.
“Production that is not profitable at these prices is usually removed from the market,” Ruusunen said.
Because hydropower cannot be slowed down or turned off, other producers like nuclear are looking to dial back their production to avoid losing money on energy production.
Ruusunen said this meant Finns could happily use all the energy they wanted.
A wind energy company has pleaded guilty after killing at least 150 eagles
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/06/1091250692/esi-energy-bald-eagles
A wind energy company has pleaded guilty after killing at least 150 eagles
April 6, 2022
BILLINGS, Mont. — A wind energy company was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed over the past decade at its wind farms in eight states, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
NextEra Energy subsidiary ESI Energy pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act during a Tuesday court appearance in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was charged in the deaths of eagles at three of its wind farms in Wyoming and New Mexico.
In addition to those deaths, golden and bald eagles were killed at wind farms affiliated with ESI and NextEra since 2012 in eight states, prosecutors said: Wyoming, California, New Mexico, North Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois. The birds are killed when they fly into the blades of wind turbines. Some ESI turbines killed multiple eagles, prosecutors said.
It’s illegal to kill or harm eagles under federal law.
The bald eagle — the U.S. national symbol — was removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2007, following a dramatic recovery from its widespread decimation due to harmful pesticides and other problems. Golden eagles have not fared as well, with populations considered stable but under pressure including from wind farms, collisions with vehicles, illegal shootings and poisoning from lead ammunition.
The case comes amid a push by President Joe Biden for more renewable energy from wind, solar and other sources to help reduce climate changing emissions. It also follows a renewed commitment by federal wildlife officials under Biden to enforce protections for eagles and other birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, after criminal prosecutions were halted under former President Donald Trump.
Companies historically have been able to avoid prosecution if they take steps to avoid bird deaths and seek permits for those that occur. ESI did not seek such a permit, authorities said.
The company was warned prior to building the wind farms in New Mexico and Wyoming that they would kill birds, but it proceeded anyway and at times ignored advice from federal wildlife officials about how to minimize the deaths, according to court documents.
“For more than a decade, ESI has violated (wildlife) laws, taking eagles without obtaining or even seeking the necessary permit,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division in a statement.
ESI agreed under a plea agreement to spend up to $27 million during its five-year probationary period on measures to prevent future eagle deaths. That includes shutting down turbines at times when eagles are more likely to be present.
Despite those measures, wildlife officials anticipate that some eagles still could die. When that happens, the company will pay $29,623 per dead eagle, under the agreement.
NextEra President Rebecca Kujawa said collisions of birds with wind turbines are unavoidable accidents that should not be criminalized. She said the company is committed to reducing damage to wildlife from its projects.
“We disagree with the government’s underlying enforcement activity,” Kujawa said in a statement. “Building any structure, driving any vehicle, or flying any airplane carries with it a possibility that accidental eagle and other bird collisions may occur.”
Anyone who works in the U.S. Capitol Building, but is afraid of radiation from nuclear power, is very ignorant of science and math
PBS wrote the following:
The US Capitol Building in Washington DC:
This building is so radioactive, due to the high uranium content in its granite walls, it could never be licensed as a nuclear power reactor site.
Original: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/facts.html
Therefore, anyone who works in the U.S. Capitol Building, but is afraid of radiation from nuclear power, is very ignorant of science and math.
Maine voters vote against transmission line that would have provided enough green electricity for one million homes
https://apnews.com/article/election-2021-maine-hydropower-line-54dea1a948e9fc57a667280707cddeb7
Mainers vote to halt $1B electric transmission line
By David Sharp
November 3, 2021
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Mainers voiced their disapproval Tuesday for a 145-mile (233-kilometer) conduit for Canadian hydropower that was billed as either a bold step in battling climate change or unnecessary destruction of woodlands.
Utilities have poured more than $90 million into the battle over the $1 billion project ahead of the referendum on Tuesday, making it the most expensive referendum in Maine history.
However, the statewide vote won’t be the final word. Litigation over the project will continue long after the votes are counted.
Sandi Howard, director of the of No CMP Corridor, called on Central Maine Power to respect the people’s will and to halt the project.
“The vote sends a message to CMP that Mainers want to reject this corridor. They want to preserve the integrity of western Maine,” she said. “Mainers clearly don’t trust CMP to develop a project of this magnitude.”
Clean Energy Matters, which supports the project, vowed to continue the effort to move forward with the project.
“We believe this referendum, funded by fossil fuel interests, is unconstitutional. With over 400 Maine jobs and our ability to meet our climate goals on the line, this fight will continue,” Jon Breed, executive director, said in a statement.
Funded by Massachusetts ratepayers, the New England Clean Energy Connect would supply up to 1,200 megawatts of Canadian hydropower to the New England power grid. That’s enough electricity for 1 million homes.
Supporters said the project would remove carbon from the atmosphere and stabilize electricity rates across the entire region while helping Massachusetts reach its clean energy goals.
Critics contended the environmental benefits are overstated, and that it would forever change the forestland.
Some Mainers were frustrated that the referendum took place at all, saying it was bad public policy to retroactively vote down a project that already was approved by multiple state and federal agencies.
Three-quarters of trees already have been removed for the project, which calls for a transmission line that mostly follows existing utility corridors. But a new section needed to be cut through 53 miles (85 kilometers) of woods to reach the Canadian border.
The project divided the environmental community and made for strange political bedfellows, with some owners of fossil fuel-powered plants aligning themselves with environmental opponents.
The parties were also divided, with some Republicans and Democrats opposing it, while current Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and former Republican Gov. Paul LePage both supported the project.
Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis
Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.
If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).
Icy weather chills Texas wind energy as deep freeze grips much of U.S.
https://news.yahoo.com/icy-weather-chills-texas-wind-030156166.html
Icy weather chills Texas wind energy as deep freeze grips much of U.S.
By Steve Gorman
February 14, 2021
(Reuters) – Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a rare deep freeze across the state locked up turbine towers while driving electricity demand to record levels, the state’s grid operator reported.
Responding to a request from Governor Greg Abbott, President Joe Biden granted a federal emergency declaration for all 254 counties in the state on Sunday, authorizing U.S. agencies to coordinate disaster relief from severe weather in Texas.
The winter energy woes in Texas came as bone-chilling cold, combined with snow, sleet and freezing rain, gripped much of the United States from the Pacific Northwest through the Great Plains and into the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend.
An Arctic air mass causing the chill extended southward well beyond areas accustomed to icy weather, with winter storm warnings posted for much of the Gulf Coast region, Oklahoma and Missouri, the National Weather Service said.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, issued an alert asking consumers and businesses to conserve power, citing record-breaking energy demands due to extreme cold gripping the state.
“We are dealing with higher-than-normal generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited natural gas supplies available to generating units,” the agency said.
Wind farms in West Texas, stricken by weekend ice storms, were particularly hard hit.
Of the 25,000-plus megawatts of wind-power capacity normally available in Texas, some 12,000 megawatts was out of service as of Sunday morning “due to the winter weather event we’re experiencing in Texas,” ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said.
Wind generation ranks as the second-largest source of energy in Texas, accounting for 23% of state power supplies last year, behind natural gas, which represented 45%, according to ERCOT figures.
Forecasts call for heavy snow and freezing rain to spread across a larger swath of central and eastern sections of the country through Monday, with a storm front in the West likely to dump 1 to 2 feet of snow in the Cascades and northern Rockies through Tuesday, according to the weather service.
Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas
Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas
February 9, 2021
Barely a week after Davos luminaries met with world leaders and Silicon Valley oligarchs to plot their latest phase of the Great Reset, the underlying provenance of their entire ‘climate emergency’ thesis is still struggling to correspond with reality.
Their much-celebrated “Zero Carbon” agenda which virtue-signaling leaders like Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are currently advocating for – is proving to be a lot more difficult to achieve in reality than it is on their elaborate UN Agenda 2030 Powerpoint slides, computer modeled projections and Zoom calls.
No one is being hit with this sobering reality more than the Europe’s premier green trailblazer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is currently in the grips of Europe’s record-breaking freeze this winter.
Stop These Things reports…
Germany’s held up as the world’s wind and solar capital. But, at the moment, the ‘green’ stuff can’t be purchased, at any price.
Its millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all. [Note: don’t forget about the constant supply of electricity from the grid that these things chew up heating their internal workings so they don’t freeze up solid!]
So much for the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future – aka the ‘Energiewende’.
Despite being the object of consternation and much vilification over the last 20 years, Germany’s coal-fired plants are now being appreciated for what they are: truly meaningful power generation sources, available on demand, whatever the weather. With a Nationwide blackout a heartbeat away, the German obsession with unreliable wind and solar is like a time bomb set to explode.
Last month, Pierre Gosselin from No Tricks Zone explained how tradition energy sources like coal, nuclear and gas have bailed out Germany’s failing solar and wind green boondoggle…
Berlin On The Brink! Winter Blackouts Loom As Coal Plants Run At 100% Capacity, Struggle To Keep Lights On In
Wintertime wind and solar energy “between 0 and 2 or 3 percent – that is de facto zero,” says German power distribution professor.
Berlin’s power supply severely strained:
Germany now finds itself in the dead of winter. Much of the country has seen considerable snowfall, meaning solar panels are often covered by snow and thus rendered useless. Even without snow cover, the weeks-long overcast sky prevents any noteworthy solar power generation.
Moreover, this winter there have been many long windless periods, and so Germany’s approx. 30,000 wind turbines have been largely out of operation. In a world 100% reliant on green energies, this would mean near 100% darkness at home.
Luckily Germany’s still existing coal and nuclear power infrastructure is (still) there to step in and keep the power on and the country running. This has been the case for Berlin this winter an RBB German television report reveals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgYubOxsjmI
German RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg) public broadcasting recently aired a report (above) on the region’s winter energy woes titled: “Germany’s green energies strained by winter.”
Coal to the rescue
The report acknowledges that all the power is “currently coming mainly from coal, and the power plants in Lausitz” are now “running at full capacity”.
Strangely the RBB report has been taken down from the archives, yet is fortunately available on YouTube thanks to wind energy protest group Vernunftkraft.de.
In the report Daniel Bartig, a mechanic at the LEAG Lausitz plant, tells RBB he is skeptical that green energy can do the job, and says “the greatest share of power is currently coming from coal.”
Green energies will not keep pace with demand
Next in the report, RBB interviews Harald Schwarz, professor of power distribution at the University of Cottbus, who tells RBB he’s very skeptical of wind and solar energy doing the job. As Germany moves to shut down its reliable nuclear and coal power plants, the gap between supply and demand will grow dangerously wide.
Physical reality “totally neglected” by policymakers
According to Prof. Schwarz:
With this supply of wind and photovoltaic energy, it’s between 0 and 2 or 3 percent – that is de facto zero. You can see it in many diagrams that we have days, weeks, in the year where we have neither wind nor PV. Especially this time for example – there is no wind and PV, and there are often times when the wind is very miniscule. These are things, I must say, that have been physically established and known for centuries, and we’ve simply totally neglected this during the green energies discussion.”
Will have to rely on foreign energy in the future
RBB then warns of the increased odds of blackouts for the region, like the blackout in Berlin in 2019.
So what will happen in the future?
The reporter says the plan is that Germany will have to rely more on natural gas (from Russia), coal power from Poland and nuclear power from France.
Green energy dumbness and obstinance on full public display.
Video: Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki gets upset because a reporter asked her when the laid off oil workers will get the green energy jobs that Biden had promised them
A reporter asked Jen Psaki when the laid off oil workers will get the green jobs that Biden had promised them.
Psaki refused to cite any specific date.
She even seems to be mad that the reporter would ask such a question.
I think it was a great question:
https://twitter.com/CurtisHouck/status/1358830482167848962
Here is a blog post that I wrote about Democrats’ previous broken promises about green energy jobs.
In the past five years, in order to protect the environment, California has shut down 9,000 MW of natural gas capacity – enough to power 6.8 million homes
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
August 23, 2020
In the past five years, in order to protect the environment, California has shut down 9,000 MW of natural gas capacity – enough to power 6.8 million homes.
I can understand shutting down the natural gas plants – if they were being replaced by new nuclear plants.
But instead of building new nuclear plants, California has been shutting down its already existing nuclear plants, and is planning to close the very last last one in 2025.
Solar power doesn’t work when the sun isn’t shining.
Wind power doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing.
Anyone in California who opposes both fossil fuels and nuclear power, but also complains about electricity blackouts, is a hypocrite.
California governor Gavin Newsom, who supports green energy, demands an investigation to find out why clouds and weak wind caused widespread blackouts
California Governor Gavin Newsom is against nuclear power and fossil fuels. He has been getting rid of those reliable sources of electricity, and replacing them with solar power (which only work when the sun is shining) and wind power (which only works when the wind is blowing).
California recently had widespread blackouts.
California’s Independent System Operator had been warning for years that the state’s growing dependence on solar and wind power could lead to blackouts. The organization blamed the state’s recent blackouts on clouds and weak wind. And now Governor Newsom is demanding an investigation to see how and why clouds and weak wind prevented California’s solar panels and windmills from operating at their maximum possible capacity.
Governor Newsom is a hypocrite and an idiot.
Here’s an article about it from the Wall St. Journal:
https://archive.is/fOpT5#selection-2543.0-2543.41
California’s Green Blackouts
If you eliminate fossil fuels, power shortages are inevitable.
By the Editorial Board of the Wall St. Journal
Aug. 19, 2020
Millions of Californians have lost power in recent days amid a brutal heat wave, and state regulators warn of more outages in the days and perhaps years to come. Welcome to California’s green new normal, a harbinger of a fossil-free world.
“These blackouts, which occurred without prior warning or enough time for preparation, are unacceptable and unbefitting of the nation’s largest and most innovative state,” Gov. Gavin Newsom declared Monday while ordering regulators to pull out all stops to keep power on. “This cannot stand.”
Mr. Newsom is demanding an investigation, though he can start with his party’s obsessions over climate and eliminating fossil fuels. Even former Gov. Gray Davis admitted the culprit is the state’s anti-fossil fuel policies. “The bottom line is, people don’t want lights to go down,” he told Politico. “People also want a carbon-free future. Sometimes those two aspirations come into conflict.” They certainly do.
California’s Independent System Operator (Caiso) has been warning for years that the state’s increasing dependence on intermittent renewables, especially solar, is making it harder to ensure reliable power. Renewables currently make up about 36% of California’s electric generation, and Democrats have set a 60% mandate for 2030 and 100% for 2045.
Caiso in part blamed cloud cover, weak winds and failures at a couple of power plants for this weekend’s power outages. But this happens when you rush to shut down power plants to meet government diktats and reduce the amount of reliable baseload power. Unlike fossil-fuel plants, solar and wind can’t ramp up quickly when other power generators go down. Solar power also plunges in the evening, and the state didn’t have enough backup power to compensate to meet high demand.
Dozens of natural-gas plants that can ramp up power on demand have closed since 2013 – enough to supply about four million households—so California is relying more on energy imported from other states when needed. In normal times it imports about 15% of its energy. But the Golden State’s neighbors are also experiencing heat waves, and many have also been replacing fossil fuels with renewables too.
Over the weekend, Caiso imported hydropower from the Pacific Northwest, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released emergency water flows from the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River to generate hydroelectricity. Californians are fortunate that reservoirs were relatively full this year after a somewhat wet winter.
Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power, which draws nearly 20% of its electricity from out-of-state coal, also chipped in supply. And Mr. Newsom on Monday waived the state’s emissions standards to allow businesses and utilities to run fossil-fuel generators, many procured for emergency power outages during wildfire seasons.
The power outages will get worse and more frequent as the state becomes more reliant on renewables. The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has directed utilities to triple their battery storage for electricity by 2026. But this won’t make up for the natural-gas and nuclear plants that are slated to shut down in the interim – or the state’s power shortfalls during the heat wave.
Batteries are also expensive and present their own environmental hazards. Caiso has warned that the PUC isn’t accounting for battery recycling and replacement costs or how several days of cloudy weather could reduce solar energy storage. Batteries need to be replaced after 10 or so years, and disposing of their toxic metals is expensive.
According to the Energy Information Administration, the capital costs for a solar plant with an attached battery system run between 50% and 150% higher than for a new natural-gas plant. Natural-gas plants are still much less expensive after accounting for fuel costs, and they generally have a lifespan of 30 or more years.
Mr. Newsom on Monday acknowledged “gaps” in reliability amid the state’s transition to renewables while affirming the state remains “committed to radically changing the way we produce and consume energy.”
In other words, Democrats in Sacramento are so committed to ending fossil fuels that the hoi polloi are simply going to have to make some sacrifices – such as living with blackouts as if the state were a Third World country. So shut up and broil, and wait for the Green New Deal to do this for the rest of America.
TED Talk: Michael Shellenberger explains why he switched from being anti-nuclear power to pro-nuclear power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak
Video: Living off grid with solar panels and batteries
The woman in this video talks about what it’s like for her and her family to live off grid with solar panels and batteries. She and her family are real environmentalist who practice what they preach. She says there are some inconveniences, but that they have manged to get used to them. She also says their daily electric usage fell from 60 kwh to between 4 and 6, not counting their limited use of air conditioning, which brings their daily usage up to 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLhlm-iZFVI
Mathematical illiterates are celebrating New York City’s new 1.6 MW solar power project
AFP reports:
On a rooftop in the Bronx far from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, 4,760 panels soak up the winter rays. Welcome to the solar power boom in New York state.
Robert Kline, director of commercial sales for the Ross Solar Group that installed the panels, is delighted.
“It is the largest (solar) installation in the history of New York City,” he tells AFP.
The 1.6-megawatt installation on the Jetro Cash and Carry has been proudly singled out by New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a prime example of a drive to haul the state into a new dawn.
I’m not disputing the claim that this is “the largest solar installation in the history of New York City.”
However, I am disputing the claim that his is a “boom” for solar power.
The Ravenswood Generating Station is one of many power plants that provides electricity for New York. It makes its electricity by burning fossil fuels, and it produces 2,410 MW.
If we wanted to replace this one fossil fuel power plant with solar power, it would require building more than 1,500 additional solar power projects of the same size as “the largest solar installation in the history of New York City.”
If this solar power plant is a “boom,” it would take more than 1,500 additional “booms” just to be able to shut down this one fossil fuel power plant.
And even that grossly understates the situation, because the claimed power rating for those solar panels is only applicable when the sun is directly overhead, and there are no clouds.
If the sun isn’t directly overhead, its power output would be less than the rated maximum.
If the sky was cloudy, its power output would be less than the rated maximum.
And if it was night, its power output would be zero.
The solar power plant would have to have a backup power source, and that backup power source would almost certainly be… something that burned fossil fuels.
If there is ever a solar power plant in New York that uses batteries to store its sun-derived energy for use at night, and is able to reliably and continuously produce at least 1,000 MW of electricity at any and all times of the day or night, then that would indeed be a “boom” for solar power in New York.
93 reasons why Obama supporters should switch to Gary Johnson or Jill Stein
Note: A longer, more recent version of this list can be found at https://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/obama-252/
In the 2008 United States election, I wrote in Ron Paul for President. In the 2012 election, I will be voting for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. Those who are of a more leftist persuasion than myself might want to consider voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Here are 93 things that Barack Obama has done, that should cause his supporters to switch to Gary Johnson or Jill Stein:
The world’s supply of resources is getting bigger, not smaller
According to the laws of physics, the total quantity of mass and energy is fixed. Therefore, we cannot “create” new mass or energy, and we cannot “use up” the mass and energy that we already have.
But there is something else that we can do – we can invent, build, and use technology to increase our standard of living. For example, petroleum was worthless until someone with a brain invented a way to use it, at which point the petroleum became a valuable resource. Likewise, today we take rocks that used to be worthless, and turn them into computer chips that are worth trillions of dollars.
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Germany replaces nuclear power with coal power, at insistence of environmentalists
In recent years, the environmental movement in Germany has persuaded the country to shut down one third if its nuclear power generating capacity.
Of that shut down nuclear capacity, more than 80% of it has been replaced with fossil fuels.
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