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.”
Wind farm in Germany being demolished to make room for coal mine
https://www.theblaze.com/news/wind-farm-germany-coal-mine
Wind farm in Germany being demolished to make room for coal mine
By Paul Sacca
October 30, 2022
A wind farm in Germany is being demolished to make room for a coal mine expansion.
German energy giant RWE is tearing down wind turbines to expand a neighboring coal mine in an effort to deal with the country’s energy crisis. The area of the wind farm near the small town of Lützerath will be used to expand the Garzweiler open pit mine in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The wind farm features eight wind turbines. One wind turbine was dismantled last week, two more are scheduled to be deconstructed some time next year, and the final five will be taken down by the end of 2023.
RWE officials admit that the move appears to be “paradoxical.”
“We realize this comes across as paradoxical, but that is as matters stand,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen said in a statement.
The Ministry of Economy of North Rhine-Westphalia added, “If Lützerath were to be preserved, the production volume required to maintain the security of supply over the next eight years could not be achieved, the stability of the opencast mine could not be guaranteed and the necessary recultivation could not be carried out.”
In addition, RWE will reactivate three lignite-fired coal units that were previously on standby.
“The three lignite units each have a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW). With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” RWE said in September. “Originally, it was planned that the three reserve power plant units affected would be permanently shut down on September 30, 2022, and September 30, 2023, respectively.”
Germany’s cabinet approved the decision to revive the unused coal units after energy prices skyrocketed because of the sanctions issued due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
North Rhine-Westphalia and RWE had previously declared they would stop using fossil fuels by 2030.
Climate change activists are furious about the transition from wind power to fossil fuels.
Last week, there were thousands of demonstrators who participated in protests against high energy prices in six German cities: Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hanover, and Dresden.
As of September 2021, 60% of Germany’s gas came from Russia, but last month it was down to zero.
Reuters reported, “Germany imported 37.6% of gas from Norway in September compared with 19.2% in the same month last year, while Dutch deliveries climbed to 29.6% of imports from 13.7%, data from utility industry group BDEW showed.”
Last week, BASF – the world’s largest chemicals group by revenue – announced that the company will “permanently” downsize in Europe because high energy costs have made the region increasingly uncompetitive.
“The European chemical market has been growing only weakly for about a decade [and] the significant increase in natural gas and power prices over the course of this year is putting pressure on chemical value chains,” BASF chief executive Martin Brudermüller said on Wednesday.
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.
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.
TED Talk: Michael Shellenberger explains why he switched from being anti-nuclear power to pro-nuclear power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak
TEDx Talk: Michael Shellenberger explains why nuclear power is cleaner, safer, cheaper, more reliable, and more environmentally friendly than solar power and wind power
This 18 minute TEDx Talk by Michael Shellenberger is one of the best pro-nuclear power, anti-solar power, anti-wind power arguments that I have ever heard.
He cites a huge number of statistics to show that compared to solar power and wind power, nuclear power is far better for the environment, far cleaner, far better for animals, far safer for humans, far more reliable, far cheaper, and has a far smaller environmental footprint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w
This person says the Vortex Bladeless cannot produce the claimed power, and is just a scam to raise money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9VjJ1e1nIY
Yale students cancel protest against fossil fuels so they can stay inside and be kept warm by fossil fuels
An organization of Yale students called “Fossil Free Yale” was formed to urge the university’s endowment to divest from coal, oil, and natural gas.
They were planning a protest against fossil fuels, but they canceled it due to cold weather.
So instead of protesting against fossil fuels, they are staying inside and being kept warm by the very same fossil fuels that they claim to be against.
If they want to make a credible case for opposing fossil fuels, I suggest they offer a realistic alternative. Specifically, I suggest they build a house that is powered entirely by whatever sources of energy they think are preferable to fossil fuels, and then spend eight hours each and every night for the entire winter sleeping in that house.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 