Category Archives: Green Energy

I’m sure the Germans really love buying electricity from France.

Posted on by
2

Solar power is not cutting it in Germany because the 1.1 million solar systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity for weeks. Via Der Spiegel:

The only thing that’s missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.
As is so often the case in winter, all solar panels more or less stopped generating electricity at the same time. To avert power shortages, Germany currently has to import large amounts of electricity generated at nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. To offset the temporary loss of solar power, grid operator Tennet resorted to an emergency backup plan, powering up an old oil-fired plant in the Austrian city of Graz.

I’m sure the German public loves the idea of purchasing power from the Czech Republic.

And France. I’m sure the Germans really love buying electricity from France.

The Spiegel story continues.

Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times.

The distribution networks are not designed to allow tens of thousands of solar panel owners to switch at will between drawing electricity from the grid and feeding power into it. Because there are almost no storage options, the excess energy has to be destroyed at substantial cost. German consumers already complain about having to pay the second-highest electricity prices in Europe.

Makes sense doesn’t it? Sink $10.2 billion of tax payer money into a green energy scheme that drives up costs and makes you more depended on foreign sources of energy?

Sounds familiar. 

Much like Frederic Bastiat’s classic “broken window” economic model

Our Government Penalizing Oil Companies for Not Using a Biofuel That Doesn’t Exist

Posted on by
Reply

This is absurd:

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

In 2012, the oil companies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend in the fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plants like corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons into gasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallons this year.

“It belies logic,” Charles T. Drevna, the president of the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, said of the 2011 quota. And raising the quota for 2012 when there is no production makes even less sense, he said.

As pointed out previously here at MCT bio-fuels, much like the green energy movement in total, makes little economic or logical sense.

SolarReserve: Another Obama Backed Green Energy Boondoggle

Posted on by
4

What will a $747 million tax payer backed loan guarantee buy these days? How about 2.5 square miles worth of mirrors. That, and a puny amount of electrical generation capacity:

SolarReserve of Santa Monica, Calif., can store heat from the sun in the form of molten salt. A field of mirrors that are aimed by a computer reflect the sun’s light on a black box on top of a central tower. In the box is the molten salt, which the sun heats to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The salt can be run through a heat exchanger to make steam to power a conventional turbine and generator.

The advantage is that extra salt can be stored for a rainy day or plain old nighttime so that the plant can continue to make electricity at any hour. That ability is increasingly important as more and more conventional solar farms are set up; ordinary solar cells produce electricity only while the sun is shining, and a system that relies heavily on an intermittent source of power needs storage.

In May, the Energy Department gave the company a promise of a $747 million loan guaranteee for a 110-megawatt plant using that technology in Tonopah, Nev.

Of course, nowhere does the three NYT articles cheer-leading the project discuss, you know, the sheer size of the project discussed. However, if you click over to the project web site they give us the projected size of this project.

Quick Facts:

Location:
 Northwest of Tonopah, NV
Technology:
 Concentrating Solar Thermal with Storage
Size:
 110 MW
Water Use:
 less than 600 Acre-feet/year
Site:
 ~1,600 Acres, BLM-managed land
Transmission:
 9.5 miles
Fuel:
 Sunlight

In case you were wondering, 1,600 acres is 2.5 SQUARE MILES.

The green zealots are willing to cover 2.5 square miles of land to generate a paltry (and more than likely overstated) 110MW of electricity.

To put this in perspective the Zeeland ‘Peaker’ power station covers 30 acres of land (including the parking lot) and generates 930MW of power using natural gas.

November 6, 2012 can’t get here fast enough.

To replace coal in 2020 Britain would burn 60m tons of wood (biomass) 5X the timber they could produce

Posted on by
Reply

Radical environmentalists are still spinning their wheels trying to solve global warming (a problem that is nonexistent) with so-called solutions that produce less power and destroy the environment in the process.  Ironic, since they are environmentalists and their goal is to protect the environment.

All the bad green ideas begin in Europe and work their here and the next push (after solar and wind power) to come from Europe is Biomass.

Via the ASI blog:

It is really quite marvellous how all of these various things we’re supposed to be doing to save the planet are exactly the things we used to do which damaged the planet so badly. As Matt Ridley points out when talking about what we’re supposed to do to keep warm when we can’t burn coal or oil:

To replace coal, the government projects that by 2020 Britain will be generating electricity from burning up to 60m tonnes of biomass, mainly wood, about five times the timber harvest that Britain could conceivably produce.

Now “five times the harvest we could possibly produce” means that we would be over using that resouce. Denuding these islands of trees in fact. Which is what we actually did do all those centuries ago and what impelled us to go and conquer a quarter of the world in order to gain resources (no, really, we did things like go to war against Denmark so that we could have access to the Baltic timber to replace what we’d burnt) and also to start digging up coal in the first place.

Because there was no wood left, see?

Boneheads.

Obama Regime: Hey, you can save money on energy while we make it more expensive

Posted on by
Reply

While driving around town today,  I caught a radio spot from our government extolling the virtues (and monetary savings) from using less energy. The spot was much like the following ‘helpful’ ad from the US Department of Energy:

YouTube Preview Image

The first two thoughts that came to mind listening to this nonsense was:

1. Stop wasting money producing and broadcasting these stupid ads. This will be an immediate savings for tax payers.

2. “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”

YouTube Preview Image

While our government nannies are trying to coerce us into saving energy, the Obama regime is doing everything in its power to block development of real energy resources in favor of his green energy scheme.

Oh, and if you think all this capping of ‘green house’ gasses and green energy is needed to save the ENTIRE planet from global warming, think again. Even hard core global warming fanatics are having to admit the so-called problem is not really as severe as first predicted.

Lead author Andreas Schmittner from Oregon State University, US, explained that by looking at surface temperatures during the most recent ice age – 21,000 years ago – when humans were having no impact on global temperatures, he, and his colleagues show that this period was not as cold as previous estimates suggest.

“This implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought,” he explained.

By incorporating this newly discovered “climate insensitivity” into their models, the international team was able to reduce uncertainty in its future climate projections.

The new models predict that given a doubling in CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels, the Earth’s surface temperatures will rise by 1.7C to 2.6C (3.1F to 4.7F).

That is a much tighter range than the one produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 report, which suggested a rise of between 2.0C to 4.5C

Of course, this still doesn’t explain why surface temperatures in my back yard have been slowly declining since the late 1930′s:

How can the mean temperature in my back yard drop at a rate of 0.0018 deg / year over the last 70+ years when the ENTIRE Planet is supposedly suffering from a catastrophic warming trend?

Even the Dutch are falling out of love with windmills

Posted on by
2

The Dutch are finding green energy too expensive:

Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour — some 4.5 billion euros last year.

The most amazing thing about the 4.5 billion Euro ($6.13 billion) PER YEAR subsidy, is that it only covers a small portion of the Netherlands overall power usage:

Renewable energy meets just four percent of the Netherlands’ total energy consumption.

All that money thrown down the drain to meet only 4% of their electricity needs.

China has found that there is no chance of profit using wind power and now the Netherlands are finding it is just too expensive.

The good news in all this is people here in the States are starting to figure this out as well.

Its good to be a Political Elite

Posted on by
1

The last quarter century has been a really good time to be a politically connected elite. Both in Europe and here in the United States.

Via STRATFOR:

The Greek elite clearly benefited financially from the European Union. The Greek public, by contrast, had a mixed experience. Certainly, the 20 years of prosperity since the 1990s benefited many — but not all. Economic integration left the Greek economy wide open for other Europeans to enter, putting segments of the Greek economy at a terrific disadvantage. European competitors overwhelmed workers in many industries along with small-business owners in particular. So there always was an argument in Greece for opposing the European Union. The stark choice posed by the current situation strengthened this argument, namely, who would bear the burden of the European system’s dysfunction in Greece? In other words, assuming the European Union was to be saved, who would absorb the cost? The bailouts promised by Germany on behalf of Europe would allow the Greeks to stabilize their financial system and repay at least some of their loans to Europe. This would leave the Greek elite generally intact. The price to Greece would be austerity, but the Greek elite would not pay that price. Members of the broader public — who would lose jobs, pensions, salaries and careers — would.

Essentially, the first question was whether Greece as a nation would deliberately default on its debts — as many corporations do — and force a restructuring on its terms regardless of what the European financial system needed, or whether it would seek to accommodate the European system. The second was whether it would structure an accommodation in Europe such that the burden would not fall on the public but on the Greek elite.

The Greek government chose to seek accommodation with European needs and to allow the major impact of austerity to fall on the public as a consequence of the elite’s interests in Europe — now deep and abiding — and the ideology of Europeanism. Since by its very nature the burden of austerity would fall on the public, it was vital a referendum not be held. Even so, the Greeks undoubtedly would seek to evade the harshest dimensions of austerity.

Save the European political elites at all costs, and don’t let the citizen vote on it. Real nice. (Not letting the people’s voice be heard reminds me a lot of the political maneuvers our political elite performed to get ObamaCare passed).

And closer to home, it literally pays to be a political elite.

Via BigGovernment:

In the new blockbuster tell-all Throw Them All Out, investigative reporter and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer reveals that on November 18, 2009, Sen. Feinstein and her husband invested $1 million into Amyris Biotechnologies, a “green” company focused on plant-based renewable fuels and chemicals. The Feinsteins’ million-dollar investment was their only stock transaction for the entire year.

Feinstein, however, had good reason to feel that all her investment eggs were secure in the biotech basket, because just weeks after her seven-figure investment in Amyris, the company scored a $24 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to build a pilot plant where altered yeast would turn sugar into hydrocarbons.

The company went public the following year with an IPO that raked in $85 million. Currently, it’s unclear exactly how much money Senator Feinstein and her husband made off their investment, “but it’s safe to assume that they did well,” concludes Schweizer.

With ‘mad stock picking skills’ like that, who needs a diverse portfolio.

Canada posts trade surplus on surge in energy exports while another White House backed green energy company goes bankrupt

Posted on by
8

Imagine if our government actually let us develop our own natural resources. Via Bloomberg:

Canada recorded its first merchandise trade surplus in eight months in September, led by energy exports and a drop in machinery imports.

The country ran a surplus of C$1.25 billion ($1.23 billion) in September, Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa.

While Canada was busily exporting oil and growing their economy, here in the United States our government has been busily growing a list of failed ‘green energy’ companies such as Solyndra and Beacon Power.

Now we can add the recently NASDQ de-listed Ener1 to the growing list:

New York-based Ener1 received a $118.5 million grant to expand its manufacturing operations in Indianapolis, Ind., run by a subsidiary EnerDel, which received a visit from Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year.

But NASDAQ pulled the firm from trading Friday for failing to file its most recent quarterly report on time. Ener1 also let go of its chairman, Charles Gassenheimer, late last month.

Now DOE says it’s watching the company.

“The department is closely monitoring the status of the company,” DOE spokesman Damien LaVera said in an email Monday.

“So far $55 million of the grant has been paid out to EnerDel,” he added. “Any additional funds received from the government would need to be matched dollar for dollar with their own investment.”

Looking at this picture, do you think Biden has any clue about what the people at Ener1 are telling him.

Another Day, Another Tax Payer Backed Green Energy Company Fails

Posted on by
5

Whoever thought this was a good idea (ahem… Dr. Steven Chu Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley) needs to lose their job:

An energy company that received a $43 million loan guarantee through the same federal program that backed Solyndra has followed the path of the failed solar firm and filed for bankruptcy.

Beacon Power Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The company, which develops energy storage systems based on what are known as “flywheels,” had received the federal guarantee for a 20-megawatt energy storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y., back in August 2010.

The loan was expected to cover the lion’s share of the $69 million project, one of several that Beacon was developing across the country.

But the company’s CEO said in a statement to the court that all those projects are “capital intensive,” and the firm is struggling to attract the additional investment needed to keep everything running. The fact that the company faced being de-listed from the NASDAQ didn’t help, he said.

Flywheels? Seriously?

What is it with the eco-fanatics fascination with Victorian era technology? The are in love with electric cars, windmills, solar (photovoltaic cells) panels and now flywheels.

One of the first patents to discuss energy storage using a flywheel dates back to 1894:

click for larger image

Text from patent abstract:

My invention relates to that class of regulators by which energy is stored when the quantity produced by the motor is in excess of that demanded by the load upon it, and restored to the system whenever the demand of the load is greater than the supply. In this respect the action of the device is analogous to that of a flywheel. Flywheels, however, on account of the excessive weight which they necessarily assume if designed to store large quantities of energy, are generally useful only to absorb fluctuations of power extending over comparatively short periods of time, such as occur during the different parts of the revolution or cycle of an engine.

The main purpose of my invention is to produce a regulator applicable to any form of motor, which, without having excessive weight in its moving parts, shall render possible the storing and restoring of any desired quantity of energy, and which may serve to neutralize fluctuations of power enduring for comparatively long periods of time, for example for several minutes, or even hours.

To accomplish this purpose, I employ, as a means of storing energy, any suitable form of electrical storage battery, and as the moving or revolving body, which replaces the flywheel of the older constructions, the armature of a dynamo electric machine, constructed and connected to the storage battery in a manner to be more fully explained hereinafter, so that when revolving with the desired speed in a constant direction it may act either as a generator, absorbing surplus energy from, the motor and charging the battery, or as an auxiliary motor drawing energy from the battery and assisting the engine or prime mover, at times when the load exceeds the average.

Way to be cutting edge… Circa 1894 (if ever) Steven Chu…

Even worse than the flawed technology is the fact that, again, a politically connected donor is at the center of the failed venture:

One of the most controversial aspects of the Solyndra case — aside from the sheer size of the $535 million guarantee — was a decision earlier this year to prioritize private investors over taxpayers in case of bankruptcy. Republicans have accused the administration of giving precedence to investors in the companies who are also Obama backers.

“As with Solyndra, the head of Beacon Power appears to have been a supporter of President Obama’s,” Sessions said in a statement.

“Increasingly, we are moving away from our capitalist heritage and towards a system where most Americans play by the rules while some are able to rig the game in their favor. The real divide is not split along income lines, but between the politically-connected and those—whether businesses or individuals—who just want the freedom to earn a living.“

Oh, and for the $43 million, Beacon power was only planned to create (or save) 14 permanent jobs and 20 construction jobs.

What a deal.

Hope and Change: The Shocking Costs Of Environmentalism

Posted on by
2

Like I’ve been saying all along… 

Via IBD:

Yes, the environmentalists’ bill is now coming due. Some cost hikes are unavoidable. The electrical grid, like other infrastructure, needs to be updated and improved.

But the costs due to “tougher environmental regulations” are avoidable. They are the product of choices, not all of them sound.

Trying to scrub and eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, is counterproductive. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a naturally occurring gas necessary for life on Earth.

But the environmentalists are extreme in their loathing of man-made carbon emissions, and their agenda is supported by many policymakers.

Remember when a 2008 presidential candidate said if he’s elected his cap-and-trade policy would bankrupt anyone who tried to build a coal-fired power plant on his watch?

h/t: Instapundit