energy costs

Wynne Government is Destroying Ontario, Tells Us, It Is “Good” for Us!

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How green energy subsidies work: the government makes stuff up, then wastes billions of dollars while the economy bleeds jobs

Two items in the Toronto Sun caught my eye earlier this month, both written by Lorrie Goldstein about what the paper calls “the Wynne Liberals’ mad obsession with expensive and unneeded green energy.”  The first column is about a recent report published by Parker Gallant and Scott Luft of Wind Concerns Ontario, agrassroots organization that opposes wind turbines.

According to Wind Concerns Ontario, last month the provincial government spent over $1 billionmore for electricity than its market value.  The organization blames the government’s “rush to incorporate ‘renewable’ energy in the form of wind, solar, biomass, etc. into the grid, without a cost-benefit analysis” as the reason for rapidly increasing energy prices in Ontario.  And as Lorrie noted in his column the following week, whenever the “Liberals are called on the carpet over skyrocketing electricity prices in Ontario, they go into their patented, ‘but we eliminated coal’ routine.  Meaning they eliminated coal-fired electricity and replaced it with ‘clean’ energy sources such as solar and wind power.”

This makes no sense, according to Goldstein, who points out that coal-fired electricity generating stations supplied 25% of Ontario’s power needs in 2007 but wind and solar provide only 4% today.

Furthermore, according to the Fraser Institute, the 4% solar and wind provides accounts “for about 20 percent of the average commodity cost,” even though the Ontario Energy Board said last year that solar and wind would provide 7% of Ontario’s power and “their direct costs would account for about the same fraction of the average commodity cost.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that the government’s estimates were wildly off.  Dalton McGuinty promised in 2009 that the Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs by the end of 2012, but as Lorrie Goldstein wrote in the Sun last year, as of mid-2013 only 31,000 jobs had materialized.  Most of them were temporary (lasting only one to three years) and were “indirect” jobs, so even the claim that 31,000 jobs were created is difficult to verify.

To make matters worse, the figure of 31,000 did not take into account the jobs that would be permanently lost as a result of increased electricity prices.  A Fraser Institute report published last year found that the Green Energy Act “will not create jobs or improve economic growth in Ontario.” Lorrie Goldstein wrote that the 31,000 new jobs cost the economy 62,000 to 124,000 jobs in other sectors, as a result of high energy prices.

Such dismal results for government investments in green energy are not unique to Ontario, of course.

Consider, for example, this paper published in 2009 by researchers from the King Juan Carlos University in Spain.  The researchers found that for every “green job” created by the government, 2.2 jobs were lost elsewhere in the economy (note that this number falls into the range of Lorrie’s estimate).
The researchers also found that every green energy job created by Spain since 2000 cost the government, on average, 571,138 Euros.  The final cost of the Spanish experience with renewable energy subsidies is massive.   Between subsidies and higher electricity prices, tens of billions of Euros were lost.  The researchers also found that these enormous costs “do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources.”

It is unclear to me, therefore, what the Ontario Government expects its residents to gain in return for all the time and money poured into green energy projects.  Ontarians are paying outrageous electricity prices, jobs have been lost, and billions of dollars have been wasted – and all we have appeared to gain is a few kind words from ‘Saint’ David Suzuki, which is of no value to anyone.

Posted by Matthew at 4:00 PM

There is No Reason for Them To Lie! Google Engineers Expose the Renewables Scam!

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Google’s Top Engineers say: “Renewable Energy Simply Won’t Work”

December 1, 2014 by

google-dr-evil

Renewable energy ‘simply WON’T WORK’: Top Google engineers
The Register
Lewis Page
21 November 2014

Windmills, solar, tidal – all a ‘false hope’, say Stanford PhDs

Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.

Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.

RE<C was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum.

The two men write:

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

One should note that RE<C didn’t restrict itself to conventional renewable ideas like solar PV, windfarms, tidal, hydro etc. It also looked extensively into more radical notions such as solar-thermal, geothermal, “self-assembling” wind towers and so on and so forth. There’s no get-out clause for renewables believers here.

Koningstein and Fork aren’t alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.

Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.

In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly). That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go – none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.

So nobody’s up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork – and many others – remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real and massive. Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that we must move rapidly not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO2 out of the air by such means as planting forests).

So, how is this to be done?

Koningstein and Fork say that humanity’s only hope is a new method of energy generation which can provide power – ideally “dispatchable” (can be turned on and off) and/or “distributed” (produced near where it’s wanted) – at costs well below those of coal or gas. They write:

What’s needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years …

Incremental improvements to existing technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive.

Unfortunately the two men don’t know what that is, or if they do they aren’t saying. James Hansen does, though: it’s nuclear power.

As applied at the moment, of course, nuclear power isn’t cheap enough to provide a strong economic rationale. That’s because its costs have been forced enormously higher than they would otherwise be by the imposition of cripplingly high health and safety standards (in its three “disasters” so far – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the scientifically verified death tolls from all causes have been and will be zero, 56 and zero: a record which other power industries including renewables can only envy*).

Nuclear costs have also been artificially driven up by the non-issue of “waste”. In the UK for instance, all “higher activity nuclear waste” must be kept expensively stored in a secure specialist facility and can only ever – perhaps – be finally disposed of in a wildly expensive geological vault. No less than 99.7 per cent of this “waste” is actually intermediate-level, meaning that it basically isn’t radioactive at all: you could theoretically make half a tonne of ordinary dirt into such “intermediate level nuclear waste” by burying a completely legal luminous wristwatch in it. (If you did that inside the boundaries of a licensed nuclear facility, the dirt really would then become ridiculously costly “waste”.)

The remaining 0.003 of “nuclear waste” actually is dangerous, but it can almost all be reprocessed into fuel and used again. So waste really doesn’t need to be an issue at all.

There can’t be any doubt that if nuclear power had been allowed to be as dangerous per unit of energy generated as, say, the gas industry* – let alone the terribly dangerous coal business – it truly would be too cheap to meter and Messrs Koningstein and Fork’s problem would have been solved for them decades ago: by now, nobody with access to uranium would be bothering with fossil fuels except for specialist purposes – and there’s no reason why nations “of concern” couldn’t be kept safely supplied. Would we run out of uranium? Not until the year 5000AD.

Cheap power solves a lot more problems than just carbon emissions, too. If power is cheap, so is fresh water (the fact is we’re really at that point already, though a lot of people refuse to admit it and prefer to treat fresh water as some sort of scarce and finite resource). If fresh water is cheap, an awful lot more of the planet is habitable and/or arable than is the case if it’s expensive: and that is truly game-changing stuff for the human race.

And as a side benefit we’d by now have actual useful spacecraft which could actually go to places in reasonable amounts of time carrying reasonable amounts of stuff at reasonable costs. We’d be able to establish viable bases on other planets – for instance to mine uranium there, should we ever find ourselves running low.

Even if you aren’t terribly convinced about the looming menace of carbon-driven warming, the fact that we have decided of our own free will not to have cheap, abundant energy and all the miracles it would bring with it … that’s a terrible human tragedy. Nobody knows how much misery might result from climate change in the future, but one can say with certainty that a lot of misery has been caused by the absence of cheap energy, water, food and decent places to live over the last sixty-plus years.

Anyway the truth is that the disruptive new technology which Koningstein and Fork are dreaming of already exists: but it’s been stolen from us by our foolish fears, inflated in many cases by dishonest activists. Even if someone could come up with some other way of making terrifically cheap energy, there’s no guarantee that the ignorant fearmongers of the world wouldn’t manage to suppress that too. There would almost certainly be a powerful application in weapons, just as there is in nuclear; this is, after all, energy we’re talking about.

Koningstein and Fork believe that the answer to the carbon menace is a reallocation of R&D spending, to seek out high-risk disruptive technologies. But the fact is it would probably make more sense to spend money on making sure that people don’t reach voting age without understanding basic mathematics and facts about risk and energy.

You wouldn’t need to take that money from R&D. You could instead repurpose some of the huge and growing amounts of money that are currently being diverted into the purchase of tiny amounts of ridiculously expensive renewable energy.

After all, no matter the wider issues, we now have it on the best and unimpeachably environmentalist of authorities that renewable energy can’t achieve its stated purpose. So – no matter what – there can’t be any point in continuing with it.

None of this is new, of course. These realities have been wilfully ignored by the British governing class and others for many years. But the British/American governing classes, so fatally committed to renewables, often seem willing to listen to Google even if they won’t listen to anyone else.

So, just maybe, this time the message will have some impact.

Bootnote

*The Piper Alpha gas rig explosion of 1988 on its own caused three times as many deaths as the nuclear power industry has in its entire history. Bizarrely though, no nations ceased using gas.
The Register

James Delingpole followed up on The Register’s brilliant piece of analysis with his usual dash and flair.

james-delingpole_3334

Renewable Energy: So Useless That Even Greenie Google Gave up on it
Breitbart.com
James Delingpole
22 November 2014

Some people call it “renewable energy” but I prefer to call it “alternative energy” because that’s what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)

Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google’s research department have reached the same conclusion.

Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Why is renewable energy such a total fail? Because, as Lewis Page explains here, it’s so ludicrously inefficient and impossibly expensive that if ever we were so foolish as to try rolling it out on a scale beyond its current boutique levels, it would necessitate bankrupting the global economy.

In a nutshell, renewable energy is rubbish because so much equipment is needed to make it work – steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage – that it very likely uses up more energy than it actually produces.

Yet our political class remains committed to the fantasy that the emperor’s green clothes are perfectly magnificent. Earlier this week, for example, the British government chucked £720 million of taxpayers’ money into a cesspit labelled the Green Climate Fund.

In theory this UN-driven initiative is supposed to help Third World countries cope with the effects of climate change. In reality, all it will do is force on their struggling economies more of the costly, intermittent renewable technologies (wind turbines; solar; etc) which have proved such a disaster for the advanced Western economies.

If we really want to throw money at the developing world so it can combat climate change, then what we should really be doing is insist that it is spent on adaptation projects – not, heaven forfend, ones to do with “decarbonisation.”

As Benny Peiser and Daniel Mahoney write here, adaptation projects make a real difference and save lives.

Bangladesh’s investment in cyclone shelters, better weather forecasts, and smarter construction practices is a prime example of how effective adaptation can be. The country has learnt how to prepare for the threat of cyclones, succeeding in significantly reducing related deaths. The two deadliest cyclones in Bangladesh’s history occurred in 1970 and 1991, killing up to 500,000 and almost 140,000 respectively. Through adaptation investment, in the last two decades the country has been able to reduce deaths and injuries from such disasters 100-fold.

Instead, though, our leaders are still ideologically committed to wasting much of our foreign aid on renewables.

Take the UK’s recent contributions. Just over a quarter of UK climate aid from 2011 to the beginning of 2014 went to adaptation measures, whereas well over 50 per cent was allocated to renewables, according to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. The World Resources Institute estimates that, between 2010 and 2012, of a total of $35bn in global climate aid, a mere $5bn was allocated to adaptation.

You know that scene right at the end of Spartacus? Well I think I’d like to recreate it, using wind turbines instead of crucifixes, and, instead of rebellious gladiators, all those lovely people – green activists, wind and solar industry parasites, idiot politicians – who’ve been telling us that renewable energy is the way forward.
Breitbart.com

Spartacus2

Wind Energy makes NO Sense…No Gain, Only Pain!

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The Economics of WIND ENERGY
Local Business & Economics Professor Urges Huntington County Plan Commission to Not Allow Wind Farms

James O'Donnell The following are the remarks of Jim O’Donnell, Professor Emeritus of Business and Economics, Huntington University.  This presentation on “The Economics of WIND ENERGY” was given to the Huntington County Planning Commission, on Wednesday, November 12, 2014.  His remarks are published here, in their entirety, with his permission.




“Greetings and thanks.”

“I’m speaking tonight as an adopted son of Huntington Co. But as that adopted son, I have struggled to understand why my chosen homeland would develop WIND ENERGY in the southeast part of the county. I guess it’s for the tax revenue, the few jobs that will come with it, and the lease payments to the severalfarmers who will permit turbines on their land. But as an investor and economist, I feel a little like the auto mechanic who’s being shown a car that a good customer wants to buy. Mechanically and economically, the purchase makes no sense to me, the mechanic, at all, but the buyer insists that he’ll get so many credits for buying the car that even if it never starts, he’ll make a bundle.”

“Warren Buffett is no auto mechanic or USED CAR salesman, but his name is known by many as a great investor. He’s chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and makes enormous bets on companies we all know, companies like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, GEICO INSURANCE, Fruit of the Loom, Heinz Ketchup, Dairy Queen, and many more. He’s very smart and is, arguably, the most successful investor alive, maybe of all time.”

“He’s made about $15 billion dollars of investments in wind and solar energy in Iowa and Wyoming, according to financial publisher Bloomberg. He’s planning on INVESTING $15 billion more elsewhere in America. Soon.”

“His wind investments, he says, have treated him especially well. But they’ve treated his tax liabilities even better.”

“The June 4th, The Wall St. Journal quoted him before an audience in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. He said, “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate. 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.””

“Those are not the words of, say, Sally and Joe living in Huntington County. No, Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, one of the shrewdest investors in the world, too, whose team has analyzed wind energies economic and investment possibilities with a fine-toothed comb. And he finds WIND ENERGY, essentially, an economic wasteland, save for the tax credits. Now if Buffett thinks that, why would Huntington be making investments in WIND ENERGY? Because the county will increase its tax revenues, even if only by benefiting from tax breaks to the very rich, paid for my ordinary taxpayers. It simply does not make sense. I don’t even think it’s right. But it makes sense for Buffett and for Huntington County because their bottom line is increased.”

“Let’s try to understand Buffett’s and other very wealthy people’s attitudes towards “the tax credits” from wind energy? If we understand, then we’ll understand why Huntington Co. might be willing to help rich people take more from the government breast at taxpayers’ expense.”

“Back in 1992, Congress created the Wind Production Tax Credit, or the “PTC,” a small tax credit of about 2c per kilowatt hour that today is an even smaller $23 per megawatt of wind electricity generated, to nurture energy production in the then-infant wind energy industry. Earlier, government supported those who build structures, not energy production. Today, at least the incentive is the production of energy. Government incentives, like the PTC, are often used to promote young but crucial industries. That’s not the problem with the PTC.”

“The history of the PTC has been an off and on credit, renewed since 1992 by Congress for a year or two at a time. Then, it expires and fans of wind [no pun intended] get it renewed. It expired again last Dec. 31st. If we were to look at an honest graph of investments made in wind, we would see that it rises with the credit and collapses with its expiration. Moreover the infant industry it is meant to encourage is now more than 30 years old, kept alive by U.S taxpayers who keep paying to make it attractive for rich investors.”

“It’s important, too, to realize that the PTC can only be taken against “passive income” – that is, income from other investments by rich people and big companies. Wall St. bankers put together investors who want tax write-offs, which are provided by the PTC. Recall Buffett’s words: “we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.””

“Approximately $24 billion of Federal subsidies have poured into wind energy since its beginning over 30 years ago. These credits limit funds that might help find really viable sources of alternative energy. In other words, as an investor myself, I’m saying the PTC is a misplaced bet. The PTC actually blocks funding for other green energy technologies that hold more promise. Rather than helping another infant, but worthy technology, the PTC is a handout to rich people and WALL STREET.”

“But government largesse does NOT end with the PTC. Not by a long shot. Not in a government as friendly to green energy and as hostile to fossil fuels as the Obama administration is. In fact, rarely has a multi-decade old infant industry enjoyed such disproportionate favoritism. Even though the wind industry produces currently only about 3.5 to 4% of the country’s electricity, it receives 42% of the federal government’s electrical financial support.”

“Combined with other targeted incentives, the federal government, in fact, gives wind producers $56.29 per megawatt-hour, according to the federal government’s own Energy Information Administration – the “EIA”. By comparison, natural gas, oil, and coal power generation only get 64 cents per megawatt, while nuclear power receives $3.14.”

“Seemingly innocuous, the PTC gives wind companies $23 in subsidies for each megawatt-hour of electricity they produce. This money adds up quickly; it costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year; while wind energy also creates huge problems, too, with sound, noise, landscape blight, bird kill, bat kill and intermittentcy. On average, wind turbines are SPINNING only about 30% of the time and, ironically, can’t spin at all in high winds (Detroit Edison, DTE, to cite only one utility, turns their turbines off when winds exceed 45 mph.)”

“In addition to the support that wind power gets at the federal level, it gets huge support at many state levels, too. Currently, 30 state governments enforce mandatory purchases of wind, solar, or other green energies under so-called Renewable Portfolio Standards that require utilities to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from green sources, whatever the cost. This, of course, jacks up consumer’s electric rates.”

“We’ve all heard the saying, “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and that APPLIES to government subsidies, too. When lawmakers give special tax breaks to their friends and favorite industries, they shift the tax burden onto everybody else left in the tax base. While subsidies may allow wind turbine makers to pump up their payrolls, such as putting a few people to work in Huntington Co., the rest of the economy suffers. Government subsidies divert labor and capital away from more productive areas of the economy, to those where cronies get richer, which slows overall economic growth – something I would think Hoosiers don’t like.”

“The PTC, when combined with federal and state benefits gives wind producers a great advantage over other energy producers. In fact, it exceeds half of electricity’s wholesale price in many areas of the country. True, more wind energy is being produced each year, and its cost, relative to other forms of electricity is becoming more competitive. But only because of massive subsidies and higher rates for consumers.”

“Federal and state subsidies are so high that they lead many wind farms to sell their electricity at a substantial loss, just to collect the tax credits. Many wind producers are literally paying utilities to buy their product — and yet they’re still turning a profit because the taxpayer foots the bill by providing credits and subsidies.”

“I have no ax to grind against the rich, but I don’t think their gains should come as a loss to great numbers of Americans through higher energy costs.”

“While wind’s tax credits may be great for Warren Buffet and his bottom line, it’s harmful for American taxpayers and very expensive to America’s energy consumers.”

“I really wish wind energy worked better. Many people, including me, think alternative energy, in time, will offer huge environmental benefits for our children and those who come after us. But right now, wind is a museum specimen of a government boondoggle, a monument to crony capitalism’s, a favor to the rich and powerful over the little guy or the average person.”

“Huntington Co. can MAKE MONEY on this, no doubt. We’ll get tax revenue, a few jobs, and a few farmers get lease payments for turbines on their property. Living off the government breast is just not how I want to make money and I think such activities fly in the face of Indiana’s character and Huntington’s, too, as a place that favors freedom and honest work. It’s won a reputation of late for free markets, low taxes, and for encouraging growth in the private sector. Indiana is and Hoosiers are enemies of senseless, wasteful spending. And Warren Buffett sees wind energy as senseless right now, except for the tax benefits it offers its investors. As conscientious, publicly-minded citizens of Huntington Co. who give of your own time and talents to consider what’s best for our county’s land, its people and its future, please don’t allow wind energy’s horrible economics to find a place to make a home.”

James O'Donnell James O’Donnell
Executive-in Residence, emeritus standing

James M. O’Donnell received his UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE from Brown University and his MBA from Columbia University. Professor O’Donnell is a certified public accountant and spent many years as an executive in the FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY with such firms as Fidelity Investments and the Dreyfus Corporation in Boston and New York, respectively.

Wynne and Her Merry Band of Miscreants, Robbing us Blind!

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One month and one billion dollars more wasted…

CleanLicencePlate_wynne_windmill

I have to ask… where is the main stream media?

Kudos to the Toronto Sun for posting the story by Parker and Lufts who run the blog Wind Concerns Ontario.  And of course Sun News for trying to get this across to the people of Ontario.

Are you aware that it only took 30 days for the Liberals to piss away yet ANOTHER ONE billion dollars (yes with a B! for Billion) in order to over pay for hydro production?

30 days and 1 billion dollars GONE!  Pfffsst gone!  If it’s any conciliation, for the previous 30 day period of September 2014, they only pissed away 800 million dollars to pay more than the actual market value of said produced electricity.

Wynne and her gang of liberal marauders have now successfully created a billion dollar a month money funnel, in order to fund their green energy scheme.

Can we predict November’s numbers?  Another billion?  Safe bet.  And December?  Another Billion?  Yep.  And on and on it will go.

Not ONE penny of that endless cycle of monthly missing billions per month will go to benefit the Ontario resident. NOT ONE PENNY!

Are you queasy yet?  Or hopefully you are angry.

No money for sick kids, no money for diabetics, no money for road infrastructure and no money for non Liberal causes.  LOTS AND LOTS of billions though for the sucking black hole of grossly expensive and unnecessary green energy projects and their owners.

We can no longer continue to give these slugs a free pass while we are being robbed blind by this Green Energy disaster.  Who’s with me?

Feel free to link or share via social media.  Please do not alter.  Thanks.

Insane Windpushers Causing Energy Poverty – People Freezing!

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UK’s Out of Control Wind Power Debacle Sets Brits up for Winters of Discontent

November 14, 2014 by stopthesethings

cold lady

Homeowners face £1,000 increase in electricity bills: ‘Folly’ of relying on wind power ‘will cost homes £26bn by 2030’
The Daily Mail
Corey Charlton
15 October 2014

  • Wind farm reliance could see costly electricity bills and winterpower cuts
  • Experts claim it will lead to costs being passed on to consumers
  • Next winter’s electricity production margins are at an ‘all time low’

Homeowners are facing electricity bill increases of £1,000 and winter power cuts if the Government continues to rely on wind farms, experts warn.

A new report claims that if the Government continues to chase renewable wind power, the average household bill will soar by £1,000, costing homes £26billion by 2030.

The report, submitted to the Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, was authored by the Scientific Alliance.

By 2030, it projected the costs of meeting future energy demands using wind farms would be £26billion per year, which was a 53 per cent increase in the average consumer’s power bill.

Further to this would be increased costs coming from the industry and carbon taxes, which in total would add almost £1,000 onto the average consumer’s bill, the Daily Express reported.

The Scientific Alliance said the Government’s aims to have 35 per cent of electrical energy generated from renewable sources by 2020 will ‘not be achieved in their entirety’.

Sir Donald Miller, the former chairman of Scottish Power, said: ‘The blind reliance by successive governments on unreliable, intermittent renewable energy has reduced the margin of safety to a critical level,’ the paper reported.

‘This has brought the country to a position where power cuts could become a regular feature of cold winters for several years.’

The report, of which Sir Miller was a contributor, stated the electricity production margin for winter next winter was at an ‘all time low’ of 2 per cent.

‘It has been reported that National Grid are taking emergency measures to increase these margins by contracting with owners of small private standby generators for emergency supplies.

‘It is not known to what extent this will be helpful, but the costs per KWhr are likely to be high.’

By 2020, the supply margins will remain at a ‘critical’ level due to the planned withdrawal of conventional power generators over the next two years and the inadequate replacement of these with wind farms.

‘It should be remembered that these margins are against the background of no growth in demand and, even so, are likely to result in extended periods of loss of supply over periods of high winter demand.’

The crisis facing Britain regarding lack and surety of power supply was also acknowledged by the chair of the committee, Earl of Selborne.

In launching the inquiry, he said: ‘An investigation into the resilience of the UK’s electricity infrastructure is a timely one, given that we are set to see our safety cushion between demand and supply drop to particularly low levels over the next two winters.’
The Daily Mail

ed davey DECC

And here’s another take on Britain’s out of control wind power debacle from the Daily Express.

UK’s wind farm ‘folly’: Electric bills to soar by £1000 thanks to reliance on wind power
The Daily Express
John Ingham
15 October 2014

HOUSEHOLDERS are facing soaring energy bills and winter power cuts thanks to the “folly” of relying on wind power, experts said last night.

The green crusade of successive governments is set to double electricity bills for households and cost homes £26billion a year by 2030, it was claimed yesterday.

The cost of renewable energy and carbon taxes will put an extra £983 a year on household bills by then, compared to relying on a mix of nuclear and new gas-fired power stations, three experts told a Lords committee.

They also said the “foolhardy” green policy will do little to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The Scientific Alliance report highlights warnings by the regulator Ofgem that the margin for electricity production for the 2015-16 winter will be at an all-time low of 2 per cent compared to the pre-privatisation requirement of at least 20 per cent.

It means that in times of high demand, such as during very cold weather, Britain would be at risk of power cuts.

The alliance argues that wind power – which is the main renewable energy source depended on by Government – is unreliable.

One of the experts, Sir Donald Miller, former chairman of Scottish Power, said: “The blind reliance by successive governments on unreliable, intermittent renewable energy has reduced the margin of safety to a critical level.

“This has brought the country to a position where power cuts could become a regular feature of cold winters for several years.”

The written report has been submitted to the Lords Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into the nation’s electricity infrastructure.

At the inquiry’s launch its chairman, the Earl of Selborne, said: “We are set to see our safety cushion between demand and supply drop to particularly low levels over the next two winters.”

And yesterday’s report stated: “The foolhardy policy of replacing reliable and efficient gas, nuclear and coal power stations by expensive and inefficient wind turbines and solar farms has raised energy prices while doing little to cut emissions of carbon dioxide.

“The total costs are some £12billion per year more in 2020 than an optimum programme of gas turbines and nuclear, and almost £26billion per year more by 2030.”

The alliance calls for new nuclear power plants to help plug shortfalls caused by the closure of ageing coal-fuelled power stations and rising demand.
The Daily Mail

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Wind Turbines are Indeed, a Health hazard!

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Wind turbines declared health hazard in Wisconsin

By Thomas Lifson

An historic first! Jack Spencer in Michigan Capitol Confidential writes:

…the Board of Health in Brown County, Wisconsin, where Green Bay is located, has declared a local industrial wind plant to be a human health hazard. The specific facility consists of eight 500-foot high, 2.5 megawatt industrial wind turbines.

The board made its finding with a 4-0 vote (three members were not present) at an Oct. 14 meeting after it had wrestled with health complaints about the wind plant for more than four years. Ultimately, the board’s ruling was based on a year-long survey which documented health complaints and demonstrated that infrasound and low-frequency noise emanating from the turbines was detectable inside homes within a 6.2-mile radius of the industrial wind plant.

Jay Tibbetts, a physician and a member of the Brown County Board of Health, said the board based its position that the turbines constitute a health hazard on the weight of evidence.

“I can tell you that we are absolutely not an anti-wind energy board,” Tibbetts said. “We worked on this for four and a half years before making this decision. Three families have moved out. I knew all of them. We also know that this isn’t only happening here. In Ontario 40 families have abandoned their homes to get away from the effects of wind turbines.”

According to Tibbetts, micro barometers were placed in homes located in the area surrounding the industrial wind plant. The purpose of this was to detect acoustic emissions, including infrasound and low frequency noise emanating from the turbines.

“They found that there were tones of infrasound and low frequency noise as far away as 6.2 miles from the nearest wind turbine,” Tibbetts said. “There were no complaints associated with the home that was 6.2 miles away, but there were complaints associated with one 4.2 miles away.

“We have 80 people on record who have made health complaints, including a nurse who is going deaf,” Tibbetts continued. “We can’t just ignore this.”

In addition to these problems, I am aware that wind turbines sin arid locales, such as the massive wind farm near Palm Springs, California, kick uop a lot of dust, aka particulate matter. Moreover, there is no mention of the toll on migratory birds that tend to follow the same wind patterns that wind farms are situated to exploit. Doug Schmidt points out:

The Truth About the Climate Scam, Fear Mongering, and Faux-Green Energy!

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Bjørn Lomborg: Climate Change “Fixes”? – the “Cure” is Worse than the “Disease”

November 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment

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When it comes to assessing the costs, risks and benefits of environmental policy, Bjørn Lomborg is one of the very few that provide balanced, detailed analysis supported by facts and evidence. The economic choices we make – about allocating scarce resources to unlimited wants – should – as Lomborg consistently points out – be made taking into account all of the costs weighed against properly measured benefits (see our post here).

Bjørn Lomborg has become one of the most high profile critics of insanely expensive and utterly pointless renewable energy policies across the globe (see our posts here and here and here).

Bjørn’s back –  in this piece published by The Telegraph – in which he hammers the insane cost and utter pointlessness of tying our energy futures to unreliable and intermittent renewables, like wind power.

Climate change is a problem. But our attempts to fix it could be worse than useless
The Telegraph
Bjørn Lomborg
3 November 2014

Panicked, ill-thought-through responses to the threat of climate change could hurt more people than they save

The UN Climate Panel came out with its final report yesterday. It is a summary of its 3 main reports, published over the last year. It tells us that global warming is real and a significant problem. And as usual, the media hears something else – in the words of Mother Jones magazine, how future warming will be “ghastly, horrid, awful, shocking, grisly, gruesome.”

In between the alarmist hype and the reality of climate change we once again risk losing an opportunity to think smartly about energy and find a realistic way to fix global warming.

We need to realise that the world will not come off fossil fuels for many decades. Globally, we get a minuscule 0.3pc of our energy from solar and wind. According to the International Energy Agency, even with a wildly optimistic scenario, we will get just 3.5pc of our energy from solar and wind in 2035, while paying almost $100 billion in annual subsidies. Today, the world gets 82pc of its energy from fossil fuels, in 21 years it will still be more than 79pc.

The simple reason is that cheap and abundant energy is what powers economic growth. And for now, that means four fifths from fossil fuel, and much of the rest from water and nuclear. While wind is lower cost in a few, rural areas, coal is for the most part much cheaper, and provides power, also when the wind is not blowing.

As the poor half of our world is reaching for a similar development to that of China, they will also want much, much more power, most of it powered by coal. Even the climate-worried World Bank president accepts that “there’s never been a country that has developed with intermittent power.”

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Realising that fossil fuels will be here for a long time means stronger focus on moving from coal to gas, since gas emits about half the greenhouse gasses. The US shale gas revolution has reduced gas prices and lead to a significant switch from coal to gas. This has reduced US CO₂ emissions to their lowest in 20 years.

In 2012, US shale gas reduced emissions three times more than all the solar and wind in Europe. At the same time, Europe paid about $40 billion in annual subsidies for solar, while the Americans made more than $200 billion every year from the shale gas revolution. Gas is obviously still a fossil fuel and not the final solution, but it can reduce emissions over the next 10-20 years, especially if the shale revolution is expanded to China and the rest of the developing world.

While global warming will be a problem, much of the rhetoric is wildly exaggerated – like when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon calls it “an existential challenge for the whole human race.” The IPCC finds that the total cost of climate change by 2070 is between 0.2pc and 2pc of GDP. While this is definitely a problem, it is equivalent to less than one year of recession over the next 60 years.

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Global warming pales when compared to many other global problems. While the WHO estimates 250,000 annual deaths from global warming in 30 years, 4.3 million die right now each year from indoor air pollution, 800 million are starving, and 2.5 billion live in poverty and lack clean water and sanitation.

When the UN asked 5 million people for their top priorities the answers were better education and health care, less corruption, more jobs and affordable food. They placed global warming at the very last spot, as priority number 17.

Climate policies can easily cost much more than the global warming damage will – while helping very little. The German solar adventure, which has cost taxpayers more than $130 billion, will at the end of the century just postpone global warming by a trivial 37 hours.

While a low carbon tax in theory could help a little, the political reality is that climate policies almost everywhere have been ineffective, done little good while sustaining the most wasteful technologies. The IPCC warns than less-than-perfect climate policies can be 2-4 times more expensive. Biofuels, for instance, have driven up food costs, likely causing an extra 30 million starving, with prospects of starving another 100 million by 2020. And it is likely that biofuels cause net increase in CO₂ emissions, because they force agriculture to cut down forests elsewhere to grow food.

This is why we have to be careful in pushing for the right policies. For twenty years, the refrain has been promises to cut CO₂, like the Kyoto Protocol. For twenty years these policies have failed. We should instead look to climate economics to find smarter solutions.

The fundamental problem is that green energy is too expensive, which is why it will need billions in subsidies the next two decades. Instead of making more failed promises to pay ever more subsidies, we should spend the money on research and development of the next generations of green energy sources. If we can innovate the price of green energy down below the cost of fossil fuels, everyone will switch, including China and India. Economics confirm that for every dollar spent on green R&D, we will avoid $11 of climate damage.

But this requires us to separate the hype from the real message from IPCC: global warming is a problem, but unless we fix it smartly, we won’t fix it at all.
The Telegraph

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Green Energy Nightmare Worsens in Ontario…

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Wynne’s billion-dollar hydro boondoggle

Ontario hydro customers are trapped by the Wynne Liberals’ mad obsession with expensive and unneeded green energy

lorrie-goldstein

BY , TORONTO SUN

FIRST POSTED: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 08, 2014 

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Ontario is heavily subsidizing companies to construct electricity generating wind turbines in a push for more renewable energy. 

TORONTO – For anyone who wants to understand what a complete mess Ontario’s Liberal government has made of our hydro bills, Parker Gallant is must reading.

A retired banking executive, he easily dissects and explains in English the never-ending nonsense the Liberals pump out to justify their green energy financial disaster.

An occasional Sun News Network contributor and newspaper columnist, Parker and Scott Luft, an energy analyst and blogger, published a report last week on energy pricing for Wind Concerns Ontario — an anti-wind turbine group — that was truly alarming.

Titled: “October, 2014, Ontario’s breath-taking, record-breaking month for electricity bills”, Parker and Luft reveal that last month, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government paid $1 billion more for electricity than the market value of that power.

Put another way, the so-called “Global Adjustment” in Ontario — the difference between the market value of electricity and what it actually cost to produce — topped $1 billion, for the first time, ever.

For the average Ontario household, Parker and Luft note, that will mean an extra charge of about $30 on November’s hydro bill alone, although it won’t appear as a separate item on many residential hydro bills because the Global Adjustment is incorporated into “time of use” rates.

The Liberals say the main reason for the Global Adjustment is to “cover the cost of building new electricity infrastructure … as well as providing conservation and demand response programs.”

But as Parker and Luft explain it:

“The situation has developed as a result of Ontario’s rush to incorporate renewable energy in the form of wind, solar and biomass into the grid, without proper planning on how this new capacity would align with demand.

“The result is that during the spring and fall seasons, when demand is lower, IESO (Independent Electricity System Operator) has a surplus supply capacity of over 100% during many hours of the day. Through the Global Adjustment fund, Ontario’s electricity consumers pay contracted generators to idle or curtail generation of thousands of megawatts.

“In October, wind power generators produced almost 600,000 MWh of electricity at a cost of $81 million and additionally were paid another $11 million for 100,000 MWh that they could have produced, but were asked not to add to the grid.

“Due to the glut of power in October, Ontario sold this power to neighbouring jurisdictions at an average of 4.31 per MWh, or $2.6 million, meaning a loss of almost $90 million for Ontario electricity users.”

Parker and Luft note these costs do not include the amount the government had to pay to the province’s privately-run nuclear operator not to produce electricity, because under the 20-year deals it signed with wind (and solar) operators, it has to buy their power first, meaning other sources have to be reduced when there’s a surplus of wind and solar .

Their advice to the Liberals is the same as energy analyst Tom Adams and University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick gave in their recent report for the Fraser Institute, What Goes Up.

That is, at least stop making the situation worse by bringing more wind and solar power on line.

As Adams put it: “Wind and solar power systems provide less than 4% of Ontario’s power but account for 20% of the cost paid by Ontarians, yet the government wants to triple the number of wind and solar generators. That’s a good deal for wind and solar producers but a raw deal for consumers.”

(The Liberals insist wind and solar power only account for 8% of the cost of our energy bills — and that they were needed to close down polluting, coal-fired electricity. But that’s absurd because the Liberals didn’t replace coal power with wind and solar, but with nuclear power and natural gas).

Sadly, the longer the Liberals double down on their green disaster, the faster hydro rates are going to rise.

Even the Liberals acknowledged last year that hydro bills would jump 42% over the next five years.

Now-retired auditor general Jim McCarter produced similar numbers in his 2011 report that was sharply critical of the Liberals’ renewable energy programs, noting green energy initiatives would account for more than half (56%) of a 7.9% annual increase in hydro bills over the next five years.

Hydro rates were bumped up again on Nov. 1 and there’s no relief in sight.

Then again, Al Gore does think the world of the Liberals.

Great Election! Republicans Are More Likely to Be Co-operative With Canada!

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Lawrence Solomon: Democrats’ loss is Canada’s gain

(November 6, 2014) It’s too late now for Obama and the Democrats to impose policies harmful to Canada.

This article, by Lawrence Solomon, first appeared in the National Post on November 6, 2014

Democrats lost big in the U.S. mid-term elections this week. Republicans won big. And Canada also won big, as in big sigh of relief. Canada is a winner less because of what Republicans will now do than because of what a president in search of a legacy-with-the-left can’t do.

Number One on the Obama Can’t-Do list involves carbon taxes or other global warming measures that could set back Canada’s economy. In a far-sighted move the day after Obama won the presidency six years ago, a prescient Prime Minister Harper tied Canada’s global warming policies to those of the United States. This stratagem — justified by the need to harmonize policies with our largest trading partner — extricated Canada from economically harmful pledges to cut back on our own emissions, unburdening our economy and helping us storm past the 2008 financial crisis better than any other G8 country.

Harper — thought to be a closet climate skeptic — took a calculated risk that paid off in spades. The Obama administration failed to pass global warming legislation while it controlled Congress and by 2010, when the Democrats lost the House of Representatives, it was too late — climate skeptic Republicans wouldn’t saddle America, and by extension, Canada, with global warming legislation. Now it is also too late for Obama to otherwise bind Canada. Though Obama may follow through on threats to act on climate change through regulatory decrees, these would be temporary scattershots from a diminished lame duck that Canada could slough off. Canada has dodged the climate change bullet.

Number Two on the Obama Can’t-Do List is trade protectionism, a favourite among many Democrats including Obama, who first won election on a pledge to reopen NAFTA on environmental and labour grounds. Various “Buy American” trade bills recently introduced in Congress, such as the “Made in the U.S.A. Act” sponsored by Democratic Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, are now dead. Pryor is among the Democrats that voters just tossed out of Washington.

Number Three: Canada can also breathe a big sigh of relief that free spending Democrats are now reined in. Obama’s exploding of the national debt — by the time he’s done, it may have doubled to $20-trillion — has destabilized Western economies, making everyone fearful of inflation and curbing the private sector investment needed for economic growth. Republicans not only took the Senate, they so bolstered their majority in the House of Representatives, where spending bills originate, that Democrats have likely lost the ability to spend federal dollars for decades to come — gerrymandered House districts make it difficult for incumbents to lose.

More welcome sighs come in at the state level, where the mid-term elections toppled several governors in traditionally Democratic states. Restraint-minded Republican governors are now in charge in more than 30 states, good augers for pro-growth policies in our largest trading partner.

Canada could benefit from more than relief from Democratic harms. Republicans are likely to pursue policies that would positively help our economy, most notably by passing legislation that would force Obama to accept, or veto, the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project that has been under review longer than the Second World War.

Pundits are betting that Obama will finally approve Keystone, both to chalk up an accomplishment for what is now an almost non-existent legacy and to please the unions, the many Democrats and the general public that favour it. To give Obama a fig leaf, the pundits expect Harper to throw in a concession on climate change.

But the pundits could be wrong. Obama has betrayed most of his constituents through broken promises — unions for his failure to deliver jobs and, ironically, because Obamacare is destroying the 40-hour work week; youth for the NSA spying on them; Latinos on his failure to implement immigration reform; peaceniks for his drone attacks and America’s reentry into Iraq. Approving Keystone would add to this string the one cause he has served passably well — environmentalism, whose backers include the Hollywood crowd that mostly remains in his thrall. His legacy with those who count to him could only be kept by chucking Keystone.

But even chucking Keystone could now be too late for Obama. He has become such a liability to his party that few Democratic politicians have a strong allegiance to him and many would fear losing their seats in the next election if they were seen to side with him. If Obama vetoed a bill to proceed with Keystone, the two-thirds majority required to override his veto might materialize.

Lawrence Solomon is the executive director of Energy Probe.

Wind Project Gets Go-Ahead….In Spite of Objections….

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Province gives greenlight to wind farm Niagara region Wind Corp’s turbines to be largest in North America

Credit:  Grimsby Lincoln News | November 06, 2014

The Province has given the go ahead for a 77-turbine wind energy project in Niagara and Haldimand.

The Ministry of the Environment has issued a Renewable Energy Approval to Niagara Region Wind Corporation to construct a wind farm within the Townships of West Lincoln and Wainfleet, and the Town of Lincoln in the Region of Niagara and Haldimand County.

The facility is known as the Niagara Region Wind Farm.

As a result of comments received by the municipality and local residents a condition of the approval requires Niagara Region Wind Corporation to:

•   not construct or operate more than seventy-seven out of the eighty wind turbine generators identified in the approval

•   comply with the ministry’s noise emission limits at all times

•   carry out an acoustic emission audit of the sound levels produced by the operation of the equipment at five receptors

•   carry out an acoustic emission audit of the acoustic emissions produced by the operation of two of the wind turbine generators

•   manage stormwater, and control sediment and erosion during and post construction

•   develop and implement a pre- and post-construction ground water monitoring program

•   carry out specific items if foundation dewatering or water takings by tanker exceed 50,000 L/day

•   apply the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Operational Statement, if during construction, waterbodies that were previously not identified are discovered

•   design, construct and operate a spill containment facility for each of the Transformer Substations

•   implement the pre and post construction Natural Heritage monitoring program, which includes bird and bat monitoring

•   undertake the supplementary monitoring program discussed with Environment Canada and determine next steps as part of the program including the implementation of mitigation measures in response to any potential unanticipated adverse effects

•   ensure that activities requiring authorizations under the Endangered Species Act are not commenced until authorizations are in place

•   create a Community Liaison Committee with members of the public and applicant

•   undertake ongoing Aboriginal consultation and fulfill all commitments made by it

•   prepare a Traffic Management Plan to be provided to the upper and lower tier municipalities, and

•   notify the ministry of complaints received alleging adverse effect caused by the construction, installation, operation, use or retirement of the facility.

 A release by the Province stated that Ontario’s Renewable Energy Approval process ensures that extensive municipal, Aboriginal and public consultation takes place. All comments the ministry received regarding the project were carefully considered before a decision was made to approve this project. The approval notice is posted on the Environmental Registry and a link can be found here: