A free-market energy blog

It is the irony of ironies. Taxpayer and ratepayer-forced subsidies for utility-scale windpower also subsidizes emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). The same would be true under a national renewable portfolio standard as proposed in pending federal legislation.

Such is a vivid demonstration of the perils of unintended consequences and, to borrow a phrase, “an inconvenient truth” about wind power.

My recent four-part Wind Integration Realities reviewed two new studies, based on actual experience, that show fossil fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions are increased, not reduced, with the introduction of wind. Their results were compared as well as to those of my fossil fuel and CO₂ emissions calculator for the same conditions. The brief summary in Part IV of the series is expanded upon here for clarity of this game-changing argument.

In general, the studies show that as wind penetration increases, the effect on fossil fuel and CO₂ emissions worsens. Specifically, at wind penetrations of about 3% (as is the case in the Netherlands), the savings are zero. At 5-6% (as for Colorado and Texas) the “savings” become negative, that is, emissions actually increase due to the presence of wind power. [Read more →]

Ultra-clarifying moments of truth are sometimes possible when environmental groups and their so-called allies end up in “family” squabbles, disagreeing over implementation of their ill-conceived schemes. The disarray, aptly described in prior posts at MasterResource by economist Robert Murphy and others as a civil war on the Left,” has become commonplace with respect to cap-and-trade proposals. And this is part of what Ken Green calls the death spiral of climate alarmism.

Just maybe the Coercion Crowd should throw up their hands and just say: give peace a chance!

Gaming the Carbon Market – Say It Isn’t So!

Yet another example of this discord, reported in a recent issue of E&E News PM, Climate: Enviro group outlines 10 schemes for gaming carbon markets — 05/18/2010 — www.eenews.net (access with free trial subscr.) involves Friends of the Earth (FOE), which recently released a strongly worded critique of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill. In its guide, FOE inconveniently details how “carbon offsets are especially prone to corruption and fraud” and directly questions whether carbon markets are an appropriate mechanism to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs).

The guide derisively attacks cap-and-trade schemes detailing the ten ways carbon markets can be scammed “at the expense of both our economy and our climate.” The scams enumerated carry such unflattering headings as, “Ponzi carbon,” “Carbon bribery,” and “Sell fake carbon offset credits,” among other derogatory descriptions. Ouch! [Read more →]

Californians are attempting to reclaim the prospects of a top ten world economy from the disastrous downside of Global Warming Solutions Act (California Assembly Bill 32, or AB 32).

Leaders of the ballot measure campaign to amend the law filed over 800,000 signatures – well over the required 435,000 – to be able to vote on a proposition to delay the implementation of cap-and-trade, as well as 70+ other progeny regulations, until unemployment falls significantly.

Signatures are currently being verified by the Secretary of State, and the measure is expected to be on the November ballot.

Then versus Now

At the time the bill was originally signed in 2006, California’s unemployment rate was under five percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, statewide unemployment in April 2010 was a record high 12.6%.

The ballot measure would put AB 32 on hold until unemployment falls below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. In other words, until the state’s devastating economic situation improves the state will not implement regulations that will increase energy costs—already among the nation’s highest—and cause additional job loss. The Initiative would not repeal the AB 32 but merely suspend it and its already adopted regulations.

Old Rationale– “Leadership” for The Children!

Flanked by “national and international dignitaries,” Gov. Schwarzenegger signed AB 32, California’s landmark global warming law, in September 2006.  He said the law is “something we owe our children and grandchildren.”

Now, with too-numerous-to-count “gates” cracking the consensus, coupled with solid analysis, such as that of Chip Knappenberger of the lack of meaningful gain from reductions of national scale, there isn’t much discussion about global climate change even being the driver behind “the global warming solutions act.”

The debate has moved, and still moves. California was to lead the global parade, with other states and countries following. Didn’t happen. The death spiral of climate alarmism confirms that California’s mandatory CO2 emission cuts are costs without climate benefits. [Read more →]

[Editor note: David Bergeron is president of SunDanzer Development, Inc., a solar energy company located in Tucson AZ. This is his first post at MasterResource.  More information on him and his company is provided at the end of this post.]

The proponents of the Arizona Renewable Energy Standards (RES) make various claims in order to promote grid-tied solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity. Unfortunately, the use of grid-tied solar PV is unlikely to accomplish any of the objectives suggested by its proponents. Specifically, 

• It will not create jobs in Arizona;
• It will not reduce global warming;
• It will not reduce electricity prices;
• It will not reduce our dependence on imported oil; and
• It will not position Arizona to be a leader in renewable energy.

Furthermore, there is a good chance that the RES will have outcomes that are directly opposite its intended effects.

The suitability of Solar PV as a grid-tied energy source can be analyzed in a straightforward manner. In Tucson, Arizona, a 1 kW residential or commercial grid-tied PV system costs approximately $5,000 installed[1] and may offset up to $66/year[2] of fossil fuel use. This 76 year simple payback is well beyond the life of the equipment and does not include maintenance cost.

Adding PV to the grid offers no other significant savings in utility generation and transmission requirements and only adds to administrative and engineering burden for the utility. Despite idealistic claims of infrastructure savings from distributed grid-tied PV, these do not exist in the real world because PV is not reliable power, so no significant reduction in generation or transmission infrastructure is possible.

PV system costs must fall by at least a factor of five[3] to offer real value in reducing fossil fuel use. Additional evidence of this is the fact that current federal, state, and utility subsidies cover 65-75%[4] of the up-front cost of these systems and net metering laws provide a rich subsidy for energy produced and yet the systems are still only marginally viable. [Read more →]

[Editor note: Some analyses are worth revisiting, including this book review in the  Energy Journal of Cutler Cleveland, ed., Encyclopedia of Energy (6 volumes, Elsevier). Bradley shared his review with Professor Cleveland, who stated his surprise that it passed peer review. The reader can the judge the quality of the review in six years' hindsight.]

This is the Hummer of energy books. The Elsevier Encyclopedia of Energy is almost twice as large as two predecessor energy encyclopedias combined. The price tag is commensurate. This set is only for the wealthy, the addicted, large libraries, and paid-in-kind reviewers.

Encyclopedia editor Cutler Cleveland, an ecological economist, introduces the compilation (p. xxxi) as “the first comprehensive, organized body of [energy] knowledge for what is certain to continue as a major area of scientific study in the 21^st century.” The nearly 500 authors are advertised as leaders in their respective fields—and from forty countries. However, the diversity stops where it is most needed. While many entries are exemplary and the scope of the effort laudable, this encyclopedia showcases the alarmist wing of the energy sustainability debate and excludes contrary views.

Alarmism & Mandates

The politicization begins right up front. The foreword paints a dire picture of the carbon-based energy economy and opines, “Major changes are required in energy system development worldwide” (xxvii). Business-as-usual is the foe because the “desired energy futures will not happen” given “present policies and conditions in the marketplaces that determine energy generation and use” (xxviii).

The solution—“combinations of technologies that meet all sustainable development challenges at the same time”—is advertised as ready to go. Policy reforms include “cost-based prices” that incorporate “external environmental and health costs and benefits (now sometimes larger than the private costs).” For maximum effect, this opening is reprinted in all six volumes.

The encyclopedia’s bias and righteous tone appears in other entries. Eric Heitz of the Energy Foundation states in “Philanthropy and Energy” (5:1), “Smart philanthropy … can help spur markets for the next generation of clean energy technologies that address the energy/environmental nexus, especially global warming pollution.” In “Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and Energy,” the authors describe the role of Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the thousands of smaller sisters as “design[ing] improved energy policies…to [meet] the needs of citizens and marginalized stakeholders” (4:313). [Read more →]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21^st Century Energy recently unveiled the “first-of-its-kind” Index of U.S. Energy Security Risk.  The U.S. Chamber in general does a lot of good work. I am a big fan of them than when they push for free-market capitalism instead of political capitalism, which is not always the case. But this report is disappointing to say the least. A thorough start-over should be considered.

The report, in its own words, provides “the first quantifiable measurement of energy security based on 37 individual metrics.” But herein resides a major problem. With so many inputs for  calculation, a definition of security is required.

But there is no such definition. We learn that the Index “addresses the need for an overarching framework with which to measure energy security in all its facets” (page 14). Shortly afterward we find that it “is designed to convey the notion of risk” (page 16). A “notion” is akin to what musicians say about “soul”: if you have to define it you can’t possibly understand it. But scholarship about energy security ain’t about soul.

Rotisserie Energy Security

The index is a weighted average of the 37 pieces of data, normalized to range from zero to 100. Even if you don’t know what’s in it you can learn a lot just by looking at the numbers. [Read more →]

 “Are environmentalists cooling to the sun, wind, and water—energy sources they have long touted as ecologically superior to oil, coal, and nuclear power? A report by the National Audubon Society, now attracting considerable attention in Washington, warns that ‘renewable’ energy sources are far from benign.

Observes one startled environmental consultant: ‘Symbolically, it’s like someone in the nuclear industry saying nukes are dangerous. . . . ‘

Some of the side effects the study identified: air and water pollution caused by converting plant matter into energy; urban sprawl from solar collectors, which are best suited to detached, single-family houses; depleted forests from wood burning; and increased chances of earthquakes from hydropower dams.”

- Staff Article, “The Graying of the Green Lobby,” Fortune, February 7, 1983, p. 22.

What happened to environmental criticism of earth-scaring renewable energy? Such criticism emerged in the 1980s but was squashed by Big Environmentalism, as it turns out.

Never mind the growing grassroots opposition to wind on environmental grounds. Never mind that firming intermittent wind removes most or all of its emission reduction, as shown by Kent Hawkins at MasterResource. Never mind the inconvenient facts, such as Enron rescuing the U.S. wind industry or the well-document ‘avian mortality’ issue.

And never mind the hard questions that even wind-advocate Paul Gipe posed in his 1995 book, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

And so there is the joke:

Q: “When is an environmentalist not an environmentalist?”

A: “When it comes to windpower.”

Think about it: industrial wind parks are noisy, intrusive, cement-and-steel intensive, require service roads in the wilds, and must be shadowed by inefficiently-run fossil-fuel generation. And did we say that wind in more expensive than other forms of electric generation that provide non-intermittent power?

Remembering Some Hard Questions

At least some mainstream environmentalists were open to the problems of wind back in the mid-1990s. Stated Chris Flavin of World Watch Institute in his foreword to Gipe’s book:

“To its credit, Wind Energy Comes of Age tackles even the most nettlesome issues plaguing the wind industry, including the problem of bird kills, often referred to euphemistically as ‘avian mortality.’ Although the magnitude of the problem is not yet fully clear, Paul raises important warning flags about the dangers of not taking it and other environmental issues seriously. Unless the industry heeds Paul’s warnings, it will lose the environmental high-ground that helped get it where it is today. . . . Even those who feel stung by his criticisms would do well to remember the fate of the nuclear power industry, and others that chose to ignore early problems.”

- Chris Flavin, “Foreword,” in Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Comes of Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), pp. xiv–xv.

 Gipe: ‘Avian Mortality’ Problem

Let’s start with the so-called avian mortality problem of windpower: [Read more →]

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

- James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

- Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

On the political front:

The IPCC’s reputation as a serious scientific institution continues to hemorrhage as a nearly endless string of errors and/or bad practices relating to the Fourth Assessment Report come to light.

As Newsweek put it recently,

Some of the IPCC’s most-quoted data and recommendations were taken straight out of unchecked activist brochures, newspaper articles, and corporate reports—including claims of plummeting crop yields in Africa and the rising costs of warming-related natural disasters, both of which have been refuted by academic studies.

Further, Newsweek opines, the case for policy-development based on climate alarmism is also off the rails,

There are excellent reasons to limit emissions and switch to cleaner fuels—including an estimated 750,000 annual pollution deaths in China, the potential to create jobs at home instead of enriching nasty regimes sitting on oil wells, the need to provide cheap sources of power to the world’s poorest regions, and the still-probable threat that global warming is underway. At the moment, however, certainty about how fast—and how much—global warming changes the earth’s climate does not appear to be one of those reasons.

Internationally, things are not much better for the alarmists. The negotiations in Copenhagen were a complete shambles, resulting only in a non-binding, let’s-meet-again memorandum that the various participating countries “recognized” having seen.

Greenpeace activist, and Independent Commentator Joss Garman characterized the “Copenhagen Accord” thus:

This “deal” is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about. There is not even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 C. Instead, leaders merely recognise the science behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it.

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

In the EU, the vaunted European Trading System continues to come apart at the seams. According to James Kanter at the NYT:

Carbon traders, for example, have been arrested for tax fraud; evidence has emerged of lucrative projects that may do nothing to curb climate change; and steel and cement companies have booked huge profits selling surplus permits they received for free.

And the EU is backing away from previous plans to tighten its carbon reduction targets. According to Greenwire, [Read more →]

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will debate and vote on a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26), sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.

S.J.Res.26 would overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding, a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a bundle of greenhouse gas regulations more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

At a minimum, as former Virginia Gov. George Allen and I explain elsewhere, unless stopped, the EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to the agency by Congress.

S.J.Res.26 puts a simple question squarely before the Senate: Who shall make climate policy — lawmakers who must answer to the people at the ballot box or politically unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life?

Precisely because S.J.Res.26 would restore constitutional discipline to climate policymaking, regulatory zealots are mounting smear campaigns against it. Climate Progress calls it “polluter crafted” (impossible, because the language and form of the resolution are fixed by the Congressional Review Act). MoveOn.Org claims the resolution will condemn many Americans to “smoke the equivalent of a pack a day just from breathing the air” (utter nonsense – just one cigarette delivers 12-27 times the daily dose of fine particulate matter that non-smokers get in cities with the most polluted air). Environmental Defense Action Fund says the resolution will give corporate polluters a “bailout” (also impossible, because S.J.Res.26 is not a tax or spending bill). 

Train Weighs In, Ignores Obvious, Knocks Down Straw Man 

A more sophisticated attack comes from Russell Train, who served as EPA Administrator under the Nixon and Ford Administrations (1973-1977). In a May 24 letter to Senate leaders, Train warns that S.J.Res.26 would “rollback Clean Air Act protections.”

Not so! Yes, the resolution would “prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.” But from its inception in 1970 through the present day, EPA has not regulated greenhouse gas emissions, and its recently finalized motor vehicle emission standards do not take effect until 2011. Train confuses “rollback” with containment. The only thing S.J.Res.26 would roll back is EPA’s regulatory overreach. [Read more →]

[Editor note: Tom Stacy of Save Western Ohio is a critic of the industrial wind lobby "using incomplete and misleading claims of energy, economic and environmental benefit ... to attract public funding far beyond the free market value of their product." This is his first post at MasterResource.]

It takes more than anger to fight against the political “green tide” of windpower. It requires courage backed by effective argumentation.

Many people throughout history have taken an unpopular stand. Most have been censored, or worse, but some have been responsible for breakthroughs in our grasp of natural science and other realms of human understanding.  Galileo, Columbus, Paine, Lincoln, Edison, Wright, and Deming come to mind.

One historical figure named Reagan even went so far as to tear the solar panels off of the White House roof when he learned how much they cost and how little they produced. That same week he terminated the Federal Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit. And the walls came tumbling down.  But we have no such constitutional leader today who, from the top down, would put a stake through the heart of the marauding beast we know as industrial wind—while simultaneously promoting sound policies that promote a genuinely competitive marketplace where contributors thrive and laggards languish.

Wind is a clever parasite, leeching our rural persona, making country people believe that it is one with their way of life, just another wind mill on a wind farm along a wind park—all beloved by peace-loving neighbors. BUT WE KNOW BETTER! We know it’s a sprawling industrial stampede using PR parlor tricks and old-fashioned political bribes to make people think black is white and pigs can fly. We know it’s a greedy tax avoidance scheme for large corporations to increase their bottom lines at our expense.

We know it’s engaged in “imagineering,” pretending to be an effective energy solution when it’s not.  The truth is, it makes our energy situation worse, and our pocket books much lighter. Had our elected representatives remained neutral toward the limited liability wind companies forcing them to offer sound, scientific proof for their many claims, the wind projects would have never been born.

Ohio Senator Bill Seitz wrote the following to one of our ranks opposing the Buckeye wind farm: ”I think you all need to continue to be zealous advocates and to realize that your advocacy has been effective and that your community’s prosecutor and his staff are doing a thorough and commendable job.” While I cannot disagree with his kudos, I think our zeal must be exercised more carefully. [Read more →]