“The deposits of mineral substances and their exploitation are not characterized by features which would give a particular mark to human action dealing with them.”
I nominate the above 25 words for the shortest, sweetest statement of energy economics (really economics applied to mineral energies) in history. Properly understood, millions of words could have been spared trying to prove the opposite.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the greatest economist of his generation and, indeed, the 20th century. John Maynard Keynes got the accolades, but his theory did not stand the test of time. Milton Friedman, the counterweight to Keynes from the free-market-oriented side, had many contributions that were more quantitative than the much-more-difficult qualitative. And Friedman, the great educator, did not pen a systematic treatise on the corpus of his discipline as did Mises, expositing “an economics that should have been but never was.”…
Continue ReadingEd note: Power shortages in California in 2020 and Texas in 2021 have exposed the limits to renewable energy for a reliable grid. The post below complements prior analysis here and here.
“The apparent difference between SDG&E [no blackouts] and PG&E [blackouts] can be attributed to the greater proportion of decentralized green power cooperatives in PG&E’s service area that relied on a greater percentage of green power.”
The anti-energy environmental lobby concluded that natural gas-fired power plants failed during California’s blackouts last summer and should be phased out. But empirical investigation reaches an opposite conclusion, questioning the future of dilute, intermittent energies.
Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and the California Environmental Justice Alliance in the article “Gas Is Failing in California: Time to Move On” (Utility Dive: April 16, 2021) accuse the Wall Street Journal and gas “industry voices” of fear-mongering about renewable’s role in the state’s blackouts during the region’s southwest summer heat wave of 2020.…
Continue ReadingEd note: This article overviews the growth of renewables over the last 20 years from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. For convenience, the DOE tables are converted to watts (W), in its billion multiple the gigawatt (GW). The same unit for both generation and consumption enables straightforward comparisons among various efficiencies, capacity factors, site factors, etc. Conversion factors such as Cal, cal, joule, Btu, Wh, each per second, hour, or year, is defined at the end. [1]
“The wind and solar industry claims employment … at about 250 000 jobs. The relative productivity per employee is thus 7.5 kW with solar, and 32 kW with wind. Compare that to 1,300 kW with fossil fuels, and 2,000 kW with nuclear.”
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) lists six significant sources of renewable energy: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal.…
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