A Free-Market Energy Blog

Wyoming-to-L.A. ‘Stored’ Windpower? Think Twice the Cost

By -- October 8, 2014

“This proposal delivers its ‘green’ energy at roughly twice the cost of a LA-basin gas-generated power, estimates energy expert Tom Tanton, since transmission losses from Wyoming to LA would be between 10 and 11 percent. This is surely a project that should be taken with a grain, or a chunk, of salt.”

California, trying to desalinize their drinking and irrigation water, is floating the idea of buying and storing renewable energy in a salt mine near Salt Lake City as part of a plan to get ‘green’ electrons to Los Angeles. This technology-over-economics, cost-be-damned project would use  an existing Utah-to-California transmission line previously dedicated to coal-by-wire from the Intermountain Coal Power Plant.

This scheme, a joint venture by Pathfinder Energy, Magnum Energy, Dresser-Rand and Duke-American Transmission, is based on the purported success of a preexisting energy storage project in Alabama that uses compressed air stored in natural caverns to power electricity producing generators.…

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More Hansen, More Eco-Civil Warring

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 7, 2014

“Big Green had a big impact on the U.S. Administration in the 1990s, deserving much ‘credit’ for the Kyoto cap-and-trade-with-offsets, which led to sharply accelerated global carbon emissions.“

“Most marchers tomorrow [September 21, 2014] will be liberals. The truth they must face is the fact that prescriptive liberal policies have no chance of solving the global climate problem.”

In Speaking Truth to Power—and to Friends (September 20, 2014), James Hansen continues to denigrate the efforts of the Big Green/Obama establishment to address climate change. For reasons that Hansen repeatedly stresses in his posts (regularly summarized at MasterResource), climate alarmists may wish they had more Green Party candidates to vote for next month.

Hansen and many other eco-alarmists might Go-Green-Party at the 2016 ballot box to support the climate section of the Green Party’s ecology platform:

[W]e especially support the reduction of consumption of the world’s raw materials by the industrialized Northern Hemisphere.

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Stones Into Bread: False Claims of CO2 Taxation

By Robert Murphy -- October 6, 2014

“If the government is going to force businesses and households to do things that are uneconomical, this will be costly. It will make the country as a whole poorer than it otherwise would have been, at least measured in conventional terms such as GDP, real income, job growth, etc…. We should not kid ourselves into thinking the here-and-now costs will be negligible.”

Lately the proponents of “saving the planet” from climate change (yes, them) are proposing that the rest of us have our cake and eat it too. In an editorial for the Denver Business Journal, Chris Hoffman cited a REMI study claiming that a “fee and dividend” on carbon dioxide emissions will not only reduce climate change, but will also (they assure us) somehow create jobs and make everyone richer to boot.…

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Enron: Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Corporate Climate Champion?

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 3, 2014
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Low Climate Sensitivity: Accumulating Evidence

By Chip Knappenberger -- October 2, 2014
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Climate Exaggeration: Trashing Science to Trash the GOP (Florida under water is a ruse)

By James Rust -- October 1, 2014
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Bird Mortality: Big Wind On Defense

By -- September 30, 2014
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AWED Energy & Environmental Newsletter: September 29, 2014


By -- September 29, 2014
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“Who Is a Libertarian?” (1955 insight for today)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- September 26, 2014
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First City Without Water: S.A. or L.A.?

By -- September 25, 2014
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