A Free-Market Energy Blog

California Energy Update: Part V

By -- April 17, 2014

• Green Power Keeps Shifting Costs to Ratepayers Who Don’t Use It
• What’s Best Way to Save Water and Energy During CA Drought?
• CA Desert Solar Tower Project Zoning Shifts Pollution to Las Vegas
• Appeals Court Rejects Nat Gas Power Plant on Same Day as Power Alert
• State Senate President Call for Carbon Tax on Gasoline
• L.A. Times Undermining of Climate Change Could Affect Court Fights
• Union Hires Pollster on Shifting to Municipal Power in Davis, California

Green Power Shifting Costs onto Ratepayers Who Don’t Use It

“Cost Shifting, a situation where the price of one product or service is higher than it should be in order to pay for losses on another product or service for which the price is too low.’”

– Cambridge Dictionaries Online

California Energy Markets recently reported that three California cities just won agreement from regulators to reclassify solar power transmission costs as distribution.…

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Republicans for Obama Energy (Senate Finance Committee okays PTC/ITC subsidies)

By Glenn Schleede -- April 16, 2014

“The April 3rd action by the Senate Finance Committee certainly helps explain why a recent Gallup Survey shows that Congress currently has a 13% favorability rating. If the nation’s ‘Millennials’ understand how the Congress is adding to the debt that they and their children will bear, they may assign an even lower rating!”

The Senate Finance Committee that manages to make life miserable for millions of tax-paying Americans with its manipulation of the U.S. Tax Code. The Committee’s latest aids its friends, punish ordinary taxpayers, and loads another $85 billion in debt on our children and grandchildren.

On April 3, 2014, by “voice” (no fingerprints) vote, the Senate Finance Committee reported out an $85 billion tax break ”extender” bill — which the Committee calls the “EXPIRE Act.” [1] The bill includes billions in unwarranted tax breaks for special interests, including the wind industry.

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AWEA Spins Price Distortions to Save PTC (hit on nuclear clouds CO2 rationale)

By -- April 15, 2014

“Negative prices are not the goal of any healthy economy, yet the PTC fosters this behavior at the expense of other, reliable generation. Building more infrastructure to correct for this problem is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

The last extension of the federal production tax credit (PTC) [1], its eighth in over twenty years, expired at the end of 2013 and the industry is again clamoring for another extension. But this time, big wind is facing a more sophisticated argument advanced by critics who contend that the PTC is artificially depressing wholesale power prices, disrupting market signals and undercutting more reliable generation including Exelon’s fleet of nuclear power plants.

Wind for nuclear–and in a way that increases greenhouse gas emissions, or certainly fails to reduce it?  The irony for climate policy has been noted by James Hansen who was informed that renewable-energy subsidies were intended to “kill nuclear.” …

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AWED Energy & Environmental Newsletter: April 14, 2014

By -- April 14, 2014
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LEEDCo Lake Erie Wind Project: Joint Letter of Protest

By Sherri Lange -- April 11, 2014
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LEEDCo Wind Project’s Mega-Opposition (Junking Lake Erie at Taxpayers’ Expense)

By Sherri Lange -- April 10, 2014
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Last Dance for IPCC Group II Report? (NYT’s Gillis, alarmism go wobbly)

By James Rust -- April 9, 2014
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Peabody Energy: Let’s Talk About Energy Inequality (coal for the masses, solar and wind for the elites)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 8, 2014
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Solar Land Blues: The Eco Reality of Dilute Energy

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- April 7, 2014
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Right on Green: In Search of Authentic Free-market Environmentalism (Book review, ‘Responsibility & Resilience: What the Environment Means to Conservatives’)

By Josiah Neeley -- April 4, 2014
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