Post-Internal Combustion Engine? Doing the UK Math

By Donn Dears -- August 22, 2017 1 Comment

“To actually accomplish replacing all light vehicles in the UK with battery-powered vehicles, while also meeting the requirements of the UK’s Climate Change Act, would require building 39,000 new 2 MW wind turbines, which is nearly 6 times the number of wind turbines built over the last 15 years. The cost would be approximately $165 billion or £131 billion. (More, if offshore wind or solar is built.) This is 90% of the UK budget for its entire health care program, or nearly three times larger than the UK’s defense budget.”

The media went gaga over France’s and the UK’s proposal to eliminate the use of internal combustion engines in automobiles by replacing them with battery-powered vehicles (BEVs).

As it now stands, the global BEV count of two million represents a 0.2 percent market share.…

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Retire the Phony ‘Social Cost of Carbon’

By Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen -- February 13, 2017 39 Comments

“As a first priority, the Trump Administration must review, revise, reject or even rescind the SCC, and reduce its values well below what Obama used – perhaps even to zero or negative numbers. Doing so will destroy the justification for many expensive, intrusive, punitive, useless, counterproductive regulations.”

“The benefit estimates … will remain orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable SCC estimates, which means the B-C ratios will also remain very high.”

The Obama Administration aggressively used a Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) scheme to justify federal regulations pertaining to carbon-based fuels, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, coal mine and pipeline permit denials, energy development foreign aid, and many other actions.

While “SCC” may sound esoteric or academic, it is a critical concept. Without the artificial and inflated SCC estimates, many recent energy and environmental regulations could not have been justified or promulgated.…

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The UN’s Coming Paris Folly: Part 1

By Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen -- November 24, 2015 19 Comments

“The UN’s ‘Deep Decarbonization Pathways’ … will require a radical transformation of economic and energy systems by 2050, through massive declines in carbon intensity in all sectors. It is not about modest or incremental change [but] … major changes in every country’s energy and production systems, over both the mid-term and long-term.”

Radical Islamist terrorists just maimed and murdered hundreds of people in Paris, dozens more in Mali, still more in other nations. They promise more atrocities in the United States and around the globe.

Meanwhile some 40,000 bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, lobbyists, activists and journalists plan to enjoy five-star Parisian hotels and restaurants, while attending COP21, the twenty-first UN Climate Change Conference, from November 30 through December 11. Like President Obama, they insist that humanity faces no greater threat than climate change.…

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Primary Energy Consumption (Part II—Electricity Sector)

By Kent Hawkins -- October 13, 2015 4 Comments

“By eliminating wind and solar from the 2014–2035 projections, almost $3 trillion in capital costs would be saved globally without any significant loss in needed power generation capacity.”

Part 1 of this series (yesterday) provided an analysis of the global use of primary energy sources. It showed that in projections to 2035 the new renewables of industrial wind turbines and solar panels will provide only about 5 percent of our total primary energy consumption.

This post narrows the focus to the electricity sector where some primary energy sources, the so-called “clean” technologies (wind, solar, hydro and nuclear), are almost exclusively used. This indicates why this sector is the focus for much of the very questionable, ineffective ‘revolutionary’ changes being advocated today.

The trends in electricity-generation primary-energy use are much the same as in overall use, that is, fossil fuels dominate notably, to date and as projected to 2035, in spite of substantial future investments in new wind and solar plant implementation of almost $3 trillion.

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“Killing Wildlife In the Name of Climate Change” (Part II: Gas, Nuclear, Little Else)

By Robert Bryce -- March 20, 2014 No Comments Continue Reading

CO2 Benefits Exceed Costs by … 50:1, more?

By Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen -- February 11, 2014 38 Comments Continue Reading

Energy Strategy: Begin with Density

By Jerry Graf -- August 21, 2013 6 Comments Continue Reading

Power Density Separates the Wheat from the Chaff

By Kent Hawkins -- February 20, 2013 7 Comments Continue Reading

Towards Sound Energy Policy (Part I – Current Flaws)

By Kent Hawkins -- January 16, 2013 3 Comments Continue Reading

Energy Transformation and "Moore's Curse": Realism Before Action

By Steven Lightfoot -- November 29, 2012 3 Comments Continue Reading