Search Results for: "Vaclav Smil"
Relevance | DateExploding Energy Prices in California
By Steve Goreham -- March 12, 2024 3 Comments“California leaders know that rising prices are a huge problem. The state is now considering a plan to tie utility rates to personal income so that the rich pay more and low-income residents pay less. Costly California looms as an example of poor energy policy.”
Energy prices are skyrocketing in California. The state’s electricity, gasoline, and natural gas prices are amongst the nation’s highest and rising. Green energy policies are the primary cause for high and escalating California energy prices.
Electricity
California electricity prices increased by 98.2 percent over the last 15 years, the highest rise in the nation. No other state comes close in terms of price increases. US average electricity prices rose 30.6 percent over the same period. California power prices rose to a level that is the second highest in the nation, only lower than Hawaii.…
Continue ReadingThe Great Texas Blackout of 2021: Triumph of the Unreliables
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 20, 2024 No Comments“The Kiesling/Giberson (et al.) narrative is a call for more government. MORE wind. MORE solar. MORE Batteries. MORE central planning to correct prior. And rationing from ‘smart meters’ to forgive all that came before. Think Big Brother, the Electricity Road to Serfdom.”
Three years ago this month, a prolonged, extensive cold snap did the unthinkable to Texas’s huge electricity grid. The shared narrative from proponents/apologists of forced energy transformation (‘Energy Transition’, ‘Decarbonization’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘Green New Deal’, ‘Virtual Power Plant’) focused on the failure of natural gas infrastructure as the cause of the debacle, a sort of “market failure” from “an Act of God.” The cancer in the system, intermittent wind and solar ($66 billion worth), was forgiven, and central planning of the state’s grid by Austin politicians, regulators, and administrators was treated as a neutrality.…
Continue ReadingOn Energy Transition
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- February 7, 2024 1 Comment“… the ‘energy transition’ has been just the other way around: from dilute, intermittent, and quantity-limited supplies to dense, reliable, storable mass quantities representing the sun’s work over the ages.”
LinkedIn is a forum of vigorous open debate on climate science, energy, and public policy. I have been an active participant, probably responding to comments an hour or more on most days. I learn, and, in turn, people learn from me. It is a good avenue for many of my links on the issues under discussion.
Here is an exchange on “Energy Transition,” as introduced by “professor, author and leader in energy transition engineering” Susan Krumdleck.
Susan Krumdleck: How would you define “Energy Transition”? What outcomes would an investment in an “Energy Transition” project require in order to meet your requirements, or to fit with the science?…
Continue ReadingAppreciating the Master Resource
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 2, 2024 1 CommentEnergy is ubiquitous to modern industrial life. It is the fourth factor of production in addition to the textbook triad of land, labor, and capital. Julian Simon coined the term master resource to describe the resource of resources, energy.
Energy as been recognized as a unique driver of economic activity and human betterment for almost two centuries–about as long as carbon-based energies came to be recognized as a sea change from the inherently dilute, unreliable renewable energies of before. The Industrial Revolution was enabled by coal, the energy required by the new machinery, as W. S. Jevons so brilliantly saw in his day.
The quotations below, some classic, resonate as well or better today than ever before. They are as ‘right” as the peak-oil quotations (compiled here and here) have been wrong.…
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