Ed. note: This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. The complete Newsletter for this post can be found here.

Renewables (General):

*** Illinois Put a Stop to Local Governments’ Ability to Kill Solar and Wind Projects. Will Other Midwestern States Follow? (This is a shameful violation of Home Rule)
*** Renewables: the more you have, the more you pay for backups
*** American Towns Don’t Want To Be Big Cities’ ‘Green Energy’ Graveyards

Wind Energy — Offshore:
*** NOAA and BOEM; Ignorance is Bliss
*** Anti Offshore Wind Project Petition Takes Off, Nearing 300K Signatures
Biden admin scientist raised alarm on offshore wind harming whales months ago
Whale death confusion abounds and some is deliberate
Greenpeace Betrays Founders to Peddle Junk Science

Wind Energy — Other:
NY’s CLCPA Hits First Cost Overrun, with More to Follow

Solar Energy:
How solar development incentives will cost Maine’s poorest the most
Big solar in NYS

Nuclear Energy:
Reactor building internal structures completed at Chinese SMR
Georgia Nuclear facility reaches first criticality

Fossil Fuel Energy:
*** Unstoppable
Biden, White House cited inaccurate ‘9,000 unused permits’ figure numerous times
Biden expected to approve Alaska oil drilling project in blow to climate activists
Delaware Voters Overwhelmingly Opposes Gas-powered Car Ban
Germany to Build 30 New Gas Plants

Electric Vehicles (EVs):
The Troubling Future of the Green Electric Revolution
Clean Car Rule for New York A Messy Case of California Envy

Miscellaneous Energy News:
*** The New Normal?…

“ExxonMobil wants more: an ‘initial’ increase in the tax credit to around $100 per metric ton (from $85) and an extended eligibility period to 30 years (from 12 years). And ‘Provide a $10 billion grant to help develop infrastructure in Houston….'”

“Carbon capture and storage is a ‘loss leader’ for ExxonMobil to officially greenwash. For the Biden Administration, CCS is a bribe providing leverage on the biggest energy major.”

Yesterday’s post described ExxonMobil’s abandonment of its biofuels (algae) venture, wildly uneconomic after more than a decade of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars invested. But the company’s Low-Carbon Solutions division has something much bigger in process: Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), advertised as “Providing industry solutions needed to help reduce emissions during the energy transition.” (Ouch! ExxonMobil endorsing “the energy transition” away from its major products, oil and gas.)…

“A major player in the renewable energy opposition in rural Michigan is Kevon Martis, who works for E&E Legal, a D.C.-based lobbying firm that gets funding from the fossil fuel industry.” (Sinclair, below)

“Those are the people funding Peter Sinclair: huge fossil fuel entities. Yet he plays the fossil fuel card against me when I have never received a dime from any fossil entity unless you count my cashback credit card used for gasoline purchases!” (Martis, below)

DC-based Big Environmentalism has a grassroots problem: local residents who do not like or want super-sized industrial wind turbines and multi-acre solar slabs. It is more than NIMBY since taxpayer dollars put such (unneeded, duplicative) machinery in play. But also respect the opposition’s rational concern about mega-machinery noise, visual blight, health effects, and property devaluation.…

“IVREs are inherently unreliable. One cannot demand that the wind blow or the sun shine. Industrial wind power and on-grid solar is not cheap but expensive, duplicative, and parasitic.”

Intermittent variable renewable energy (see Part I) generation sources are primarily wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels (solar PV). But they can include underwater-based turbines (“tidal”) and solar collectors (“mirrors”); large-scale lithium-ion battery storage facilities (“batteries”); and electric facility-stored fuel (water/hydro, oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy), to be turned into electrons when needed, since these fuels can be stored at less cost than electrons.

Storing fuel and converting it into moving electrons (electricity), with the exception of planned maintenance (relatively rare occurrences) and unplanned outages (even rarer), most generators were designed – and, more importantly, costed – to operate at a fairly steady state.…