“The Icebreaker Windpower project can be seen as entirely moot: there will be no meaningful benefit to Ohio and its citizens. The chimera of jobs and a boosted economy will never become material; the obvious loss to bird and bat life scarcely needs a comment.”

The heat is on for supporters of the six-turbine LEEDCo Icebreaker Windpower project offshore of Cleveland.

A show of “yeas” at the November 8^th public meeting of the Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) at Cleveland City Hall failed to make a dent in the logical and passionate opposition. A few dozen supporters at a public meeting is not material for a facility that is uneconomical and environmentally invasive–and unneeded except for a poster child of what was Obama energy policy.

It is surprising that the OPSB has not closed the file on the now called “Icebreaker Windpower.”…

“[I]t is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the extraordinary polymath Sir David MacKay pointed out, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.”

– Matt Ridley, “Wind is an Irrelevance to the Energy and Climate Debate“(May 15, 2017)

An op-ed and blog post several months ago by Matt Ridley is still making the rounds. A great thinker, Ridley gets to the essence of things. He is hard to ignore, even by his critics. Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010), is a seminal contribution in the Julian Simon tradition. (His other work can be found here.)

Here are some salient excerpts from his op-ed/post:

“[Wind power’s] contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

“Given Tesla’s multiple business lines – leading edge EVs, auto financing, solar roof tiles, battery storage projects, and tunnel boring – more investors lump the company in with technology companies, meaning investors focus on the ‘dream’ rather than the results.”

“In 2016, the global motor vehicle population of cars and trucks was estimated at 1.4 billion, but just 2 million of them are EVs, or a 0.0014% market share.”

After spending three months as the world’s most valuable auto manufacturer, Tesla Inc.’s (TSLA-Nasdaq) share price has fallen due to perceived problems with its business model. Tesla reported its second quarter shipments at the end of June, results that were not as robust as many investors had hoped (being at the low end of management’s guidance).

As the quarter ended, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted details about the timing of production and delivery for the new Model 3 units, the company’s electric vehicle (EV) targeting the mass market.…

“Perhaps the most distressing characteristic displayed by the pushers of soft energy was the intellectual poverty of their grand designs, their impatient dismissal of all criticism, their arrogant insistence on the infallible orthodoxy of their normative visions.”

“There is little doubt about the origins and the real message of soft energy dogma: the roots are in the muddled revolts of young Americans in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the goal is a social transformation rather than simply a provision of energy. The latter fact explains the widespread appeal of soft energy sources among zealous would-be reformers of Western ways.” 

Vaclav Smil is one of the leading energy scholars of our day. He has, time and again, tried to inject energy reality into energy fantasy. Some of his previous posts at MasterResource (see here) include ‘The Limits of Energy Innovation’: Timeless Insight from Vaclav Smil and the five-part Power Density Primer.…