“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.…
Continue Reading“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.…
Continue Reading“Why should a thermal plant spend money in a government-rigged market that threatens a reasonable profit? Why should the plant even remain in the market under these conditions?”
“For IVREs it’s a no-risk deal, with markets guaranteed and taxpayers country-wide adding profits. But what about the need for reliable power?”
This two-part post (Part II here) is a follow-up to Robert Bradley’s recent IER article, “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.” His article discussed how regulatory shifts and subsidies favoring Intermittently Variable Renewable Energy (IVRE) producers resulted in prematurely lost capacity, a lack of new capacity, and upgrade issues with remaining (surviving) traditional capacity. These three factors–“the why behind the why”–explain the perfect storm that began with (or was revealed by) Storm Uri.
Part I below describes how the market was originally meant to work–but has not worked given the governmentally redesigned power market, beginning with generation.…
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