For a long time, fans of renewable electricity have made their case by running simulations. Input the right data and (more importantly) the right assumptions, impose a renewable portfolio requirement or carbon plan, compute 30 years forward, and walk into a clean, fully employed future. Just close your eyes, click your heels, remember
to believe, and elect the right federal government.
Then reality intervened in the form of two country-wide case studies.
Denmark
More than a year ago, this column scooped the mainstream media with the truth about Denmark’s 20 percent wind generation. The country actually uses less than half of that power, but can keep the machines spinning thanks to (export) connections with the coal-based German grid and the nuclear- and hydro-based Scandinavian RTO.
For all this, the little mermaid enjoys the highest power costs in Europe.…
Continue ReadingDesperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on “saving the planet.”
James Hansen, for instance, said three years ago in the New York Review of Books: “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.” That was also Al Gore’s estimate in “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the time has been ticking away, and it’s increasingly obvious that the Gore/Hansen “wrenching transformation” of the U.S. energy system is simply not going to happen.
Perhaps Copenhagen will make it official.
U.S. cap-and-trade has become a big political liability, in particular, as polls show voters are relatively unconcerned about climate change, and are deeply averse to higher energy prices.…
Continue ReadingThe energy policy debate is well informed by history. So many ‘silver bullets’ being proffered by the Obama Brain Trust (‘smartest guys in the room’?) energy interventionists/transformationists are yesterday’s failures. As F. A. Hayek would put it, the Holdren-Chu approach to energy suffers from the ‘fatal conceit’ and cannot expect to be cost-effective in addressing the alleged problem.
Whither the Electric Vehicle
Take the electric vehicle versus the internal combustion engine. The market verdict of a century ago still holds–and for the same reasons. Thomas Edison was correct to pronounce the verdict to Henry Ford in 1896.
Edison himself labored to make batteries more economical for the transportation market, but the problem of weight and poor energy density could not be overcome. A news splash in 1914 by Ford Motor Company of an “experimental” car, the “Ford Electric” that would sell for $900 and have a range of 100 miles, based on Edison’s work, described as “Mr.…
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