Industrial Wind Power: An Old, Tried Failure (the intermittency curse then and now)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 29, 2009Best of MasterResource: 2009
This post orginally appeared (with comments)
on March 4th
The disadvantage of windpower as a primary energy source has been long recognized. This 1838 textbook described the competitive situation of wind as follows:
William Stanley Jevons also detailed the problems of windpower
in his 1865 classic, The Coal Question,…
MasterResource’s 1st Anniversary: 300,000 Views; A Top ‘Green Blog’
By Roger Donway -- December 28, 2009Master Resource turned one year old on December 26th. We have gone from a few hundred daily views to more than a thousand per day on average, and the quality and variety of our energy-related fare continues to improve.
Of the 4,100 ‘green blogs’ listed by Technorati, MasterResource consistently ranks in the top 50 and has broken into the top twenty. MasterResource is the top free-market energy blog with an All-Star list of nine principals and distinguished guest bloggers, including Robert Bryce, Indur Goklany, Mary Hutzler, Jim Manzi, Randall O’Toole, and Vaclav Smil.
Suffice it to say that we have exceeded expectations, and 2010 should see continued high quality and expanded reach and influence. We hope to increase our international presence and invite new voices into the energy and energy-related climate debates.…
Continue ReadingWSJ’s “Heard on the Street”: Political Energy Down, Market Energy Up Post-Copenhagen (Remembering the risks of Enron’s political capitalism model)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 26, 2009Matthew Curtin’s Heard on the Street in the December 22nd Wall Street Journal, Green Investments Are Being Clouded by Copenhagen, caught my eye. Copenhagen not so much failed as energy reality won. The 19th century British economist W. S. Jevons would have smiled as neo-Malthusian politics fell victim to old fashioned consumerism, economic growth, free trade, and energy economics 101.
Copenhagen also brings into review the risky political capitalism model where profit-making is tied to special political favor rather than underlying consumer demand. Enron’s core business model was tied to rent-seeking, part of the problems that brought down the company in spectacular fashion.
Here is what Mr. Curtin wrote:
… Continue ReadingThe Copenhagen climate summit will do little to spur further investment in environmental technologies.
That is hardly surprising given the fundamental flaw at the heart of the process: Negotiations to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions were premised on how much of the gas nations produce, rather than what they consume.