“Cal-ISO reported for August 14 … a sudden, unplanned 1,098-megawatt ‘forced’ loss of wind power on that day from the Alta Wind Energy Center in Tehachapi serving Southern California….”

“Cal-ISO formed a Western regional Energy Imbalancing Market in 2014 … to provide power during its daily ‘two-hour energy crisis’ at sunset when solar power cuts out (called the Duck Curve).”

Writing in Forbes magazine online, journalist Ken Silverstein claims that “Green Energy is Not Among the Culprits Behind California’s Energy Crisis”. Who is this author, and what is his logic and evidence?

Silverstein has written several non-fiction titles for Verso Books, a publishing house dedicated to radical leftism. He is one of the promulgators of the media myth that Enron caused the California Energy Crisis of 2001, notwithstanding the Enron officials who were convicted of accounting fraud.…

“Public and regulatory pressure continues against LEEDCo. Freeing the fresh-water lakebed from a billionaire foreign developer using US taxpayer dollars is Step One. Step Two is bringing New York Governor Cuomo’s green fantasy back to earth.”

This Thursday, September 17, 2020, the Ohio Power Siting Board will revisit the LEEDC0 decision of this May that placed significant environmental conditions on the project.

For years, MasterResource has followed the LEEDCo (Lake Erie Energy Development Corp) offshore wind application, what is now owned by Icebreaker Windpower, Fred Olsen Renewables. The massive-sized 6-turbine 20.7 MW project offshore Cleveland has produced a decade of controversy and false starts, and no electricity, with generous DOE funding underwriting the futility.

LEEDCo is on life support. The Ohio Power Siting Board (OPSB) approved the project in May subject to 33 conditions, the most significant being the turbine blades must be “feathered” or shut down at “night” (usually dusk to dawn) during the eight months of migration of many species. …

“Offshore wind is not cost-effective, and the forecasts of rapidly declining costs through increasing economies of scale are unrealistic. Absent continued subsidies … it is unlikely that any offshore wind facilities will be developed.”

“The experience with offshore wind projects in Europe over the last decade has demonstrated that newer, larger turbine technologies have been accompanied by significant reliability and maintenance issues, causing the amount of electricity that these turbines generate each year to decline by almost half over 10 years.”

An important data source for offshore wind is a new study by Jonathan Lesser, “Out to Sea: The Dismal Economics of Offshore Wind,” just released by the Manhattan Institute.

This major study reviews the history of offshore wind, the subsidies to date in the Northeastern U.S.,…

“If we believe that somehow the market is going to take care of this, that you put a price on carbon and everything will sort itself out, or that we can shame companies into doing it, then I think we’re kidding ourselves. This needs a very significant interventionist approach and all industries have to be part of the intervention.”

– Ben van Beurden, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell. Quoted in Akshat Rathi and Laura Hurst, “Look Who’s Talking About Zero Emissions.” (Bloomberg: June 9, 2020)

Enron’s Ken Lay. BP’s John Browne. Duke Energy’s James E. Rogers. T. Boone Pickens. GE’s Jeff Immelt. And now Shell’s Ben van Beurden.

Welcome to the swamp of political correctness when industry leaders morph into apologists for mineral energies and endorse open-ended government intervention for forced energy transformation from dense, reliable energies to dilute, intermittent ones.…