Renewables

Renewables are Not Taking Over the World

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By Bjørn Lomborg – Re-Blogged From WUWT

We’re constantly being told how renewables are close to taking over the world.

We’re told they are so cheap they’ll undercut fossil fuels and reign supreme pretty soon.

That would be nice. If they were cheaper, they could cut our soaring electricity bills. With cheap and abundant power, they would push development for the world’s poorest. And it would, of course, fix climate change.

Unfortunately, it is also mostly an illusion. Renewables are not likely to take over the world anytime soon.

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No New Natural Gas Hookups in New York’s Westchester County

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By Reuters – Re-Blogged From Yahoo

New York energy company Consolidated Edison Inc said on Friday it still plans to impose a moratorium on new natural gas service in parts of Westchester County after March 15 despite a $250 million plan by the state to reduce energy usage.

“The moratorium will still go into effect after March 15,” Con Edison spokesman Allan Drury said, noting the company needs to stop hooking up new gas customers to avoid compromising gas system reliability because of limited space on existing interstate pipelines into the region.

Westchester County is north of New York City.

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The Crisis of Europe’s Green Energy Agenda

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By Benny Peiser, GWPF – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Presentation at the De-Greening Day, Amsterdam 7 March 2019

The EU’s green energy policies have

* increased energy prices significantly

* reduced competitiveness of European industries

* failed to solve the technological Achilles’ heel of intermittent renewables

* increased energy insecurity and dependence on Russian energy imports

* increased division between Western Europe and Central & Eastern Europe

* given rise to widespread public discontent and the rise of populist parties opposed to the green energy agenda

Here is a link to the complete presentation.   Worth a read and spreading around~ctm

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Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet

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By Michael Shellenberger – Re-Blogged From Quillette

When I was a boy, my parents would sometimes take my sister and me camping in the desert. A lot of people think deserts are empty, but my parents taught us to see the wildlife all around us, including hawks, eagles, and tortoises.

After college, I moved to California to work on environmental campaigns. I helped save the state’s last ancient redwood forest and blocked a proposed radioactive waste repository set for the desert.

In 2002, shortly after I turned 30, I decided I wanted to dedicate myself to addressing climate change. I was worried that global warming would end up destroying many of the natural environments that people had worked so hard to protect.

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100 Percent Renewable Cities

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Cincinnati, aptly the home of the Flying Pig Marathon, and formerly known as Porkopolis, has been the 100th city to fight climate change by pledging to be powered 100% by renewable energy. Chances of success are likely to be high, according to the mayor. As a former Cincy resident who knows the climate for wind and solar, I say, in a pig’s eye. BTW if you’ve never had it, and want to try something truly unique, try this Cincinnati Chili mix.  – Anthony

By Steve Goreham – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Mayors in more than 100 US cities have announced plans to transition their electrical power systems to 100 percent renewable by 2050. They propose replacement of traditional coal, natural gas, and nuclear generating stations with wind, solar, and wood-fired stations. But none of these mayors has a plausible idea of how to meet their commitment.

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Renewables and Climate Policy Are On A Collision Course

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By John Constable – Re-Blogged From GWPF

Those advocating climate change mitigation policy have hitherto wagered everything on the success of renewable energy technologies. The steadily accumulating data on energy and emissions over the period of intense policy commitment suggests that this gamble has not been successful. Pragmatic environmentalists will be asking whether sentimental attachment to wind and solar is standing in the way of an effective emissions reduction trajectory.

For almost as long as there has been a climate policy, emissions reduction has been seen as dependent on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Policies supporting this outcome are ubiquitous in the developed and developing world; markets have been coerced globally, with varying degrees of severity it is true, but with extraordinary force in the OECD states, and particularly in the European Union. The net result of several decades of such measures has been negligible. Consider, for example the global total primary energy mix since 1971, as recorded in the International Energy Agency datasets, the most recent discussion of which has just been published in the World Energy Outlook (2018):

Figure 1: Global Total Primary Energy Supply: 1971–2015. Source: Redrawn by the author from International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2017 and 2018. IEA Notes: 1. World includes international aviation and international marine bunkers. 2. Peat and oil shale are aggregated with coal. 3. “Other” Includes geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #346

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Influence of Greenhouse Gases: The past two TWTWs discussed that when liquid water changes phases and turns into a gas, water vapor, it absorbs heat energy, which is not measured by temperature. By convention, the energy is called latent heat. Most, but not all, of the idealized process takes place in the tropics or what was once labeled the Torrid Zone, lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. In the idealized model, solar energy transports the water vapor to the top of the troposphere (the lowest layer of the atmosphere) where the water vapor condenses into rain, or freezes into ice, releasing the latent heat.

This idealized process, which TWTW called the weather engine, apparently accounted for a major amplification of the greenhouse gas effect emphasized by climate modelers discussed in the 1979 Charney Report. The speculated impact is called the “hot spot” and is common to global climate models. As TWTW previously discussed, 40 years of comprehensive atmospheric temperature trends and 60 years of more narrow weather balloon temperature measurements by separate instruments do not reveal an unusual rate of warming at the speculated (hypothesized) region. Thus, the prediction fails and one should no longer assume the speculated warming exists.

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