I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more passionate denunciation of wind power than the one written by James Delingpole, a self-described “conservative – libertarian” from Britain. As you’ll see in the link, Delingpole is not sanguine about wind power. Despite his hands-in-the-air rhetoric, he identifies the same problems with wind power that its [...]
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Noted in passing: The WTO has issued orders to China about the terms under which they may sell, or not sell, their natural resources. Why this matters. China owns a controlling proportion of so-called rare earth metals. Rare earth metals such as neodymium are key to the development of greed gadget energy because they have [...]
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The electric car makers keep on dreaming, bless ‘em. A forecast by Deloitte says they’ll sell a bazillion overpriced golf carts, soon, to “Generation Y” because (I am not making this up) digital dashboards could be user-customized, and Gen-Yers like smart phones in their cars. Personally, I’m doubtful. But digital dashboards can be put anywhere, [...]
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I’ve often fumed about everyone in the power business picking natural gas over every other fuel source. The problem is that they’re all running to the same side of the boat. Now, gas is good stuff. It’s way cleaner than coal. Gas fired power plants are far easier to start and stop than either coal [...]
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A brief, back-of-envelope estimate of power costs from a new nuclear plant shows why utilities are still interested in building new nuclear capacity. No, this isn’t a scientific analysis, just a rough estimate to show you it makes sense. Suppose it costs $17 billion to build a new, two-unit nuclear power plant. And let’s suppose [...]
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When I was a kid, nobody wanted a battery-powered toy. Carbon-zinc cells were all you could buy. They were so weak that photons from a flashlight would ooze out of the filament and drip onto the floor like goo. Batteries are way better now. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells can power your cell phone for many hours. [...]
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The Edison Electric Institute has stated that the EPA’s new rule on mercury emissions from power plants is the most expensive in the agency’s history. Nobody’s in favor of releasing mercury into the environment. The regulatory approach and schedule for getting rid of it are what it at issue. The power industry can certainly find [...]
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Electric cars Cutting to the chase on electric cars: People don’t want and cannot use what the car makers are selling. The range on the cars is just too darned limited at roughly 100 miles. Recharging time for the batteries is too darned long at several hours. The price of the cars is too darned [...]
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Professor Ross Baldick (Electrical Engineering, Univ. of Texas) has analyzed the economics of wind in Texas. Baldick concluded that the problems with wind generation are all still there. 1. Wind farms are not near electric loads, so the cost of power lines to connect production to consumption is excessive. 2. Wind farms suffer from very [...]
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Jordan says they’re the world’s fourth largest holder of shale oil reserves. If you’re wondering who’s number one, why that’d be the United States which has more oil in shale than all the petroleum reserves in the Middle Eastern countries combined. Our energy reserves truly are ginormous, gargantuan, humongous, or any other hokey size superlative [...]
The Xinhua on-line edition noted that China’s immense Three Gorges Dam reached its full power capacity today. It’s a little over 8 GW, or roughly 11 million horsepower. That’s about the size of eight large U.S. nuclear power plants. You can read about it here. Can you imagine what it would take to build something [...]
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The Solyndra scandal tells you everything you need to know about green gadget energy: It cannot survive on its own. Since it requires federal money to stay afloat, it aggressively spawns corruption. The government orders people to build stuff nobody wants to buy. With that as your business model, survival resides in the greasy palms [...]
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The Obama administration’s rogue Environmental Protection Agency has begun implementing new rules on emissions for power plants. The result is going to be lots and lots of coal-fired power plants getting shut down, according to an article in the Washington Post. The fifth amendment to the Constitution says private property must not be taken for [...]
The damage just keeps on piling up. Breitbart has published a report on oil rigs leaving the Gulf of Mexico for foreign shores. A whole domestic industry is being systematically destroyed. It’s very disheartening that the public isn’t tuned in to this, not merely because it’ll make gasoline more expensive (which it will), but because [...]
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Former Missouri Senator Kit Bond recently published an article in the Southeast Missourian explaining what Mr. Obama’s minions are doing through the Environmental Protection Agency. Read it here. Early in his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said he would make it impossibly expensive to burn coal. He’s doing that. And if the EPA is not reined [...]
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