LOL Reuters, 11 years ago: "Texas has the most wind power in the country, but the wind does not blow during the summer"

Texas has the most wind power in the country, but the wind does not blow during the summer. Ercot said it got about 2,000 MW from wind during the peak hour on Wednesday. Those wind farms can produce about 9,000 MW when all turbines are spinning.

Reuters, here.

Wind generating capacity in Texas today is in the neighborhood of 35,000 megawatts, but only about 7,770 megawatts of that would be available under similar summer circumstances, with much less coal generating capacity available today than in 2011 to fill the breach:

Because of the increase in wind power and the retirement of almost 6,000 megawatts of coal-fired generating capacity, coal-fired power plants supplied 18% of state generation in 2021, down from a 36% share in 2011.  

And as a result Texas now gets to listen to this:

Texas grid operator tells residents to curb power as heat hits record highs

Texans face rolling blackouts because "wind generation is currently generating significantly less than what it historically generated in this time period"

 Actually, it's because Texas retired reliable sources of electricity from coal and natural gas for unreliable "green energy".

The New York Times as usual just leaves that part out, here:

The regulator forecast demand in Texas to peak at 79,671 megawatts, just short of the 80,168 megawatts that will be available.

That's a forecast margin of just 497 megawatts.

Texas has retired 6,453 megawatts of coal generation capacity since 2017 and added 3,945 megawatts of wind generation capacity.

In addition Texas has retired 2,316 megawatts of natural gas generation capacity since 2008 and added 3,425 megawatts of solar generation capacity since 2010.

Not only is Texas short a net 1,399 megawatts of generation capacity over the period, if the wind doesn't blow it's potentially short another 3,945 megawatts, and another 3,425 megawatts if the sun don't shine.

Way to go, Brownie.

All it took was Russia invading Ukraine for countries to junk the Paris climate agreement and begin a desperate frenzy for coal

  Coal Makes Comeback as World Thirsts for Energy...

Countries are rejiggering distribution channels to obtain more coal from other big suppliers such as Australia and the U.S., but that takes time and money, said Gerben Hieminga, senior energy-sector economist for Dutch bank ING Groep.

“The whole world is doing this,” Mr. Hieminga said.

Germany's Economy Minister Robert Habeck of its Green Party says Germany will fire up the coal plants to produce electricity and conserve natural gas for winter heating as Russia reduces gas shipments

 Reality trumps ideology.

‘The situation is serious’: Germany plans to fire up coal plants as Russia throttles gas supplies

America's idiotic green dream will end up in disaster just like Germany's

 Hans-Werner Sinn, here:

To cushion the twin phaseout of coal and nuclear, and to close supply gaps during the long transition to renewable energy, Germany decided to build a large number of additional gas-fired power plants. Even immediately before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, policymakers assumed that the gas for these facilities would always come from Russia, which supplied more than half of Germany’s needs. ...

Germany’s pledge to abandon coal and nuclear, the very energy sources that would have given it a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy, has thus placed the country in great danger. Not so long ago, Germany was the world’s second-largest lignite producer, after China. And it easily could have procured the tiny amount of uranium needed to run its nuclear power plants, and stored it domestically for many years. ...

Despite the fact that turbines and photovoltaic panels now dot much of the landscape, in 2021 the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7 per cent. And while wind and solar generated 29 per cent of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption. Germany would not have come close to achieving energy autonomy even if the renewables sector had expanded at twice the speed that it did. ...

If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems, on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely, and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down before replacement energy became available. The government would be unlikely to survive the resulting economic chaos, public uproar, and outrage should gas become unavailable or heating costs rise dramatically. In fact, the likely scale of domestic disruption would call into question the cohesion of the Western response to the Ukraine war.

Low energy Joe: Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council for Joe Biden, wants to eliminate fossil fuel use completely

 

Listen.

Electricity use alone in the US is 60% derived from natural gas and coal in 2020.

This is their idiotic message in a crisis.

Low energy Joe: The batshit crazy loons of the Biden regime think this crisis is an opportunity to just jettison overnight the 60% of our electricity generation which comes from hydrocarbons

 President Biden's Chief of Staff wants a clean energy revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, revolution would mean breaking most of the eggs.

Shackleton's "Endurance" finally found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea where climate is still the same more than a hundred years later

Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915. ...  

The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. ...

Once the wreck was located several days ago . . ..

Shackleton was tripped up by the Weddell’s notoriously thick, long-lasting sea ice, which results from a circular current that keeps much ice within it. In early January 1915 Endurance became stuck less than 100 miles from its destination and drifted with the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it. ...

The Weddell Sea still remains far icier than other Antarctic waters . . ..

The icebreaker, Agulhas II, left the search area on Tuesday [yesterday, March 8] for the 11-day voyage back to Cape Town.

More.

Why do you think it's taken this long to find the wreck?

Conditions there are as inhospitable now as they have ever been, and are forbidding even to a $10 million expedition using a modern icebreaker and fancy undersea gear with sonar and high resolution cameras and a short window of opportunity of only "several days" to spend documenting the find once they'd found it before having to high tail it out of there.

From departure from Cape Town Saturday February 5 to departure from the Weddell Sea Tuesday March 8 was thirty-one days.

That's the news that's not mentioned by The New York Times, even while mentioning it.

 

Endurance's coal-fired steam engine could make 10 knots

Dock workers in the UK and Netherlands refuse to unload Russian oil, gas, and coal

 Story.

Also today we learned that your receding shoreline is the canary in the climate coalmine

 The oceans are rising, or something, but not on Martha's Vineyard.

Receding hairlines remain unexplained.

“Now for the bad news: We are nowhere near where we need to be yet…Most countries have failed to meet the action plans that they set 6 years ago".

Michigan is increasingly like a third world shit-hole: Day four without electrical power from Consumers Energy, over 81k still affected

My electric power went out Tuesday night at about 11pm.

It is still out.

Over 81,000 customers, just of Consumers Energy, remain without power four days after a line of storms came through.

The utility runs ads on the radio incessantly saying "Count on us"!

It spends more time and money trying to get consumers to curtail electric usage than it does providing it.

It decommissions coal fired generating capacity and then turns around and buys electricity from Indiana. Under Democrat Gretchen Whitmer we are increasingly like California. 

The utility is a cruel joke, especially this week as humidity levels soared with the heat. Indoor temperatures at night above 80 degrees F make for miserable sleeping, when sleeping occurs at all.

The air is full of the sound of generators, day and night. Lines are long at gasoline stations where people wait to fill their cans to get them through another night.

Green energy isn't green, and the power company doesn't provide it, green or otherwise.

 

 

You fools who won't have enough electricity for air conditioning this summer have only yourselves to blame

From the story:

Peak temperatures are forecast to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46°C) in interior California through the week, according to the state's electric grid operator, which warned the biggest supply deficit could occur on Thursday after the sun goes down and solar power is no longer available. ...

On Wednesday, solar power was providing about 30% of California ISO's supply, and the grid warned that it would be unlikely to be able to rely on additional supplies from other states due to the extreme heat hitting much of the Western United States.

The ISO was currently getting 13% of its power from other states. The ISO has said it expects to have about 50,734 MW of supply available this summer, but some of that comes from solar.

102,000 MW of coal-fired electric capacity was retired from 2010-2019, over 38,000 MW alone in 2012, 2015 and 2018. Another 17,000 MW is scheduled to be retired by 2025. 

The EIA blamed "flat electricity demand growth" during the decade for the retirements.

It should have blamed Obama, under whom real GDP grew at a rate worse than during the Great Depression.

But YOU elected him.

Twice.

 

 

This has to be the dumbest blackout story ever written: The crisis is entirely of their own making

Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits :

States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).

 

Well don't shutter 'em then!

 

Bunch of idiots.

Joe Biden is loudly for tariff punishment of China for burning coal

He's a Democrat Trump.

The only thing saving industrial production in this country since 2007, up less than 5%, has been fracking to mine oil and gas

It has had little to do with Trump or Obama either way, political support or no political support.

The only thing giving an additional recent boost to oil and gas was the 2015 bipartisan agreement to end the oil export ban, signed by Obama.

Industrial production from all mining categories is up almost 17% 2015-2019, and a whopping 53% 2007-2019.

Industrial production from coal mining, a subset of this like oil and gas, is down over 39% since 2007, and 21% since 2015 despite Trump's promise to restore the industry. Industrial production from base metals mining is up less than 3% since 2007. Industrial production from gold and silver mining is down almost 15%.

Industrial production from crude oil mining is up a whopping 140% since 2007, and from natural gas 79% from 2007 through November 2019 on an average basis.

Otherwise it's a sorry picture.

Industrial production from manufacturing is down 1.3% 2007-2019, despite Trump running on bringing manufacturing back to the United States.

And industrial production from electric and gas utilities has grown a paltry 2% 2007-2019.

It's all mining of crude oil and natural gas.

If the anti-capitalist climate kooks get their way, we're all in big trouble.

Trump digs coal's grave

Joe Biden in New Hampshire this week to the coal miners: Learn to code, 'cause I'm going to put you out of work

"Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well." 

"Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God's sake!"

More.

Headlines you won't be reading: "Greta Thunberg takes slow boat to China to protest coal-fired power plants"

The utility companies in Minnesota wouldn't have to say this if natural gas were reserved for residential heating and coal for electricity

Extreme Cold Straining Xcel Energy’s Natural Gas System, Residents Urged To Turn Down Thermostat:

“We need those in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton, and Isanti to reduce use of natural gas. Until further notice, you are urged to turn down your thermostat to 60 degrees or lower and avoid the use of other natural gas appliances including hot water,” Xcel Energy said. WCCO’s Reg Chapman said shortly before noon Wednesday that Xcel Energy is asking customers to lower thermostat to 55 degrees. Xcel Energy says residents’ cooperation is critical to prevent widespread natural gas outages. The company also suggests using electric space heaters.

About 39% of utility-scale electricity generation in Minnesota came from coal-fired electric power plants in 2017, down from 49% in 2014.

Increasing amounts of natural gas are fueling electricity generation in the state. In 2016, about one-seventh of the natural gas consumed in Minnesota went to the electric power sector, more than double the amount of natural gas used for electricity generation in 2011.

A. Barton Hinkle shows once again that libertarianism is of the left, not the right

Here:

[B]oth parties have grown more extreme in recent years. Congressional Republicans certainly have. Congressional Democrats tend to be more moderate, relatively speaking.

The perception that the Democrats haven't shifted radically left in recent years is due to libertarianism agreeing with what that shift represents more than disagreeing with it. And frankly, the evidence A. Barton Hinkle cites shows how the whole country has indeed shifted left. Not completely, obviously, but shift left it has, and that libertarians can't see that tells you more about libertarianism than libertarianism tells you about libertarianism.

It's not that Republicans have become more extreme. It's that the country's shift to the left has isolated them. And Democrat positions are only "moderate" in the sense that they are now more widely shared. It's the growing isolation of Republican conservatism in the face of these which only makes it seem extreme. It would be more accurate to say that Republican positions have become anachronistic, not extreme.

Hence much of the recent evidence cited by Hinkle which demonstrates where Americans are united today is of the "shift-left" variety, including:

62% now believe in gay marriage when for generations the vast majority of Americans did not, and for millennia human beings did not, and anti-sodomy laws still dotted the land up to 2003;

73% now favor utopian pipe dreams of "alternative energy" when it was coal, oil and nuclear which made America the industrial powerhouse of the world;

73% now unsurprisingly favor euthanasia just 44 years after the Supreme Court made it legal to murder unborn children;

83% favor "medical marijuana" despite the evidence of its risks for human health and well-being;

85% want to let the Dreamers stay;

90% favor universal background checks for weapons purchases;

83% disavow "extremist bigotry" under the influence of multiculturalist indoctrination in American public schools.

And libertarians are pretty much on board with these things, along with most Democrats. That's why all the action is in the Republican Party. The war for its soul continues to animate the present time. The Democrat soul already belongs to the devil.