Tag: green energy

Wyoming: A thorough assessment of the threat wind turbines pose to eagles needs to be done

A programmatic Environmental Impact Assessment (“EIA”) is a comprehensive analysis of the cumulative impacts of the massive wind development underway in Wyoming. The growing adverse impact on golden eagles and other wildlife is especially disturbing. What can be done to limit the damage is a big part of the assessment.

There is National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) language for this. It is called a “Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)” looking at “cumulative effects.” The Feds completed two back in 2024. The first one was for multiple offshore wind projects in the New York Bight. They then completed one for the five proposed floating wind projects off California. These are good precedents for Wyoming.

Of course, both these offshore wind studies were Biden-era greenwash jobs that mostly ignored the obvious adverse impact on protected whales and other marine mammals. This does not mean that a good PEIS cannot be done for Wyoming.

A good start on the PEIS issues can be found in the numerous comments already filed in opposition to individual Wyoming wind projects. For example, the Two Rivers Project received over a hundred pages of detailed technical comments, many regarding the extreme threat to golden eagles. Two Rivers is part of what is called the growing “wall of wind” in southeastern Wyoming.

The Two Rivers comments are HERE.

One of the best is “Comments on Environmental Assessment of the Two Rivers Wind Energy Project on behalf of National Audubon Society and the Wyoming Outdoor Council.” It is really a 17-page research report including lots of data and maps. See letter #16 of 18 [see below].

Keep reading

U.S. intercepted Ukraine government messages discussing plot to route money to Biden re-election

U.S. intelligence intercepted Ukrainian government communications discussing a plot to route hundreds of millions of American tax dollars earmarked for clean energy in the war-torn country and move them to the United States to enrich then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to a declassified intelligence report summarizing the intercepts that was obtained by Just the News.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently learned of the intercepts and has asked the U.S. Agency for International Development officials to scour for records to see if the plot actually was carried out and whether a criminal referral should be made to the FBI.

Gabbard’s team has not found substantive evidence the intercepted allegations were thoroughly investigated during the Biden administration, and the communications are not believed to be tied to Russian disinformation efforts, officials said.

USAID involved in routing the money, memo alleges

The declassified report is a summary of raw intercepts from U.S. spy agencies in late 2022 concerning the alleged plot, and officials who have reviewed the files said there seemed to be a lack of curiosity to investigate such an explosive allegation of foreign interference in a U.S. election.

“The Ukrainian Government and unspecified U.S. Government personnel, through USAID in Kyiv, reportedly developed a plan that would provide hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to fund an infrastructure project for Ukraine that would be used as a cover to send approximately 90% of funds allocated to the DNC to fund Joe Biden’s reelection campaign,” the declassified summary of the intercepts stated.

“They were confident the project would be funded initially, even though at some time in the future the project would be disapproved as unnecessary.  At this time, the money would already be allocated and impossible to return or use for a different purpose,” the report added.

The intercepts mentioned two American subcontractors as possible recipients of the money that would eventually be moved to Democratic coffers, officials said. The names are included in still classified raw spy data but were redacted from the declassified report obtained by Just the News.

“The plan included details of how subcontractors would be funded through U.S. companies so that how the funds were spent and allocated would be difficult to track,” the declassified summary stated. “Additionally, contracts would be executed that would be difficult to verify. In this manner, most of the U.S. funding would be diverted to Joe Biden’s election campaign without the ability to track where exactly the funds came from.”

The discovery of alleged 2022 efforts by Ukraine to help Biden’s 2024 campaign comes at a sensitive time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been working closely with President Donald Trump’s envoys to craft a peace plan to end the four-year war started by Russian aggression in 2022 during the Biden Administration.

Keep reading

The EU’s Failed Green Deal Is a Warning to Us All

Ambition cannot replace realism.

In 2020, the European Union launched its Green Deal. Six years later, investments in hydrogen-based projects have collapsed, and electricity prices are twice as high as in the US and China. Europe is losing its competitive edge. In our research for the Institute of Economic Affairs, we identify eight reasons why the EU Green Deal is not working. In doing so, we draw policy lessons for the United Kingdom.

In December 2019, the European Commission presented the Green Deal as a historic project. Europe would become the world’s first climate-neutral continent while strengthening its industrial base. Six years later, the picture is considerably bleaker. Electricity prices for industrial customers are about twice as high as in the US and China, several large-scale hydrogen projects have been postponed or cancelled, and the EU’s global competitiveness continues to weaken.

This development is not surprising. The green deal marks a clear break with traditional environmental policy, which has historically been based on emissions pricing, technology neutrality and incremental improvements. Instead, the EU has embraced a mission-oriented industrial policy in which the policy identifies winning technologies, sets detailed sectoral targets and channels large resources to selected projects and companies.

In a new collective volume—“The Green Entrepreneurial State? Exploring the Pitfalls of Green Deals”—we, together with 17 other researchers, analyse the green agenda from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The conclusion is clear: green industrial policy suffers from structural problems; therefore, it rarely works as intended in practice.

First, the policy attempts to solve complex, systemic challenges with tools that require overview, control and predictability. But climate and energy systems are characterised by uncertainty, rapid technological development and global dependencies that cannot be controlled from above through roadmaps drawn by politicians. Germany’s Energiewende is a cautionary example: A politically motivated nuclear phase-out has contributed to high electricity prices, continued fossil fuel dependence and weakened industrial competitiveness.

Second, the green agenda ignores the fact that politicians and authorities are not neutral social planners but are influenced by self-interest, emotional narratives and special interests. The result is rent seeking, clientelism and support for projects that are politically attractive rather than socio-economically valuable. Europe’s investments in hydrogen, steel and battery production are stark illustrations of this problem.

Third, competition is distorted. When certain technologies—such as hydrogen, wind power or specific industrial projects—receive extensive support, the market’s decentralised selection process is undermined. Technologies that are not socio-economically viable are kept alive, while alternative solutions are squeezed out. This is exacerbated by the fact that system costs, grid expansion and storage requirements are often ignored in decisions.

Fourth, government risk-sharing increases moral hazard. When taxpayers bear a large part of the downside, the incentives to take excessive risks become stronger. Experience from several green mega-projects shows that technological optimism is often combined with a lack of cost control.

Finally, behavioural economic mechanisms play a central role. Climate policy has typically been couched in alarmist terms where threats are exaggerated and opportunity costs downplayed. In such a “loss framing,” even very risky and expensive projects become politically rational, despite the uncertainty of their benefits.

Keep reading

“Renewable” energy policies can’t work – because of physics

Chapter 1: The Physics That Demolishes Energy Policy, Or Why You Can’t Boil An Egg In A Swimming Pool

By Richard Lyon, 3 March 2026

On Saturday, I told you I’d written a book and promised to walk through its core arguments chapter by chapter. Some long-standing readers will recognise what follows from a post I wrote in 2024. This is the sharper, tighter version that became the book’s opening chapter – the foundation everything else rests on. If you’re new here, start here.

There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available – and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.

Gradient

To do useful work, energy must flow from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. This difference is called the energy gradient. The steeper the gradient, the more work you can extract. A shallow gradient means the energy is real but useless.

Think of a ski slope. A run that falls 1,000 feet over 1,000 feet of distance is steep enough to let gravity do the work. A ski queue that falls 10 feet over 100 feet is too shallow – you have to shuffle. Now join 100 ski queues end to end. The total height difference is 1,000 feet – the same as the ski run. But do you glide down it? No. Because the gradient hasn’t changed. It’s still a long, flat shuffle.

This is exactly what happens when you build more wind turbines. A gas flame at 1,500°C in a 15°C room is a ski run – a vast temperature difference that a power generation system can exploit. A wind turbine extracts energy from air moving at perhaps 25 miles an hour. That’s real energy, but it’s a tiny gradient – the difference between a breeze and no breeze. Build a thousand turbines and the total energy grows, but the gradient of each one hasn’t changed. You haven’t built a ski run. You’ve built a thousand ski queues.

Density

Energy gradient tells you whether a source can do work, and therefore why the sheer quantity of energy available tells you almost nothing about how much useful work you can extract from it. Energy density tells you whether you can build a civilisation on it.

Diesel contains roughly 44 megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion battery manages about 1. That is a ratio of 44 to 1 – and the gap is not an engineering problem. It is a chemistry problem. Carbon-hydrogen bonds release enormous energy when broken. Shuttling lithium ions between electrodes releases much less. The periodic table is not subject to software updates.

This is why you can drive from London to Edinburgh on 50 litres of diesel, but need a battery weighing half a tonne to do it in an electric car. It’s why aviation runs on kerosene and always will. It is not a matter of waiting for better technology. It is a hard physical constraint.

Every successful energy transition in history has moved up the density ladder: wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to nuclear. Each step concentrated more energy into less mass, enabling capabilities that were physically impossible before. Railways. Aviation. The globalised supply chain. The direction has always been the same: concentration.

Keep reading

How Green Is My Cult: CA Now Importing US Gas From *check notes* 4000 Miles Away

I don’t know if any of you got to see California’s oleaginous presidential ass-pirant (and still technically governor), Gavin Newsom’s performance at the Munich Security Conference. I know between Secretary of State Rubio’s tour de force appearance, the Hillary traveling freakshow, and AOC’s sideshow comedy act, there’s been a lot of news made, so Randall Flagg Lite might have slipped past your radar.

But he was there, fresh as skunkweed ankle-deep in the flow of a new septic tie-in, every ‘lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque’ inch of his skeevy frame.

He was so comfortable onstage in that august assemblage that he could convivially remind the Germans that they knew what Nazis were. 

He genially whaps the German sitting next to him.

YEAH, YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT I’M TALKIN’ ‘BOUT NAZIS

As the governor worked the room, making the best possible impression – I only spotted a couple of his trademark shimmies – I thought of another thing he has in common with the Germans – a failed state.

While he’s hiding out in Europe pretending to be someone…

Keep reading

GENIUS: Vermont Spent Millions on Electric Buses That Turned Out to be ‘Unreliable’ in Cold Weather

Behold the genius of liberalism.

Like so many blue states, Vermont decided to ‘go green’ and spent millions on electric buses. There’s just one little problem. It turns out that they’re not reliable in cold weather.

It’s a good thing they never get cold weather in Vermont, right? Except for maybe just six months out of the year, of course.

The Vermont Daily Chronicle reports:

Vermont EV buses prove unreliable for transportation this winter

Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont’s Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can’t be charged in a garage.

Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: “Taxpayers were sold an $8 million ‘solution’ that can’t operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England.”

“We’re beyond the point where this looks like incompetence and starts to smell like fraud,” Behrens said.

“When government rushes money out the door to satisfy green mandates, basic questions about performance, safety, and value for taxpayers are always pushed aside,” Behrens said. “Americans deserve to know who approved this purchase and why the red flags were ignored.”

General manager at Green Mountain Transit (GMT) Clayton Clark told The Center Square that “the federal government provides public transit agencies with new buses through a competitive grant application process, and success is not a given.”

Keep reading

Trump Administration Halts Offshore Wind Farms, Citing National Security

President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) announced on Monday that it is pausing leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects off the East Coast.

“Due to national security concerns identified by @DeptofWar, @interior is PAUSING leases for 5 expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized offshore wind farms,” DOI Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X. “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED.”

President Trump “is bringing common sense back to energy policy and putting security first,” Burgum added.

In a separate news release, the DOI stated that the pause was also connected with “national security risks” identified by the Department of War in “recently completed classified reports,” according to reporting by Fox News.

According to the news outlet:

The department highlighted unclassified reports from the U.S. government in the past that have “long found” that massive turbine blades in large-scale offshore wind projects can create radar interference called “clutter” that can obscure legitimate moving targets and generate false targets.

In 2024, a Department of Energy report found that while the radar threshold for false alarm detection can be increased to reduce some of that “clutter,” the radar can “miss actual targets” when that threshold is increased.

However, on Monday the New York Times called the pause “a major escalation of President Trump’s crusade against offshore wind power.”

Keep reading

Germany’s Municipal Financial Crisis: The Green Transformation Backfires

For years, politicians managed to hide the damage caused by the green transformation. Now, deep cracks are appearing in municipal finances amid the severe economic crisis gripping the country. Cities like Stuttgart serve as showcases for the future of the republic.

For a long time, Stuttgart’s city treasurer was more than just a steward of solid numbers. He was regarded as the uncrowned king of fiscal policy in the region—and held a position envied by many colleagues. The robust foundation of the automotive industry and its extensive supplier network funneled generous tax revenues into the city’s coffers for years, particularly from trade taxes.

As recently as 2023, Stuttgart recorded a record 1.6 billion euros in trade tax revenue—a sum that gave the city extraordinary financial leeway. Social projects, infrastructure initiatives, municipal ambitions—the local government could spend freely.

Cracks in the Model Municipality

Then came 2024. Early cracks in Germany’s economic foundation, building up over years, began to appear in Stuttgart as well. By the end of the fiscal year, the city faced a deficit of 6.8 million euros—a first warning that things might be spiraling out of control.

In green-led Baden-Württemberg, officials explained the shortfall with one-off effects and general problems in the German economy—problems they firmly believed could be managed under the state’s green transformation.

Then 2025 arrived—and with it, shock. Trade tax revenues collapsed, expected to bring only around 850 million euros into the city’s coffers for the year. The supplementary budget shows Stuttgart now faces a deficit of 890 million euros—a fiscal hammer blow, reflecting the massive collapse of Germany’s core industries, including automotive, machinery, and chemicals.

The Moment of Truth

The picture is the same across the country. For 2025, the German County Association forecasts a cumulative municipal deficit of around 35 billion euros—a historic figure unseen since World War II, and notably, for Germany, once considered a model of fiscal prudence.

The moment of truth has arrived. Ideologues have run their course. What follows are retreating maneuvers, frantic repair attempts, and the reflex to stabilize past policies artificially with ever-larger debt programs. The house of cards is stacked higher before it inevitably collapses.

Recent experiences with Berlin’s debt policies allow a fairly precise prediction of what comes next. Parts of the so-called “special fund”—new federal debt taken on outside the regular budget—will likely be repackaged into municipal aid packages to plug ever-growing budget holes.

If municipal finances worsen, the next escalation stage is already prepared: a consolidation of debt across the states, accompanied by the issuance of so-called special bonds. Initially through the federal states, guaranteed by the federal government, possibly involving the KfW Bank, labeled as infrastructure investments. Political imagination knows almost no bounds—at least until the bond market puts its foot down and abruptly ends the spree.

Germany has become, as a result of prolonged, fatal political mismanagement, a fiscal parasite. The attempt to pull tomorrow’s purchasing power into the present through debt is fundamentally flawed. It generates growing mountains of debt, forces higher levies, and gradually erodes citizens’ purchasing power through rising inflation.

Keep reading

The Hidden Subsidy for Renewable Energy

Renewable energy really means anti-establishment energy, or politically correct energy.  The energy is usually electricity that is distributed via the electric grid.  The source of energy has to be “natural.”

Solar and wind are the most popular types of renewable energy.  Hydroelectric energy derived from a big dam on a river might seem ideal, except that the promoters of renewable energy don’t like dams.  If you can figure out how to generate hydroelectricity without a dam, you can call it renewable.  Nuclear energy might seem like a good candidate except that nuclear energy is too scary and too good a fundraising tool to accept as renewable.

Solar energy costs about seven times as much as electricity from coal or natural gas.  Most of the cost is hidden in subsidies.  If that truth were not obscured by massive propaganda, hardly anyone would build solar energy or wind energy farms.

The renewable energy promoters are politically successful.  About half the U.S. states have renewable portfolio laws that mandate the amount of renewable electricity they use.  For example, California requires that 60% of its electricity be renewable by 2030.  That has increased and will increase the cost of electricity in California.  Many electric customers pay more than 50 cents per kilowatt-hour.

According to the promoters of renewable energy, it is well-suited for solving a multitude of imaginary problems.  The number-one imaginary problem is global warming, rechristened “climate change” when the globe failed to warm.

The Sierra Club is a leading promoter of renewable energy.  This is the pitch on one of their websites promoting renewable energy:

We are facing monumental threats to our planet’s future. We are fighting back with every tool at our disposal — but to face these challenges, we need your support. Make your gift today.

Even the New York Times has become critical of the Sierra Club, for reasons described in this video.

Solar and wind are erratically intermittent sources of electricity.  Solar quits at night and whenever a cloud obscures the sun.  Wind quits when the wind slows or stops.

When solar or wind electricity is introduced, it is supplementary to the existing electric infrastructure.  Solar or wind cannot replace existing generating plants because solar and wind  are intermittent sources of electricity.  The existing grid generating plants must be retained so they can supply electricity when solar or wind fails.  In order to compare the cost of solar and wind with the traditional fossil fuels, we need only to compare expenditure when the traditional plants are powering the grid with the expenditure when solar or wind is engaged.

When solar or wind is working backup, coal and gas plants are idling.  Every megawatt-hour of electricity not produced by a coal or gas plant reduces the cost of fuel by about $20.  Every megawatt-hour of electricity produced by a solar plant costs about $150, mostly amortization of the original cost of the plant.  The cost for wind is similar.  A spreadsheet showing a detailed calculation of the cost of solar energy can be downloaded here.

Keep reading

Germany Has, for All Intents and Purposes, Committed Itself to An Economic Implosion Due to Its Failed Energiewende

Doug Sheridan analyzes the fall of Germany due to its Energiewende, European peer pressure and a nasty case of the green virtual signalling syndrome:

The FT writes, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is stuck in its fourth year of stagnation. Six months after Friedrich Merz took office, “the crisis in German engineering is gaining momentum at force”, says Dirk Pfitzer at Porsche Consulting. It’s “very clear” the slump is not cyclical and “won’t just disappear” in the next upswing.

Industrial production sits at the 2005 level even after a partial rebound in Sept. “Many of Germany’s economic core strengths have turned into vulnerabilities,” says Marcus Berret of Roland Berger. Those include a large industrial base that’s hard to decarbonise, a high dependence on exports, and a mighty auto industry having to write off 140 years of internal combustion engine expertise.

Meanwhile, Trump tariffs have hit German exporters hard. Over the first nine months of the year, their US exports plunged by 7.4%. But the prospects in China are if anything even bleaker, creatinga “China shock” that is now biting into the bottom lines of globally successful German companies.

In addition, for about two decades up to the pandemic, Chinese demand for German engineering goods and cars was seemingly insatiable, fueling the Merkel-era growth in corporate profits, employment and economic activity. Since the pandemic, however, China is “increasingly beating Germany at its own game”, says Spyros Andreopoulos of Thin Ice Macroeconomics.

Germany is now running a trade deficit in capital goods with China over a rolling 12-month period—a first since records began in 2008. Chinese machinery exports to Europe roughly doubled to around €40bn in over six years and may reach €50bn this year.

While German premium car brands like AUDI AG, Porsche AG and Mercedes-Benz AG were the first to feel the pain, capital goods makers have started to get similarly pounded. “As a country, the Chinese have been in the last years much better, more proactive, more consistent in going after the big technologies and conquering them,” said Klaus Rosenfeld, CEO of Schaeffer.

Oliver Richtberg of VDMA is sceptical of improvement. “Do we really have other sectors that can pick up the slack?” he asks. Domestic politicians have not yet internalized just how bad things are, he adds. “There’s still a lingering public perception that we enjoy high margins and a strong competitive position. But we no longer have those margins.”

Keep reading