Tag: green energy

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.

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“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.

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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…

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Endgame For Germany’s Industrial Power Prices: Green Deal Failure Sparks Subsidy Spiral

On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosted top executives from the German steel industry at a summit in the the Chancellery to discuss solutions to the deepening crisis. Since the peak year of 2018, German steel production has fallen by around 25 percent.

Germany’s economic crisis is accelerating. Sky-high energy costs, relentless competition from China and India, and the EU’s absurd push for “green steel”—a climate-neutral variant no one demands on the world market—are pushing companies either into insolvency or out of the country.

Thursday’s meeting will bring together industry representatives, unions, and policymakers to chart the next steps for a sector facing its most severe turbulence in decades.

This is just the latest in a string of crisis summits orchestrated by the federal government for media effect. Awareness is demonstrated—solutions? Not so much. For Germany’s economy, political “solutions” increasingly mean one standard instrument: more subsidies.

A One-Issue Summit

Aside from the expected push for protective tariffs, the summit can be reduced to a single dispute: the so-called industrial electricity price. While many energy-intensive companies already receive partial relief, it is far from enough to remain internationally competitive.

Industrial electricity prices have hovered around 16–17 ct/kWh for months. German industry still pays up to 70 percent more than U.S. or French competitors, who benefit from nuclear power as their energy base.

This is the cost of the green transition.

And with it come job losses, shrinking value creation, and, for the first time, sharply declining municipal tax revenues.

Unsurprisingly, the federal government is ready to approve this subsidy. We are deep in a spiral of interventionism.

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RFK Jr. Probes Health Dangers Of Offshore Wind Turbines

eset by soaring prices, an increasingly hostile regulatory climate, and growing public opposition in coastal communities, offshore wind faces a new challenge from a powerful public official and erstwhile booster of strict climate policies.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to investigate wind projects’ effects on the health and safety of commercial fishermen, Bloomberg News reports. Specifically, Kennedy in late summer quietly instructed CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare such research. The office of the U.S. Surgeon General is also involved in the assessment.

Originally, the research was to be wrapped up within a couple of months, but its completion has been delayed by the government shutdown. “Work on this report has been halted solely due to the Democrat-led shutdown,” a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told Reuters.

Human Health Effects

To date, research on the human health effects of offshore wind turbines has been spotty, with a 2011 literature review finding “no peer-reviewed articles demonstrate a direct causal link between people living in proximity to modern wind turbines, the noise they emit and resulting physiological health effects,” according to The Hill.

But a study released in January by the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. warned of potentially harmful levels of metals from turbine protection systems. “The materials used to protect wind turbines from corrosion leach into the surrounding water, which could pose risks to ecosystems, seafood safety, and human health,” the study found. “Offshore wind farms release thousands of [tons] of aluminum, zinc, and iridium each year.” 

Professor Gordon Watson of the university’s School of the Environment and Life Sciences supports wind farms because of their role in reducing carbon emissions but adds, “There is limited data on how these metals affect the environment near operational offshore wind farms, so it’s hard to assess the full risks.”

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