For the first time in the history of the Nation of Cuba: Yes, it got to freezing (zero degrees Celsius) for the first time. Cuba has always had an excellent meteorological service, so I trust this.  While on the subject of winter: The North American Reliability Corporation's latest long-term assessment warns that half the U.S. will face increased risks of blackouts during winter storms as demand for electricity increases while coal- and natural gas-fired power plants are retired. Details here . No one wants another Nashville!

This graph compares the "all-in" costs of various types of energy. For example, because fossil fuel plants are usually built along existing transmission lines, there minor transmission costs. Because wind and solar are built in the middle of nowhere, transmission costs can be in the billions. We've frequently made the point that wind turbines have lifetimes of 20 years or less while nuclear plants have a lifetime of 75 years or more. That makes nuclear's clean energy dirt cheap.  We should not install a single additional wind turbine nor solar field. Nuclear and, where possible, hydro are the ways to go. 

..........run into a  floating wind turbine.   The post was inspired by several news reports (examples here and here ) this week about plans to create many more floating wind turbines. I have a mental picture of some of them breaking away and floating into the waters of Miami Beach.  Image by Trina Sanders Ocean wind turbines are yet another mistake by Big Climate, even bigger than land-based wind turbines. They are far more expensive than their land-based cousins and still have the prob let with intermittency. Of course, if one of these monsters floated close-in to the beach off one of Barack Obama's oceanfront mansions in Massachusetts or Hawaii, he'd have the Coast Guard shoot it down in a second. 😉 And, yes, part of this post is tongue-in-chiefs. 

This "chilling" information is from  hotair.com . The U.S. power grid is becoming increasingly prone to blackout amid rising electricity demand and power plant closures, a group of power officials and executives, including Electric Reliability Council of Texas President Pablo Vegas, warned Monday. At an event hosted by the U.S. Energy Association, a trade group, Vegas said there simply wasn’t enough investment being put into developing the transmission lines, natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure upon which the power grid relies. If this isn't bad enough, look at this :  While every state has different laws, the fact is that judges sometimes look at other states' rulings for guidance. Especially when you consider that wind and solar are undependable and you have a real mess during major storms and extreme temperatures. So, if you are in a situation where having virtually guaranteed electricity is necessary, it is time to make a plan. We are on our own!

This classic World War II story from the late, great George Gobel on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson  on this Veteran's Weekend is a humorous way of getting into a rather serious subject.  On a number of occasions (examples here and here ) we've written about the numerous issues with wind turbines interfering with weather radar. Below is a Kansas radar image with the wind turbines circled.  None  of the echoes below are storms. It is all wind turbines across northern Oklahoma and Kansas.  While we -- I hope -- don't have to worry about enemy aircraft being obscured by wind turbines in Oklahoma and Kansas, we may have to worry about them   off our coasts .  The Telegraph  of Great Britain brings us this story : It seems that British Royal Air Force pilots have learned to, during exercises, duck around the wind turbine installations to avoid detection. With all of the concerns about war with Russia -- which would involve aircraft and high-speed...

Is there a more clueless bunch than President Biden's Cabinet secretaries?   From her bio at Wiki, it appears the smallest town she has lived in is Anaheim. So, she doesn't know that small towns in the USA don't have charging stations -- let alone remote areas like Afghanistan.  Given all that is occurring in the world right now, the stupidity of this is beyond measure -- regardless of its impracticality.  For the rest of us, the Biden Administration wants a remote control "kill switch" (really!) in all new automobiles that would allow the feds to disable your car if they don't like your driving habits. 

Is this the way we want to live? Because Big Climate is irrationally in love with unreliable windmills? Of course, I guarantee Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio and the others will have reliable power.  Now, consider this: once they've pushed us into electric cars, electric stoves and electric hot water heaters, what happens when we have the daily blackouts?  I recommend you consider these issues the next time you vote. What did environmentalists use before candles? Electricity!

Yesterday's Wall Street Journa l   had an article about our hapless and increasingly dangerous federal government taking 17 years to approve a wind energy project under a "fast-track" program.  But, I want to bring some of the article's important fine print to your attention. It says, "the permit allows the developer, Pattern Energy, to build the country's largest wind energy project across three counties in rural New Mexico and deliver that electricity to large markets in Arizona and California." Wait, what?! Forget killing eagles and rare birds, forget killing endangered whales (via off-shore wind), forget rising rates and making the grid less stable by the year: the people who have to look at and hear these monsters won't get any benefit from them?! And, who is going to pay for them? In Kansas, ratepayers are being required to fund an expensive transmission line like the one above that will send wind electricity generated in the Sunflower State to...

Turbines not  turning in calm winds on a >100° day in southwest Kansas. Winds are usually light during extreme heat and extreme cold.  Wind energy? For the sake of our nation and our energy security, it looks like -- finally -- the wind energy boom is over. The marketplace is working, even though it is up against huge government subsidies. The details are here . Giant wind energy companies are asking for yet more subsidies . So, when your year-over-year orders drop by 46% while costs rise by 25%, that can indeed be a problem. And, when you’re a maker of offshore turbines and your offshore turbine business unit doesn’t receive a single order during that same quarter, that’s an even bigger problem, isn’t it? Sure, it is, and I can easily sympathize with the fix Siemens Gamesa management finds itself in. What I can’t figure out, though, is why I should have any sympathy at all with the argument by this massive corporation that right fix here is more rents from the government, ...

The timing of a load of wind turbine blades making their way by rail through Wichita this morning, was interesting. The the official NWS wind speed at the time was 3 mph -- which was too light for any electricity to be produced at any of the existing wind farms.  In fact, the weather map of the region at 6am showed winds were too light not just in Wichita (arrow) but over a vast area of Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma -- states with an exceedingly high number of wind farms. To decode: The large black circle around the inner green circle denotes calm winds. The green circles with the line sticking out of them and a half "barb" at about a 90° angle (I've put an "L" near a few) have winds too light to turn the blades. Where the line with a full barb exists, the winds are okay. As you can see, the vast majority of weather stations in the area have winds too light to generate electricity.  Here's the thing: If someone had taken a magic wand and instantly tripled the ...

There have been numerous articles the past six months stating that all we need to do is hook batteries into the wind (and solar) farms so that we get electricity even when the wind is calm.  R...i...g...h...t... I haven't written on this topic before because, instinctively, I thought this won't work because our current technology isn't even close to being sufficiently capable to make this scheme work.   Now, there is a price tag for this. Are you ready?   $175 trillion dollars The details are at the link, along with the quotation that is the title of this post.  Yes, global warming advocates want us to spend eight times  the U.S.'s gross national product to replace a system that worked very well (the U.S. grid prior to 2000) and inexpensively (the U.S. grid prior to 2000) for something that doesn't work -- with any consistency consistency -- as we again learned over the Christmas period.  And, remember, the more wind and solar we install the worse the prob...

As of 9am, here is a map of power failures across the Lower 48. In many areas in the Northeast, the high winds are responsible for the outage. But, in the South, it is poor planning ("we didn't know it was going to be this cold") and, you guessed it, renewables.  From this morning's Nashville Tennessean ,  "Demand ran 35% higher than a normal winter day."  Remember how yesterday I wrote about how we forecasted this extreme cold wave an amazing 13 days  in advance? I also wrote, It is hard to believe that they claim they were expecting a "normal winter day." And, it isn't just Nashville. Once we ignore the spin, I suspect there were two problems: Thanks to wind and solar, we no longer have excess capacity. As during the Texas 2021 power catastrophe, there isn't enough power anymore, especially when (as happened in Texas) wind drops to 2% of capacity. They didn't believe the weather forecasts in time to maximize the power they had. From ...

The forecast continues on track. If anything, the cold air is still a bit ahead of schedule.  That makes it critical  for electric car owners to realize their greatly decreased range on a full charge. The chart below is from Canada and it compares the range at 70°F versus 32°F. Of course, in many areas, temperatures will be far below freezing, so that means range will be decreased further.  Be conservative! Do not get caught in this extreme cold. 

A number of people have asked me how much damage Ian caused in Florida. Here is an estimate.  The full article is here . More than two million homes and businesses are without power at this time = more than 5,000,000 people. It will be weeks before all of the power is restored. 

Amen! And, remember, you can triple the number of windmills but if the wind is calm the amount of electricity they produce is still zero. 

In short, the closure of the Palisades Power Plant will increase emissions, reduce energy affordability, and hurt the resilience and reliability of America’s electric grid. That’s a lousy quadfecta. The full story is here . You can thank Big Climate for this.  The energy situation will get far worse before it gets better. More here . 

Wall Street Journal This needs to be a campaign issue this fall!  Unfortunately, since we have put all of our money into unreliable wind and solar, we need to build a few natural gas plants asap. What we really need is nuclear and, in a few spots, hydroelectric. Our nation needs to stop allowing a tiny minority to stop progress. 

Big Climate talks a lot about global warming but, when it counts, it keeps demonstrating it does not  want to solve the problem. The latest example is from Colorado. Colorado is so short of electricity that the National Center for Atmospheric Research had to install its supercomputer in Wyoming. The bill would have created a study  on new generation nuclear power and its potential deployment in Colorado . New generation nukes are extremely safe and, when mass produced, will be economical. Remember: this was just to study nuclear energy.  As expected, all of the Democrats voted against it and the bill failed.  This happens over and over again. The Democrats and Big Climate would rather have the political issue rather than solving the problem.  It is impossible to solve global warming with windmills and solar panels on roofs.  As Glenn Reynolds puts it, I'll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who keep telling me its a crisis start ac...

The latest focus-group results are in. And, they are bad. Big Climate made fools out of the catastrophic climate narrative by calling ordinary January and February snowstorms " super-extreme weather ." Now, they must try to recover their sullied credibility. Shown below, for the first time ever, is the Big Climate War Room (BCWR) where they diligently attempt to blame every raindrop (or lack of rain), every snowflake (or lack of snow) and every tornado (or a tornado drought) on global warming. The meeting was called to order by the reclusive Dr. Strangeclimate (in glasses, above). He negotiates the tens of millions of dollars that flow in monthly from various foundations, political groups, and the "protection" money from Big Tech executives who do not wish to be called out for their gigantic carbon footprints.  Awaiting Big Climate's marching orders, via hotline, are three dozen marketing-types on Madison Avenue.  Melvin James Kaminsky, the maddest of Mad Men wo...

On this blog and Twitter, you've read mentions of the Department of Energy's Climate Gestapo. They are now hiring.  Their job is to get into local communities --  and even come onto your property -- to build support for 'clean' energy. Per various news releases on of their first tasks will be to rally support for transmission lines for wind energy since solar and wind usually aren't located where people live. Per the DOE web site, they will:  Engaging and collaborating early  with states, tribal nations, and stakeholders to accelerate transmission deployment.  I'm going to take a wild guess that they will try to blend in and make the public believe that what they are seeing and hearing is a result of local residents. This is a known technique of Big Climate . Of course, $20 billion of your tax dollars will be spent on this effort -- which will result in more expensive and less reliable electricity.  So, thanks to the Biden Administration, the climate gesta...