.... this is nothing but another political grift in the field of climate alarmism.  From meteorologist and statistician Matt Briggs.  More and more, climate alarmism is about money and power.

Nuclear power plants are tornado-proof. Most conventional (gas and goal) plants are hardened against tornadoes.  The same cannot be said for solar and wind! From last week's Florida tornadoes.  Who is going to clean up this mess -- some of which was made from hazardous chemicals? Given the increasingly poor economics for solar and, especially, wind, I wonder if it will be cleaned up at all?

The Wichita Eagle  had a fascinating and well-reported story from central Kansas Sunday on the topic of solar panels being installed near Cheyenne Bottoms (CB), an area which, from an environmental perspective, is highly sensitive. CB is a swampy area on the "Central States Flyway" -- which is probably the most important bird migration path in North America.  There is a proposal to put a large solar array very close to the southeast edge of CB. This raises a large number of environmental questions. For example, there are birds which cannot take off unless they are in water? Will they be deceived by the panels, which may appear to be water, land, and die?  That said, there is an aspect of the story that was omitted that I believe is extremely important: Why are we taking more prime agricultural land out of production for solar panels?  Yes, the owners have property rights. Yes, solar panels pay more than food farming. But, at what cost? The contract from the solar c...

Higher on the graph = more outages.  Based on a U.S. government report, power outages are increasing and there's no reason to believe this trend will not continue. The graph above is from Liberty Energy via LinkedIn.  We have spent far, far too much on utility-scale wind and solar. That has had two effects: The cost has skyrocketed because wind (calm conditions) and solar (overcast) are not dependable so expensive backups have to be used. The grid has become unstable as politicians insist more wind and solar should continue to be installed.  We are rapidly approaching third world electricity status, if things don't change. Remember: it is election season. This is something ask your candidates about.  

Another 'green' energy company -- in spite of huge subsidies -- has gone belly up. Imagine where the industry would be without the subsidies, which have been around since Jimmy Carter. 

In Europe, they are closing solar panel manufacturing plants that were opened just three years ago. You'll find the details here .  Remember: today's global warming movement isn't about saving the planet. It is about money and power. 

We've all seen magicians and the "hidden ball trick. The Wall Street Journal  hides the ball in this story about Houston's energy reliability. The Journal's  article about the crisis in Houston pertaining to CenterPoint Energy's latest power outages -- due to Hurricane Beryl -- hides the ball by not mentioning a key factor. As has become all too typical in the Journal's reporting recently , climate change is blamed for things that have little or nothing to do with climate as last month's story does.  This latest story says,  During the same period, CenterPoint documented 15 extreme weather events around Houston including hurricanes, ice storms and tornadoes. It took CenterPoint at least two days to restore power following six of the events, with outages lasting for more than four days after two major storms in 2021... “We’re going to be dealing with more of these storms, which means we either need to start burying more lines or hardening the system even m...

This hailstorm occurred just west of Houston on March 15. It shows what happens when you combine the (far too numerous) solar farms with Great Plains hailstorms on (desperately needed) productive farmland.  Let's break this down: Obviously, solar developer wants to put their panels in areas where the sun shines often. The cloudy Great Lakes region, for example, is a bad place to put them. So, the Great Plains with its abundant sunshine -- at first thought -- seems like a great place.  The Great Plains (a/k/a "Tornado Alley) has big hailstorms. It is almost impossible to protect solar farms from large or giant hail.  Did you know that -- for the first time in the history of the Republic -- the United States has become a net importer  of food since 2020? So, valuable farmland is taken out of service for solar panels that -- as the Harvard Business Review  and other publications have recently pointed out -- wear out much more quickly than planned.  So, where ...

NOW Current Temperatures Across Kansas... ...range from +8° to -4°F. Those aren't wind chills, but actual temperatures. I'm using Kansas as an example because the majority of our energy capacity is wind. School is out for tomorrow in most areas because of the extreme cold. The meme below is literally true: Or, a miner with a geiger counter. We have a nuclear power plant in the eastern part of Kansas. Our energy company, Evergy, recently canceled plans to close a coal plant because they are learning that wind and solar don't cut it and demand in our growing region keeps rising.  It is snowing at my house and any solar panels in my area would be partially covered before sunset. Kansas and Iowa are two of the four states with the most 'green' energy (percentage basis). Even if someone cleared off the solar panels, there was very little sunlight as clouds cover most all of both states.  To our south, although it has picked up in the last five hours, in Texas' ERCOT ...

There is even more graft than I estimated. This update is as of 7:10pm Thursday, the first day of the conference. $4 Trillion!!! --- original posting --- I am presenting three articles over the next two days in advance of the gigantic global warming meeting in Dubai. They will help provide context in view of the often slanted coverage of the MSM. We often talk about how the primary sources of propulsion for the global warming movement are 1) power, and 2) cash ... with graft often lurking as part of #2. Here's the latest scam in the form of solar energy contracts. The title of the piece? The Green New Steal . Just this morning, Instapundit.com  published a piece on the Administration's graft  "green" energy loan department that 'invests' huge sums of our money in hugely risky enterprises (some run by politically well-connected individuals) many of which have failed .  While on the subject of graft, consider the giant climate meeting that begins in Dubai on Thu...

He Calls It Wistful Thinking;  I Call It "Magical Thinking" We didn't have a "required reading" in October. This is required reading  for November.  There is simply no meteorological way that wind and solar will ever be primary energy sources -- and, they are hugely wasteful and expensive secondary sources.  By the way, I learned a new word, "dunkelflautes:"   In the renewable energy sector, a dunkelflaute is a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power, 

The graph below shows the amount of wind energy currently available in Texas. It shows that -- again today -- the amount of wind energy is minuscule when measured against the billions and billions invested in wind. The wind energy capacity is 38,000 (the graph automatically zooms in). A value of 1,000 represents just 2.6% of capacity!  Why does this keep occurring? It is a meteorological fact  that when it is extremely hot and extremely cold that winds are usually light -- too light to turn the turbine blades.  Thanks to wind energy, Texas is now in desperate shape. How do I know? The head of ERCOT sent this letter to the U.S. Department of Energy asking for help. An excerpt: At times, the combination of wind generation and dispatchable generation output has been sufficient to cover load and minimum reserve levels during this solar-ramp period. However, in recent weeks, with the solar ramp-down occurring earlier each day, the total amount of generation available to serv...

Did you know that, for the first time since the Republic was declared in 1776, the U.S. was a net importer  of food in 2022? And, it looks like that will be true indefinitely into the future. This latest news, from last week (above), is more discouragement.  We have too many in Washington and New York that believe "food comes from the grocery store"! Since COVID, a number of companies have sought to bring their manufacturing back from China and have found the USA doesn't have the expertise anymore. Believe me, that can happen in ag -- especially since we are -- stupidly -- converting some of our best farmland from crops to solar energy farms.  Producing inadequate food is, in my opinion, a major national security issue and should be treated as such. 

We haven't done a "required reading" in a couple of months because I don't want to waste your time unless the story is important and succinct.  Here is a story that is vital to America and its energy supplies . Three highlights... CBS News Texas posted an article to their website describing how wind turbines struggle to produce enough electricity during heat waves, due to the natural effect of lower wind speeds during these events. This is true, and it highlights one of the biggest problems renewable sources face when they are supposed to make up a greater and greater share of electricity production. That is, they are highly weather dependent and often fail under unideal conditions. The expert CBS interviewed for the post, Dr. Todd Griffith of the Wind Energy Center at UT Dallas admitted that when the wind doesn’t blow, “we need to compensate for that with these other sources…namely, natural gas and coal sources and nuclear. ”This is true, and it doesn’t seem to make ...

When the  Washington Post  published an article  Wednesday about the human tendency to be unable to reverse one's opinions, regardless of the evidence, I thought of wind energy and the Rube Goldberg devices that are being patched onto it because of its many serious issues. For the young: Rube Goldberg was best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. The cartoons led to the expression " Rube Goldberg Machines " to describe similar gadgets and processes. (Wikipedia) Below is an example. This machine was 'designed' to mail a letter.  In the world of electricity generated by coal, gas, hydro and nuclear, things are done in a straightforward way. Unfortunately, wind and solar are so filled with flaws, their workarounds increasingly resemble Rube Goldberg Machines. As a reminder:  Wind turbines only turn when the wind speeds are between about 6 and 30 mph and when the temperature is warmer than...

Here is just the latest report about the fact  that retiring fossil fuel energy plants when combined with becoming more dependent on solar and, especially, wind is going to cause more and more blackouts -- especially in extreme weather. T he nation's largest grid operator is warning it may face a major coming shortfall in  electric  generating capacity as utilities retire more and more traditional fossil fuel  power plants .  It's a challenge  facing grid operators across the country  as power generators mothball coal and natural gas-fired plants for various reasons, such as reducing high maintenance and regulatory compliance costs or cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  PJM Interconnection, which manages grid operations across 13 states and the District of Columbia, published new  analysis  Friday showing retirements outpacing new additions in the coming years that could leave its service area short of thousands of megawatts of capacity ...

Increasingly, engineers -- the people actually understand how the grid works -- are speaking out against the mindless installation of wind and solar with no real plan as to how the new grid is going to work.  This is an excellent piece that I highly recommend. The bottom line is that nuclear is incompatible to wind+solar: that if you install nuclear, there is no reason for those poor technologies. As we have previously discussed, wind (especially) and solar advocates hate nuclear for that reason -- with it, the global warming problem is solved (no more issue for fundraising) and their ideas for a quaint semi-1890's American energy dissipate.  However,  as the piece points out, this only works if the nuclear is reasonably priced. The laughably expensive plants currently under construction are so expensive because the industry seems to be in love with one-off designs. There were plans to create standardized designs that would be much less expensive. Those need to be dusted...