Oil and natural gas are our primary transportation fuels, supplying 97% of the energy (27 quadrillion BTUs!) that we use annually to move our cars, trucks, buses, boats, planes and trains. The 3% that comes from renewables is ethanol. (Source.) Beware the man who tells you he’s ever going to reduce our oil imports by growing wind and solar energy. Wind and solar are used | Read More »
Bwhahahahahaha! In a replay of last year’s weather pattern, the U.K. is once again in the grips of a Global Warming Climate Change-induced record cold snap. Not to worry. Those industrious Brits had the foresight to build wind farms with rated capacity equal to 5% of the country’s electricity needs. But they’re getting only 1.6% of their electricity from the wind farms. Because… Extreme wintertime | Read More »
Wind energy, the crown jewel of President Obama’s green revolution, seems to be encountering a stiff headwind of its own. As we shall see, wind energy is a highly inefficient technology for reliable power generation. The industry which supports it depends entirely on direct tax credits and federally-mandated consumption for its profitability. This week in wind energy news: Wind farms exposed as a threat to | Read More »
It’s a familiar-sounding story. Sometime in the past, the Executive Branch surreptitiously met with Energy Industry interests to craft policy on energy issues. Specifically, officials of the Department of Energy met with energy lobbyists and friendly think-tankers to rebut a university study that cast the industry in a bad light. When the ranking member of the congressional committee charged with oversight in this area asked | Read More »
From Wikipedia: The winter of 2009–2010 in the United Kingdom (also called The Big Freeze by British media) is an ongoing meteorological event that started on 10 December 2009, as part of the severe winter weather in Europe. A persistent pattern of cold northerly and easterly winds brought cold moist air to the United Kingdom with many snow showers, fronts and polar lows bringing snowy | Read More »
At first blush, this story from the Washington Post is pretty funny: a “green energy” firm’s wind farm project in West Virginia is being challenged under the Endangered Species Act by some local tree bat huggers. Tiny bat pits green against green It is the first court challenge to wind power under the Endangered Species Act, lawyers on both sides say. … At the heart | Read More »
A soon-to-be released study of the health effects of living near wind turbines challenges the popular image of the graceful, benign windmill gently coaxing free megawatts from the passing zephyrs. Dr. Nina Pierpont, a New York pediatrician, has studied subjects who live near windmills in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, Ireland and Canada for the last five years. She concludes that some, but not all, | Read More »
Here’s an excerpt from a RedState diary written by yr humble correspondent dated January 18, 2009: Wind Energy: How Con-veeeen-ient! T. Boone Pickens’ wind energy plan calls for blanketing the Great Plains [with wind farms], from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas. That’s because that’s where the wind resource is best, right? Wrong! That’s because “nobody lives there”, at least from the perspective of the | Read More »
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