Best Energy Picks - April 12, 2025
Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week’s best energy picks:
More Solar and More Wind Mean Higher Electric Prices
The data is now overwhelming and irrefutable: electric prices rise in direct proportion to the number of solar and wind farms:
The EIA forecast of continuing large increases in solar and wind power capacity is a red flag. As more wind and solar generation is added to US power grids, they will become more unstable, and electricity prices will continue to rise.
It is increasingly apparent that President Trump must address wind and solar subsidies in the ridiculously named Inflation Reduction Act. The problem is that the wind and solar tax credits, the Production Tax Credit, and the Investment Tax Credit are embedded in law. The most feasible path is to eliminate or limit the tax credits through reconciliation by capping them, adding limitations, or shortening their duration.
The most important energy policy that President Trump can implement after his tax cut package becomes law is the elimination or drastic limitation of the wind and solar tax credits using reconciliation. Otherwise, wind and solar generation will increasingly destabilize US power grids and restrict dispatchable natural gas generation.
When, oh when, will they finally learn?
Hat Tip: E.I.
New York’s Green Energy Plans Aren’t Selling with Upstate Communities
There is no way New York can possibly achieve its goals to cover upstate with solar and wind facilities:
New York’s headlong push for an all-renewable electric grid is running out of gas.
Or, to be more accurate, it’s colliding with New Yorkers who refuse to allow their farms, forests and neighborhoods to be paved with oceans of solar panels and planted with forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines…
The state has “fallen short” of those eco-friendly goals because of such “challenges” as “local opposition” and “lack of transmission capacity.”
Local opposition? You don’t say.
As early as 2007, the Catskills towns of Meredith and Bovina passed an ordinance banning wind projects after residents expressed concerns “about views, health, safety, noise, and property values.”
I created the Renewable Rejection Database to track the backlash against alternative energy. Since 2015, New York towns and counties have logged at least 78 rejections or restrictions of wind and solar projects.
That means close to 10% of the database’s 793 rejections have occurred in the Empire State. Only Ohio has recorded more.
Alt-energy promoters understand why rural residents are fighting back.
As Anne Reynolds, then the executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, admitted in 2018, “I personally think the arguments against wind energy are because people don’t want to see the turbines.”
New York’s climate plan, signed into law in 2019 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was never more than a hopium-filled wish list.
It requires the state to obtain 70% of its electricity from renewables by 2030 and 100% zero-carbon-emission electricity by 2040.
Achieving that, the plan says, would require “aggressive deployment of existing renewable energy” and batteries.
How aggressive? Very.
New York now has about 2,600 megawatts of wind-generation capacity. But it has only added about 1,000 megawatts of new wind generation since 2012.
The state also has about 6,000 megawatts of solar capacity — not nearly enough juice to meet demand during the hot summer months, when peak loads exceed 33,000 megawatts statewide.
In 2020, the backlash against Big Solar and Big Wind led Albany to implement an executive law that gives state officials the authority to override local zoning laws and force communities to accept renewable projects they don’t want.
New Yorkers are going to pay a heavy price for the asinine green virtue signaling exercise in which they have been engaged for several years now. It’s all coming apart.
Hat Tip: J.F.
The Stinking Rotten World of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs)
Renewable energy credits are pure grift, as this story shows us:
Democratic Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson is backing legislation to strip trash incinerations from the state’s renewable energy subsidy program — a policy shift that could directly benefit the solar company that now employs him.
Lawmakers are quietly folding the proposal into a broader energy package set for a vote before the legislature adjourns Monday. If it passes, millions in taxpayer-funded renewable energy credits could be redirected from waste-to-energy plants to solar firms like CI Renewables, where Ferguson took a job last year.
Ferguson, of Baltimore, announced in June that he had accepted the job with CI Renewables, a company that finances and develops large-scale solar projects in Maryland and along the East Coast. He retained his leadership position in the state Senate, where he now holds near-total control over which legislation advances…
The full package, called the Next Generation Energy Act, is expected to be taken up in the coming days — likely before the session gavels out Monday. Lawmakers are advancing the proposal as part of a larger legislative vehicle, allowing it to move forward despite missing the usual procedural deadline.
In October, Ferguson posted on X that he would introduce a bill to remove trash incinerators from Maryland’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Environmental groups who have long sought such a move argue waste-burning plants should not qualify for clean energy subsidies.
By removing incinerators from the RPS, solar companies would face less competition for lucrative state subsidies. The Maryland government doles out these subsidies via renewable energy credits (RECs) that divert state-mandated green energy spending away from waste-burning facilities and toward solar developers — like Ferguson’s employer.
Maryland politicians are some of the most ethical to be found, so I'm sure this will be straightened out quickly. Nancy Pelosi learned her trade there, after all. Perhaps they'll even get rid of RECs altogether instead of fostering all this scrambling for the grift…
Hat Tip: R.N.
California Says No to Still Higher Gas Prices
“What can't go on won't” appears to apply to California increases in gas prices via dumb legislation and lawfare:
California lawmakers have blocked a bill to make oil and gas companies liable for damage to homes from natural disasters caused by climate change, warning it could raise gas prices.
The bill would have allowed victims of natural disasters, including fires, floods and hurricanes, to sue fossil fuel companies over harm to themselves or their property for damage totaling at least $10,000. Home insurers would also have been able to seek damages under the legislation. The proposal was announced weeks after the Los Angeles-area fires broke out in January, burning thousands of homes and killing at least 30 people.
The Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the bill late Tuesday, with several Democrats abstaining, but left open the possibility for it to be reconsidered later this year. Opponents also said it would threaten jobs in the energy industry by dealing a blow to business, and that it would be difficult to prove a specific company's responsibility for a particular natural disaster.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat representing San Francisco who authored the bill, rejected the argument that it would lead to higher gas prices. He said it was about holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for the impacts of climate change. The bill would have eased the burden on disaster survivors and insurance companies to cover damage costs, he said.
“Today’s vote is a setback for the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires and for the cost of living in California,” Wiener said in a statement. “Victims of the Eaton and Palisades Fire — and of all climate disasters — deserve accountability for the decades of Big Oil lies that devastated their communities.”
…State Sen. Anna Caballero, a Democrat representing part of the Central Valley, said ahead of the vote that lawmakers' decision not to support the bill shouldn't be viewed as a move to deprioritize environmental policy.
Is there still hope for the Golden State? Maybe, just maybe…
Hat Tip: S.H.
And, Briefly:
Octopus Supports Tortoise to Promote Net Zero Sceptics, from D.T.
Methane Emissions Keep Decreasing, from N.J.
South Africa Needs What Renewables Cannot Provide, from S.T.
Why CO2 Lags Temperature Rise in Antarctic Ice Cores, from J.S.
New York to Lose 80,000 Homes to Flooding in Next 15 Years? from J.C.
Exxon Eyes $800M Earnings Boost from Oil, Gas Price Surge, from J.S.
Scottish Battery Plant Explodes for Second Time in Less Than a Year, from D.B.
#Energy #NaturalGas #BestPicks #Climate #GreenEnergy #Money #Power #Electricity #Solar #GlobalWarming #Wind #EVs #Oil #Gas #FreeSpeech
A little more great stuff from California. We have enough installed batteries now that we can make it through evening peak under most conditions, with some help from neighbors of course. However there is now a morning peak because solar isn’t functioning yet and the batteries are all drained from last night. There have been several near misses. Another issue is building as people start their car chargers at midnight, no solar, little wind, dead batteries. The duck curve has turned into the Oh Shit curve
Znog