
Clipper yacht Liverpool 2018 passes the Burbo Bank Wind Farm on August 14, 2017, off Liverpool, England. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
INFORMATIVE piece written not by a climate change “denier” but by energy and environment expert Michael Shellenberger – a democrat and climate change activist, no less.
ALWAYS refreshing reading Shellenberger’s work and commentary on twitter. Like Bjorn Lomborg, the other well-known ‘warmist’, they both provide reasoned analysis of environmental issues, focusing on costs and outcomes of climate and energy policy, rather than blind ideology so common in mainstream media environmental reporting that only poisons and polarises the debate leading to unnecessary alarmism resulting in overarching climate policy and misguided allocation of public money.
Shellenberger concludes…
This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn’t because they don’t know how to report critically on energy — they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources — but rather because they don’t want to.
That could — and should — change. Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.
A good start would be for them to investigate why, if solar and wind are so cheap, they are making electricity so expensive.
Read on here…
Clipper yacht Liverpool 2018 passes the Burbo Bank Wind Farm on August 14, 2017, off Liverpool, England. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
OVER the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.
People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.
And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.
And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.
Electricity prices increased by:
What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity riseinstead of decline?
Electricity prices increased by 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy.
One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.
But, again, that’s not what happened.
The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.
The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.
Electricity prices increased 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017.
Another hypothesis might be that the closure of nuclear plants resulted in higher energy prices.
Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that nuclear energy leaders Illinois, France, Sweden and South Korea enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the world.
Since 2010, California closed one nuclear plant (2,140 MW installed capacity) while Germany closed 5 nuclear plants and 4 other reactors at currently-operating plants (10,980 MW in total).
Electricity in Illinois is 42 percent cheaper than electricity in California while electricity in France is 45 percent cheaper than electricity in Germany.
But this hypothesis is undermined by the fact that the price of the main replacement fuels, natural gas and coal, remained low, despite increased demand for those two fuels in California and Germany.
That leaves us with solar and wind as the key suspects behind higher electricity prices. But why would cheapersolar panels and wind turbines make electricity moreexpensive?
The main reason appears to have been predicted by a young German economist in 2013.
In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.
The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.
Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.
And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to payneighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.
Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.
Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind would decline 40% once it reached 30% of electricity, and that the value of solar would drop by 50% when it reached 15% of electricity.
In 2017, the share of electricity coming from wind and solar was 53 percent in Denmark, 26 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in California. Denmark and Germany have the first and second most expensive electricity in Europe.
By reporting on the declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines but not on how they increase electricity prices, journalists are — intentionally or unintentionally — misleading policymakers and the public about those two technologies.
The Los Angeles Times last year reported that California’s electricity prices were rising, but failed to connect the price rise to renewables, provoking a sharp rebuttal from UC Berkeley economist James Bushnell.
“The story of how California’s electric system got to its current state is a long and gory one,” Bushnell wrote, but “the dominant policy driver in the electricity sector has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation.”
Part of the problem is that many reporters don’t understand electricity. They think of electricity as a commodity when it is, in fact, a service — like eating at a restaurant.
The price we pay for the luxury of eating out isn’t just the cost of the ingredients most of which which, like solar panels and wind turbines, have declined for decades.
Rather, the price of services like eating out and electricity reflect the cost not only of a few ingredients but also their preparation and delivery.
This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn’t because they don’t know how to report critically on energy — they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources — but rather because they don’t want to.
That could — and should — change. Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.
A good start would be for them to investigate why, if solar and wind are so cheap, they are making electricity so expensive.
Michael Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress. Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.”
If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive? | Forbes
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See also :
Energy Poverty related :
Energiewende Fail related :
World Coal-Fired Power Surge related :
“Goudie points to one post he saw recently from National Geographic that showed what appeared to be a starving polar bear, but in reality was an animal that was sick.”
NAT Geo pops up again with another blatant falsehood designed to deceive its audience. 100+ years building a publication of reputation and integrity only to have it destroyed in as little as a decade thanks to a religious zeal to the doctrine of CAGW.
REAFFIRMS the old adage that reputation takes a long time to build but can be destroyed overnight.
RIP Nat Geo. Viva La Polar Bears!
Inconvenient rebound in polar bear numbers.
Polar bears not starving, says Nunatsiavut wildlife manager
Geoff Bartlett · CBC News
One of the people who oversees an Indigenous hunt of polar bears says the population is doing well, despite heart-wrenching photos online suggesting some bears are starving.
Every year, the Nunatsiavut government awards polar bear licences to Inuit hunters living in the northern Labrador settlement area.
The Inuit set a quota of 12 polar bears this winter. Nunatsiavut wildlife manager Jim Goudie said all 12 were taken within the first seven days of the season.
Goudie said it’s just the latest evidence that polar bears are on the rebound in northern Canada — a trend he said officials have been recording for years.
“There are lots of signs of bears,” he told CBC Radio’s Labrador Morning. “Lots of bears and a continuation of what we’ve seen over the last three or four years.”
The Nunatsiavut hunt takes place over an area stretching from Cape…
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NICKNAMED “The Gray Lady“, The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record”.
IN March the paper launched a series called Warming Planet, Vanishing Heritage which examines “how climate change is erasing cultural identity around the world.” The series based on a UN “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate“ report, designed to push the fashionable theme that your lifestyle is causing imminent danger to ancient monuments by dangerous sea-level rise and other climatic horrors.
Shock news. Any climate related news that is positive or contradicts the edicts of the global warming religion is met with fearce resistance. Weird but sadly true.
One might ask, who are the real science ‘deniers’?
Polar bear specialists made global population numbers the focus of the world’s attention when they predicted a dramatic decline and possible extinction of the species. But now that the numbers have increased slightly rather than declined, the same scientists say global numbers are meaningless: the public should give those figures no credence and anyone who cites global population numbers should be mocked.
See the screen shot from a 2015 NBC news video above and another from the science journal NATURE in 2008 below (Courtland 2008):
Yet, below is a recent message from one of the world’s most vocal polar bear specialists, four years after a similar incident raised the public’s ire:
However, you can’t make a plausible prediction of future survival without an estimate of present population size: not even today’s worst journalists would buy it, nor should they.
Here is Steven Amstrup on June 8, 2014 to his PBSG…
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“Of course, we have the usual problem, that those who read the article originally and who would have been deeply misled, won’t see the correction now.”
THE disturbing part is that the BBC knows unequivocally that they are creating alarm by distorting historical data and exaggerating future scenarios in order to push their catastrophic climate narrative.
By Paul Homewood
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42251921
You may recall the above report by the BBC, which described how bad last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was, before commenting at the end:
A warmer world is bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and a greater risk of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5.
As I promised, I fired off a complaint, which at first they did their best to dodge. After my refusal to accept their reply, they have now been forced to back down.
The above sentence now no longer appears, and instead they now say:
Of course, we have the usual problem, that those who read the article originally and who would have been deeply misled, won’t see the correction now.
What is perhaps of most concern is that this report was written by Chris Fawkes, who is one of the BBC’s weather forecasters, and who should therefore know…
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