Artificial islands in the North Sea could power millions of UK homes

Artist’s impression of Dogger Bank island [credit: The Independent]

For some on-and-off hours per day, perhaps they could. We’ve heard this one before but it’s being talked up again, as they start to run out of good offshore sites nearer to the coasts of power-hungry and fuel-averse north European countries. But an artificial island plus long-distance undersea power cables won’t come cheap, and that’s without the vast cost of all the wind turbines.

Wind farms that are built more than 30km off the coast can yield more energy but are costly – at least for now, says WIRED.

Dogger Bank, a windy and shallow stretch of sea 125 kilometers (km) off the East Yorkshire coast isn’t an awful lot to look at, unless you’re an energy firm looking for the perfect place to drop a huge new wind farm.

Chill Wind Of Reality Blows Through The Green Energy Lobby

They will just rattle the begging bowl in front of gullible leaders even more frantically.
H/T Climate Change Dispatch

In recent weeks, observers of the energy scene have been wondering if the long honeymoon of the renewables industry might finally be over.

They’re right, says Andrew Montford.

EU renewables capacity additions have been falling for years, and have now declined to less than half of their 2010 peak.

Meanwhile, a wave of insolvencies is sweeping the wind industry as a result of the sharp scaling back of subsidies.

#Brexit blackmail: EU extorts UK taxpayers by withholding carbon creds from UK industry

Brussels strikes again. The EU commission has decided to withhold the free carbon credits it gives to member states’ industries from the UK ‘until a Brexit withdrawal agreement is ratified’.

A UK government which had any capable negotiators would respond in kind by withholding the much bigger amount in membership fees we are still paying to Brussels every month, despite taxpayers having voted to leave the EU almost three years ago.

Taxpaying voters will get an opportunity on May 23 to let our incompetent government and the Brussels mafia know that they now support the Brexit Party which seeks a mandate to take over negotiations with the EU and leave on WTO terms in the meantime.

Western Link failure leaves energy users facing £36m bill

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

From the Times:

Consumers in England and Wales may have to pay millions of pounds in compensation to Scottish wind farms after a £1.1 billion underwater cable failed for a second time.

The Western Link, which connects Hunterston in Ayrshire and Connah’s Quay on Deeside, will be out of action until the end of May as engineers tackle a failure 90 miles off the Scottish coast.

Big Green, Inc. : The money fuelling the environmental left

H/T The GWPF.
A database listing $4.2 billion worth of grants represents a small fraction of the total financial investment and is just the tip of the iceberg, says the Institute for Energy Research.

Today’s environmental movement is fueled by a group of interconnected, left-leaning foundations that are seeking to disrupt the development of America’s energy resources.

In order to understand how these groups work together and where the environmental movement’s funding originates, IER developed Big Green, Inc., a database that tracks environmental grants stemming from 14 foundations and directed to over 1,900 grassroots activists groups and totaling more than $4.2 billion.

Our key findings include:

Alan Carlin: The “Green New Dealers” have lost all perspective

Do we have a climate problem or a bad science problem? The author argues for the latter.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the “Green New Deal” (GND) recently proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey is that the authors have lost (or possibly never had) all perspective on climate change, writes Alan Carlin.

They are acting as if climate change were as bad a problem as the Great Depression, and that another “New Deal” is required for the US to survive.

This shows that they they really have no understanding of climate change and that Congress should never appropriate any funds for the purposes proposed by the GNDers.

Green New Deal Reveals Green Left’s True Colors

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Presumably the idea is to start off by proposing the completely ridiculous, and then see what can be got away with before finally being rumbled.

PA Pundits - International

By Larry Bell ~

Over the next 10 years, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., supported by at least eight prospective 2020 presidential Democratic-Socialist candidates and 40 acolyte lawmakers, plans to eliminate fossil fuels; make air travel obsolete using bullet trains; upgrade or replace every building in America to ensure energy efficiency; and ensure “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.”

Oh yes — and apparently for those who are dumb enough to turn away free money for doing nothing — this New Green Deal will also guarantee “A [government] job with a family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security.”

An original summary fact sheet posted on Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s official congressional website (then rapidly removed), stated, “The Green New Deal resolution [is] a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War II to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas…

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George Melloan: The Yellow Jackets Are Right About Green Policies

When folk are told they need to pay ever-rising ‘carbon’ taxes, based on guesswork, to somehow control the climate, many aren’t impressed and may take their discontent to the streets.
H/T The GWPF

Seek out the most basic cause of the French riots and you’ll come to a bizarre answer: carbon dioxide.

More specifically, the demonization by political activists of that vital element of the earth’s atmosphere. French President Emmanuel Macron stirred popular rage by trying to raise the gasoline tax by about 25 cents a gallon.

Brendan O’Neill: In praise of the Gilets jaunes

At last, a people’s revolt against the tyranny of environmentalism. Paris is burning. Not since 1968 has there been such heat and fury in the streetsThousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the capital at the weekend to rage against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof, technocratic disdain. And yet leftists in Britain and the US have been largely silent, or at least antsy, about this people’s revolt. The same people who got so excited about the staid, static Occupy movement a few years ago — which couldn’t even been arsed to march, never mind riot — seem struck dumb by the sight of tens of thousands of French people taking to the barricades against Macronism.

Germany’s green transition in a blind alley

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

Another opinion piece pointing out the engineering impossibilities being attempted by countries that try to pursue intermittent renewable power to the limit. Unthinking insistence on such policies is not the way to go.

More and more people are about to realize, that supplying the world with stable energy from sun and wind only, will be impossible, says Kalte Sonne.

Germany took on the challenge to show the world how to build a society based on green energy. They have now hit the wall.

Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last 10 years despite huge investments in green energy production capacity.

Wind Farm Victims Vindicated: WHO Declares Turbine Noise ‘Serious Health Hazard’

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This report from the WHO ought to be hard for wind power promoters and their ideology-bound supporters to ignore.

STOP THESE THINGS

The World Health Organization’s declaration that wind turbine noise is a serious health hazard, is a liability bombshell for developers and governments, alike.

No longer can wind power outfits and those that make a living running propaganda for them claim that ‘there’s nothing to see here, move on.’ The wind industry’s victims – mocked and denigrated for years – have been vindicated. Now comes the vengeance. Litigation is already on foot in Victoria, with more claims to follow.

The significance of the WHO’s new noise guidelines hasn’t been lost on STT Champions Alan Jones and Liberal MP, Craig Kelly.

Liberal MP Craig Kelly on renewables and the Paris agreement
2GB
Alan Jones and Craig Kelly
19 October 2018

Alan Jones: Look, this Wentworth stuff, seriously. Dave Sharma is an outstanding candidate, but you’ve got Kerryn Phelps. She has a profile. They’re saying in Wentworth, climate change is an issue. If…

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Tony Thomas: Christiana Figueres, the Green Fairy

Ever-polite Stan Grant tried his very best to keep Christiana Figueres drifting off in a cloud of sob-sister vapours to Warmist Land, where only the transfer of vast wealth from the West to Third World kleptocrats can foil global warming. Yes, Stan gave it his best shot, but he never had a chance

Lord Tennyson with his “tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean” has been an inspiration to Christiana Figueres (left). She was secretary-general of the top-level UN climate body UNFCCC (2010-16)  and spruiked doom on Stan Grant’s Matter of Fact show on ABC-TV on October 9.

IPCC SR15 Report lacks cost/benefit analysis of ‘Goldilocks thinking’

The UN climate report known as SR15 calls for high carbon taxes from $135 to $5,500/ton while a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg of Oct. 9, 2018 says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts are not worth it, leading the Friends of Science Society to slam the UN report as Goldilocks thinking without any rational cost-benefit analysis or practical plan.

Friends of Science says the WSJ paragraph in which Lomborg describes the economic impact on Europe of cutting emissions 80% by 2050 should be front page news in every newspaper in Europe and North America. Lomborg notes that, with a well designed and coordinated climate policy (i.e. the opposite of what European and North American governments have now), the annual costs will reach U.S. $3.3 trillion, “more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined”.

“The policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.”

Saudi Arabia puts world’s biggest solar power project on hold

Image credit: BBC

One Saudi energy official commented: “Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die”. Looks like it has run into the sand.
H/T DW.com.

Citing Saudi government officials, the US business daily Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Monday that Saudi plans to build the world’s biggest solar power generation facility had been shelved, as the desert kingdom was working on a “broader, more practical strategy to boost renewable energy.”

The solar project was expected to generate about 200 gigawatts of energy by 2030 — more than three times the country’s daily needs.

Federal auditors call out Germany’s failing green energy transition

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

Spending fortunes, having little of any benefit to show for it, and not being in control of what’s going on. That seems to be the verdict from the auditors on their government. The sums involved are eye-watering.

Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the government of a catastrophic mis-management of the green energy transition (Energiewende), reports The GWPF.

The wastage of resources is “unprecedented”. Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems.

Corbyn: I’ll create 400,000 green jobs (and destroy a million real ones)

In Spain, every ‘green job’ created led to the loss of 2.2 others in the real economy.

Meanwhile one of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs, Laura Smith, the Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich, has called for a general strike to help bring down the Conservative government – if there isn’t a general election.

She spoke at The World Transformed festival, which is running alongside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

Big Green Inc.: Inside the $4 billion U.S. foundations funding Green activists

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

Censorship and the Climate Clown Show

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has put together a 10 minute video exposing the Censorship against those who disagree with the rampant climate alarmism of the left wing establishment. The signatories to the latest clampdown on free speech are listed for posterity below the break.

Trump to California fuel standards: “You’re fired!”

Image credit: auto.ndtv.com

US Government efforts to bulldoze Americans into buying more electric cars seem to be over.

Driven by Green ideology, the Obama Administration set unrealistic fuel standards (a.k.a. “CAFE” rules) for cars sold in America, says CFACT.

Yesterday, the Trump Administration announced it is putting a freeze on their implementation before any serious damage is done.

Wind energy’s big disposal problem

German wind farm

Optimism – or is it wishful thinking? – may not be unusual among so-called greens, but merely hoping for solutions after creating the problems doesn’t look like much of a strategy.

Germany has more than 28,000 wind turbines — but many are old and by 2023 more than a third must be decommissioned. Disposing of them is a huge environmental problem.

Expert Jan Tessmer (coordinator on wind energy research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)) tells DW he’s optimistic.