Subsidised plug-in cars driven on fuel

Credit: dieselstation.com

Company car drivers don’t have time to wait for recharges when working, even if they could find an available charging point, and usually they aren’t personally paying for the fuel anyway. Farcical waste of subsidies, but at least the batteries won’t be worn out when these vehicles hit the second-hand market.

Plug-in hybrids bought for fleets with subsidies may never have been charged, research for BBC shows.

Tens of thousands of plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) bought with generous government grants may be burning as much fuel as combustion-engine cars.

​Data compiled for the BBC suggests that such vehicles in corporate fleets averaged just 40 miles per gallon (mpg), when they could have done 130.

Time To Pull The Plug On Electric Vehicle Handouts For The Rich

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How long does an introductory incentive period for EVs have to go on for? The hefty subsidies have to come out of finite state budgets.

PA Pundits - International

By Nicolas Loris and David Grogan ~

Earlier this year, Congress passed an irresponsible budget bill that included handouts for electric vehicle owners and alternative fuels.

Eager to frivolously waste more taxpayer dollars, some legislators are now pushing to extend the electric vehicle tax credit and lift the cap on the number of vehicles that qualify for the credit by each manufacturer.

In 2014, 79 percent of electric vehicle tax credits went to households making over $100,000. (Photo: nrqemi/Getty Images)

Doing so would reward special interests and only benefit the wealthiest Americans. Congress should instead eliminate the subsidies for electric vehicles.

Promoted as a way to wean Americans off their alleged addiction to oil, both federal and state governments have generous handouts for electric vehicles. Consumers can use up to $7,500 of other peoples’ money to buy an electric vehicle.

Add in-state and local incentives and that number can easily top…

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Bangkok climate conference sounds alarm ahead of UN summit

Yet another climate conference?

It’s always alarm time in the climate alarm industry, obviously. This time it’s because the Paris agreement begging bowl is not filling up at anything like the required rate. The Green Climate Fund is in disarray and the US government has turned against the whole globe-trotting circus.

Time is running out to save the Paris Agreement, UN climate experts warned Tuesday at a key Bangkok meeting, as rich nations were accused of shirking their responsibility for environmental damage.

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.

Ever wonder where the 275 billion taxpayers money went that got poured down the EU carbon trading system hole?

Talkshop readers may remember a damning report by UBS about the billions of public money lost in the ETS carbon trading system. It calculated that if the money had been invested in modernising the European power generation fleet, CO2 could have been cut by 40% (and generate a huge number of high quality jobs). EU emissions rose 1.8% last year.

Despite all the recent turmoil over the UK steel industry and meetings in Brussels today, the reality is that the European Union has actually been subsidising the Chinese steel industry for years, in payments hidden amongst its efforts to combat Climate Change.

Using complex methods of carbon credits and carbon offsets, the EU devised rules on climate change ended up paying Chinese steel manufacturers billions to upgrade their steel mills and other energy intensive industry.

According to the analysis company, European Insights, almost €1.5 billion was paid to over 90 steel plants in China with the purpose of modernising them to consume less energy, and making the plants more efficient. Taken with the downturn in Chinese trade and the need for them to reduce world market prices to sell their product, the output of these mills has flooded onto the European market making steel products artificially cheap and endangering thousands of jobs in the UK. One plant alone, Anshan Iron and Steel, received a payment of €150 million to help pay for the installation of up to date equipment and replace the old inefficient Communist era machinery.

German ‘eco-friendly’ gas power plant set to be idled for third successive year

Irsching 4 gas power plant, Bavaria [image credit: E.ON]

Billed as ‘the world’s most eco-friendly fossil fuelled power plant’ when it opened in 2011, the owners say Irsching is not commercially viable due to the built-in advantages handed to part-time subsidised renewables. Meanwhile Germany continues building cheaper-to-run coal-fired power stations to help replace its nuclear fleet. A strange situation to be in.

German utility Uniper announced on Thursday that it had applied to extend the closure of its loss-making Irsching 4 and 5 gas-fired power generation plants with a capacity of 1400 MW for a third year beyond April 2019, reports PEI.

Uniper and the other owners of unit 5, N-Ergie, Mainova MNVG.DE and HSE, see no way to ensure the Bavarian plant’s commercial viability, it said in a statement.

Bad books: How Ontario’s new hydro accounting could cost taxpayers billions

Hydro power lines in Ontario

Once again the high cost of so-called ‘green’ policies turns out to be politically embarrassing, and attempts to hide the true facts seem to have made things much worse.

As Ontarians head to the polls in June, voters have to make sense of two competing versions of their province’s bottom line: The Auditor-General’s and the Kathleen Wynne government’s, reports Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

Matthew McClearn investigates how creative accounting in hydro revenue made their math so different.

Ed Hoskins: UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy installations: Installed capacity, costs and output 2017

Introduction

This post is concerned with the two main forms of UK Weather Dependent Renewable Energy in the UK, Wind Power, (Onshore and Offshore), and on grid Photovoltaic Solar Power.  In the UK these amount to ~75% of all installed Weather Dependent Renewable Energy.  The other Renewable energy inputs are traditional Hydro power ~8% and the remainder are other sources such as biomass, waste and landfill gas amounting to ~17%.

The capacity percentage, or load factor, of any power generating installation is calculated as the actual electrical output achieved annually divided by the nominal maximum Nameplate output.  This article uses the real measures of capacity reported in up to date time series data of UK Renewable installations.  It thus provides reasonably correct comparisons of the efficacy of Weather Dependent Renewables as is reported annually by the Renewable Energy Foundation in the UK.
 

Tesla faces turmoil as cashcows look nervously at share price falls.

By Jim Collins

It is amazing to me that Tesla stock closed the penultimate day of February above $350 per share and today is struggling to hold $295 per share.  The volatility in TSLA shares has bitten the longs with a 15% decline in 19 trading days, and the bulls are struggling to make coherent arguments.  That points to the most pressing issue facing Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk: time.