Provinces agree on nuclear energy plan for small reactors to reduce emissions - The Globe and Mail - "The governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a nuclear plan they say will move them toward cleaner energy. On Monday, the provinces’ energy ministers agreed to a proposal for small modular reactors. The first 300-megawatt plant is to be built in Darlington, Ont., east of Toronto, by 2028. Two advanced reactors are to be developed in New Brunswick by 2030, and Saskatchewan could break ground on its own site by the mid-2030s. The provinces hope the reactors will eventually help phase out coal-produced electricity in Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick and provide a steady power supply to complement renewable energy sources like wind, solar and battery storage. The transition is part of the provinces’ goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050... The plan aims to meet domestic energy needs, curb greenhouse gas emissions and make Canada a global leader in clean technologies. That includes positioning Canada as an exporter of SMR technology. Ontario Energy Minister Todd Smith said Canadian technology is already attracting private investment from Poland. Synthos Green Energy is teaming up with nuclear parts supplier BWXT Canada to build up to 10 reactors in Poland by the early 2030s. “The war in Ukraine right now has certainly heightened countries’ need for energy autonomy,” said Smith who added it will open up export opportunities for the provinces and create jobs... Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have worked together to advance small modular reactors in Canada since 2019. Alberta joined last April. Saskatchewan and Alberta do not currently use nuclear energy, but Ontario and New Brunswick do. Permanent storage for waste will be needed as provinces transition to nuclear energy. John Gorman, president of the Canadian Nuclear Association, said nuclear waste – or spent fuel – will be stored in gigantic cement casks underground in Ontario. “It’s important to note spent fuel has never hurt anyone, let alone killed anyone, in Canada or around the world”... “Uranium is about one million times more energy dense than coal for example. For any of us, the amount of uranium it would take to power our entire lives: transportation, homes, everything – it would fit in a coke bottle”"
Meme - ""Green" capitalism to address climate change is invading/ couping every country necessary in order to get enough resources for the batteries required for enough electric cars for white people in the US and Europe"
Meme - "When the peasants start complaining that they can't afford gas.
Let them buy Teslas"
Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies - "Electric police cars are running out of charge when responding to emergencies because the blue lights and sirens drain the batteries, it has been suggested. Officers using environmentally friendly vehicles in rural areas are also struggling to locate charging points, raising questions about their effectiveness. The vast majority of constabularies in England and Wales now include electric vehicles in their fleet, with the Metropolitan Police pledging to be 100 per cent electric by 2030... vehicles using their lights, radio and heater were in danger of "running out of puff"... The Government has pledged to ban the production of all new diesel and petrol vehicles by 2030, leaving police forces urgently looking for alternatives. But the increasing amount of technology carried in them – such as Automatic Number Plate Recognition computers and sophisticated radio equipment – affects battery range."
Virtue signalling over climate change is more important than fighting crime
Tesla Asks Texans To Limit Charging Cars During Heat Wave As Wind Power Slows - "Texas uses a mix of fossil fuels and renewables to keep its electrical grid running. When major heat waves move through the state, wind power is often decreased due to a change in pressure in the atmosphere. Thus, the state’s wind turbines are failing to produce the necessary amount of energy to keep the grid operating without significant problems. Texas has experienced similar issues in recent years due to extreme weather — including winter storms... “Texas has spent $66 billion of taxpayer money on renewable energy with the promise of 30,000 MW of capacity,” he said in an emailed statement. “According to ERCOT for the last few days it has generated far less than that.”... “This is the ongoing lie about green energy,” Turner continued. “Capacity is not a valid metric since it is dependent on unknowable wind and sun. The electric grid requires constancy yet it is being sourced with a persistent variable. This is the application of the social sciences, political philosophy, and equity studies to the hard science — not engineering and physics.”... “Texans are sent warnings to raise their air condition temperature and not use appliances like washing machines,” Turner clarified. “These are the messages sent to the developing world, yet in the name of ‘progress’ Texans are taking steps backward in their quality of life.” Turner also pointed out that the state is currently being assisted by fossil fuels — the kind demonized by leftists — to keep the grid afloat."
The big looming problem with old EVs: It’s really, really hard to change the battery - "virtually no B.C. dealer had ever installed a post-warranty battery, and they even struggled to quote him a price. “They keep referring you to Nissan Canada, who refer you back to your local dealer,” said Brander, adding, “this problem is going to get bigger as more of these Leaf’s start to lose their range.”... their vehicle’s most critical component — the battery pack — is often difficult to replace. As the electric vehicle revolution hits Canadian roads in earnest, many of those cars might end up hitting the junkyard far sooner than buyers suspect. The National Post conducted an informal survey of Western Canadian Nissan dealerships to ask the cost of replacing a battery pack on a 2013 Nissan Leaf. Estimates ranged from $8,000 to an eyewatering $30,953.28 plus $1,200 in labour. Virtually every dealer contacted said they had never once performed a non-warranty battery replacement, and that ordering a full stack replacement is a complex process unlike any other Nissan component. “It’s not a normal process,” said one Vancouver Island dealer. Scott Waddle is the owner of Precision Auto Service, a Vancouver-area mechanic specializing in electric vehicles. He says he’s unable to acquire aftermarket batteries direct from Nissan, and thus all of his battery replacements have to be done using salvaged components from written-off vehicles... “we need to keep these cars on the road. It’s an environmental disaster if these cars get thrown away every 10 years.”... A spokesman with Nissan Canada confirmed with the National Post that a replacement battery for a 2011-2017 Nissan Leaf retails at $11,533 plus installation for both the 24 kWh version and the 40 kWh version. Batteries are not cheap, and on competing makes of electric vehicles, their replacement quickly comes to rival the cost of the vehicle itself. The battery pack for the Chevy Bolt — which was introduced to Canada in 2017 — currently retails for US$12,341.88 ($15,427.97). Without accounting for labour and shop costs, that’s already 40 per cent the cost of a brand new 2022 Bolt. Most Tesla vehicles on Canadian roads are still within their original eight-year, 160,000 km battery warranty. Nevertheless, last year, the owner of a Tesla Model 3 in Illinois experienced a rare example of a non-warrantied battery replacement when the vehicle’s power pack was damaged by a rock. The final bill came in at US$16,500 ($20,000), which also represents a significant proportion of the price of a new Model 3 (CDN $44,999). The high cost of battery replacement is also why Teslas have been found to have a higher “claim severity” on insurance than comparable luxury vehicles... early model EVs can dramatically lose charge well before the vehicle has even approached 150,000 km. This has been particularly apparent in early model Leafs, with some of the car’s first models becoming notorious for their quickly degrading batteries... “Nissan’s not in the business of keeping these things running forever, they want you to come and buy a new car. That’s their business model and it’s not a secret,” said Sale. “They want to make maintaining the old vehicle so cost prohibitive that you just buy a new one.”"
Bigger batteries in EVs could lead to colossal boost in particulate emissions—from tires, study suggests - "Putting bigger battery packs in EVs can boost range, but a new study suggests it could also lead to a major increase in particulate emissions—from tires. The study comes from Emissions Analytics, a U.K.-based independent emissions testing firm. It first began sounding the alarm in 2020, publishing a study showing that tire-wear particulate emissions were 1,000 times worse than tailpipe emissions."
The Gas Tax is Running on Empty. How Governments Plan to Target Electric Vehicles Next - "it seems axiomatic that no government would allow an ample source of revenue to disappear without replacing it with something else. Taxes are the lifeblood of the public sector, after all. Or as Kitchen puts it: “They’re going to have to figure out how the heck they are going to make up for all that money.” So what will the disappearance of the gas tax mean for Canadian EV drivers? For a glimpse into the future, look south of the border... Oregon and Utah have the only two permanent road usage programs operating in the U.S., although Virginia is set to roll out its own next year. As a result, both states are well-versed in selling the concept of road usage fees and rebutting the most commonly-heard objections – in particular privacy and choice. “Privacy is our number one issue,” stresses Oregon’s Godfrey. Participants in OReGO can choose a private company, rather than government, to handle their mileage data and collect fees owing. Utah offers similar options, and neither state actively tracks their participants. Feigenbaum stresses that privacy protection and giving drivers a choice in who and how they pay will be crucial to convincing U.S. drivers to accept such a novel replacement to the familiar gas tax. “Americans are very concerned about Big Brother”... Saskatchewan became the first province to require that electric vehicle owners contribute to their own road use by paying a new annual registration fee of $150... Yet Saskatchewan’s modest attempt at bringing fairness to road costs triggered instant pushback from EV owners... Asking electric vehicle owners to pay for the roads they use will imperil the uptake of electric vehicles, he claimed. Rather, they should continue to drive the roads for free. Saving the planet, it seems, must always be subsidized... Utah’s first option is a yearly odometer reading accompanying annual vehicle registration... The other scenario includes the possibility of inserting a GPS-linked device in every vehicle to transmit mileage data and calculate miles owing on a monthly basis... Some of the opportunities created by all this additional data could be benign or even beneficial for drivers. With GPS tracking, for example, it could be possible to compensate drivers for time spent on roads in other states; this might mean a lower monthly fee payment if other states do not charge road-usage fees, or charge at a lower rate. Utah has also proposed that drivers may be able to access their own data, which could provide additional advantages for accounting or travel planning purposes. It could also be possible to charge drivers different rates depending on whether they drive on expensive-to-maintain urban roads and freeways or on cheaper country roads, offering a potential bouquet to the rural community. But by far the biggest attraction of GPS-connected road usage charges is that they open the door for a comprehensive system of congestion charges and road tolls... Feigenbaum admits there is a risk activists may demand much higher per-mile fees to further their anti-car agendas"
The unintended consequences of the Trudeau government banning gas-powered cars by 2035 - "Charging infrastructure isn’t even close to being ready. There are about 12,000 gas stations across Canada, ranging from massive southern Ontario truck stops to mom-and-pop filling stations strewn along the Alaska Highway. As per Natural Resources Canada, the country has 6,800 charging stations. While that sounds comparable, keep in mind that most charging stations only have two or three ports, and that a “fill-up” can take between 20 and 40 minutes. For now, the average EV driver is disproportionately likely to live in a detached home that they can rig up with a 240-volt charging station. But if EVs are going to represent 100 per cent of all sales in 13 years, they’re increasingly going to need to be owned by Canadians who live in condos or apartments. Any resident of the Canadian Prairies is used to the wintertime sight of extension cords haphazardly strung overtop sidewalks to charge the block heater of a vehicle parked on the street; those owners would presumably have a similar problem rigging up a reliable place to charge their EV. The other issue is that this is all happening without any apparent plans to ramp up Canadian electricity production. California, which has enacted a similar 2035 ban on internal combustion engines, is already experiencing acute electricity shortages that are forcing the state to lean on oil-fired power plants in order to avoid the need for rolling blackouts.
Expect the price of used cars to go way up...
owning an internal combustion vehicle? It’s easier to fix. While there’s no telling what the next 13 years may yield, any EV owner currently looking to get their car fixed faces a deficit of qualified mechanics at best, and a Kafkaesque nightmare at worst... Internationally, the most glaring example of a sudden halt to a supply of new vehicles is in Cuba, where U.S. trade bans beginning in 1962 forced the country to strenuously maintain a fleet of 1950s-era cars well into the 21st century. The effect on Canadian roads won’t be nearly as dramatic, but the average 2030s car owner will likely be incentivized to pay more for extending the life of their car when it’s increasingly the last of its generation...
vehicle-hoarding may be about to strike the Canadian car market. Particularly when Western governments happen to be phasing out gas-powered vehicles at the precise moment that manufacturers are churning out some of the best internal-combustion cars ever made. “This is the absolute golden age for internal combustion cars right now,” said Caleb Bernabe, co-founded of VINN, a Canadian online marketplace for new and used vehicles."
Sobering stats for the EV Revolution - "More than half, or 53 per cent, of consumers polled say they are either “very unlikely” or “somewhat unlikely” to consider an EV for their next vehicle purchase. South of the border, 59 per cent of consumers say they are either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to consider an EV for their next purchase... nearly half (49 per cent) of those who own an EV say they will consider another EV for their next vehicle purchase... geographic location plays a big part in EV consideration. The study found that rate is highest in Western Canada, with 59 per cent of British Columbia consumers showing interest in EV ownership, 50 per cent in Quebec, 47 per cent in and Ontario, and 38 per cent in the Prairies. Atlantic Canada residents, at 35 per cent, showed the least interest."
It's telling that more than half of those who own an EV won't even consider another EV
The Electric-Vehicle Unicorn Crash - WSJ - "A parade of electric-vehicle startups have gone public in recent years and commanded multibillion-dollar valuations—Rivian, Nikola, Canoo, Lordstown, Fisker, Workhorse Group, Mullen Automotive and Lucid. Most had never sold a single car at their public debut. Fueled by cheap credit and political subsidies, their stocks surged, only to crash. Their ambitions were ahead of reality. The same is true of Democrats who want to replace gasoline-powered cars with supposedly climate-friendly electric vehicles. Consider the problems now befalling China, the world leader in electric-vehicle production and exports. Beijing has set aggressive production quotas for car makers and provided generous subsidies for buyers. China’s annual electric-vehicle production capacity has ballooned to 5.7 million vehicles—for comparison, 434,879 electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. last year—and is expected to hit 15 million in a couple of years. Yet concerns are mounting in China about oversupply of what the country calls new energy vehicles. “Reckless investments and disorderly efforts can be seen in the country’s NEV industry,” Lin Nianxiu, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, warned in March. “We have too many EV firms,” Xiao Yaqing, minister of industry and information technology, said in September. Some 200 Chinese EV startups have launched in the chase for government subsidies. Many have struggled to scale up production, and some have gone bankrupt. Foreign auto makers, possibly excepting Tesla, are struggling to sell electric vehicles in a saturated Chinese market. China’s problem is twofold: too much investment chasing too little demand, and too many companies with too little profit. The U.S. is starting to see the same problems. Almost all EV startups went public by merging with SPACs, or special-purpose acquisition companies. That allowed them to avoid required financial disclosures and make exceedingly rosy business projections. The Federal Reserve encouraged risky investing by holding down short- and long-term interest rates. Easy money provided an enormous subsidy. But now the cost of capital is rising as the Fed tightens, and so are production costs as prices for lithium, nickel and cobalt surge. Rivian recently increased the price of its pickup truck by $12,000, to $79,500, to offset rising costs. These so-called unicorns are rapidly burning through cash... Electric vehicles have some advantages. They are cheaper to maintain. Charging a car with electricity in most places costs less than fueling with gasoline. But electric cars are still on average 35% more expensive than gas-powered ones, and the price disparity is likely to increase as demand for critical minerals grows. Most EVs today can’t go more than 250 miles on a charge (and less in cold weather). Drivers worry for good reason that they’ll run out of juice on the road. President Biden hopes to alleviate this so-called range anxiety by subsidizing a nationwide network of charging stations. This won’t solve the problem. Public charging stations are nowhere more ubiquitous than in California’s Bay Area. But a recent study found that less than three-quarters of charging stations worked. In many cases the plugs, screens or payment systems were broken, or connector cables weren’t long enough to reach the car’s port. Imagine if 25% of the nation’s gasoline stations weren’t working and drivers didn’t know until they got out of the car whether they’d be able to fill up. Much still needs to be worked out before widespread adoption of EVs is feasible. Yet the Biden administration and states like California plan to use fuel-economy and emissions mandates to force auto makers to phase out conventional vehicles. What happens if electric cars don’t sell? Perhaps auto makers would lobby politicians for higher gasoline taxes to boost EV sales, as they are doing in Europe. More likely they’d discount electric cars and raise prices on gasoline-powered ones to compensate. The alternative would be bankruptcy. Mr. Biden says he wants to beat China in the electric-vehicle race. Americans would be better off if government didn’t try to drive the market."
The EV revolution: The road ahead for critical raw materials demand - "Mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is anticipated in the years ahead, driven primarily by policy incentives, rising incomes, and technological advancements. However, mass adoption is predicated on the availability and affordability of the raw materials required to facilitate this transformation. The implications of material shortages are currently not well understood and previous research tends to be limited by weak representation of technological change, a lack of regional disaggregation, often inflexible and opaque assumptions and drivers, and a failure to place insights in the broader context of the raw materials industries. This paper proposes a CoMIT (Cost, Macro, Infrastructure, Technology) model that can be used to analyse the impact of mass EV adoption on critical raw materials demand and forecasts that, by 2030, demand for vehicles will increase by 27.4%, of which 13.3% will be EVs. The model also predicts large increases in demand for certain base metals, including a 37 and 18-fold increase in demand for cobalt and lithium (relative to 2015 levels), respectively. Without major changes in certain technologies, the cobalt and lithium supply chains could seriously constrain the widespread deployment of EVs. Significant demand increases are also predicted for copper, chrome and aluminium. The results also highlight the importance of China in driving demand for EVs and the critical materials needed to produce them."
Oxford students vote to ban beef and lamb from university - " The Oxford Student Union passed the motion banning beef and lamb at a recent meeting. Students feel the campus ban at canteens, libraries and other university buildings would help the University of Oxford reach its climate change goals... “The university has a commitment to anti-racism, and this requires urgent action to minimise greenhouse emissions.”... If the ban goes ahead, the university would be following in the footsteps of the University of Cambridge which removed beef and lamb from its menus in October 2016."
Bjørn Lomborg - Posts | Facebook - "Ever-lower death risk from climate-related natural disasters. Over the past hundred years, the climate-related death risk has dropped by 99+%... This is clearly the opposite of what you normally hear, but that is because we're often just being told of one disaster after another – telling us how *many* events are happening. The number of reported events is increasing, but that is mainly due to better reporting, lower thresholds and better accessibility (the CNN effect). For instance, for Denmark, the database only shows events starting from 1976."
Ryan Orbuch on Twitter - "Here's your reminder that the whole idea of a personal carbon footprint was a targeted BP media campaign in 2005 and it worked so well that it seems like we've all forgotten this"
Meme - "WHO WANTS TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE?"
"WHO WANTS TO TELL CHINA, WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE THIRD OF ALL GLOBAL EMISSIONS, TO REDUCE ITS POLLUTION SO WE CAN STOP CLIMATE CHANGE?"
Greta Thunberg: "HOW DARE YOU!"
China's greenhouse gas emissions exceed U.S., developed world: Report - "China is now responsible for more than 27% of total global emissions. The U.S., which is the world’s second-highest emitter, accounts for 11% of the global total. India is responsible for 6.6% of global emissions, edging out the 27 nations in the EU, which account for 6.4%, the report said... Chinese officials have also emphasized that economic growth, which is still largely dependent on coal power, remains a priority. And the nation is still increasing construction of coal-fired power plants."
Clearly more Western virtue signalling and self-flagellation will solve the "climate crisis"
Patricia Adams: China's energy actions speak louder than its climate pledges - "China’s Achilles heel is its dependence on foreign sources for its oil and gas, a vulnerability that the country’s super-planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, admitted last year for the first time. In its 2020 annual report to China’s official decision-making body, the National People’s Congress, it barely mentioned climate change as China instead pledged to “ensure energy security” to “improve our contingency plans in response to major changes in supply and demand at home and abroad.”... China’s dependence on foreigners for its oil has grown steadily. In 2008, its dependence on foreign oil reached 50 per cent for the first time. Last year, it was 73 per cent. The trend is especially worrying to China because, while its oil imports increased by 7.3 per cent last year, its domestic production inched up a mere 1.6 per cent. Despite its drive for self-sufficiency, Chinese production since 2017 has stalled at 3.8-3.9 million barrels per day. Moreover, most of its oil and gas imports pass through chokeholds — in the South China Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and especially the Strait of Malacca, connecting the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, through which roughly 80 per cent of China’s imported oil transits. China’s energy imports transit sea lanes controlled by other states, making its position precarious in the event of possible conflicts with Taiwan, Japan, India, or the U.S. The recent six-day blockage in the Suez Canal of a ship laden with Chinese goods only added to the urgency China feels in wanting to guarantee its security. China’s determination to better secure its fossil-fuel supplies can be seen in its militarization of the South China Seas, where its navy, the world’s largest, protects both oil and gas tanker routes into China and the far-flung offshore oil and gas resources it is claiming. China has also been willing to risk U.S. sanctions by surreptitiously purchasing Iranian oil. To minimize its vulnerability to interruptions at sea, China has also been aggressively developing overland oil and gas routes from Russia, from Burma, and from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang, China’s far-western Muslim province, whose Uighur population it sees as a security threat... Developing the fossil fuels that China needs to meet its strategic economic and military goals is a top priority. Climate-change targets just don’t figure in China’s grand schemes, except for propaganda purposes or to extract subsidies or trade concessions. President Xi may well promise to do more on climate change in exchange for the West turning a blind eye to its treatment of Uighurs or relaxing tariffs on its exports, and the West may well accept his promises, knowing full well they won’t be kept, so as to maintain the pretence of progress on the climate-change file. Climate change is a charade both sides act out for their mutual benefit."
Too bad the Chinese don't care about virtue signalling, so it will become stronger as the West destroys itself
Facebook - "China: not yet green. China's renewable fraction (biomass, hydro, solar, wind etc) 40% in 1971 when poor (wood, dung) As average Chinese got 35x richer over the period, fossil fuels maxed at 92% in 2011, now at 88% in 2019"
Terry Glavin: Coal-spewing China has taken the world's climate hostage - "Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, Chinese banks have emerged as the top 10 lenders for coal financing around the world. The main investors: the Bank of China, China CITIC Bank, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. It’s a profitable racket, with no risk of furious Chinese masses choking on coal pollution. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air has found that China’s overseas coal projects, in some of the world’s poorest countries, produce pollution up to seven times as toxic as China’s domestic standards allow."
Nuclear Energy Is Not a Solution for Global Warming | HuffPost Impact
Could A Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming? | HuffPost Impact
Amazing. The first article is written by Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor of Climate Science at Rutgers University. But Climate Science is not based in reality anyway
The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid | MIT Technology Review - "These batteries are far too expensive and don’t last nearly long enough, limiting the role they can play on the grid, experts say. If we plan to rely on them for massive amounts of storage as more renewables come online—rather than turning to a broader mix of low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas with carbon capture technology—we could be headed down a dangerously unaffordable path. Today’s battery storage technology works best in a limited role, as a substitute for “peaking” power plants... But much beyond this role, batteries run into real problems. The authors of the 2016 study found steeply diminishing returns when a lot of battery storage is added to the grid. They concluded that coupling battery storage with renewable plants is a “weak substitute” for large, flexible coal or natural-gas combined-cycle plants, the type that can be tapped at any time, run continuously, and vary output levels to meet shifting demand throughout the day. Not only is lithium-ion technology too expensive for this role, but limited battery life means it’s not well suited to filling gaps during the days, weeks, and even months when wind and solar generation flags. This problem is particularly acute in California, where both wind and solar fall off precipitously during the fall and winter months. This leads to a critical problem: when renewables reach high levels on the grid, you need far, far more wind and solar plants to crank out enough excess power during peak times to keep the grid operating through those long seasonal dips, says Jesse Jenkins, a coauthor of the study and an energy systems researcher. That, in turn, requires banks upon banks of batteries that can store it all away until it’s needed. And that ends up being astronomically expensive. There are issues California can’t afford to ignore for long. The state is already on track to get 50 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2020, and the legislature is once again considering a bill that would require it to reach 100 percent by 2045. To complicate things, regulators voted in January to close the state’s last nuclear plant, a carbon-free source that provides 24 percent of PG&E’s energy. That will leave California heavily reliant on renewable sources to meet its goals. The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy policy think tank, recently found that reaching the 80 percent mark for renewables in California would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. Achieving 100 percent would require 36.3 million. The state currently has 150,000 megawatt-hours of energy storage in total. (That’s mainly pumped hydroelectric storage, with a small share of batteries.) Building the level of renewable generation and storage necessary to reach the state’s goals would drive up costs exponentially, from $49 per megawatt-hour of generation at 50 percent to $1,612 at 100 percent. And that's assuming lithium-ion batteries will cost roughly a third what they do now. “The system becomes completely dominated by the cost of storage,” says Steve Brick, a senior advisor for the Clean Air Task Force. “You build this enormous storage machine that you fill up by midyear and then just dissipate it. It’s a massive capital investment that gets utilized very little.” These forces would dramatically increase electricity costs for consumers. “You have to pause and ask yourself: ‘Is there any way the public would stand for that?’” Brick says. Similarly, a study earlier this year in Energy & Environmental Science found that meeting 80 percent of US electricity demand with wind and solar would require either a nationwide high-speed transmission system, which can balance renewable generation over hundreds of miles, or 12 hours of electricity storage for the whole system (see “Relying on renewables alone significantly inflates the cost of overhauling energy”). At current prices, a battery storage system of that size would cost more than $2.5 trillion. Of course, cheaper and better grid storage is possible, and researchers and startups are exploring various possibilities... But it’s dangerous to bank on those kinds of battery breakthroughs—and even if Form Energy or some other company does pull it off, costs would still rise exponentially beyond the 90 percent threshold... “The risk,” Jenkins says, “is we drive up the cost of deep decarbonization in the power sector to the point where the public decides it’s simply unaffordable to continue toward zero carbon.”"
Renewable Energy Curtailment 101: The Problem That’s Actually Not a Problem At All
It's "not a problem" if you throw even more money down the drain just to pursue the "renewables" fetish
Japan Quietly Endorses Fossil Fuel Investments Weeks After COP - Bloomberg - "It’s been less than a month since world leaders pledged to combat climate change at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, yet Japan is already showing signs of putting the brakes on divestment from fossil fuels. Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects... The officials are concerned about the long-term supply of traditional fuels as the world doubles down on renewable energy, the people said. The import-dependent nation wants to avoid a potential shortage of fuel this winter, as well as during future cold spells, after a deficit last year sparked fears of nationwide blackouts... To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the world needs to stop developing new gas, oil and coal fields, the International Energy Agency said in May. Japanese officials are echoing concerns highlighted by Australia last month, which said Europe’s gas supply squeeze is proof that nations need to continue to add more production."
This was before Ukraine. The Japanese aren't as suicidal as white people
Justin Welby’s climate hysteria - "The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has clearly noticed that another, more popular religion is in town – that is, environmentalism. And so, not wanting to be left out, he is attending the COP26 gathering in Glasgow and giving his divine thoughts on the warming planet. He’s not done a particularly good job so far. In an interview with the BBC yesterday, Welby said that a political failure to act on climate change would be comparable to those who ignored the warnings about the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s... He has also been keen to say that politicians will be ‘cursed’ if they don’t adequately deal with climate change over the next fortnight. Perhaps there are personal reasons for Welby’s overzealous interventions. He may be especially keen to atone for his own sins on climate change, given he spent 11 years in the oil industry before deciding to join the Church of England in 1987. He has told journalists that people didn’t really know about climate change when he was in the black-gold trade (which is scarcely believable given the idea of global warming first gained traction in the 1980s). And now we have to endure him assuaging his guilt by threatening us with global catastrophe and politicians with a curse from God... climate alarmism is especially tempting if you are the head of a religious movement that deals in destruction and rebirth as a matter of necessity... Faced with a dwindling flock, Welby is latching on to the latest fads in whatever way he can. It hasn’t worked. The Church of Woke has delivered sermons on Black Lives Matter, climate change and gender. But none of this has pulled people back into the church’s arms. Desperate people will do and say desperate things. They might even start talking about the Nazis."
