February 12, 2025
Why wind and solar power are dying out – The New York Post

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Technique

2 September 2023 | 12:00 PM

Despite billions of dollars of investment and government subsidies, the above wind power turbines in France have proved far more expensive and more difficult to build than imagined. AFP via Getty Images

Green energy and efforts to electrify everything have been in the news lately but for all the wrong reasons.

Instead of the green energy nirvana promised by politicians and green energy advocates, the economic and physical reality is beginning to emerge.

Start with the economic realities.

Wind turbine manufacturers such as Siemens and General Electric have reported huge losses in the first half of this year, around $5 billion for the former and $1 billion for the latter.

Turbine quality control has been affected, among other problems, forcing manufacturers such as Siemens and Vestas to undertake costly warranty repairs.

In Europe, offshore wind generation has fallen short of promise, while operating costs are much higher than advertised.

Offshore wind developers in Europe and the US are canceling projects due to high material and construction costs.

In Massachusetts, AvanGrid, the developer of the 1,200 MW Commonwealth wind project, paid $48 million to exit its existing contract to sell electricity to ratepayers.

This way, the company can bid again for the project next year at an even higher price.

Nearby, the developers of Martha’s Vineyard’s 1,200 MW Southcoast Wind Project will pay about $60 million to get out of their current contract.

The state’s main electric utility, Rhode Island Energy, recently rejected the Second Revolution wind project because the contract price was too high.

Washington state Governor Jay Inslee promised that his state’s new “cap-and-invest” program would have little impact on residents’ pocketbooks. Ron Sachs – CNP

And Ørsted, the Danish government-owned company that is developing the Southfork Wind and Sunrise Wind projects on Long Island as well as the Ocean Wind project off the New Jersey coast — announced last week that, without additional subsidies and higher contract prices , it would have to write off billions of dollars in potential losses.

The result: Even though Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch emphasizes that “the energy transformation doesn’t work without wind power,” there will be 16% less new wind-power in 2022 than in 2021, according to the American Clean Power Association. Potential seen.

In New Jersey, the legislature passed a law in July to bail out Oersted, which is potentially unconstitutional.

The legislation would award the company billions of dollars in investment tax credits that should have gone to consumers.

Now gas prices in Washington state are among the highest in the entire country. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On dry lands, opposition to land-swallowing wind and solar projects continues to grow.

Local governments in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have all rejected or banned the project.

It seems rural communities don’t want to host large-scale turbine farms—nor the high-voltage transmission lines needed to deliver electricity to power-hungry cities.

Then there are electric vehicles.

Siemens Gamesa, the wind turbine business of German manufacturer Siemens, lost nearly $5 billion last year. AFP via Getty Images

Ford, which has bet heavily on its electric Lightning pickup and Mustang and received a $9.2 billion government-subsidized loan in January, revealed it lost $60,000 for each EV sold in the first half of this year Has happened.

Another EV company, Rivian, managed to reduce its losses per EV to about $33,000, a vast improvement from the $67,000 loss per EV in the first quarter of the year.

Proterra, the Bay Area-based maker of electric buses and batteries whose $10 million loan was forgiven by the Biden administration, recently filed for bankruptcy.

like a magician the Wizard of OzAlternative energy proponents claim these are only temporary potholes on the road to economic and climate nirvana – all of which can be filled with more money through renegotiated power purchase contracts and more zero-emissions mandates.

An employee works on the factory floor of e-car start-up Rivian. reuters

The alternative energy craze – and that’s it – has had its biggest impact in California.

But New York and New Jersey have adopted most of that state’s mandates.

States will ban the sale of new internal combustion vehicles from 2035. All electricity sold to retail consumers must be “zero-emission”.

Homeowners and building owners will be forced to replace gas and oil burning space and water heaters with electric heat pumps.

And, the gas stove will be voted out of existence.

New York will also soon implement another California import: a carbon “cap-and-invest” program, which would tax fossil fuels sold by wholesalers and utilities.

The billions of dollars collected each year would provide a green slush fund, allowing governors and legislators to hand out money to their politically favored peers, as has often been the case in the past.

Washington state launched its “cap-and-invest” program in January of this year.

Along the lines of California, Governor Jay Inslee promised that the program would have “minimal impact, if any.” We’re talking about money.

Instead, the program has raised gasoline prices — by about 50 cents per gallon so far this year. Washington state now claims the honor of having the highest gasoline prices in the country: in Seattle, for example, the average price of regular gasoline is more than $5 a gallon.,

Electric vehicle maker Rivian has cut its per-EV loss in half to about $33,000 — less than half of what it started earlier this year. Getty Images

Of course, the whole point of the program was to raise the prices of gasoline and fossil fuels to encourage consumers to switch to electric vehicles, mass transit, electric heat pumps, etc.

But politics being what it is, Governor Inslee, along with environmentalists and legislative backers, now blames greedy oil companies for the price hike.

The governor said at the press conference on July 20, 2023, ‘We will not stand for corporate greed.’

Once New York’s cap-and-invest program kicks in, probably next year, you can expect a similar result: higher prices for gasoline and diesel, used to heat homes and apartment buildings. The high prices of natural gas and fuel oil, and the endless political demagoguery to condemn it all.

France has been able to wean itself off fossil fuels by investing in nuclear power – which the country has proven can be produced safely. ZUMAPRESS.com

As the push toward electric-everything-powered green energy barrels on, proponents are also refusing to face basic physical realities.

Only one-sixth of the total energy use comes from electricity.

The rest is used for fossil fuel transportation, space and water heating, and manufacturing.

Convert everything to electricity and electricity consumption will increase. Very.

New York will meet that increased demand by building about 15,000 MW of offshore wind and more than 40,000 MW of solar panels, according to the New York Climate Action Committee’s final scoping plan. (By comparison, the emissions-free Indian Point Nuclear Plant, which was forced to close by former governor Cuomo, had a capacity of a little over 1,000 megawatts.)

Siemens CEO Christian Bruch has stressed his insistence that wind power is the key to solving the global energy crisis. DPA/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, keeping the lights on will require far more backup resources.

This “reserve margin” – basically, the amount of generation capacity available to try and meet electricity demand – would need to increase from the current 20% to more than 100%.

In other words, for every megawatt of generation capacity in 2040, the same amount or more will be needed in reserve.

It’s like buying a second car and keeping it idle all the time, if the first one doesn’t start.

The scoping plan claims this will be accomplished by building more than 20,000 MW of so-called “dispatchable emissions-free generation resources” (DEFR) and installing more than 12,000 MW of battery storage.

Those claims are fictitious.

Start with DEFRs, which are generators that burn pure hydrogen created from surplus wind and solar power.

They have not yet been invented (we repeat – they don’t exist yet, Nor do any large scale commercial plants exist for manufacturing green hydrogen.

Hydrogen cannot be transported in existing natural gas pipelines.

An entirely new infrastructure would need to be created.

To assume that politicians will invent new technology by any date is foolish.

Technology doesn’t work like that.

Danish electricity giant Ørsted has invested heavily in the US market – and suffered huge losses. If the company does not get subsidies and cash in the future, it will have billions of dollars in additional losses in the US. Doug Kuntz

Ask everyone working on commercial fusion energy, that’s only 30 years away from the last 50.

As far as battery storage is concerned, 12,000 MW would provide a maximum of 48,000 MW-hours of actual power.

That may sound like a lot, but based on a recent forecast from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), on windless and cold winter evenings in 2040, the lights will be on for just one hour.

The material requirements for the batteries are also staggering, which is one reason existing internal combustion cars and trucks will be impossible to replace.

Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo mine copper and cobalt, rare and precious materials needed to manufacture electric batteries. Getty Images

The batteries required large amounts of cobalt, much of which is now mined in the Congo using child and slave labor.

They also need a lot of graphite, much of which comes from China – along with rare minerals needed for wind turbines and solar panels.

Ultimately, nothing New York does will have any measurable effect on the world climate because the state’s carbon emissions are so small compared to the 35 billion metric tons of total global emissions.

New York’s efforts will have little environmental value unless China, which accounts for nearly a third of world energy-related carbon emissions, India and other developing countries focus policies on economic growth rather than emissions reductions.

Miners in China, where materials such as graphite are mined and used to make electric batteries. NurPhoto via Getty Images

Yet, if politicians and environmentalists were serious about zero-emissions goals, they would abandon the electrification mandate, and abandon reliance on wind, solar, battery storage, DEFR, green hydrogen and other unrealistic and unreliable energy sources.

Instead, they will embrace the existing technology they dare not name: nuclear power.

Unlike wind and solar power, nuclear plants run all the time.

New, smaller modular reactors will provide greater safety, lower cost and easier scalability to meet increased electricity demand.

The buses are made by California-based electric vehicle company Protera, which recently announced it was filing for bankruptcy. Getty Images

Storing spent fuel is a political issue, not a technical one, for which the best solution is to recycle and reuse it, as France has done without incident for the past half century.

The country is also developing a permanent storage site for nuclear waste that can no longer be reprocessed.

Economist Herb Stein once quipped that whatever can’t go on forever, won’t last.

This is true of New York’s current alternative energy craze.

It won’t save the world, but it will plague the state’s economy and its residents until the stupidity becomes too great to ignore.

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Jonathan Lesser is the Chair of Continental Economics and an Adjunct Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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