Politicians on state public utility commissions and in state legislatures don’t have the knowledge or the courage to represent the interests of the people, rather than the interests of the manufacturers of wind and solar stations and the interests of the environmental organizations that are profiting from an artificial fear of traditional energy.

By Norman Rogers

One might think that having a quota for renewable power means that the power has to be generated by wind or solar and consumed within the state. There is a loophole. The “renewable attribute” can be legally separated from the actual power. So, the power can be consumed in one place, but a different place gets credit as if it had actually consumed the renewable power. For example, a wind farm in Colorado can generate a megawatt hour of electricity. The power is actually sold and consumed in Colorado, but California gets credit for a megawatt hour of renewable power.

The Colorado wind farm in the normal course of events can sell the abstract credit, known as an RPC or Renewable Power Certificate to California. California needs credits to meet it renewable power quota, so it is willing to pay, for what is a piece of paper. The wind farm can also sell the real electric power separately to someone who is willing to buy electricity that comes without the renewable power attribute, because the renewable power attribute has been sold to California. This is a legal way to convert power from fossil fuels into renewable power, or to meet a renewable power quota without actual renewable power.

Sometimes the certificate may be more valuable than the power. In fact, sometimes the power may literally be worth less than nothing. At certain times California has too much solar power that it can’t use because it would destabilize the grid. When the power is worth less than nothing, the producer will have to pay someone to use the power. Someone has to use the power or there can’t be a certificate. That would be a counterfeit certificate. You can’t just throw the power away. That would negate the whole rationale. You might think that any state would be happy to accept free power, but it may be inconvenient for technical or economic reasons, or it may just be that only one party is available that can take the power and they can exercise monopoly power and make the party trying to get rid of the power pay for the privilege.

A similar situation exists in the spring with wind power in the Pacific Northwest. Wind power receives a 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour subsidy from the federal government. But in the spring, there is a surplus of hydroelectric power due to plentiful rainfall. The wind power suppliers pay power consumers to take their power so they can get the federal subsidy. The hydroelectric suppliers have no motive to do the same because they don’t get a subsidy. So, the hydroelectric suppliers spill the excess water and some electricity users get paid rather than billed for their power. This is known as a market distortion caused by the government.

Often with solar power there is too much during the middle of the day and not enough later in the day. In the evening there isn’t any solar power. In California the major problem with excess solar power is in the spring, when the sunshine is kicking in, but the big consumption for air conditioning hasn’t yet kicked in. California could simply tell the solar power generating stations to cut back, but then they would lose credit toward their renewable power quota. Some contracts may even make them pay for the power that they would have received without the cutback. So, they try to get utilities in adjacent states to take the power, keeping the certificates for themselves. This was all revealed in a Los Angeles Times article. Apparently, California is paying as much as $15 a megawatt hour to unload the unusable solar power.

To see why this makes sense for California it is necessary to look at the economics of solar power. To generate solar power if there weren’t various subsidies would cost about $80 per megawatt hour. With the federal and state subsidies the cost might be reduced to $25 per megawatt hour. In contrast, the marginal cost of generating power with natural gas is $15 to $20 a megawatt hour. But the $25 renewable power runs out when the California grid can’t accept any more solar in the middle of the day. If they pay Nevada $15 to accept the excess solar, they now have a route to get renewable credits for $40 per megawatt hour, $25 for the solar power and $15 to get Nevada to accept the unusable power. Essentially by a legal strategy they are converting natural gas electricity, delivered in the evening, into renewable electricity. Nevada, on the other hand is getting electricity that is not legally renewable, even though it really does come from solar. Nevada may not want more non-renewable electricity unless they are paid for it, because Nevada has a quota for renewable power too.

The situation is more than a little strange. Propaganda from the sellers of wind and solar power makes people think that wind and solar are actually useful. Huge subsidies make wind and solar seem cheaper than they really are. The idea that introducing wind and solar in U.S. states will make a significant difference in world CO2 emissions is wrong. The real emissions problem, if it is a problem, is in Asia. People that really believe in global warming should face up to the fact that nuclear is the only route to stopping the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Some of the most important advocates of global warming catastrophe make that clear.

The most salient fact concerning wind and solar is that they are intermittent and erratic sources of power. They always have to be backed up with fossil fuel plants that take over when the sun sets or the wind stops. They never replace fossil fuel plants.

A pathetic attempt to correct the inherent problems of wind and solar is to add batteries to store power. That costs a fortune, a very high price to pay to help in meeting renewable power quotas..

The utilities know the facts. But the utilities have no incentive to stop the waste because they have figured out how to make money by promoting dubious renewable power. Apparently, the politicians on state public utility commissions and in state legislatures don’t have the knowledge or the courage to represent the interests of the people, rather than the interests of the manufacturers of wind and solar stations and the interests of the environmental organizations that are profiting from an artificial fear of traditional energy. People send money to environmental organizations because they have been convinced that catastrophes are looming.

Read the full article at the following weblink:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/renewable_power_th...

Harvard, Yale under federal investigation for shady foreign gifts

https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14374

Polls Find Americans Not Concerned About “Climate Change”

Political candidates seeking votes on the basis of their commitment to stopping “climate change” — a category that includes all the Democratic candidates for president — might want to reconsider how much emphasis they place on the subject. Two respected nationwide polls have found once again that preventing global warming is a very low priority for Americans.

The Pew Research Center recently released its survey of Americans’ opinions on the federal government’s priorities. The poll of 1,505 adults, conducted January 9–14, asked them to state whether various issues should be a “top priority” for Washington this year.

Topping the list were typical kitchen-table issues: the economy, healthcare costs, and education. Next came combating terrorism, shoring up Social Security, and protecting Medicare. Out of 18 issues in the survey, climate change placed 17th as a top priority for the government, behind such matters as improving race relations, strengthening the military, and upgrading transportation infrastructure. (Global trade came in dead last, suggesting that President Donald Trump might not want to hang his reelection hopes solely on his trade policies.)

While many more Democrats than Republicans consider climate change a top priority (67 percent versus 21 percent, respectively), the issue still isn’t in Democrats’ top five and, therefore, is unlikely to make a significant difference in the primaries, especially since most of the candidates have already declared their support for the unconstitutional, enormously expensive, economy-killing Green New Deal.

Furthermore, although climate change is now said to be a top priority by 44 percent of respondents, an increase of 18 percentage points since 2011, it has always landed at or near the bottom of the list since it was added to the poll in 2007, at which time it came in next to last. From 2008 to 2013, it ranked dead last. Since then it has returned to next to last except for 2016, where it ranked third from the bottom; perhaps coincidentally, that was also the year the issue was renamed in the poll from “global warming” to “climate change.”

Gallup takes a different approach but obtains similar results. Instead of presenting poll respondents with a list of issues, it simply asks 1,000 of them to name “the most important problem facing the country today,” a question it has been posing to Americans on a monthly basis since 2001 (and less frequently for the prior six decades).

What did Americans in 2019 identify as our nation’s “most important problem”? The top four responses were government (27 percent), immigration (18 percent), race relations (6 percent), and healthcare (6 percent). Climate change didn’t make the cut.

In fact, an examination of the monthly survey results from August 2018 to February 2019 shows that climate change was never specifically mentioned as a separate issue. There is a catchall category called “environment/pollution,” which probably includes some responses related to climate; it was named by anywhere from one to five percent of respondents, but usually two or three percent, over that period. Moreover, during the entire 2001–2019 timeframe, not once did either climate change or environment/pollution make the top four “most important” problems in the poll.

Continue reading at the following weblink:

https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/34858-polls-fi...