Clean , Green and Catastrophic : Many more "Green" failures on the way
Terence Corcoran: Clean, green and catastrophic
Terence Corcoran | April 1, 2016 10:30 AM ET
More from Terence Corcoran | @terencecorcoran
There are signs of green economic turmoil everywhere
Green and clean, that’s how politicians all over the world like to describe their national energy profiles. From Europe to North America to China, action plans and policies are in place, subsidies have been dispersed and new ideas are in constant production. In Washington Thursday, Prime Minister Trudeau brought his Liberal green message to Washington, telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that green industries are the backbone of a strong economy.
Maybe it depends on what “backbone” means and on one’s definition of a “strong economy.” The latest news on green and clean energy fails to support the standard definitions of either concept. In the wake of government action around the world, industrial plants are closing, so-called green operations are failing, prices are soaring, subsidies are rampant, jobs are being lost, competitiveness eroded and energy consumers, especially the poor, are threatened by regressive carbon taxes.
What’s green and clean is turning catastrophic.
Scanning news stories and the work of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, there are signs of green economic turmoil everywhere. Here’s a sampling, in no particular order.
Albengoa, the Spanish green-energy giant, filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. this week. With help from subsidies, the company built giant wind and solar farms all over the world, from Arizona to Uruguay. Shares once worth $25 are now all but worthless.
In a posting this week, Benny Peiser, head of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, urged the British government to delay carbon-control plans and scrap the country’s unilateral Carbon Floor Price, which is contributing to a crisis in the U.K. steel sector and other energy-intensive industries.
One of those U.K. steel companies, owned by Tata of India, is up for sale with no buyer in sight, threatening thousands of jobs and generating a national economic crisis that forced Prime Minister David Cameron to end a personal vacation and fly home. Among the causes of the steel crisis: green energy and carbon taxes.
In China, the National Energy Administrator has stopped approving wind turbinesbecause energy is being wasted and parts of the national grid are being disrupted.
China has claimed to be on a big green streak. It may be closing old coal plants and steel mills that produce smog, but it is not doing all that much on the carbon front. If dirty coal plants are closed, they are replaced by cleaner coal and gas — that is, fossil fuels.
The Wall Street Journal reports that many U.S. states — Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Utah and others — are thinking of cutting back on subsidies to homes with solar panels. “What is in danger of being overlooked is the harm inflicted on the 96 per cent of our customers who do not have solar.” Those non-solar customers pick up the subsidy.
Sunedison, the U.S. clean-energy giant and a Wall Street darling, appears to beheading for bankruptcy.
Subsidies to wind appear to be soaring in Ontario. The website Wind Concerns reportsthat for the first two months of this year, 425,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind power were spilled — which means power consumers will have to pay $120 per MWh for wind power that never reached consumers or was not produced. On an annualized basis, that would add $300 million to electricity costs with no electricity to show for it.
Speaking of Ontario, a Forbes article on Wednesday details job losses and lost investment brought on by the province’s green-energy policies. “Ontario is probably the worst electricity market in the world, “ says Pierre-Olivier Pineau of the University of Montreal.
Pineau’s view of Ontario might be debated by Europeans, where green-energy policies — regulations, US$100 billion in subsidies, fracking bans and assorted carbon prices and trading — have sent European electricity prices through the roof. Robert Bryce, in a review for the Manhattan Institute, reports that, since 2005, industrial electricity prices rose 133 per cent in the U.K., 64 per cent in Spain, 49 per cent in France and an average 46 per cent across the EU. Is this a model for North America?
In Germany, the business paper Handelsblatt last week ran a feature. “How to Kill an Industry: Germany’s massive push into renewable ener...” Utilities are losing billions, surplus energy is being dumped on neighbouring countries and industries are moving to Asia.
Another green-energy fantasy, the Powerwall, just bit the dust. Touted not too long ago by Elon Musk, the US$5 billion e-car subsidy grabber, the Powerwall was seen as a potential miracle electricity-storage system for homeowners. It was scrapped this week. Never mind the economics, the chemistry didn’t work.
Speaking of Telsa, the multi-billion-dollar electric-car subsidy seeker on Thursday announced its new Model 3, a $35,000, smaller e-car that still qualifies for $8,000 in subsidies at the retail level for buyers.
Carbon taxes, promoted by Trudeau and President Obama, come with big social costs that few want to talk about. A 2009 U.S. study estimates that the carbon-tax burden is a giant regressive tax that is likely to fall disproportionately on people with lower income. There may be fixes to the punishing impact, but none appear to be all that easy to implement.
Finally, a survey of top executives conducted for KPMG and The Globe and Mail shows that more than 50 per cent believe the objective of completely eliminating fossil fuel use by 2050 is “not worthwhile.” Nobody said it might lead to another green catastrophe, but that wasn’t one of the choices in the survey questions.
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Comment by arthur qwenk on April 2, 2016 at 11:26pm
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Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law
Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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