Energy

Today, elites like Robert Downey Jr. virtue signal their wealth by taking pristine older restored cars and paying to have them ripped apart so they run on vegetable oil. In the future, it may mean simply having an air conditioner. There is concern that the world will be warm enough by 2100 that the climate itself is changed. To prevent that, wealthy countries have begun to mandate and subsidize alternative energy like solar and wind. The success to-date has been negligible, after $4 trillion spent conventional energy's share of overall production has dropped by 0.1%, but it would be not only…

Food waste is a major problem in the developed world. People new to buying organic food are annoyed at how quickly it spoils but what if that wilted brown lettuce could be converted into energy? Anaerobic digestion hasn't been done on a large scale, the numbers don't work, but academics say it could. In a numerical model. The authors looked at supply chain logistics - potential sites, transportation, production, and facility costs, as well as revenue and return on investments. Anaerobic digestion is a biological process that decomposes organic feedstock using rich organic materials such as…

A new op-ed in Nature argues that countries which have air conditioning owe the world up to $298 trillion. And counting. That figure is virtual money. Like virtual water, or virtual pregnancy, it isn't a real thing, it is a computer model by activist economists who love to use terms like "reparations" because the modern world doesn't have people routinely freezing to death. The economists behind the paper want to give the money collected to poor countries - but they ignore why it would fail. If the stipulation is that poor countries only use it for solar and wind, and it is, then 2 billion…

Prior to natural gas hydraulic fracturing making played out gas wells viable again, America was in a real climate emissions pickle. In 1994, Democrats finally won their war of extinction on nuclear energy, they cheered as President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry(1) created regulations that act as bans and eventually forced through a series of anti-nuclear activists at the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. What had taken its place during the lag between nuclear and natural gas was coal. The thing Democrats now want to ban. The problem is that solar and wind are an adjuvant to…

To make solar power viable, there need to be gigantic installations in remote locations. Then there need to be new power lines equivalent to every paved road in America. Then the grid needs to be modernized with battery storage. None of that is happening any time soon but what may spur at least grid improvements is the reliance on natural gas. Though alternative energy gets mandates and subsidies conventional fuel supplies 80 percent of American energy, but natural gas needs energy to get from place to place. While most of that is still, fittingly, supplied by natural gas, in places where it…

President Biden issued another slap to those oil-guzzling Republicans intent on ruining Gaia, or he enraged environmentalists by letting oil-guzzling Republicans ruin bucolic Alaska, all in one day. Even in the same minute. Which was it? Neither, and that is a problem with corporate media. To get you to see an ad and get them paid they have to write a headline that is most appealing to you - and if you are someone in the middle, you quickly receive both. In the real world, twice prior to Russia invading Ukraine, Democrats dragged executives to Capitol Hill where they could engage in populist…

Farms have a lot of open land and that has made them ideal for solar power installations. For example, though it is in defiance of the bucolic imagery sold by food and solar marketing groups, which show lush farms with an old tractor on one side and panels on homes charging an $80,000 Tesla on the other, New York has large-scale solar installations on 40 percent of their farms while up to 84 percent of farms will be great for solar. Not just because of open land but because farms make solar more efficient also.  A study shows that solar panels mounted over a soybean crop had temperature…

If you believe your electric car is not using the 80 percent of electricity generated by conventional fuels, you may also believe the high cost is worth it to save the environment. But there is no running from the environmental problems created by the cars themselves.  There can be no sustainable value chain when we haven't had new batteries in 30 years. Unfortunately, as long as mandates and subsidies are in effect, there is no incentive to create better technology, which means the only hope is to reuse old, inefficient batteries in order to mitigate the high social and environmental…

It's easy to get a penalty waiver from the federal government if your wind power installation kills an eagle, but if such alternative energy ever becomes more widespread, winged creature deaths of all kinds could be substantial. Current mitigation strategies are efforts like blanket curtailment, which slows blade rotation to less than one revolution per minute at the low wind speeds which have been found to cause the highest number of bat fatalities. Wind power is not viable now, and such an unsophisticated procedure applying a general wind speed threshold for all wind turbines for a…

Unlike US environmentalists, Belgian greens didn't flip and suddenly regard hydropower as a bad thing, they regard it as a viable part of their renewable energy strategy. All options are on the table, 50 percent of their electricity is even nuclear.  That's smart, nuclear is 2 times the energy capacity of natural gas and obviously an order of magnitude greater and more reliable than wind and solar. But to many European greens, nuclear isn't really "green" - it is too science to be accepted in the modern EU, where they once banned ugly fruit and decreed water could not cure thirst.…