By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Communities Digital News.
The global energy outlook has changed radically in just six years. President Obama was elected in 2008 by voters who believed we were running out of oil and gas, that climate change needed to be halted, and that renewables were the energy source of the near future. But an unexpected transformation of energy markets and politics may instead make 2014 the year of peak renewables.
In December of 2007, former Vice President Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for work on man-made climate change, leading an international crusade to halt global warming. In June, 2008 after securing a majority of primary delegates, candidate Barack Obama stated, “…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…” Climate activists looked to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference as the next major step to control greenhouse gas emissions.
The price of crude oil hit $145 per barrel in June, 2008. The International Energy Agency and other organizations declared that we were at peak oil, forecasting a decline in global production. Many claimed that the world was running out of hydrocarbon energy.
Driven by the twin demons of global warming and peak oil, world governments clamored to support renewables. Twenty years of subsidies, tax-breaks, feed-in tariffs, and mandates resulted in an explosion of renewable energy installations. The Renewable Energy Index (RENIXX) of the world’s 30 top renewable energy companies soared to over 1,800.
Tens of thousands of wind turbine towers were installed, totaling more than 200,000 windmills worldwide by the end of 2012. Germany led the world with more than one million rooftop solar installations. Forty percent of the US corn crop was converted to ethanol vehicle fuel.
But at the same time, an unexpected energy revolution was underway. Using good old Yankee ingenuity, the US oil and gas industry discovered how to produce oil and natural gas from shale. With hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, vast quantities of hydrocarbon resources became available from shale fields in Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania.
From 2008 to 2013, US petroleum production soared 50 percent. US natural gas production rose 34 percent from a 2005 low. Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey, and more than ten nations in Europe began issuing permits for hydraulic fracturing. The dragon of peak oil and gas was slain.
In 2009, the ideology of Climatism, the belief that humans were causing dangerous global warming, came under serious attack. In November, emails were released from top climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, an incident christened Climategate. The communications showed bias, manipulation of data, avoidance of freedom of information requests, and efforts to subvert the peer-review process, all to further the cause of man-made climate change.
One month later, the Copenhagen Climate Conference failed to agree on a successor climate treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Failures at United Nations conferences at Cancun (2010), Durban (2011), Doha (2012), and Warsaw (2013) followed. Canada, Japan, Russia, and the United States announced that they would not participate in an extension of the Kyoto Protocol.
Major climate legislation faltered across the world. Cap and trade failed in Congress in 2009, with growing opposition from the Republican Party. The price of carbon permits in the European Emissions Trading System crashed in April 2013 when the European Union voted not to support the permit price. Australia elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the fall of 2013 on a platform of scrapping the nation’s carbon tax.
Europeans discovered that subsidy support for renewables was unsustainable. Subsidy obligations soared in Germany to over $140 billion and in Spain to over $34 billion by 2013. Renewable subsidies produced the world’s highest electricity rates in Denmark and Germany. Electricity and natural gas prices in Europe rose to double those of the United States.
Worried about bloated budgets, declining industrial competitiveness, and citizen backlash, European nations have been retreating from green energy for the last four years. Spain slashed solar subsidies in 2009 and photovoltaic sales fell 80 percent in a single year. Germany cut subsidies in 2011 and 2012 and the number of jobs in the German solar industry dropped by 50 percent. Renewable subsidy cuts in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom added to the cascade. The RENIXX Renewable Energy Index fell below 200 in 2012, down 90 percent from the 2008 peak.
Once a climate change leader, Germany turned to coal after the 2012 decision to close nuclear power plants. Coal now provides more than 50 percent of Germany’s electricity and 23 new coal-fired power plants are planned. Global energy from coal has grown by 4.4 percent per year over the last ten years.
Spending on renewables is in decline. From a record $318 billion in 2011, world renewable energy spending fell to $280 billion in 2012 and then fell again to $254 billion in 2013, according to Bloomberg. The biggest drop occurred in Europe, where investment plummeted 41 percent last year. The 2013 expiration of the US Production Tax Credit for wind energy will continue the downward momentum.
Today, wind and solar provide less than one percent of global energy. While these sources will continue to grow, it’s likely they will deliver only a tiny amount of the world’s energy for decades to come. Renewable energy output may have peaked, at least as a percentage of global energy production.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Please, “Using good old Yankee ingenuity” enough of the jingoistic drivel. engineers from all over the world have known about the ‘next mile’ extraction of carbon reserves for decades.
The fact that the USA is just waking up to clean coal, gas, shale and fracking extraction is good to see, but the USA woefully lags the rest of the world in this regard, but I suspect with yankee enthusiasm for the job at hand, not for much longer.
It is a good thing – welcome Americans to the 21st century and beyond to the real world of affordable, clean, diverse and abundant fuel and join the rest of us laughing at the idiocy of windmills.
Given that the EU is no longer subsidizing wind farms I suspect that there will be piles of rusting steel soon and a very ugly eye sore… But then we knew this was coming.
Investment climate change.
Andrew30,
+1
Save the birds, stop the windmills.
cnxtim says: “engineers from all over the world have known about the ‘next mile’ extraction of carbon reserves for decades.”\
JK – Then why didn’t they do it all over the world?
Not enough “good old Yankee ingenuity”?
thanks
JK
Thanks Steve, but . . .
This is terribly inconvenient news. Someone wants a legacy and foreign policy and health care are beyond salvage. Stopping the Planet from warming and the sea from rising was going to be the good news. Now what?
A lot of our money has been passed to his friends, that ought to get him something!
Are the renewable companies responsible for rehabilitating the countryside when they leave?
FANTASTIC!
AGW is dead. Hurrah! Hurrah! Oooohhhh, huuuurrrah!!!
Celebrate the TRIUMPH OF TRUTH with a song
by an Italian (Rossini) about a Swiss hero (Tell) using Chinese fireworks
(viewed on a little device that is yours compliments of …
Yankee Ingenuity (Edison and Bell and Gates, et. al. — (smile))
.
.
.
D1e, windmills, d1e!
cnxtim says:
March 1, 2014 at 10:06 pm
Please, “Using good old Yankee ingenuity” etc. etc. fracking . . .”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Enough of your “jingoistic drivel” :
On March 17, 1949, Halliburton performed the first two commercial hydraulic fracturing treatments in Stephens County, Oklahoma, and Archer County, Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing#Hydraulic_fracturing_in_oil_and_gas_wells
Oil shale in Australia was referred to for the first time by François Péron, in “Voyage de Découverte aux Terres Australes”, which was published in Paris in 1807, It described what was Torbanite from the Newnes deposit in the Blue Mountains. Around 1850, oil shale was discovered at Joadja Creek in Southern New South Wales. In 1854, oil shale from the River Lett near Hartley, in New South Wales was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition and in 1862, oil shale from Murrurundi, New South Wales was exhibited at the London International Exhibition.
N. Tesdorf (at 10:36pm) — Well, sir, that’s all very nice in its way, but, well, hm.
Just standing about looking at that oil shale wasn’t going to accomplish much, was it?
See John Hultquist’s more powerful point at 10:34pm. #(:))
cnxtim: Come off the grass mate! As an experienced Aussie geologist, I have nothing but admiration as to how “Yankee ingenuity” took the techniques of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing and applied them successfully to “tight” shale formations. Just one question, though: was this done on any scale prior to USA application anywhere else in the world? Love to know.
jim, simple fact is they did and they have without any goyi
Can you imagine a country where all the bus’s, taxis and most of the long-distance truck run on actual gas (not refined petrol or diesel)?
No need, they exist beyond your boundaries and have for decades, and even better they are now relegating nonsense UNsustainable renewables to the history books along with their rusted on greenuts – where they belong.
But Obama was right.
Sea level rise is slowing down and the world has stopped warming.
Coincidence?
Nr 10 on the list of reasons why the warming has stopped.
Anyway, we better make good use of this period of plenty and develop something affordable and long lasting, like it or lump it one day oil will only come from difficult places where it will be pumped if the price is $200 or more a barrel.
Nothing to do with AGW or whatever it is called these days and even if oil and/or gas is abiotic eventually with the ever increasing rate of consumption we will scrape the bottom of the barrel.
At $200 a barrel solar and wind will seem affordable too.
Whogives a shit who did what and when? The windmills are dying! (in my dreams at least)
Mr. or Ms. C. N. Xtim,
And just who invented the predecessors to those buses, taxis, and trucks?
Good for you to be proud of what Jews have done — a whole lot! Being proud of what you can do “without any goyi{m}” is fine. Perhaps, though, you might pause and think a moment that it is pardonable in us Yankees {both those who are Jewish and those who are not so fortunate} to be a bit proud, too?
Thank you, nevertheless, for reminding us Americans that others (such as Australia! — good on you, John Karajas) have also made important, enduring, contributions to science.
Your Gentile Friend (who loves the Jews),
Janice
Solar and wind costs are still falling so output from them is still rising despite total investment dropping. The Chinese economy is now driving ….. more and more coal stations are being mothballed as renewable have a momentum without recourse to subsidy.
Funny story. My renewable energy shares have risen frmo $4 to $18 in the last year. If that’s evidence of decline, roll on decline
Wrong. “Renewable” are viable NOWHERE in the world without rate subsidies, friendly tax subsidies, fabrication subsidies, and permanent backup from conventional fossil and nuclear power plants. Not everywhere, but such “legal” fraud as the Spanish company that powered their solar plant at night using floodlights from a nuclear power plant ….
Nowhere in the world are wind and solar plants competitive except isolated off-grid location (islands, remote low-power sites where no other lines can be run.
The EPA is demanding through bureaucrat dictates that fossil plants be shutdown – not through rational policies nor long-range planning. Just dictatorship-mandated rulings based on a compliant injustice system based on lies and propaganda.
Every wind turbine requires expensive shutdown and maintenance times that are NOT being routinely subsidies: Wait another five years and let’s just see how many have burned up. Who will pay for their stripping, their roads, their waste?
@ur momisugly Fred B. — SELL. Now.
Your friendly investment advisor.
Several proposed UK offshore wind farms have been camcelled in the last few months. It is the result of subsidies being cuts, costs rising and the realisation by developers that wind turbines do not perform as the salesmen claim and their performance degrades rapidly as they age. By 15 years they are total junk.
fredb says:
March 1, 2014 at 11:10 pm
Janice Moore says:
March 1, 2014 at 11:24 pm
I ran the numbers. It’s a splendid hockey stick. Don’t sell, Fred. Your stock will rise to $80 this year and will sit pretty at $350 in 2015. Don’t sell.
I’d show you the math if I didn’t think Janice would try to find something wrong with it.
My dear Lord Wellington,
As if. #(:)) My advice is based solely on intuition based on information I read about markets, current events, etc… and my own knowledge. Your figures would be unassailable by me.
And after all your graciousness toward me these past few months, I would not even want to try. I hope March in Colorado is going well for you so far.
(I still think Fred ought to sell, though)
Your WUWT pal,
Janice
Please use proper terminology, folks – don’t fall into the Greenist DoubleSpeak. Firstly, use wind turbines, not windmills Windmills use the power of the wind to mill (ground) corn. Second, don’t use windfarms. Sounds green and environmentally friendly. Call them what they are – wind power stations. (Well they ARE supposed to produce power…)
And, finally, please refer to the European Union as the European Soviet Union – for that is what it is: a replacement for the USSR
I am sorry to contradict your intuition, my dear Lady Janice, but the renewable energy hockey stick math is robust. I did it on a spreadsheet.