Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
On April 18, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced his new energy policy. His speech included the following predictions of a dire future unless we repented of our evil ways:
I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.
The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation’s independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.
The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about five percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.
…
Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price.
If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.
…
Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.
If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.
SOURCE Carter’s Speech
His conclusion was that “We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.” So he started throwing money at the problem. His “solution” involved inter alia:
• A “gas-guzzler” tax on automobiles
• A rebate on electric vehicles
• A gasoline tax
• Subsidies to buses
• Taxes on aviation and marine fuel
Sound familiar? It should, as these are all parts of the current war on fossil fuels.
A year and a half from now, it will be the 40th anniversary of President Carter’s prophecies of catastrophe. And it will also be the 40th anniversary of the start of the subsidization of the solar and wind power sectors. These subsidies have currently reached astounding levels. Table ES2 from the US Energy Information Agency gives the subsidies of all types (direct expenditures, tax expenditures, R&D, rural utilities subsidy) for 2013, the most recent year available. Here are the results:
In 2013, coal was subsidized about a billion dollars. Natural gas and oil, about $2.3 billion. Nuclear got about $1.7 billion. Total, about $5.0 billion dollars.
Now, how about renewables? Solar energy alone, at $5.3 billion, gets more subsidy than all the fossil fuels put together plus nuclear. And wind energy alone, the recipient of an even larger $5.9 billion dollar subsidy, also is larger than all fossil plus nuclear. In total, the renewable sector got about $15 billion dollars in subsidies, three times that of fossil fuels plus nuclear. More than two-thirds of that went to wind and solar.
And it is getting worse. Despite years of people saying that the solar and wind power were market ready and competitive and all that, in 2010 solar and wind got a total of $6.5 billion dollars in subsidies … and by 2013, the subsidies were up to $11.2 billion dollars.
$11.2
Billion.
Dollars.
Note that this $11+ billion dollar subsidy was just for 2013, and does not include the billions and billions of the past 36 years of solar and wind subsidies since Jimmy Carter. It also doesn’t include the billions upon billions of dollars that the Europeans have poured into solar and wind subsidies of all types. And importantly, it doesn’t include the subsidization of expensive renewable energy sources through “renewable energy mandates”. It also only includes US Federal Government programs, so it doesn’t include any State programs.
It also doesn’t include the implicit subsidy of renewables from the penalties imposed on fossil fuels (Carter’s gasoline taxes, “cap-and-trade” programs, the Kyoto Protocol, “carbon taxes”, and the like).
So we’re talking a playing field which has been tilted in favor of solar and wind energy by something on the order of at least a hundred billion dollars … how’s that going?
Well, yesterday I noticed that the new 2015 BP Statistical Review of World Energy had been released. So I thought I’d investigate the massive progress that the hundreds of billions of dollars of solar and wind subsidies in the US and other countries had bought us. Here’s the latest global data, read’em and weep …
Figure 1. Global consumption of all forms of energy (blue line) in millions of tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE). SOURCE: 1.6 Mb Excel workbook
I bring all of this up for three reasons. The first is to show just how little our ~ hundred billion dollars in solar and wind subsidies has bought us. If that was supposed to be our insurance policy, it’s not only a failure, it’s a cruel joke. It’s cruel because that amount of money could provide clean water for everyone on the planet …
The second reason is to highlight the continuing failure of these “We’re all DOOOMED!! We’re running out of energy!” kind of prophecies. President Carter was neither the first nor the last of these serial failed doomcasters.
The third reason is to highlight the ludicrous nature of the claims that solar and wind are making serious inroads into the global demand for energy. They are not. Solar and wind are a rounding error. Despite almost forty years of subsidies, despite renewable mandates, despite carbon taxes, despite cap-and-trade, despite a hundred billion dollars spent on this Quixotic quest, solar and wind have barely gotten off the floor. Look at that chart, and give me a guess for how long it will take for solar and wind to catch up with fossil fuels.
Then give me a guess how long it would take if we removed all subsidies as we should.
Here’s the bottom line. It’s not just that solar and wind can’t replace fossil fuels.
It’s worse than that. Solar and wind can’t even keep up with just the increase in fossil fuels … fail. Massive fail.
As far as I’m concerned, giving one more dollar to either solar or wind subsidies is a crime against the taxpayer, as well as against the economy … after almost forty years of fruitless subsidies, they’ve had their chance and they still don’t measure up. Time to stop throwing good money after bad.
Best regards to each of you,
w.
My Usual Request: If you disagree with me or anyone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend someone’s interpretation of my words.
My New Request: If you think that e.g. I’m using the wrong method on the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the right method on the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong doesn’t advance the discussion.
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Jimmy Carter: “ we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.”
Well, translating 1980 to 2015, at least he got that part right. We’re now demanding more oil that we can indeed produce. Amazing. Jimmy must have received a prophecy about fracking.
I was wondering where the horrible Ethanol Mandate fits in to all this. Then I realized, as one of the little people, I just have to pay.
Then there is creative accounting, like this little gem: (from USEIA, link Table ES2)
So the govt. makes a legal demand that we have to buy something, then adds to the injury by slapping a tax on the product. Then the govt. waives a portion of the tax and claims a “tax expenditure”, and “subsidy”.
I wonder how much of the FF “subsidies” are of this, or a similar nature.
The enviros howl about FF subsidies, but when you look, it is generally stuff like this.
Let’s all help out the accountants at Greenpeace!
Calculate the Subsidy to Big Oil if the Ethanol Mandate was repealed, and the tax no longer had to be paid.
Your answer below:
TonyL add to this that cheaper ethanol from outside the US has a tariff so we tax payers are not allowed to benefit from lower available product the problem is magnified.
And now the NY Attorney General is going after Exxon Mobil for “possible climate change lies.” We deserve to freeze and be forced to walk everywhere and to burn wood for cooking fuel. This climate crusade is coming dangerously close to complete insanity. Thanks for another timely post.
The green Progressives forget how energy companies such as Exxon have historically contributed significantly to our well being via research and engineering, especially in the WW II effort by providing sufficient high octane gasoline for our Air Force to defeat Germany and Japan. Without this technology the would have been a shortage of fuel and possibly a lost war. The history of the important technology development starting 7 decades ago is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfiLjYc8n38
Of course there are other technology developments but this one is the most important and still in use today.
Willis, to get a true comparative cost of subsidies, divide the subsidies by the amount of power each sector produces. Dollars of subsidy per kW-hr of electricity produced. The true disparity between fossil fuel and “renewables” subsidies will become even more starkly obvious.
I remember the start of subsidized wind power here in California. The touted idea was subsidies will help the industry compete until the technology improved enough so that subsidies became unnecessary. I don’t know of any other fledgling industry that received such favored treatment. Did governments subsidize transistors? Or personal computers? Or developing trains, planes, and automobiles? Nope. Subsizing industry is a clear sign of alternative thinking.
Let’s also note that the technological improvements have not happened, after 40 years. Let’s see, forty years of unsubsidized automobiles went from the Stanhope Eclipse to the Pontiac Torpedo.
And aircraft? Forty unsubsidized years went from the rear-engined single-seat biplane to the Beech model 18B, the Douglas DC-3A, and the Vought XF4U-1 fighter.
The lessons are obvious. Governments can’t pick technological winners. A winning technology doesn’t need government subsidies. And both wind and solar have abysmally failed the promises made on their behalf. The whole “renewables” enterprise of large-scale energy production should be abandoned, imMediately. Subsidized solar and wind power: a modern morality lesson in how to get rich being a failure. At least crony capitalism produces something people can use. Crony eco-sacralism, not so much.
Pat Frank says:
Governments can’t pick technological winners. A winning technology doesn’t need government subsidies.
That says it all. Subsidies are cronyism.
That wonderful biplane with the fine cambered wings is the Silver Dart, 1909. The XF4U Corsair flew in 1940, only 31 years later. Seven years later, the first flight of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet.
http://www.aviation-history.com/boeing/b47.htm
That is a grand total of 38 years. In the same time frame, wind and solar have done absolutely nothing.
I was a little surprised that aircraft progress wasn’t measured from the start of the Wright Flyer in 1903. That would put the Corsair closer to the 40 year comparison. The better comparison might have been from the Wright Flyer to the Bell P-59 Jet fighter, which first flew in 1942, or the Me 262, which also first flew (with yet engines) in 1942, the point being that 40 years took us from the dawn of flight to the dawn of the jet age.
But some stimulus, if not actual subsidization, occurred in the aviation industry from government research and procurement. Compare this, perhaps, to the role of NASA in its early years to stimulating technological progress. I suspect many supporters of subsidies of renewables view these subsidies as somehow equivalent to other kinds of government actions in support of technological or industrial development. Consider as well land grants that stimulated the transcontinental railroads, or the stimulus effect of the Interstate Highway system on truck transport.
Government stimulus can work if the technology is viable. What we see here is that for its stated purpose — replacing fossil fuels — wind and solar are not viable, and government stimulus is an evil waste of taxpayer resources.
blcjr:
You conclude
Yes, well said. Thankyou.
I would add to your argument about facilitation of new technology that government subsidy of demonstration projects has two benefits and is also warranted.
Underwriting the novelty cost removes an inhibition introduction of new technology.
There are unforeseeable risks in introducing a novel technology (using aviation as example, the de Haviland Comet crashes) and this is why ‘being second’ is often best when a new technology is adopted. Hence, investors require a premium interest rate to compensate for the risk of ‘being first’ and this delays introduction of technologies to the market. A government can subsidise a demonstration project (hypothetically, e.g. the first windfarm) by underwriting the novelty cost. This demonstrates the success or problems of the technology to the market, and the underwriting costs nothing if unforeseen problems do not occur. Thus, at no cost a beneficial new technology is more rapidly adopted by subsidising a demonstration.
Secondly, the demonstration with underwritten novelty risk both
(a) with no cost, removes the delay to adoption of beneficial technologies provided by novelty risk
while
(b) for a relatively little one-off cost, the underwriting removes any justification for long-term subsidies (such as those being provided to wind farms) by demonstrating when a novel technology is flawed.
Richard
There are other budget numbers provided for agencies that are much higher probably for a good reason.
I ask the question “what results have the DOE in Energy production considering the total over many years
DOE budget for FY 2014 is $28,4 Billion
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/FY14_DOE_Budget_Highlights_Final.pdf
Over $ 20 billion per year for climate change which has doubled since 2008
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43227.pdf
The total $$$ are staggering over the years since Carter
Willis: Also remember when electric utility companies buy energy from solar sources they are required by law in most states to pay close to retail or more per Kw Hr, but they only save the cost of fuel which is much less. So they must raise the rates on all customers to make up the difference. Another subsidy, but not disclosed.
Richard, a good point, but it is worse than that. In NJ the utilities must purchase renewable electricity on an exchange which can be very expensive. Often the price is in the order of 50+ cents per KWH.
Because of this the the cost of electricity to the consumer has risen dramatically.
In New England, distributor buy through ISO-NE. At night the price is often $20/Mwh or so. During peak times in the winter, it goes up to $200-300/Mwh. You can see the real-time activity at http://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/
It also says right now 11% of our electricity is coming from renewables, of that, 16% is wind, so that’s about 2% overall. Wood and refuse are 81% of the renewables.
“Traders watched in amazement as prices surged, with the grid paying £2,500 per MWh to one operator, Severn Power, as it bought in emergency supplies; the usual going rate is around £60.”
Try $3.78 per KWhr
No that will make you eyes water
Hi Willis. Let me make a couple of points:
1. You seem to believe that the supply of fossil fuels is unlimited. Unless you believe in a deus ex machina like Thomas Gold’s “Deep Oil” theories (Surely that should be Deep Gas. Probably too hot for complex hydrocarbons once you get down a few tens of kilometers) unlimited fossil fuels seems impossible. We can discuss Gold if you wish. A different thread might be appropriate. Suffice it to say that I’ve never encountered a geologist who thought Gold’s ideas were stupid, but I’ve also never encountered one who thought they were right — at least with regard to the coal, oil and natural gas deposits currently being exploited.
2. How much fossil fuel is available? Really, no one knows. Very likely a century’s worth. Probably several centuries worth. But keep in mind that the price of those fuels is almost certainly going to increase on average as we are forced to exploit lower grade deposits.
3. As an aside, Carter was right about oil y’know. Even with the recent modest improvements in production due to hydraulic fracturing, the US is importing something like 9 million barrels of oil every day (EIA, recent. Seems a bit high. Probably ignores oil imported-refined then exported). In point of fact, the US ran out of domestic oil decades ago, and is running on foreign oil purchased with borrowed money. I’m guessing that the borrowed money part of that is going to turn out to be a bad idea in the very long run. But that’s tangential.
4. There aren’t a lot of non-fossil fuel resources with enough potential capacity to eventually replace fossil fuels. Hydroelectric, solar, wind, nuclear — maybe eventually OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion).
4.1 Hydro is fine since most people (including me) are willing to ignore the environmental problems. But it’s limited by topography, water availability, geology and economics (e.g. A dam across the Potomac at Harpers Ferry isn’t going to happen because of the cost of acquiring the land that would be flooded). Hydro probably can’t provide more than 5%-10% of humanity’s needs.
4.2 Nuclear is fine. Except that nuclear power plants are going to be run at times by lunatics, fools or, perhaps worse, MBAs. We just don’t have a design for a nuclear fission plant that can safely be left in the hands of a covey of ivy-league MBAs. Further, the plant must shut itself down safely in the event of disaster, must generate little or no significant radioactive waste (our politicians have proved to be incapable of solving the waste disposal problem). And finally, the fuel must not be refinable into weapons grade material. Can such a plant be designed, built and tested? I have no idea. But frankly, no one except maybe the Chinese and Indians seems even to be trying.
(Aside. The failure of governments pretty much everywhere to prioritize designing and proofing an unconditionally safe nuclear power plant is pretty deplorable).
4.3 Fusion? Who knows? Ask me again in twenty years. For now, 0 is (unfortunately) a not unreasonable projection for the foreseeable future
4.4 So we are left with solar and wind.
5. You’re right that solar and wind are currently pretty much completely incapable of doing what is expected by “environmentalists”. Without vast amounts of inexpensive energy storage. they can’t be matched to most loads. How much energy storage? How the hell would I know? Maybe 100 Twh for the US (WAG 600Gw*24hrs*7 days)? = 2000 Twh for the 10 billion folks who will likely be around in 2100. More than that if fossil fuels usage for heating and transportation is to be cut back. Cost? I dunno — Many trillions of dollars. Not something I can work out in a hurry but it looks to be a genuinely huge investment. Anyone got good figures for any of this?)
BTW, I’m very skeptical that there is either enough water or enough available sites to do hundreds of Twh of pumped storage even if the money were available. And pumped storage seems to be the only show in town capable of actually storing vast amounts of energy for cloudy days when the wind isn’t blowing.
No amount of specious bookkeeping is going to alter the flaws in wind and solar. If the bloody things were cost effective, it wouldn’t be necessary to bribe people to build them.
6 Green “Planning” seems to assume that fossil fuel plants will somehow magically be there when the sun and wind aren’t available. Not all that likely. At least not without more incentives (i.e. bribes). So the current plans made by our best minds have us paying people to build expensive intermittent power sources then paying other people to bail them out when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Who is going to pay for all that? I’m sure that in the minds of environmentalists, they are going to tax Warren Buffet, the Koch brothers et. al. What will actually happen is that Mr Buffet and the Koch brothers will be the folks they are paying both to build the wind farms/solar array, and the fossil fuel powered backups. The funds to pay for all this will be extracted from the users.
7. In my opinion, figuring out how to store wind and solar power cost effectively has to be be the keystone of any sane plan to replace fossil fuels in most applications. It isn’t even considered in current plans except as an afterthought.. So I have to conclude that the folks formulating energy policies are pretty much clueless.
Sorry to break your string, but I’m a petroleum geologist with 30 years of experience with the highest levels of oil and gas theory and execution.
Thomas Gold’s theories are stupid.
The resource pyramid for fossil fuels is very real however, and the potential for production by horizontal fracking of source rocks is immense. The Bakken and Eagle Ford are not unique to the USA.
Fortunately not. Which is damn good thing. However, it’s not clear to me how well distributed tight shales with recoverable hydrocarbons are. We do know that a disproportionate share of world’s easily recoverable oil and gas is found in the small geographic region around the Persian Gulf. And it seems that a disproportionate share of the world’s coal is found in the US. It’s possible that the US and Canada are fortunate enough to be sitting on unusually large deposits of tight shales shales with recoverable hydrocarbons. We’ll know more in a decade or two.
Depends on your definition of fusion.
I haven’t commented much on E-Cat and LENR stuff lately, but Rossi and company are in a year long run of a 1 MW process heat system, see http://www.e-catworld.com/2015/11/01/rossi-explains-positive-or-negative/
Airbus has taken an interest in LENR and is hosting conferences! Seems a bit premature to me, but I’m certain a lot of big companies have very active R&D projects going on but aren’t talking about them. Maybe Airbus knows some of them.
Ric – yes there are approaches to fusion other than Tokamak magnetic bottles. But Tokamak is where the governments of the world have currently placed their bets. I have to have doubts about Tokamak. Freeman Dyson — who surely knows more about fusion than I do (Not hard) — said recently that Tokamak and similar devices probably aren’t going to work in practice. Not now. Not ever. So we’re possibly left with alternatives that may or may not prove out. And even if a design that works and doesn’t have too many drawbacks is identified, I’m guessing that a decade or more will be required to go from working prototype to roll out of commercial plants.
Wind and solar are a wasteful money pit. The ocean waves and tides are a huge power source, not to generate electricity but used as a power to pump the ocean water to holding dams, then use it for hydro.
Not dependent on rain fall, the ocean is going to waste. LA has some serious elevations not far out of town, getting real possible stuff like this passed the greens is the biggest hurdle. As an engineer I find that no one seems to have tried this idea. The engineering is simple and reliable.
Wayne. I’m not sure about waves other than the obvious problem that if you are going to harvest the energy from 100 km of coastline, you are probably going to need a facility 100km long. And it has to be able to deal with salt water which is kind of corrosive and to withstand whopping great storms. I’ve never seen a credible engineering estimate of how much power is available from waves. Have you?
Tidal energy? Turns out to be analyzable as an oddball form of hydro electric. It can work (Google ‘LaRance power’). The problem is that pragmatically, you need a site with high tides and you then need to build a dam. The problem is that while tides move a lot of water, there’s not much pressure head and the power production is likely to be pretty limited overall. I’d class it as something like geothermal. Great if your neighborhood is gifted with the right situation. But not the salvation of mankind.
La Rance is paid for and generates a couple of GWh every day quite cheaply. But it also has 8 meter tides to work with. It is certainly one of the best sites for tidal power in Western Europe.
Not talking tides, I,m talking floatation, take a tethered float that can carry 50 ton with no load on it it will pull upward 50 ton with every swell, one little float and a shipload of HP for pumping. Simple pump engineering like an old windmill bore pump with a stroke to match all possible tidal and swell heights attached to the ocean floor. the floats could be hooked up in daisy chains. Modern materials are no problem with salt water.
Your assessment of nuclear is not accurate. Molten salt reactors invented in the 1960’s and being developed currently in several countries are completely safe regardless of the operator and can be mass produced for a lower capital cost than a coal plant. Take a look at any of these; Thorcon power, Transatomic power, Terrestrial energy, Moltex, or Flibe. There are many more beyond these.
Another words, your safe cheap power plants, like pebble beds and god knows what else, currently only exist on paper. Get back to me when/if they materialize and we have some real data on costs, reliability, unexpected problems, etc.
Thorium also can be used to produce nuclear bomb grade U233. Perhaps not the ideal fissionable for such devices, but a working bomb can be built. India reportedlydetonated a small U233 device a few years ago. See http://wmdjunction.com/121031_thorium_reactors.htm
Nothing against Thorium. Maybe it’s the future. But it has not yet demonstrated itself to be ready for prime time.
A couple hundred years for oil, a few thousand years for coal.
It’s way to soon to start worrying about what will replace either.
The technology of 200 and 1000 years from now is something that none of us can predict. So stop making plans for what our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren are going to d.
As anyone figured out how to make weapon material from normal large water reactors?
All of those billions of $$$ thrown at two near useless energy sources when there are so many people in the world (as Willis said) have no access to clean water, sanitation and electricity.
This is what happens when the wrong people stomp their feet and pound on the table the hardest and yell the loudest at politicians demanding to be heard. And their renewable energy ideas were terribly bad ones from the very beginning.
There probably was no crime committed here although it sure seems as though there should have been.
“The 1973 gasoline lines are gone”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Arab Oil Embargo was a Muslim Arab response to getting their buts kicked by the Israelis.
Yom Kippur 1973 coalition, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, et al – the usual suspects, meet your new boss – ISIS.
Too bad real journalism no longer exists in the main stream media to do similar research and reporting.
+100
It must be said that carter was not an anti-coal or anti-emission activist.
one of the things he threw money at was coal gasification, a project from which i received some personal benefit while at the colorado school of mines in golden colorado.
by today’s agw era standards the coal gasification process is an emissions nightmare scenario.
It seems like a waste to burn natural gas to make electricity when it is ideally suited for heating homes when we have all this coal which is only good for electricity. When I grew up in the heart of the city of St. Paul Minnesota in the late 1930s we had no natural gas and only cooking gas (made from coal and distributed). We had a coal burning furnace in the basement. Every week or so we had coal delivered down a chute inserted in a basement window moving the coal into the coal bin room. The truck driver looked black, but he was not an African American. Women, when hanging out clothes to dry, worried about coal dust.
Many years later we got natural gas distributed. What a blessing it seemed. And a furnace with a thermostat too! And now we are using this gas to make electricity and leaving coal in the ground, a good energy source in cleaned up power generation plants. A combination of nuclear and coal is as good as all natural gas regarding CO2.
You forgot the double nickle in you bullet points!
But, sinners must repent.
The price, is whatever will be accepted before the torches and pitchforks arise.
Just about at that price point.
Little Georgia Peanut Farmer Jimmy Carter has no where to hide!
When President Jimmy Carter took office in January 1977, he inherited a unique relationship with the shah of Iran, who had been returned to his throne by a U.S.-British covert action and who had accepted the role of protecting U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf. The shah had some of the most sophisticated arms in the U.S. inventory.
When the monarchy was overthrown, the United States and other countries in the world got their first real introduction to radical political Islam, not only during the revolution against the shah but also in the 444-day captivity of American diplomats in Tehran. That experience shaped the U.S. relationship with Iran for decades thereafter.
The Algiers Accords ending the hostage crisis returned only a fraction of Iran’s frozen assets. It created a claims tribunal that settled hundreds of U.S. claims against Tehran. Those costs, plus Iran’s alienation from much of the world, suggests the hostage model is not likely to be repeated.
The Carter administration’s effort to build an independent military capability in the Gulf established the initial framework that was completed by its successors.
And doomed.
ISIS is the James Earl Carter LOV Child with an Iranian prostitute.
Snicker Snicker
Now look at the subsidies in terms of Dollars/per kWh or mWh generated. – The numbers for Wind and Solar are staggering.
Also in table ES2, “Tax Expenditures” is actually deprecation, other state and local taxes and many other normal business expenses e.g. buying new equipment, computers, etc. The same thing they give to every manufacturing, retail, service and any other “business.” It is just called a subsidy because it makes big oil and gas look like they get a BIG subsidy and are somehow shirking on their taxes.
You’re not wrong. Perhaps your most powerful article yet; the facts are simply stunning.
Please treat yourself to a cookie or something. It was well earned and thank you!
The amount of subsidies needs to be made visible to the public in terms that they understand. As an example, a Finnish website counts the amount of subsidies paid to wind energy companies by every second, day, month and year: http://tuulivahinko.fi/
It’s only available in Finnish but you get the idea due to the visual design
Don K
If you think nuclear power is dangerous, you probably don’t want to be anywhere near if any significant part of that 2000 Twh of storage shorts out, suffers a small meteor impact, or is seriously mismanaged by the mba’s who will undoubtedly be running those facilities as well.
Ooh, Ooh, I Know, I Know!
2000 Twh = 1,721 MT
If even a trivially small portion shorted out, the blast would level a medium sized city.
Oh course, you would want to place this energy storage as close to your population centers as possible to minimize transmission losses.
Can you describe in details the hypothesis of “2000 Twh of storage shorts out”?
s-t
What is meant is, what happens if the “battery breaks down (as often happens with phone batteries http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25733142 or http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/612389/MH370-lithium-mobile-phone-batteries-missing-Boeing-777-crash)
Or an electrical fault or lightning strike etc etc
The point being, storing electricity (power) is inherently dangerous, the more you store the bigger the problem. Pumped storage is great if you do not mind the loss of land/agriculture/environment, but only in a few places.
If storage is to be practical on a large scale, then it is probably going to have to exclude chemicals altogether. But then, who would want to be anywhere near a flywheel with 2,000TWhr of stored energy? or even a bloody big spring!
Stu
Right now, today, if humanity HAD to build hundreds of Twh of electrical storage, it’d probably have to be hydroelectric pumped storage. Of course, there’s not enough water, not enough sites, and not enough money to do that. But shorting out isn’t realistically a danger. However, Like any dam, there is a risk that some of them will fail. Probably shouldn’t do pumped storage upstream from cities.
TonyL, Transmission losses probably aren’t that big a deal. Southern California has LOTS of people and adequate electricity despite the fact that it’s almost all imported from many hundreds of kilometers away. What’s going to bail my fellow Vermonters out when they eventually discover the hard way that wind and solar don’t work very well (especially at 45 degrees N latitude) is electricity from rivers in Northern Quebec.
Nous sommes ouille.
I googled that.
“we ouch”
Google translate on my phone?
“f*ck yes”
A couple of thoughts on this.
For a start we need to understand what subsidies are. The left deliberately confuses the issue by including tax breaks as subsidies. They are not. A subsidy is a NET flow of money or energy into something. This means that not everything can be subsidised because something has to carry the burden. You can only subsidize something by ranking up the price on something cheaper. Or to put it another way, you cannot subsidize the cheapest energy source. At the moment fossil is the cheapest.
I would like to see the figures for net tax and net subsidy for all energy sources. I expect that solar and wind receive more subsidy than they pay in tax.
I can make the case that the cost of something is a very good measure of the energy that has gone into producing it and so that tells me that wind and solar therefore receiveyan energy subsidy from fossil.
That means that we are using real energy just to run what I consider to be performance art or religious ritual, depending how you want to look at it. We would use less fossil fuel if we get rid of wind and solar.
Look at nuclear power. By law, the NRC must recover, through fees to applicants and licensees, 90 percent of its budget. That is about $5,000,000 per NPP, (and every other facility that uses radioactive material has fee they pay.) How if tax breaks are a subsidy, what is this fee? Why do they not subtract that from the tax break in figuring out subsidies. There is also a fee for the never approved Yucca Mt. storage facility, about a 1/10 of a cent per kWh (suspended until they get their act together). The total collected now totals over $30 Billion. Why is that ignored – it is just like a tax.
Set up some fees like that for the Airline Industry and see what happens to the cost of your plane ticket. The present licensing fee is only $5.00 per plane, regardless of size/number of passengers. Compare that with $5 Million for a NPP. Why does the airline industry get a “subsidy” and then complain about the REAL CASH given to the railroad industry? Shouldn’t they be supporting the cost of operating the FAA and the NTSB?
And why don’t airline crew don’t have to carry a dosimeter?
Heck, why don’t all the people travelling by plane wear a dosimeter?
Will someone think of the children?
From http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/05/12/even-warren-buffet-admits-wind-energy-is-a-bad-investment :
Warren Buffett seems a pretty sensible guy although a lot of people don’t like him for some reason that has never been clear to me.
Hardly your basic economic imperialist.
Come to Omaha for an annual meeting and follow around the stockholders on their annual party/pilgrimage and see what they consider “winning.”
Buffet opposes pipelines, the result being that oil has to be carried on trains that he owns.
He’s a total idiot when it comes to tax policy. But what the heck, you like him, so it’s all good.
As your quote, just another example of his being a total idiot.
People keep moaning about nuclear and safety etc. Then I ask, how many people have died as a direct result of a nuclear accident/incident/contamination/radiation exposure (Sure there is risk. Life on this rock is a risk)? I have not read reports of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands. How many people die, say in the UK alone, from cold? Regularly read reports of 10’s of thousands…EVERY YEAR!
In an article in the WSJ Lomborg stated that solar and wind supplied just 0.4% of world energy and this would be about 2.2% by 2040. What a joke and con job on the planet’s taxpayers. And zero change to temp/ climate or co2 levels. Here’s the quote——–
“Alarmism has encouraged the pursuit of a one-sided climate policy of trying to cut carbon emissions by subsidizing wind farms and solar panels. Yet today, according to the International Energy Agency, only about 0.4% of global energy consumption comes from solar photovoltaics and windmills. And even with exceptionally optimistic assumptions about future deployment of wind and solar, the IEA expects that these energy forms will provide a minuscule 2.2% of the world’s energy by 2040.”
And here’s the link to the article——- http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/the-alarming-thing-about-climate.html
The sequence of tackling the energy problem is important, first to start with energy conervation before to change the energy production. For example the subsidies for windturbines could be better invested in the housing market to make them more energy efficient. This would have 2 advantages : a. the energy saving would be at free costs for the owner b. there is an economical saving in the allocated costs, it outweighs additional energy production
For what they spend on wind alone, they could buy free LED lightbulbs for everyone in the country.
That would save way more electricity that wind could ever generate.