By comparison, the USA Gross Domestic Product for 2018 was $20.54 trillion.
| E&E Legal Releases Tom Tanton State-by-State “Electrification” Costs Report For Immediate Release: September 22, 2020 – Today, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), released a state-by-state report on the capital cost associated with “electrification” for states and the nation. The report, and its accompanying data spreadsheet, was authored by Tom Tanton, E&E Legal’s Director of Science and Technology Assessment. According to the report, electrifying the entire nation, with a goal of eliminating the direct consumption of fuel and reducing climate change emissions, would cost between $18 trillion and $29 trillion in first costs. Going all renewable will force costs to the high end of the range. Also, constructing and implementing an “all-electric” nation will include two other significant costs: stranded assets and deadweight losses. The bottom line is that electrification is not a cost-effective means of reducing carbon emissions from commercial or residential buildings nor the transportation sector. “Electrification of everything is a poor means to reduce greenhouse gasses and exposes customers to more frequent outages. Further, we’d just be substituting one set of environmental impacts for another,” said Tanton. “There are several other more environmentally-friendly and cost-effective means to accomplish this goal, and we simply can’t afford to electrify everything as the report clearly shows.” Tanton adds that electrification will destroy decades of diversification by the market, tying consumers to a fragile yet monolithic electric grid. The electric grid is ill-equipped for extreme conditions, like extended heat waves or polar vortex cold snaps, without blackouts, like just happened in California. The likelihood of outages will increase with the considerable increase in demand associated with electric cars, removing natural gas from buildings, and other electrification moves. Building a more robust grid to handle such extremes would add perhaps $7 trillion to the costs. The report notes that Texas would lead the way in terms of total electrification costs at $3.157 trillion, followed by California at $2.823 trillion. What’s even more frightening is the per capita costs of such an expensive and destructive experiment. For example, each resident of Louisiana can expect a bill of $166,065, while Wyoming citizens would be on the hook for $158,961 apiece, and those in North Dakota would face a tab of $133,847. Tanton, who lives in California and formerly a Principal Policy Advisor with the CA Energy Commission (CEC), has witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by attempts at complete electrification. “California’s rolling blackouts and cataclysmic forest fires are not the results of climate change. They are the direct result of poor leadership and destructive energy policies that should be rolled back in my state and others before it’s too late,” Tanton concluded. The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) is a 501(c)(3) organization that champions responsible and balanced environmentalism, which seeks to conserve the nation’s natural resources while ensuring a stable and robust economy through energy dominance. Specifically, E&E Legal advocates responsible resource development, conservation, sound science, and respect for property rights. |
-30-
According to the BEA, the USGDP is now negative. The greens should explain how they plan to pay for the “green new deal” under these circumstances:
“The greens should explain how they plan to pay for the “green new deal” under these circumstances:” (last words in above article).
Well yes, it would indeed be nice if the Greens would explain – but since when did they ever try to explain anything. They are only ever in the business of preaching and admonishing.
With Progressives, it’s always someone else who will be made to pay.
I always ask where they are progressing to? They never answer, they should be called regressives.
Money…it grows on trees.
$18 to $29 million and it STILL WON’T WORK!
trillion
“and it STILL WON’T WORK!”
Yes, it’s a ridiculous proposition.
The very first thing that should be done before attempting to spend any money on reducing CO2 is to determine if there is any need to reduce CO2.
It’s a greenhouse gas. Does that make it dangerous? Not as far as I can see.
Even the experts can’t tell you how much, if any, warmth will be added to the Earth’s atmosphere with a doubling of CO2 content. We should determine this number before moving forward on spending money that may just end up being wasted for no good purpose.
The Obama administration deemed CO2 dangerous and in need of regulation. We should find out what Mother Nature has to say about CO2 instead. Mother Nature is not a partisan, political hack. The Obama administration was and is a bunch of partisan political hacks. CO2 was deemed dangerous for political reasons, not from scientific findings.
That doesn’t even count the ecological cost from all the damage after installing tens of millions of solar panels on the landscape and tens of thousands of wind turbines.
Just chop down all the trees.. easy, peasy !
No more bush-fires then.. 😉
Where is the electricity going to come from on hot windless nights ?
Batteries. That is their plan. They are planning on building huge battery installations to store power. I’m not kidding. That was Thomas Edison’s idea too, but fortunately Nicola Tesla had a better idea.
1. The technology doesn’t exist
2. using current technology, the raw materials don’t exist
3. storing of energy in compact form is highly dangerous.
Would storing huge quantities of energy as Yellow Cake be too unrefined?
Battery backup requires at least 1/3 more “Renewable” generating capacity (and as much as 3 X’s more depending on length of time).
Additional costs are not just the batteries.
Germany is showing us the way…. to economic ruin while accomplishing nothing.
The CAGW crowd invented a crisis that can’t be fixed. We’d need to build 2 new Gigawatt Nuclear reactors every day from last year to 2050 to replace not just electricity, but transportation, heating, aviation, and industrial processing. Nothing like that kind of “Carbon Free” energy is going online. Not even 1/20th of that. And nuclear power is off the list of solutions.
Of course all that doesn’t matter… because this isn’t about the climate.
A direct transference of energy from Congressional B.S. to
WashingtonD.C. electricityNot much discussion of the cost of keeping back-up power sources or extensive energy storage (batteries). You can easily double the above costs because wind and solar are by definition unreliable.
It’s just dumbass not to identify that wind and solar suck. There is also not enough of the rare elements required to even begin to do this stupid project; it would mean raping the world. When a suggestion is totally stupid, does no one stand up and point that out? Apparently not.
YOU CANNOT BUILD A RELIABLE ENERGY SUPPLY FROM UNRELIABLE ENERGY SOURCES.
Wind and Solar Subsidies Provide a Bonanza for Wall Street
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-more-wind-and-solar…
This URL shows wind and solar prices per kWh would be at least 50% higher without direct and indirect subsidies. They would be even higher, if the costs of other items were properly allocated to the owners of wind and solar projects, instead of shifted elsewhere. See below section High Levels of Wind and Solar Require Energy Storage.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/economics-of-tesla-powe…
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/large-scale-solar-plant…
http://www.usu.edu/ipe/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/UnseenWindFull.pdf
This URL shows about 2/3 of the financial value of a wind project is due to direct and indirect subsidies, and the other 1/3 is due to electricity sales.
http://johnrsweet.com/Personal/Wind/PDF/Schleede-BigMoney-20050414.pdf
– Indirect subsidies are due to federal and state tax rebates due to loan interest deductions from taxable income, and federal and state MARCS depreciation deductions from taxable income.
– Direct subsidies are up-front federal and state cash grants, the partial waiving of state sales taxes, the partial waiving of local property, municipal and school taxes. See URLs.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/excessive-subsidies-for…
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf
Any owner, foreign or domestic, of a wind and/or solar project, looking to shelter taxable income from their other US businesses, is allowed to depreciate in 6 years almost the entire cost of a wind and solar project under the IRS scheme called Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System, MARCS. The normal period for other forms of utility depreciation is about 20 years.
Then, with help of Wall Street financial wizardry from financial tax shelter advisers, such as BNEF*, JPMorgan, Lazard, etc., the owner sells the project to a new owner who is allowed to depreciate, according to MARCS, almost his entire cost all over again. Over the past 20 years, there now are many thousands of owners of RE projects who are cashing in on that bonanza.
Loss of Federal and State Tax Revenues: The loss of tax revenues to federal and state governments due to MARCS was estimated by the IRS at $266 billion for the 5y period of 2017 – 2021, or about $53.2 billion/y.
The IRS is required to annually provide a 5y-running estimate to Congress, by law.
The next report would be for the 2018 – 2022 period
The indirect largesse of about $53.2 billion/y, mostly for wind and solar plants^ that produce expensive, variable/intermittent electricity, does not show up in electric rates. It likely is added to federal and state debts.
Most of the direct federal subsidies to all energy projects of about $25 billion/y also do not show up in electric rates. They likely were also added to the federal debt.
Most of the direct state subsidies to RE projects likely were added to state debts.
The additional costs of state-mandated RPS requirements likely were added to the utility rate base for electric rates.
* BNEF is Bloomberg New Energy Finance, owned by the pro-RE former Mayor Bloomberg of New York, which provides financial services to the wealthy of the world, including providing them with tax avoidance schemes.
^ In New England, wind is near zero for about 30% of the hours of the year, and solar is minimal or zero for about 70% of the hours of the year. Often these hours coincide. Where would the electricity come from during these hours?
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68227.pdf
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/tax-equity-investors-b…
Warren Buffett Quote: “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” Buffet told an audience in Omaha, Nebraska recently. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/05/12/e…
The ‘financial wizardry’ as you put it is very apt and needs to be accented more. Accelerated depreciation, and then selling the asset to be depreciated again is an indirect subsidy that doesn’t even show up in the electricity tariff, but a Gov’t tax loss, which is usually additive to the local/state/national Gov’ts debt, as who is running surpluses these days. This is where the dark legal style corruption of renewables does damage in the shadows while not creating much useful electricity, in fact, messing up the grid with its unpredictable input. Cut off this important revenue stream (avoided cost of paying tax), and the ruinable house of cards collapses.
Sorry – I think you meant that Solar sucks and wind blows! /sarc
Couldn’t help but comment on that one
“Communism is a Soviet power plus Electrification”. V.I.Lenin, 1920.
Energy is more than electricity. We’ve had almost 200 years to develop clones or generics to replace the more than 6,000 products we get from crude oil derivatives such as: medications, electronics, communications, tires, asphalt, fertilizers, military, and transportation equipment.
Neither wind nor solar can manufacture those derivatives from oil. In fact, wind and solar cannot exist without fossil fuels as all the parts for those that produce intermittent electricity, are made with oil derivatives.
The social needs of our materialistic societies are most likely going to remain for continuous, uninterruptable, and reliable electricity from coal or natural gas generation backup, and for all those chemicals that get manufactured out of crude oil, that makes everything else that’s part of our daily lifestyles.
That can’t be true, the earlier leader of the German Green Party, Trittin. spoke about a price of a scoop in concern of renewebal energy.
What size the scoop has, and the material it consists of he didn’t tell.
We need more nuclear power.
And obviously easier at existing nuclear sites.
But in terms adding new sites, I think should get floating nuclear sites which are +20 km
from any residential area.
“floating nuclear sites”
Not even necessary. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) can be built to be totally unmanned as they are self-regulating and being already liquid, they cannot meltdown. A failure is automatically scrammed without human input. They can be built the size of a UPS truck or larger and used to provide local energy for 9 or 10 years between refueling. We could actually dismantle the electric grid and recycle millions of tons of iron and copper and never again have regional blackouts. The advantages of decentralized energy are numerous.
The great part of LFTR is that the fuel is burned up much more efficiently than our current nuclear designs and we can even take our old fuel, which was only 50% used up, and reburn it to get the rest of the energy out of it. Not only is the waste only 1%, rather than the current 50%, but some of the products are even useful for other purposes.
Why did we not go for LFTR back in the 60s when they had one running for a few years? Simple. They could not use the products to make nuclear weapons. They needed fast breeder reactors to make Plutonium.
“Not even necessary. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) can be built to be totally unmanned as they are self-regulating and being already liquid, they cannot meltdown.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
The salt can freeze- but apparently they can’t meltdown
“We could actually dismantle the electric grid and recycle millions of tons of iron and copper and never again have regional blackouts. The advantages of decentralized energy are numerous.”
Can give a few number of them?
“The great part of LFTR is that the fuel is burned up much more efficiently than our current nuclear designs and we can even take our old fuel, which was only 50% used up, and reburn it to get the rest of the energy out of it. Not only is the waste only 1%, rather than the current 50%, but some of the products are even useful for other purposes.”
According wiki a problem is have get old fuel to work. Wiki:
“Startup fuel – Unlike mined uranium, mined thorium does not have a fissile isotope. Thorium reactors breed fissile uranium-233 from thorium, but require a small amount of fissile material for initial start up. There is relatively little of this material available. This raises the problem of how to start the reactors in a short time frame. One option is to produce U-233 in today’s solid fueled reactors, then reprocess it out of the solid waste.”
“Why did we not go for LFTR back in the 60s when they had one running for a few years? Simple. They could not use the products to make nuclear weapons. They needed fast breeder reactors to make Plutonium.”
Well, we still need nuclear bombs.
LFTR seems might good to do this- and perhaps particularly good in terms having all nations having access to LFTR nuclear power. But seems still going to need other ways to make nuclear energy.
Or I would tend to say an addition rather than a replacement.
Also, US should allow recycling nuclear waste:
” The United States does not currently recycle used nuclear fuel but foreign countries, such as France, do.”
And:
“On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel.”
So, we need to end that.
When we have frequent grid collapse – a nearby future certainty – if the eco-loons and scientifically ignorant politicians backed by the even more scientifically ignorant MSM – have their way.
The quick and dirty fix will be to hire Russian floating reactors – sail them into a port and hook up. Clearly the Russians can see a way around the endless red tape to get a reactor built anywhere in the West.
https://www.power-technology.com/news/russia-floating-nuclear-power-plant/
Imagine a city running out of power and having to constantly ration its citizens and subject them to rolling blackouts which will be euphemistically called “load shedding” and “demand side management” – guess who’s not getting voted back onto the gravy train come next election.
With the best will in the world these idiot politicians will be unable to get a power station built overnight – but they can get the Russians to sail one in relatively quickly.
This process allows the politicians (and the Russians) to literally sail around any red tape, bureaucracy, legal challenges, protest action etc. etc. as it will be implemented as an emergency measure. My guess is it will never sail away and become a permanent feature.
The fact that the Russian reactors use military technology that would be unacceptable to western regulatory and safety concerns would be completely glossed over.
The Russians will be only too happy to profit from our energy shortcomings and as consequence extend their sphere of influence and have us lose our energy independence to them.
We live in an age of technology but we are led, guided by and have our opinions shaped by scientific idiots.
We’re doomed.
Let’s check just the cost of operating wind and solar. That industry claims employment already higher than either the gas or coal extraction industry at about 250 000 jobs. The relative productivity per employee is 7.5 kW with solar, 32 kW with wind. Compare that to 1300 kW with fossil fuels, and 2000 kW with nuclear. No society could enjoy our standard of living without the traditional plants.
We should simply ban computers, think of how many people we could employ then whose jobs are to manually calculate things.
A broken window economy is a loser. Making work primitive just to create jobs is not much better. We could make many jobs by simply outlawing combines and harvesters, forcing people to do everything by hand. Welcome to North Korea.
A REALLY dumb estimation of costs. The future w/o fossil fuels is by replacement using molten salt
small modular nuclear reactors. The cost of these is clearly knowable – roughly half that of conventional nuclear power plans. These reactors do NOT require peak load supplementary generation capacity – they can load follow. The cost of output is 4 cents per kWhr, as cheap as anything out there. Spend a trillion dollars and , with the output of the current nuclear power plants,
you can build enough molten salt nuclear reactors to power the country – no need for hydro (10%) or anything else. Keep hydro and there will be more than enough electricity to power a total electric automotive fleet as well.
Let us know hen they have a commercially viable reactor working, and China is starting to use them as their main electricity supply
Until then.. blah… blah !
How can the cost be knowable when we still don’t know how to build industrial sized units?
Excellent question. What’s the answer Col?
*crickets*
But do we want an electric vehicle fleet. It’s not cost effective as the materials are unsustainable, the batteries have relatively short lives ( my last car ran perfectly for 18 years with only alternator and water pump replacements). The electric load of charging many cars might be taken up by building a lot more reactors, but nothing can match the energy density of gasoline or diesel.
As we are not going to run out of these fuels, being abiotic and from the core, we have little to worry about. Burning carbon fuels just to make electricity is indeed stupid when you can have clean, low footprint LFTR energy. You could just take any gas or coal burning power plant, stick a reactor next to it and plug the steam into the already existing generators. Very easy and small foot print, as most of the machinery is already in place.
ColMosby, yes molten salt will be great, sorry I won’t be around in 2035 the earliest possible date for the first commercial one as I detailed in several earlier postings. Again let’s see your timeline. “soon” isn’t helpful.
Hi Tom,
If high levels of weather-dependent wind and solar, as California and Texas are aiming to do, with dubious success, huge storage (multiple TWh) would be needed to cover: 1) single and multi-day heat waves over large areas, and 2) wind/solar lulls throughout the year, as frequently occur in New England, and 3) seasonal variations.
The ADDITIONAL environmental impact would be enormous all over the US.
That storage would be several trillion dollars, if materials could be found to build such capacity.
It would be much better to build millions of PASSIVHAUS-style buildings all over the US.
They would need only 1/3 the energy of the current energy hogs.
Without coal and oil plus all of their derivatives and products produced from these fossil fuels, the losses will be even greater.
Is it possible to make the steel, aluminium (aluminum) or to dig up the raw materials without fossil fuels in order to make the planet-saving solar and wind generators?
As always, my requests for answers to green-influenced politicians only gives me grand-sounding schemes without any detail or discussion of the details.
It’s castles in the sky. Thirty trillion is a low ball estimate. It’s going to be way more expensive to get a system that actually works, if that’s even possible with anything other than nuclear.
When electricity is your only energy source, they will be able to control you by restricting your electricity ration, or by cutting it off altogether. These would be the mild punishments for infractions such as laughing in public, or not cheering loudly enough when BLM party members beat police officers to death. Serious offences, such as complaining that things were better in the old days, will of course require visits to re-education centres. Criticising the BLM government will be cause for disappearance into the gulags on Axel Heiberg Island.
Demented visions? Consider that we have already seen threats to cut off utilities to lockdown violators in the UK. These are just hints of what will come when they have taken over your country.
The document doesn’t explain what it means by fully converting to renewables. Do they mean faceplate capacity, or do they mean enough renewables to actually power the country. There’s a factor of 10 difference between the two.
Nor does the article go into the costs of providing enough storage capacity to handle the times when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
I don’t see anything regarding the cost of the thousands, if not 10’s of thousands of miles of new, high power distribution lines to get the power from where the sun shines and the wind blows to the places where people actually live.
The true cost of switching to renewable power is likely 10 to 100 times greater than this estimate.
Does this analysis include the job losses that will occur when manufacturing that uses large amounts of electricity moves out of the country ?
I’m sure China likes the idea. They continue to build new coal fired electrical generating capacity.
Lomborg’s team estimates that to change NZ to net zero emissions by 2100 would cost about 5 trillion $. And the NZ govt agrees with that number.
But the USA emissions are about 14 % of world emissions while NZ is 0.1%.
Therefore the US would be about 140 times the NZ cost or about 700 trillion $, but this is to move to NET ZERO by 2100.
Here is the link to Lomborg’s article and the cost of 5 trillion $ for NZ.
https://nypost.com/2019/12/08/reality-check-drive-for-rapid-net-zero-emissions-a-guaranteed-loser/
The Matrix.
That’s the solution.
Just pull Neo’s plug in the opening credits!
A thorium liquid salts cooled nuclear reactor future would mean an economic boom based on cheap electricity. Saudi Arabia and Russia would become less important….the whole mideast would become less important. The smallest reactors could power ships….no need to burn the smelly oil. Nuclear power went in the wrong direction…scaling up reactors designed for submarines and betting on breeder reactors….and depending on humans to not make a big mistake and cause a meltdown.
So this is what passes for debate here. Plainly ludicrous figures plucked from the air by a fossil fuel mouhpiece are accepted at face value.
But never fear, nuclear will come to the rescue. Pathetic. Nuclear is NEVER cheap, and ALWAYS survives on government subsidies. It might be in looking after the waste, subsidising insurance, gauranteed high kwh/ price, etc. I’m not quite sure why rightwingers such as the readers of this site like nuclear so much when they pretend to abhor government subsidies.
The US government must approve any nuclear proposal and that is expensive. Investors are not attracted to putting up millions and waiting years for approval of a machine that is not going to produce huge returns. China has a thorium reactor project….Westinghouse is involved…Indonesia is negotiating with a European company. Development of nuclear reactors has been neglected for years…if the original thorium liquid slats cooled reactor at Oak Ridge had not had the funds removed, we could be at a wonderful place today. It is a very large subject….there are many types of reactors…I would recommend one start by viewing some Kirk Sorenson videos on youtube.
You are right Tony, the costs would be much higher than 29 trillion, as it’s been already pointed out by at least a couple of readers.
But, on the topic you brought up, you don’t have to troll this site if you don’t like it. Or otherwise give us your detailed calculations.
For the woke, this counts as virtue signalling. tony can now tell his friends about how he educated us deniers.
You make your political leanings obvious from that remark. Readers are not “right wing” despite what you lefties think. Whilst Nuclear Generation has some attraction, even here in “nuclear-free” New Zealand, it is unlikely to become very widespread if the Greenies have their way. To me, the main drawback would be the lack of CO2 production – even though mankind produces such a small proportion of the total, our small contribution would be missed. CO2 generators, anyone?
Lots of places have gotten reliable energy at a reasonable price by running nukes, in Ontario, Canada, say, or in France. Whether this is truly competitive with natural gas or coal might be another question, I suppose. At least nuclear is generally reliable, dispatchable and also much more scalable as compared to hydro (which you can only develop so far without remaking all the rivers and streams, etc.).
In regard to the CANDU reactors in Ontario, those are heavy water moderated, with an advantage over light water reactors in that the CANDU’s use nonenriched or ‘natural’ uranium as the primary fuel. Thorium gets mentioned in these discussions a lot, but the CANDU’s apparently already have the option of mixing thorium into the primary uranium fuel (should there be some need or advantage to ‘burning’ thorium at any time). Some fairly elaborate safety arrangements no doubt add to the cost of these reactors, and it’s certainly possible that some of the newer designs would have advantages in safety, and therefore in costs, as well?
Tony,
Since you didn’t bother to mention any facts or figures I have to assume you are either a idiot or an A$$H@T!
The French get almost 75% of their electricity from their nuclear fleet of 58 reactors that are mostly 25-35 years old and not in any way of the latest or greatest designs available! The U.S. Navy has eleven aircraft carriers and about seventy submarines of different types that are all nuclear powered. The submarine fleet once numbered over one hundred ships but many have been decommissioned due to treaties or the end of the Cold War!
If you want to worry about something think of the Russians who have a fairly large nuclear fleet including some new nuclear powered icebreakers to deal with the large amounts of global warming that often covers large expanses of the Arctic Ocean. The U.S. Navy has a nearly perfect record of nuclear safety; the Russians not so much!
If you bothered to do even a minimal amount of research you would find out that modern reactor designs have a novel way of dealing with the waste problem; some of them burn it as fuel! I would recommend that you read Michael Schellenberger’s book; Apocalypse Never, but it doesn’t sound like you are open to any facts or data that conflict with your religious beliefs! How sad! A mind is truly a terrible thing to waste!
P.S.-
Forgot to include that the French electrical rates, while almost double the US average are only about one half of the rates in Germany. Good old Unreliable wind and solar strike again!
Oh dear, looks like you’ve got some issues Tony.
The way it works is, if you don’t agree for some reason then that’s fine but you have to show or at least explain why you think the figures are ludicrous, otherwise much more informed people will think you’re just being a dick.
I’m not sure where you’ve picked up the idea that Nuclear power is a”right wing” thing, in my country France, the big push for nuclear was under the left wing government of François Mitterrand back in the eighties.
Our Nuclear power stations do not survive on subsidies, EDF is a very profitable self financing company.
Now I provide a link so that people can go and see for themselves…… are you getting the idea Tony?
https://www.edf.fr/en/edf/2019-group-annual-results-1
Love the way the alarmists never, ever argue facts. They just shovel insults towards those who don’t worship as they do.
Once again, not taxing at 100% is defined to be a subsidy.
There are no subsidies for nuclear. Just like there are no subsidies for fossil fuels.
The problem with committing to such a harebrained renewable scheme, is that by the time it is half finished and the cost overruns are exceeding $100 Trillion, civilization will come up with a better innovation like it always does and a lot of that expensive junk electricity apparatus will be toxic waste, like it is now already. Can’t even easily recycle solar PV panels or wind turbine blades after 20-25 years…so much for that idea.
The power line infrastructure would be a good start as there is nothing better than electricity coming down the pipeline, and so that we are ready for Gen 4-7 nuclear when it can replace natural gas and coal and ruinables for the long term future, but spending anymore on useless solar PV and wind is ludicrous. There wouldn’t be enough available raw resources to replace the energy density of fossil fuels right now anyway, considering FF’s are still 85%-90% of the energy we do ultimately utilize. Ain’t gonna happen this century, even in a fairy tale. Good thing we won’t run out of fossil fuels (or uranium) anytime soon.
A good example of that was the rush to VFL bulbs, crap solution that was superseded by LEDs before they really got going.
Remember governments planning to mandate VFLs everywhere and poof they’re toast, wiped out by a better technology
I did a quick search for VFL bulbs and I can’t find anything. Did you perhaps mean CFL?
Earthling2,
Ruinables! ROTFLMAO! Mind if I steal it?
I wonder whether, when calculating these costs, they have included the cost of running CO2-generators to ensure that the present minimal level of CO2 does not decrease? Of course, it could have been much cheaper to just continue operating coal-fired generators with perhaps some modification for flue-gas filtration! Otherwise, if these fools persist and the world CO2 content is reduced, we would all be so much worse off due to reduced harvests, slower plant growth, etc.
This isn’t a report, it is propaganda. This organisation is a fossil fuel lobby group against climate science. We can’t relay on a single finding…
The Guardian has described E&E Legal/the American Tradition Institute as having “a core mission of discrediting climate science and dismantling environmental regulations,” while E&E Legal has been called “a free-market think tank that wants the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud” that uses tactics including “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/09/climate-change-american-tradition-insitute
Propaganda.. and griffool cites the GRUNIAD…… That is HILARIOUS. !!!
Still thinks the gruniad is not FAKE news and rampant propaganda pap from start to finish.
So gullible. !!
Griffool.. the gruniad has BELOW-ZERO-CREDIBILITY on anything to do with science or truth.
It is people LIKE YOU that discredit climate science, with your inept inability to produce any real science to back up even the most basic fallacy of AGW.
All E&E Legal et al. have to do is TELL THE TRUTH..
Something you are incapable of doing.
The Grauniad! 🤣😂🤣😂
“This isn’t a report, it is propaganda.”
We’ll be waiting patiently for your full rebuttal of the facts……. btw, ad hominem attacks from 8 years ago from a climate alarmist rag don’t count.
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If the griff collective had any facts, they would use them.
Now that’s funny, the Guardian labeling someone else as a propaganda site.
Nobody can discredit climate science, the so called climate scientists did that decades ago.
Secondly, I love the way progressives react to any criticism. In this case they proclaim that anyone who objects to their latest regulatory scams, wants to eliminate all regulations.
Beyond that, I find it hilarious that left wing trolls are upset about the filing of nuisance lawsuits. That’s been their go to method for at least the last 70 years.
Billions, trillions, zillions… Hello Zimbabwe! What’s coming is the Charcoal Economy…
Article innacurate: That’s the *initial* price and then the price will increase by 20% every ten years… so an additional 20-33trillion ten years later not including horribad inflation.
I’m fairly certain the article also completely ignores the fact that you cannot build windmills within 200 miles of the Gulf and Atlantic coast South of Greenland. You can’t even build big windmills in Newfoundland.
Doing so could easily cost 3 or 4 trillion dollars per year.
First there was NAFTA and WTO to make U.S. labor uncompetitive in trade and even domestically. Then there was EPA making every manufacturing site a litigation and permit process point source target. Now they will go after the energy cost advantage and negate that one. All that remains is a financial cost advantage and that will fade with a falling dollar.
It wasn’t NAFTA and WTO that made US labor uncompetitive, it was US unions and US government taxes and regulations.
Thorium liquid salts cooled reactors are….IMO….like diesel electric locomotives replacing coal steam power and jet engines replacing piston engines in airplanes. Just go to Youtube and search Gordon McDowell….he has many videos on the subject.
Willem, thank you for the comprehensive RE tax report. You’ve detailed what I’ve only superficially understand. What angers me is the corruption at the federal level that created and perpetuates this pathetic waste of capital.
I understand how individual states find harvesting federal dollars politically irresistible for projects in their states that provide income for the benefiting contractors and employees (i.e. Concrete supplies for the mult-ton wind power bases). In North Dakota, where the in state wind power is largely consumed in Minnesota, the damage to North Dakota ratepayers is substantially reduced. But North Dakota is still stuck with seeing these monuments of human stupidity smeared across the countryside. A perfect storm of poor legislation and regulation all for the supposed need to reduce CO2 plant food to save the planet.