In a post a couple of weeks ago on December 21, I observed that the country of Germany appeared to have won the race among all countries and states to be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.” Its pursuit of the “renewable” wind and solar electricity fantasy has put it in a spot where regular wind/sun droughts cause huge electricity price spikes, and major industries have become uncompetitive. It has no solution to its dead end, and can go no farther.
If Germany has “hit the wall,” what is the appropriate analogy for New York? New York passed its Climate Act with great fanfare in 2019. The Act orders that we are to have a “net zero” energy system by 2050, with interim deadlines along the way. The first serious deadline arrives in 2030, where the official mandate is 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” (aka “70 x 30”). That deadline is now just five years away. Within the past year, all the efforts to move toward the 70 x 30 goal are falling apart, as anybody who had given the subject any critical thought knew that they inevitably would. But nobody in authority has yet been willing to acknowledge that this has turned into a farce.
Here’s my analogy: New York is like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, who has run off the cliff and is now suspended in mid-air, apparently not knowing what will happen next.
We know what’s next: shortly, he will crash to earth.
Consider a few data points:
Off-shore wind procurement
The Scoping Plan developed under the Climate Act calls for some 9000 MW of offshore wind by 2035. People with elementary-school-level arithmetic skills knew that this amount of intermittent generation would not be nearly enough to replace the amounts of dispatchable generation set to close; but maybe this would at least be a serious start. By early 2023, it was reported that some 4300 MW out of the 9000 MW were in “active development,” with wholesale prices having been agreed to with developers in the range of $100/MWh.
But then reality started to hit. In this post on October 15, 2023 I reported that “essentially all” of the developers of the 4300 MW of off-shore wind in “active development” had backed out and demanded price increases in the range of 30 – 50% to proceed. New York rejected that maneuver, but ultimately had no option other than to re-bid the contracts and get bids in the range that the developers were demanding.
On February 29, 2024, the State announced that it had accepted re-bids for two of the projects in question, for a total of only about 1700 MW and at a price of over $150 per MWh. (This level of price would require retail electricity prices in the range of at least $0.40 per kWh and would be completely uneconomic if it were to become the norm for New York electricity production.).
Meanwhile, the remainder of the offshore wind procurement appears to be in complete disarray. On April 19, E&E News reported that New York had canceled efforts on three of its big offshore wind development areas, Attentive Energy, Community Offshore Wind, and Excelsior Wind. These three, had they proceeded, would have totaled about 4000 MW out of the 9000 MW 2035 goal. Excerpt:
New York canceled power contracts for three offshore wind projects Friday, citing a turbine maker’s plans to scrap its biggest machines. The news is a heavy blow to the U.S. offshore wind industry and a major setback for the climate ambitions of New York — and President Joe Biden. The three projects would have delivered 4 gigawatts of offshore wind to the state, amounting to almost half of New York’s 2035 goal.
At this point nobody has any idea how to get large amounts of offshore wind developed around New York at a price anybody is willing to pay. And of course, nobody has a solution to the intermittency problem either.
Green hydrogen
The New York regulators have recognized that a de-carbonized and predominantly wind/solar electricity generation system will require something called the “dispatchable emissions-free resource,” or DEFR, to make it work. The best idea that anybody has for the DEFR is so-called “green” hydrogen, that is, hydrogen produced by some non-emitting system, like wind, solar, or hydro.
Currently, only negligible amounts of green hydrogen are produced in the world, and none in New York. But somehow, New York got the idea that it could make this work. Two green hydrogen facilities have been granted state subsidies and are supposedly under way. One is being developed by a company called Plug Power, and is at an industrial park called STAMP west of Rochester; and the other is being developed by Air Products at Massena, on the St. Lawrence River. Both of these facitilities are almost comically small relative to the amounts of hydrogen that would be needed to fully back up New York’s electricity generation in a world of mostly wind and solar generation. But at least they would be something.
On October 18, the Batavian reported that the Plug Power hydrogen facility was “on pause.” Excerpt:
Chris Suozzi, VP for business and workforce development at the Genesee County Economic Development Center, reportedly told a Washington, D.C.-based commercial real estate firm that Plug Power’s STAMP project is on hold. . . . “They’re not ready to go,” Suozzi reportedly said. “They’re on pause. We don’t know what’s going to happen with them at this point.”
The pausing or cancellation of a green hydrogen project should surprise no one. The past year has seen major cancellations of much larger such projects by big players like Australia’s Fortescue and Origin. The fact is that the cost of producing green hydrogen is a large multiple of the cost of getting natural gas out of the ground for the same energy content, besides which natural gas is a much superior fuel in every way (higher energy density, easier to handle, less corrosive, less subject to leaks, far less dangerous and explosive, etc.). Meanwhile, the developer of the STAMP green hydrogen project, Plug Power, reported as its results for the third quarter of 2024 a loss of $211 million on revenues of $174 million. They are hoping for a loan from the federal Department of Energy to keep themselves going. I wonder what Chris Wright is going to think about that.
The Air Products facility in Massena plans to use hydro power from a dam on the St. Lawrence to produce its hydrogen. Excuse me? The hydro power is already dispatchable. How can it possibly make any sense to use dispatchable electricity to produce hydrogen whose purpose is to make dispatchable electricity? At least about 40% of the energy is going to get lost on the round trip from electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity. It simply has to be that there is a better use for the St. Lawrence River hydro power than turning it into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen. But nothing here makes any sense.
Clean Path Transmission Line
Another key facility to make renewable energy work for New York was supposed to be the Clean Path transmission line. This is a proposed 175-mile high-capacity (4 GW) transmission line to bring to New York City and the downstate region power generated at various new “renewable” (wind and solar) facilities being developed in the northern and western parts of the state. The stated cost of this major project was to be $11 billion.
On November 27, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority informed the Public Service Commission that the Clean Path project had been canceled. Here is a copy of the NYSERDA letter. Here is a piece from Utility Dive on December 3 about the cancellation.
I don’t find any discussion about the reasons for the cancellation, but it has to be that the developers figured out the the economics did not work. Here’s the problem: because wind and solar generators only work about 20-40% of the time, this enormously expensive transmission line would not be operated at anywhere near its capacity. Likely, it would only average about one-third of capacity. That means, compared to a line that operates at or near 100% of capacity, its charges for transmission would be about triple.
The cancellation of this line has only occurred within the past month, and I haven’t seen anything about plans for a re-bid or an alternative strategy. So far, nobody is saying “this can’t possibly work.” But no matter how you approach the problem, the cost of transmitting intermittent wind and solar power from far upstate to New York City is going to be around triple the cost of transmitting power from a natural gas plant that runs nearly all the time.
So here we are, suspended up in the air, and nobody seems to realize that we will shortly crash to earth. Everybody involved is trying to milk the last dollars out of the taxpayers before the crash hits.
DEFR apparently is like a unicorn, that one can describe such a thing does not say anything about it’s existence.
Nuclear power plant is DEFER, especially the SMR.
There is a political party whose super power is gaslighting; using speech to obfuscate and mislead. (Maybe there are two, but for one its really SUPER). On “Social Science” stuff, the underlying meanings are already muddy as hell, so it can always come down to a difference of opinion.
When they apply that super power to Thermodynamics, the results are ridiculous, as the OP eloquently spells out.
They think the job is done if they can invent a tricky name for something. More truth would have been communicated if they called it the Unicorn Fart Battery.
If you’ll excuse the self-reply, here’s ANOTHER example: https://nystateofpolitics.com/state-of-politics/new-york/politics/2025/01/04/climate-change-superfund-moves-forward-
Cannot wait for the Stock Market exchange in TEXAS to fire up and get well under way!!
.
https://www.txse.com/
Harold the Organic Chemist Says:
ATTN: Francis and Everyone
RE: Climate Science Lie
Please use Google to obtain the essay: “Climate Change Reexamined” by
Joel M . Kauffman. The essay is 26 pages and can be downloaded for free.
Shown in Fig. 7 (See below) is the infrared (IR) absorption spectrum of a sample of Philadelphia city air from 400 to 4,000 wavenumbers. Integration of the spectrum
of the spectrum determined that H2O absorbed 92% of the IR light and CO2 only 8%. Since the air sample was inner city air, it is likely the concentration of CO2 is much higher than that of a remote location such as the countryside or the oceans. In the city air with a temperature of 28 deg. C and 76% RH, the concentration of H20 was ca.
20,100 ppmv. In 1999 at the MLO the concentration was ca. 375 ppmv.
This spectroscopic data falsifies the claim by the IPCC since 1988 that CO2
(the control knob) causes global warming. That claim is lie and its purpose is to provide the UN the justification to distribute the donor funds, via the UNFCCC and the
UN COP, from the rich counties to poor countries to help them cope with global warming
and climate change. At the recent COP29 conference in Baku, the poor countries came clamoring for not billions but trillions of funds. They left the conference empty handed with no pledge of funds from the rich countries.
How do we convince the politicians that H2O is the main greenhouse gas, CO2 does not cause global warming, and there is no need to control CO2 emissions?
Here is Fig. 7. It was prepared by the Australian sherro01.
Having problems posting Fig. 7 Here it is
Sorry, Harold,
I, sherro01, had nothing to do with this graph.
Will I agree that it contains significant information, you seem to be confusing me with another person. Geoff S
You are right. I don’t recall why I thought you prepared the Fig. 7. My son Owen extracted it from the essay so I could post it in comments. The spectrum was first published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2004 and later in 2007 in the essay.
I have posted Fig. 7 here numerous times here in the comments and mentioned have your name. A little promotion for you and Australia.
Most people and in particular all politicians don’t know how little CO2 there is in the air and that H2O is the major greenhouse gas by far. They have been brainwashed by the IPCC into believing that CO2 is really dangerous greenhouse gas.
Hopefully, President Trump will reverse the EPA endangered finding that CO2 is pollutant.
Check out the chart for the temperatures for Adelaide from John Daly’s website. The trend is for colling since 1857.
The pass through administrative costs of “helping the poor countries” to cope is probably 80% or more. That is the real reason the accounting is too bad for anyone on the outside to know what is going on (and the real reason the UN proposes the funds transfer from the richer nations go through the UN itself).
You should use Google or Bing to obtain the budgets for these organizations. You will be amazed to learn about the amounts of funds these organizations are handing which are many billions of dollars. The pledged budget for COP28 was about 57 billions of dollars.
When Donald Trump becomes president, he end funding to these organizations.
If you want to convince them, you have to get your argument straight first.
As you move higher in altitude, temperature drops. As temperature drops, water vapour drops. So for the vast majority of the air column, water vapour is almost entirely absent. What the bottom fraction of a percentage at near surface in Philadelphia is has little to do with the over all effect.
Sensitivity is grossly exaggerated by the alarmists, as are the feedbacks, and the whole silliness of tipping points, almost always predicated on RCP 8.5 which is so high we’d have to drill oil wells for the specific purpose of burning them off to get anywhere near those levels.
The gas cell for the air sample was a 7 cm Al cylinder with KCl windows.
The absorbance for the CO2 peak at ca. 2350 wn is 0.035. If the gas cell was 700 cm (7 meter, ca 23 ft) in length, the absorbance would 3.5 and 99.9+% of the out-going IR light would be absorbed.
The tallest peak for H2O at 1,600 wn has an absorbance of 0.063. If the was cell was ca 220 cm in length, the absorbance would be ca 2 and 99% of the
out-going IR light would be absorbed.
For air with a H2O concentration of 20,100 ppmv, there is 16 g of H2O per cubic meter. For air with a CO2 concentration of 375 ppmv, one cubic meter of the air has 0.74 g of CO2. To the first approximation and all things being equal, the amount of the greenhouse (GHE) effect due H2O is by:
GHE for H2O = 16 g H20 / 16 g H2O + 0.74 g of CO2 = 0.95 or 95%
Keep in mind that 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with H2O,
the 800 pound Greenhouse Gas Guerilla.
Your entire response is just more detail on the same error. Going from a 7 cm tube to 220 cm makes no sense in the context of what I was trying to point out. The troposphere is 14 km high and almost devoid of water vapour for most of it.
It doesn’t matter if 100% of the earth surface was covered with water, co2’s effects would be mostly pronounced at high elevations, high latitudes, and winter seasons where it it’s effects are not being swamped by water vapour.
At high elevations CO2 gets rid of energy to space.
There is basically zero chance of it radiating at all in the lower atmosphere.
There is basically zero warming efect in the troposphere, and a cooling effect at high altitude (10s off km)
Tom Shula and Markus Ott : The “Missing Link” in the Greenhouse Effect | Tom Nelson Pod #232
Attenuation of the 15μm band is 99.94% within 10m from the surface, and this is all thermalised to become part of the atmosphere controlled by the the gravity/thermal gradient.
Any water vapor, above the clouds, froze on the molecules, dry air and CO2 molecules.
Any IR photons, with long wavelengths, are absorbed by the ice, not by the CO2, which is covered with ice.
Contrails are formed by combustion water vapor freezing on the combustion particles. The sunlight gets refracted, which makes the contrails visible
IF A PLANE FLIES THROUGH WARMER AIR, CONTRAILS DO NOT FORM
“CO2 does not cause global warming”
Harold
Only science deniers who comment her make that false claim, Over 99.9% of scientists have disagree since the 1800s. Including popular skeptic scientists like Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Roy Spencer, John Christy and Judith Curry. For you to be correct every one of them has to be wrong.
According to most scientific consensus, water vapor contributes around 50% of the total greenhouse effect, clouds contribute roughly 25%, and carbon dioxide (CO2) accounts for approximately 20% of the greenhouse effect.
These percentage are rough estimates but that does not make them 100% wrong
Harold the Chemist, however, is 100% wrong, along with the rest of the WUWT Peanut Gallery.
Dickie-boi.. The ZER0-EVIDENCE, ZER0-SCIENCE yapper.. yaps again !!
1… Please provide empirical scientific evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
2… Please show the evidence of CO2 warming in the UAH atmospheric data.
FAKE Consensus is NOT EVIDENCE… if you knew even the remotest thing about science, you would know that.
But you are a science VOID !!
It is very obvious that you KNOW you cannot provide any empirical evidence for warming by atmospheric CO2…
… otherwise you would post it and stop your childish attention-seeking.
Sorry, Richard. I doubt seriously that “99.9% of scientists” disagree, as I doubt that all scientist in the world have been polled. Maybe 99.9% of “Climate Scientists (TM)” disagree, but that is a much smaller number.
It’s like saying 99.9% of “The Squad” didn’t vote for Trump. 😎
Everyone agrees that CO2 has a forcing effect. Other things being equal it will raise the global temperature.
The question is whether this forcing, applied to the climate of Planet Earth, will cause any increase in global temperature.
Other things may not be equal. Its a complicated system to which the forcing is being applied. The effect may well not be linear. Not only is the magnitude of the forcing not linear as a function of concentration, also the reaction of the climate to a given increase in forcing is probably not linear.
Your mistake is persistently to confuse forcing with its end effect and to assume that people who deny the second are denying the first. Please stop doing this. They are not. There is no doubt of the first, but there are lots of doubts about the second, and one can reasonably agree that the first exists but also deny that the second does to any significant extent.
Of course the effect is not linear. It is logarithmic.
Which is why you see all sensitivities expressed in w/m2 per DOUBLING of CO2.
Except measurements by Leckner show it is not actually logarithmic (which is an IPCC approximation)…
.. but levels off around the 200ppm mark
Possibly one of the most amusing things about Bnasty is that he posts evidence that directly refutes assertions he made on other threads, and has no idea he did so.
“The question is whether this forcing, applied to the climate of Planet Earth, will cause any increase in global temperature.”
Yes, that is the question.
Richard Greene uses Dr. Happer as a reference, but Dr. Happer says his estimate of ECS of 1.5C is a “non-feedback” number. In other words, feedbacks could take that number lower. How low? Nobody knows. Some estimates are near zero (Moeller, for one example).
My reading of Dr, Happer was a 1.0 ECS when working with Richard Lindzen and about 0.7 most recently on his own. 0.7 would be CO2 based on lab spectroscopy with zero net feedbacks. I have never seen Happer write about a 1.5 ECs and challenge you to prove he ever did. Not that Happer’s ECS guess is any better than any other guess. The ECS of CO2 with all feedbacks is unknown. Very few scientists guess less than 0.7 degrees C. per CO2 x 2.
A worst case guess by assuming all warming since 1975 was caused by CO2 would be about 1.8 with UAH (using the UAH average for 1975 to 1979) and 2.4 for NASA GISS. The IPCC prediction based on computer game average guesses has been about 3.0 since 1988.
Every ECS guess is baloney unless it has three decimal places, which is real science!
A guess to 3 decimal places is still a guess, not science.
“Your mistake is persistently to confuse forcing with its end effect and to assume that people who deny the second are denying the first.”
Thank you for making this important point. I don’t use the word “forcing” to describe the static radiative effect of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O etc., but I realize it is a semantics choice. I understand what you mean.
I don’t understand what a “forcing” is and as an engineer have long objected to the use of the term in the context it is used here. It is ill defined, if it ever even has been clearly defined. It appears to me to be used as a description of a complex factor or even a catalyst in a process that changes overall air temperature in a harmful way. In my view, this misrepresents the complexity of the process and leads to misunderstanding among disinterested observers (Carbon is bad!). I believe it is wrong to use it in this context and should be replaced with a better- and well-defined term.
I too object to the word “forcing” applied to the investigation of a climate system response from rising concentrations of non-condensing GHGs. They add no energy to the land + ocean + atmosphere system and therefore the response should not be assumed to be like that expected from changes in albedo or incident solar irradiation. The “forcing” + “feedback” framing of the investigation of GHGs implies the answer is known at the outset – i.e. circular reasoning.
David D,
In my years of lab spectrometry, there were entirely adequate scientific terms for all of the identified factors of interest. Text books were the primary references for terms. (The Internet did not exist).
There was no reason that I can see for the creation and use of new pop-science terms like “forcing”. It has the advantage for propaganda of introducing a social feel to the word, in contrast to existing neutral science words.
Time will tell if we sceptical scientists were fundamentally correct to be sceptical. For now, I am entirely comfortable with that coming judgement but I retain an open mind should the data change. Geoff S
I will second your distaste for using a term like “forcing”. It is generally construed to illustrate a feedback that results in a warmer temperature.
As an EE, I understand that a feedback can not supply additional energy to the system. That additional energy must come from an energy source. In this case, the sun. Yet the sun is supplying all the energy it can. The only additional energy must come from a change in albedo such that more energy is absorbed rather than reflected. CO2 doesn’t directly affect albedo so it can not be the source that obtains additional energy. More water vapor could absorb more energy, but, water vapor stores energy in a latent fashion, i.e., it is not sensible so there is no rise in temperature.
Around and around the circular arguments we go. Climate scientists ignore trying to find empirical evidence for their arguments. Why? I guess they think models will somehow justify their circular arguments.
Why has no scientists postulated building a tall tower like a windmill pylon, separating it into 1 foot layers to simulate the atmosphere, active cooling to simulate a lapse rate, and measured what various levels of CO2 does to temperature? Grandiose? Probably, but no more so than super colliders.
My guess is that this will never occur because it would eliminate many cushy jobs all over the globe working on computer models. Kinda of like an orbital telescope, not every university could have one!
“Your mistake is persistently to confuse forcing with its end effect and to assume that people who deny the second are denying the first.”
Thank you for making this important point. I don’t use the word “forcing” to describe the static radiative effect of incremental CO2, CH4, N2O etc., but I realize it is a semantics choice. I understand what you mean.
I have no idea why this reply was duplicated. I only entered it once.
It does bear repeating, realizing that most don’t really get what you are saying. 😉
Attribute it to global warming and move along.
Fig. 7 speaks for itself. The CO2 peaks are pretty small. If the scientists you mentioned saw the spectrum they would change opinion re CO2 and the greenhouse effect. I recall that Happer calculated that amount warming of air by CO2 is to small to measure.
Shown below is a chart of average annual temperatures of Adelaide from 1857 to 1999. The trend is cooling. Go to John Daly’s website and check out the temperature charts from the weather stations in Oz. They all show no warming up to c. 2,000.
Believing that CO2 causes global warming and is a dangerous gas,
Gov. Gavin N. is a path to inflict much harm on the economy of California, like banning vehicles with ice’s by 1935. Chevron was founded 140 years ago in California, but determined the company had no future there and moved its headquarters to Houston.
It looks like Adelaide was just as warm in the recent past as it is today.
That’s what all regional surface temperature written records show from all around the world.
The only thing that doesn’t show that the recent past was as warm as today is the bogus, bastardized, computer-generated Hockey Stick global temperature chart.
The Hockey Stick chart was created to promote the Human-caused Climate Change narrative. It does not represent reality, and the written, historic regional data does not support a “hotter and hotter and hotter” Hockey Stick temperature profile.
The Hockey Stick chart is a BIG LIE used to keep the Human-caused Climate Change narrative going. It’s a fraud on the people of the Earth.
Without the Hockey Stick chart the Climate Alarmists would have nothing to point to as evidence. That’s why it was created. But the written record puts the lie to the Hockey Stick chart profile and to Human-caused Climate Change.
Adelaide is 1,259 square miles
Earth is 197 million square miles
Why does the chart stop 25 years ago?
According to available climate data, the average temperature in Adelaide, Australia, has shown a clear upward trend over the past 25 years, with a noticeable increase in mean temperature, indicating a warming trend in the city; most studies point to an average temperature increase of nearly 1°C compared to earlier decades.
Adelaide population
2000 26,1,122,000
2024 1,379,000, a 23% increase
Adelaide, Australia has multiple weather stations, including:
Adelaide Airport Weather Station: Located at 138.5E / 35.0S
North Adelaide Station: Located at an elevation of 46 ft, 34.92 °S, 138.6 °E
West Terrace Park Lands: The official Adelaide Weather Station until 1976. In 2017, an automatic weather station was built at this location, allowing the Bureau of Meteorology to resume climate records from 1860.
John Daly was an El Nino Nutter and Sunspot Count Nutter. I would not trust any data he presented, or any climate claims he made.
Harold P,
Adelaide has a number of weather stations whose data is available to the public from the BOM site Climate Data Online – Map search
No single weather station has data for the period that you show, 1857 to 1997. Therefore, any complete reconstructions involve one or more data splices.
The act of splicing station data carries large errors. In essence, it is guesswork biased by the whims of the adjuster. The data splice is among the largest sources of error in all reconstructions – there is no way to know what is closest to actual. It is therefore fertile ground for adjusters on a mission.
In a week or so I will be updating and releasing heatwave studies in about 15 large and tiny weather stations in Australia. They will be selected for long weather observation periods, typically starting before 1880. In the course of that work, I will show several splices of Adelaide data to give a graphical view of how large the errors are.
Geoff S
I am looking forward to it. Please hurry!
Once again, here is the temperature chart for Death Valley. No warming from 1922 to 2001.
The data available today refute that old charts with the record TMAX set a fee years ago/
Over 99.9% of scientists have disagree
once again, source?
In 1999 at the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 was ca. 375 ppmv.
No surprises there in the light of work by The Energy Realists of Australia in 2021.
THE REAL COST OF GREEN HYDROGEN
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/21-18-the-cost-of-green-hydrogen
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/Efficiency_of_Hydrogen_Fuelled_Gas_Turbines_Version_1.5.pdf
And now we have provided the world with the gruesome failures of the green loon Andrew “Twiggy” Forest.
There is a “dispatchable emissions-free resource” or DEFR made by the ACME Company I believe.
Exercise wheels, whether mouse of camel size, don’t really count as emissions-free as far as the greens are concerned.
Unfortunate for the people caught in the no energy today situation this is what it will take to convince everyone that sun and wind can’t power their lifestyle/economy. With low percentages of wind and solar power today it can’t be done so what happens when they increase the renewables and phase out the fossil fuels and nuclear? Not rocket science conundrums.
In 2024 US primary energy consumption was about 84% from fossil fuels. US secondary energy consumption (electricity) was about 34% of US primary energy consumption.
Net Zero requires a focus on primary energy consumption, not just electricity.
New York State primary energy consumption was 72.4% from fossil fuels. NYS electricity was 36.6% of NYS primary energy consumption.
More than 150,000 electric vehicles are registered in New York, with more than 42,000 of them within the five boroughs of New York City, according to state vehicle registration data. Electric vehicles make up less than 2% of New York’s 9 to 11 million (I can’t find a trustworthy number) million vehicles, however.
New York State
Goal 70% renewable electricity by 2030
2023 actual: 50% excluding biomass
2024 expected to be slightly higher than 2023 (not much progress).
The EIA claims:
“New York consumes less total energy per capita than the residents in all but one other state, and per capita energy consumption in New York’s transportation sector is lower than in all other states.
New York’s per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are consistently lower than those of any other state in the nation.”
New York’s electricity comes from a variety of sources, including:
Natural gas: 47.7% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Nuclear: 22.1% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Hydroelectric: 21.9% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Wind: 3.9% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Solar: 2% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Biomass: 1.3% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
Petroleum: 0.3% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023
New York’s energy laws include goals to increase the amount of renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions: 70% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040.
The 2030 70% “renewables” target includes nuclear, hydro, solar, wind biomass, and carbon capture.
New York’s 100% carbon free electricity by 2040 goal includes renewable resources and zero-emission resources:
Renewable resources
90% of the electricity generated in New York in 2040 will come from renewable resources like wind, solar, and hydropower.
Zero-emission resources
10% of the electricity generated in New York in 2040 will come from zero-emission resources like nuclear generation and Renewable Natural Gas. Renewable natural gas (RNG) is a pipeline-quality gas produced from organic waste sources like landfills, agricultural waste, and wastewater treatment plants, essentially “upgraded biogas”.
The 2030 70% target was not completely insane if building another nuclear power plant and buying more Canadian hydropower was the strategy. Hydro power available from Canada, however, varies with annual rainfall. The 2040 100% carbon free NY electricity target is insane.
The Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) will provide about 20% of New York’s power needs from Canadian hydropower. The CHPE is a $6 billion transmission line that will connect New York City’s power grid to hydroelectric power plants in Quebec, Canada. It’s scheduled to go operational in spring 2026. New York City uses about two-thirds of the electricity consumed in New York State.
In 2019 NY State got 34% of electricity from nuclear power. Then they closed the Indian Point nuclear plant. The nuclear percentage was only 22% in 2023. They needed one more nuclear power plant by 2030 but instead closed one of four in 2020 and 2021.
Restarting Indian Point is likely not an option. The site’s reactors are being demolished and their parts are being shipped out of state. But Knickerbocker thinks the site could be a candidate for a small modular reactor, technology that is years away from widespread commercial use.
Last July at WUWT in an article posted by Roger C., a commenter said he calculated that
6.9% of the land area of NY would needed for the PV solar panels and wind turbines to meet the 70 by 30 goal. Does this seem right?
In winter, snow covers large areas of NY, especially up state. What are these guys thinking?
I mentioned to Roger that he needed not worry too much because this scheme will never get pass square one: acquisition of the large tracts of land solar panels and wind turbines.
BTW: I saw on the TV that the “Northern Canadian Polar Pipeline” will inundate the eastern US with a large mass of really cold Arctic air next week. Will you be spared?
At night there is never any solar energy, so that is an expensive non-starter for a modern economy, from Day 1, says any sane person
There are niche situations where these forms of energy make sense… but running a modern economy on these non-dispatchable sources of energy makes no sense at all ( given current technology) and won’t unless economically competitive grid-scale storage (batteries, not hydrogen) is developed. In the mean time …. drill baby drill ( for more nat gas powered generation).
“Plug Power, reported as its results for the third quarter of 2024 a loss of $211 million on revenues of $174 million”. It looks to me like everything is going to plan for Plug Power: no doubt a very large part of the expenditure to date is on directors’ salaries which will not have to be paid back when the company folds. Surely nobody ever expected them to actually build anything.
No more “Uncle Sucker!”, come January 20, 2025. No subsidy money for you!
This article is about the high capital cost, $/installed MW, of offshore wind systems and the very expensive electricity, c/kWh, wholesale, they occasiaonally produce.
Without 50% subsidies, these systems would not even exist, per Warren Buffett
Ban the Expensive, Dysfunctional Offshore Wind Turbine Fiasco
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/ban-the-dysfunctional-offshore-wind-turbine-fiasco
by Willem Post
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Eliminate all subsidies of any kind for all industries, etc.
Federal government spending would be reduced by several hundred $billion each year
High Costs/kWh of Offshore Wind Foisted onto a Brainwashed/Gullible Public
Forcing utilities to pay 15 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from fixed offshore wind systems, and
Forcing utilities to pay 18 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from floating offshore wind systems is suicidal economic insanity.
Excluded costs, at a future 30% wind/solar penetration on the grid, the current UK level:
– Onshore grid expansion/reinforcement, about 2 c/kWh
– Traditional plants counteracting wind/solar variable output, on a less than minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365, about 2 c/kWh
– Traditional plants providing electricity during 1) low-wind periods, 2) high-wind periods, when rotors are locked in place, and 3) low solar conditions, about 2 c/kWh
– Wind and solar electricity that could have been produced, if not curtailed, about 1 c/kWh
– Disassembly at sea, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites, about 2 c/kWh
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming
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The insanity and environmental damage of it all is off the charts.
No wonder Europe’s near-zero, real-growth economy is in such big do-do
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Comparing Area Requirements of Nuclear, Solar and Wind
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Nuclear plants last 60 to 80 years, solar about 25 y and wind about 20 y
Nuclear plants can be designed to be load following, as in France.
Wind and solar are highly subsidized, grid disturbing, weather-dependent very expensive electricity sources, as shown below.
Open URL at the top to see image
Levelized Cost of Energy Deceptions, by US-EIA, et al.
Most people have no idea wind and solar systems need grid expansion/reinforcement and expensive support systems to even exist on the grid.
With increased annual W/S electricity percent on the grid, increased grid investments are needed, plus greater counteracting plant capacity, MW, especially when it is windy and sunny around noon-time.
Increased counteracting of the variable W/S output, places an increased burden on the grid’s other generators, causing them to operate in an inefficient manner (more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh), which adds more cost/kWh to the offshore wind electricity cost of about 16 c/kWh, after 50% subsidies
The various cost/kWh adders start with annual W/S electricity at about 8% on the grid.
The adders become exponentially greater, with increased annual W/S electricity percent on the grid
The US-EIA, Lazard, Bloomberg, etc., and their phony LCOE “analyses”, are deliberately understating the cost of wind, solar and battery systems
Their LCOE “analyses” of W/S/B systems purposely exclude major LCOE items.
Their deceptions reinforced the popular delusion, W/S are competitive with fossil fuels, which is far from reality.
The excluded LCOE items are shifted to taxpayers, ratepayers, and added to government debts.
W/S would not exist without at least 50% subsidies
W/S output could not be physically fed into the grid, without items 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. See list.
1) Subsidies equivalent to about 50% of project lifetime owning and operations cost,
2) Grid extension/reinforcement to connect remote W/S systems to load centers
3) A fleet of quick-reacting power plants to counteract the variable W/S output, on a less-than-minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365
4) A fleet of power plants to provide electricity during low-W/S periods, and 100% during high-W/S periods, when rotors are feathered and locked,
5) Output curtailments to prevent overloading the grid, i.e., paying owners for not producing what they could have produced
6) Hazardous waste disposal of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. See image.
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It is clear that the New York State Climate Action Council and its Scoping Plan are both huge failures. All members of the council should be fired, all actions, rules or regulations created by or supported by the council should be nullified. People like Roger and Francis should be hired to dismantle the council and make preparations for building new fossil fuel and nuclear generators in addition to firing up all current fossil fuel and nuclear generators.