IN THIS ISSUE:
- Big Tech Embraces Reliable Energy, Jettisons Wind, Solar
- Subsidence, Rising Seas, Drive Sinking Cities
- Overseas Windfarms Closing Early
Big Tech Embraces Reliable Energy, Jettisons Wind, Solar
In late October 2024, The Heartland Institute released a study I coauthored with Heartland President James Taylor and Robinson Center Research Fellow Linnea Lueken describing the high costs utilities are foisting upon ratepayers and taxpayers in their profiteering quest to replace fossil fuels with unreliable so-called renewables. Utilities embraced renewables because they could reap large profits in the form of fixed costs of construction plus subsidies for operation, but also because virtue-signaling big banks, investment firms, and Big Tech pushed the green energy transition as a way to fight climate change. When it comes to secure, reliable electric power supplies, utilities are no longer on their customers’ sides, choosing increased profits over the public services they were chartered for and charged with providing.
In recent months, as I detailed previously in a Townhall column, under pressure from the attorneys general and legislatures in various states, and with Donald Trump returning as president, big banks, investment houses, and fund managers have begun to see the writing on the wall and have started withdrawing their support for multilateral and domestic climate goals and efforts to end fossil fuel use. Their support for wind and solar continues, but now it’s alongside support for other sources of energy, instead of in lieu of it.
The third private pillar supporting the green new scam, big tech/AI, last year finally began to acknowledge that despite their decades-long support for government-driven green energy mandates and subsidies to reach net zero carbon emissions, their industry can’t rely on the “renewable” wind and solar power they wanted the world to run on. What big tech/AI needs is reliable power, power not dependent on the whims of the weather or the day not turning to night. Heartland policy experts discussed the shift in Big Tech toward demanding increasing amounts of reliable electric power, in an episode of our popular In the Tank livestream, and I discussed model legislation aimed at that goal—reliable energy for all, not just Big Tech—in a column for Real Clear Energy.
What was once a trickle of Big Tech support for reliable energy has become a torrent, at least for nuclear power, with the release of an official statement in support of nuclear, “The Large Energy Users Pledge,” on the World Nuclear Association’s website, signed by Big Tech/AI heavyweights. Among the points the pledge states are these:
- Recognizing that, despite ongoing energy efficiency and optimization efforts, energy demand in many industries is expected to increase significantly in the coming years in order to support growing economies.
- Agree that nuclear energy capacity should at least triple by 2050, from current levels, to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.
- Recognizing that large energy users often depend on the availability of abundant energy for their successful and cost-competitive operations, and that nuclear energy can provide round the clock energy independently of the weather, the season or the geographical location.
- Agree that safe, clean, firm energy technologies, including nuclear, play an important role in creating a diversified and reliable grid.
- Agree that a resilient strategy for fostering economic growth should include an increase in the share of electricity provided by nuclear energy and should ensure energy abundance delivered through a diversified and reliable grid infrastructure.
Science writer Jo Nova’s comment on Big Tech’s sharp energy turnabout on her popular blog merits quoting at length:
Just like that—the renewables bubble went phht.
After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse—they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm”. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t say nuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?
Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too, Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say they want energy that’s not dependent on “the weather, the season, or the geographical location”.
There’s no “Sorry we got it wrong”. There’s no apology for hectoring us, censoring us, or wasting billions of dollars. It’s just Mr Don’t-Look-Over-Here telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years. This is the billionaire club asking the taxpayers to build them more nuclear plants.
Signatories include Siemens Energy, which suffered a 36% share price fall 18 months ago when it admitted it was losing billions trying to maintain wind turbines.
It’s the perfect storm. Just as renewable investments wallow in their failures, the AI race is escalating, and it needs monster data, which means monster energy. As we saw in Texas the new grid entrants are asking for a whole gigawatt of capacity each, and peak demand is expected to rise by a wild 75% in the next five years.
Less than a year ago Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” but now it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
Sadly, the Big Tech giants didn’t boldly go where they should have, to embrace all sources of reliable, affordable electric power, which would have included coal and natural gas, but they have been seen consulting with and publicly embracing President Donald Trump. Perhaps his public pronouncement this week in support of expanding use of coal means Big Tech’s embrace of Old King Coal might not be far behind. After all, it has become apparent that for them what is good is whatever can give them enough electricity to power their desired growth of AI.
Sources: Jo Nova; World Nuclear Association; The Heartland Institute; The Heartland Institute
Subsidence, Rising Seas, Drive Sinking Cities
A recent New York Post (NYP) article, “Scary Map Reveals Major Coastal Cities Rapidly Sinking into Sea,” reports that a study from NASA claims several major coastal cities are sinking at alarming rates due to a combination of land subsidence and rising sea levels.
The study, published in Science Direct, suggests that projections of sea level rise based on climate change as the driver fail to account for an independent factor behind recent coastal changes of relative sea height, a factor possibly of greater significance than melting ice caps and thermal water expansion itself: changes due to coastal land subsidence and uplift.
An accurate understanding of the causes and degree of sea level rise is critical to forming successful societal and policy responses.
Using satellite data for 2015 through 2023, the authors examined sea level changes and projections for coastal California in particular. Despite the limited sample size (coastal California, a short period, satellite data only), they conclude current projections of sea level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change significantly underestimate relative “sea level rise” changes because they do not account for changes in land height. They write,
Vertical land motion (VLM), including uplift and subsidence, can greatly alter relative sea level projections and flood mitigations plans. Yet, current projection frameworks, such as the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, often underestimate VLM by relying on regional linear estimates. … Our findings reveal that regional estimates substantially understate sea level rise in parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles, projecting more than double the expected rise by 2050. Additionally, temporally variable (nonlinear) VLM, driven by factors such as hydrocarbon and groundwater extraction, can increase uncertainties in 2050 projections by up to 0.4 meters in certain areas of Los Angeles and San Diego.
“In many parts of the world, like the reclaimed ground beneath San Francisco, the land is moving down faster than the sea itself is going up,” said Marin Govorcin, the lead author of the NASA study, who specializes in remote sensing at NASA’s Propulsion Laboratory, according to the NYP story about the study.
Climate Realism has published more than 200 stories debunking recent mainstream media reports attributing dangerous rates of sea level rise to anthropogenic climate change. As the Climate Realism posts show, such claims are often wildly off base, misstating rates of sea level rise and entirely ignoring local factors which swamp any discernible rise that can be fairly attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions. In short, there is no “global” average sea level rise. In some locations, measured sea level rise has increased rapidly in recent years; in other locations, rates of rise have not changed; in still other places; coastlines are fairly static with little if any measurable increase; and in others still, measured sea levels are falling, in some cases dramatically. This fact, by itself, should have suggested to researchers and any honest journalists with an ounce of curiosity and integrity that something other than global greenhouse gas emissions were the cause of coastal changes.
While one should applaud the researchers involved for looking beyond anthropogenic climate change as a causal factor for rising seas, there are a variety of weaknesses in the dataset its authors used to come to their conclusion of rapid sea level rise along the coast of California, as my colleague meteorologist Anthony Watts pointed out in response to the NYP report on this study.
First, a point Watts didn’t discuss but that I have concerns about. Satellite data for the coasts exist for decades before 2015, and one wonders why the researchers didn’t avail themselves of the longer-term dataset, especially since eight years’ data would hardly be enough to attribute any changes to long-term climate change.
That leads to two related points Watts made. It is not clear that satellite measurements of coastal sea level rise are the best way to identify relative changes in sea levels. Unlike satellites, which can have calibration errors and short-term variability due to orbit decay, tide gauges provide consistent, long-term records that show no alarming trends in sea level rise. Also, we have long-term, consistently measured and monitored data from tide gauges.
Looking at the tide gauge data from San Francisco and Los Angeles, Watts found neither location has experienced an increase in the rate of rise over the past century. The tide gauge at San Francisco has measured a steady rate of sea level rise of 1.98 millimeters per year with a 95 percent confidence interval of +/- 0.17 mm/yr since 1897, equivalent to a change of 0.65 feet in 100 years. In Los Angeles, the rate of sea level rise over the same time period is even lower: 1.05 millimeters per year with a 95 percent confidence interval of +/- 0.21 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1923 to 2024. That is a change of 0.34 feet in 100 years. The rate of sea level rise measured in both San Francisco and Los Angeles is, in fact, lower than the global average rate of sea level rise over the past century. And whatever the rate, the acknowledged subsidence along California’s coast makes it unclear whether any of the sea level rise there—low and slow as it is—can be attributed to climate change.
Sources: New York Post; Science Direct; Climate Realism
Overseas Windfarms Closing Early
Industrial wind facilities in Australia and Germany are closing early, ceasing operations decades earlier than coal and nuclear power plants would reach the end of their useful lives.
Two neighboring wind operations in Australia are shutting down and filing decommissioning plans: the 18.2 megawatt (MW) Codrington facility and the nearby 30 MW Yambuk site. Codrington, which opened in 2001, is the oldest wind facility in the country.
Australia has pushed wind power as a way to provide electricity while fighting climate change, with taxpayers heavily subsidizing the construction and operation of the facilities. Each facility has cost more and delivered less, and less reliable, power than promised, Now many are shutting early rather than repowering as their turbines’ operations start to fail.
“In a first clue as to what might be the future for some ageing wind farms sites, renewable energy company Pacific Blue says it will not repower the country’s oldest commercial wind farm, … [t]he 18.2 megawatt (MW) Codrington wind farm … commissioned in 2001,” reports Renew Economy. “Despite an enviable location near Port Fairy in southwest Victoria, which benefited from the same southern ocean winds that drew the federal government to the offshore Southern Wind zone, repowering the site will be too expensive, the company says.”
Maintenance costs for the turbines are rising and replacing them with new turbines would be expensive because the latest-generation turbines are much larger, requiring deeper, heavier foundations, different spacing requirements, and upgraded infrastructure. These changes, in turn, would require going through a new regulatory approval process and new negotiations with landowners. The Chinese company that owns the facilities determined all this would just be too costly to undertake.
Its important to note coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants’ useful operating lives typically extend to 30 or 50 years or longer. These plants operate long after their loans and capital costs are paid off, whereas wind farms often begin to fail or become unprofitable before their initial loans are paid off, unless the government lets them write off their investments on an expedited basis.
Australia is not the only country watching its costly “carbon-free energy” fantasy come crashing down. Germany’s first offshore industrial wind facility is shutting down after only 15 years of operation. As Germany’s massive subsidies for the Alpha Ventus wind facility’s operations have run out, so have its owner’s desire and ability to operate it.
Alpha Ventus first began operating in 2010, backed by a government subsidy of 15.4c per kilowatt hour (kwh). As reported by Energy News Beat, even with generous taxpayer support Alpha Ventus has faced numerous difficulties in maintaining its operations, problems common to offshore wind farms:
Overall, offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive to operate than onshore wind farms due to increased maintenance costs, poor accessibility, harsh environments, and the specialized equipment and personnel needed to conduct operational work.
Offshore wind farms are significantly more expensive to operate than onshore wind farms due to a combination of factors stemming from their challenging marine environment and remote locations.
Offshore turbines are exposed to corrosive saltwater, strong winds, large waves, and potential storms, which act to accelerate wear and tear on components. This leads to more frequent failures and the need for more robust and expensive materials.
When turbines break down offshore, the time required to access, diagnose, and repair them is typically much longer than for onshore turbines due to weather limitations and logistical challenges.
This results in more significant losses in electricity generation and revenue.
Faced with high operating costs and significant down time, the final blow for Alpha Ventus was the end of its high government subsidy, which dropped to 3.9c per kwh (still more than 40 percent higher than the production tax credit for wind power in the United States).
Amid political backlash over the high energy prices created by its policies, the German government scrapped the high feed-in tariff it had granted to wind, solar, and geothermal developer/operators in its 2014 Renewable Energy Sources Act. Alpha Ventus’s owners determined continued operation of the facility is unprofitable with the remaining tariff payment.
It seems that despite repeated claims wind is cheaper than other sources of electric power, it is still not competitive with traditional sources such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear, absent substantial subsidies and, in Australia’s case, likely regulatory relief.
Sources: Renew Economy; Energy News Beat
