Renewable rejections surged in ’21, Joe Craft talks coal, Madison County update, & Spotted Sandpiper
Renewable rejections surged in 2021, Joe Craft talks coal, Madison County update, TPPF panel on ERCOT, new graphic for my power density talk, & Spotted Sandpiper at Barton Springs
Happy Friday, y’all. The last few days have been busy. I have done three presentations in the past eight days, including a well-attended lecture on Monday at the Houston Petroleum Club. I presented on the ERCOT grid and the regulatory efforts now underway to help assure we don’t have a repeat of last year’s deadly blackout. But enough for the introduction. Lots going on. Six items today:
Forbes piece updates Renewable Rejection Database
New graphic for my Power of Power Density talk
Joe Craft, CEO of Alliance Resource Partners, on the podcast
TPPF panel on ERCOT
Power Brief: update on the Wind Turbines of Madison County
Spotted Sandpiper spotted at Barton Springs
The photo of the Spotted Sandpiper above was taken in Toronto in 2005.
Yesterday, I published a new piece on Forbes that provides the latest updates to the Renewable Rejection Database, which is now going to be updated exclusively on my website. I began:
Of the many whoppers that renewable-energy promoters use while advocating for huge increases in the use of wind and solar, the most absurd claim is that building massive amounts of new renewable energy capacity won’t require very much land. Indeed, that assertion is often made by climate activist Bill McKibben.
Or consider a report published in 2020 by San Francisco-based Energy Innovation, a “nonpartisan energy and environmental policy firm,” which claimed that all of the wind and solar kit needed to get us to 90 percent zero-carbon electricity would amount to a mere “28,200 square kilometers” (about 10,900 square miles). The report’s authors helpfully point out that that much territory would be “about triple the land currently devoted to golf courses, and equivalent to about half the land owned by the Department of Defense.” It must be noted that one of the authors of that report, Sonia Aggarwal, now works in the White House in the Office of Domestic Climate Policy as a senior policy advisor.
Despite the many false claims about the land intensity of renewables, the physics and the math don’t lie. The incurably low power density of wind and solar energy (which are the subject of a 10-minute TED-style talk I gave last week) means that they require cartoonish amounts of land. Furthermore, the notion that there are plenty of rural towns and counties who just can’t wait to have forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines and oceans of solar panels inflicted upon them is nothing more than rank propaganda.
I concluded the piece:
I hope the Renewable Rejection Database will inject more realism into our politics and energy discussions. Energy realism is energy humanism. Energy realism requires accepting the reality that large-scale renewable projects are dividing rural communities all across America. Energy realism requires accepting the fact that we must stop subsidizing the destruction of our natural environment and our wildlife, with intermittent, weather-dependent sources of electricity that cannot — will not — be able to meet our energy and power needs.
My other hope for the Renewable Rejection Database is that it will further debunk the claims that renewables are low-cost or somehow morally or environmentally superior. One of my intellectual heroes is Jesse Ausubel, who by the way, was on the Power Hungry Podcast last October. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University nails the situation when he says: “Wind and solar may be renewable, but they are not ‘green.’”
Again, here's a link to the Forbes article. Here's a link to the Renewable Rejection Database. Please share both of them. (If you have updates for the database, please send me the details, with relevant info and URL to media stories or sources.)
New Graphic for the "Power of Power Density" talk
A new friend of mine made a nice graphic for my power of power density talk. So I am using it here. If you haven’t watched the video, please give it a listen and share it.
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Joe Craft of Tulsa-based Alliance Resource Partners, on coal demand, ESG, and more
Since starting the Power Hungry Podcast in mid-2020, we’ve had lots of guests who focus on nuclear energy. We’ve also had guests talking about hydrocarbons and why they will stick around, as well as people like my friend, Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Oilfield Services, who are in the business of getting oil and gas out of the ground. But we’ve not had anyone on the podcast who is actually in the coal business. That’s one reason why I’m pleased that the latest episode of the podcast (#89) features Joe Craft, the CEO of Tulsa-based Alliance Resource Partners, the second-largestcoal producer in the eastern United States. I’ve known Joe for more than a decade. He was instrumental in facilitating my visit to the Cardinal Mine, one of Alliance’s mines in western Kentucky. That visit provided the opening scene for my fourth book, Power Hungry. In this episode, Craft talks about why coal demand in the US and Europe has rebounded, his friendship with Donald Trump, how the pressure on banks to conform with ESG rules is affecting his company’s access to capital, his philanthropic efforts, and why we “can’t take energy for granted.”
I was glad to reconnect with Joe. Among the most interesting things he said was that the ESG push is crimping Alliance’s ability to access capital through its revolving credit facility, which is the money that businesses use for operating capital. “We've had half of our banks decide, tell us that they're not going to be renewing, when we go to renew our revolver in 2023. They are saying don't count on us being there. Because of ESG purposes, only our balance sheet is pristine. We've got debt-to-EBITDA of less than one. So we're generating enough cash flow on an annual basis to pay what debt off we have... banks are basically saying because of ESG purposes, we decided not to reduce our exposure to the coal industry and or just to not invest in order to lend to the NGO industry.”
I had heard that ESG rules were being used to choke the hydrocarbon sector of the money it needs to stay in business. Joe’s comment was the first that I had heard about this first hand. It’s a remarkable story. Alliance is selling a product the market wants. It is not doing anything illegal. And yet, banks are shutting off funding because of rules that are being put in place by an unaccountable capital
Again, here’s a link to the audio of the podcast. And don’t forget, the video of the episode is on my YouTube channel.
TPPF panel on ERCOT and what Texas needs to do to fix its grid
Last Friday, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual Policy Orientation here in Austin. The other guests on the panel were Peter Lake, the new chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, and Dan Hunter, the assistant commissioner for water and rural affairs at the Texas Department of Agriculture. The panel was moderated by Michael Nasi, a lawyer at Jackson Walker who also works with the Life:Powered team at TPPF. I was flattered to participate in the panel which was captioned “More Blackouts? What Texas Needs to Do to Fix the Grid.” I was also pleased to hear how Lake is implementing regulations at the PUC that should make the Texas grid more reliable. Most of my remarks were focused on the massive amount of wind and solar that are proposed to be added to the ERCOT grid. Again, here’s the video.
New Power Brief on the wind turbines of Madison County
I haven’t had time to write a piece about the ongoing land-use conflicts over wind turbines in Madison County, Iowa, so I made this 5-minute Power Brief. The county made famous for its wooden bridges is now caving into pressure from MidAmerican Energy to accept more wind turbines. Please have a look.
Spotted Sandpipers at the pool
One of the many great things about birdwatching is the sharing ethic among birdwatchers. If one birder sees a given species, they will eagerly publish info about when and where they’ve seen it. Sites like ebird.org allow birders to see what species have seen on any given day and location. I often check ebird before going out to birding spots around Austin, including the Hornsby Bend sewage treatment plant.
But it’s the person-to-person sharing that is the most fun. On a recent cold day here in Austin, Lorin and I were walking around Barton Springs Pool. As we circled the pool, we passed a couple of friends who are also regular swimmers. They had binoculars and were scanning the nearby trees. We asked what they were seeing and they said that there wasn’t much activity except for a Spotted Sandpiper, which was spending a lot of time on the edge of the water. One of them told us, you’ll see it, it’s a “smallish brown bird that moves its butt up and down all the time.” That was a helpful hint because I’m not very good at identifying water birds. Sure enough, a short distance further down the path, we spotted a Spotted Sandpiper (Actitis macularius), a bird that I, at first glance, thought might be a Killdeer. (The photo above was also taken in Toronto in 2005.)
Wikipedia says this:
Adults have short yellowish legs and an orange bill with a dark tip. The body is brown on top and white underneath with black spots. These spots vary in degree over the course of spotted sandpipers' lives, becoming especially prevalent around the breeding season. The overall health of spotted sandpipers may be suggested by the "spottiness" of an individual. Generally, females with more "spottiness" were healthier than those who did not have as many spots. The condition of males based on the amount of spots they exhibit is yet to be determined. Additionally, spot size gets smaller and the spot shape becomes more irregularly shaped as age increases. Spotted Sandpipers also feature a white supercilium.
Spotted Sandpipers are a philopatric species. Their breeding habitat is near fresh water across most of Canada and the United States. They migrate to the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America, and are very rare vagrants to western Europe. These are not gregarious birds, and are seldom seen in flocks. Spotted sandpipers are the most widespread species of their kind in North America due to their high breeding rates and their ability to adapt to various environmental pressures.
Breeding grounds are chosen based on various environmental factors, but tend to be in the proximity of bodies of water that offer some coverage from vegetation. Successful breeding sites may be used repeatedly until either the site becomes physically unsuitable (from overgrown vegetation or flooding) or predation becomes too severe. The females usually arrive at breeding grounds before the males do and establish their territories. Males arrive to breeding sites later, but it is uncertain whether or not they will arrive to the same breeding sites that some females have chosen. The search for mates amongst female spotted sandpipers is much more competitive than finding potential mates is for males.
During each summer breeding season, females may mate with and lay clutches for more than one male, leaving incubation to them. This is called polyandry. Male spotted sandpipers take care of the offspring, both before and after the offspring hatch. They will incubate their eggs for about 20–23 days... Additionally, mated females have testosterone concentrations that are 7 times higher than those of unmated females. Due to their polyandrous behavior, spotted sandpipers tend to produce more offspring compared to other species of sandpipers.
I hope you have a great weekend.
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