"News" letter #100, Invenergy sues Iowa cty, Toby Rice on the podcast, two Red-shouldered Hawks

Jun 17, 2022

Invenergy's litigation and "nefarious tactics," Toby Rice of EQT talks LNG, and a pair of Red-Shouldered Hawks

I pay attention to numbers. Much of my career in writing about energy and power has been about trying to make numbers understandable. I also use them as markers in time. This is the 100th edition of my “news” letter. I started it two years ago as a way to promote the Power Hungry Podcast. Since then, the list has grown a lot and it has become my once-a-week chance to write about whatever is on my mind. Of course, I’m still using it to get attention to the podcast, but it’s also been my chance to update my followers about my articles, speaking engagements, and of course, birds. I get as much, or more, feedback about birds in this newsletter as I do for my podcasts or writing. I love birds and birdwatching. There is power in birds. As Roger Tory Peterson rightly said, "birds are a vivid expression of life."

Since this is newsletter number 100, I also must acknowledge that over the past two years, my business has changed a lot. My speaking business has grown enormously. And my speaking has meshed nicely with my book and documentary. Twenty-seven months ago, my friends at PublicAffairs published my sixth book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, and almost exactly two years ago, we (my colleague, Tyson Culver, and I) released, our feature-length documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World. I’m crazy proud of both the book and the film and as the world faces an energy crisis with insufficient supplies of electricity, both properties are even more relevant today than they were two years ago.

Of course, the last two years have been grueling, with Covid, lockdowns, vaccines, mask mandates, soaring inflation, economic instability, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and everything else. That’s a rather long way of getting to the point which is this: I am profoundly grateful to have an audience for my work. Every day, I wake up and think about what piece of content I can make that will have the most impact. And on Fridays, I get to publish a personal dispatch about the things I care about the most. Thanks to all of y’all for being such a generous audience. And if you want to share this epistle, by all means, do so. Okay, now to business. One media hit this week: I was on the Laura Ingraham Show on Tuesday talking about the electric grid and the shuttering of the Palisades nuclear plant. (The podcast appears to be behind a paywall.) Three other items today:

Forbes: Invenergy sues Worth County, uses “nefarious tactics”
Podcast: EQT’s Toby Rice talks pipelines and decarbonization
Two Buteo lineatus at the birdbath.

I took the photo above with my iPhone on June 11, 2022, at about 4 pm.

Subscribe to this "news" letter. Click here.

This morning, I published a piece in Forbes about Invenergy’s lawsuit against Worth County, Iowa. It’s the latest example of the hardball tactics that “green” energy companies are using to force local communities to accept big renewable projects. I began:

Five years ago, K. Darlene Park, a homeowner and anti-wind activist in Frostburg, Maryland, explained to me why she and so many other rural Americans are fighting the encroachment of large wind and solar projects. “We feel this renewable energy push is an attack on rural America,” she said.
Of course, that’s not the narrative that alternative-energy companies, climate activists, and top officials in the Biden administration are promoting. Instead, they claim that wind and solar energy are “less expensive” than traditional forms of energy and that big renewable projects should be welcomed by rural landowners. But the truth is that communities all across America are rejecting or restricting these projects. As can be seen in the Renewable Rejection Database, more than 330 communities have rejected wind projects since 2015. In addition, at least 38 solar projects have been rejected since 2017.
As siting wind and solar projects has gotten more difficult, big renewable companies are resorting to hardball legal tactics. The latest example came last month when Chicago-based Invenergy, the world’s largest privately held renewable energy company, sued Worth County, Iowa as part of an effort to force the county to accept a wind project the county doesn’t want.

I concluded:

Back in 2014, Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathawayfamously said the “only reason” to build wind projects is to collect the PTC. “They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has also coined another famous line: “show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.” In another version, which is available on YouTube, Munger says “You get what you reward for. So if you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes."
The PTC is a dumb incentive. And because of that incentive, MidAmerican sued Madison County and Invenergy sued Worth County. Furthermore, their litigation tactics show that the pursuit of wind and solar across rural America is not about climate change. Instead, it’s about money and the no-holds-barred pursuit of tax credits. Indeed, the push for renewables across the country has become — as Darlene Park told me five years ago – an attack on rural America. And that attack is being fueled by dumb incentives.

Again, here’s a link. Please share it.

Toby Rice: hydraulic fracturing is a "miracle technology"

I have been closely following the natural gas sector for the past several months as prices have soared and demand for LNG in Europe has risen due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The surging demand for gas fits with a thesis I’ve been promoting for a dozen years: N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

I’ve also been following Toby Rice, the CEO of EQT, the biggest natural gas producer in the country, because Rice has emerged as one of the most outspoken defenders of the hydrocarbon sector. We talked for more than an hour. We covered a lot of topics. I particularly liked his response to my question about what gives him hope. He replied, “energy is everything and a root cause, a lot of these issues that we have, are due to lack of lack of enough energy in this world. What gives me hope is the potential that the United States has with energy. What gives me hope is unleashing US LNG. I really think this is going to be a solution to a lot of issues. Whether it’s people addressing people’s concerns about climate or you know, finding a way to pull these 3 billion people out of energy poverty and give them a better quality of life. I’ve never been more excited or driven to make something happen.”

Again, here’s a link to the audio. As always, the podcast is also on YouTube.

Subscribe to this "news" letter. Click here

A pair of Red-shouldered Hawks stopped by for a bath

I’ve written about our resident Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus) before. We have a pair that are frequent visitors to our yard. (As I write this, one of them just flew past my office window.) Over the past few days, as the weather has gotten insanely hot, they have been coming closer to the house and have begun landing on the birdbath just outside of our kitchen windows at least once a day to drink water and cool off. Last Saturday, for the first time, a pair visited the birdbath at the same time. They stayed long enough for me to shoot photos and even a bit of video, which I posted on Twitter. As you can see, they are fierce-looking birds. I never get tired of watching them perch. They are also amazing fliers, able to navigate in very tight spaces in the dense woods behind the house. Allaboutbirds.com says the Red-shouldered Hawk is:

typically a sign of tall woods and water. It’s one of our most distinctively marked common hawks, with barred reddish-peachy underparts and a strongly banded tail. In flight, translucent crescents near the wingtips help to identify the species at a distance. These forest hawks hunt prey ranging from mice to frogs and snakes...[they] return to the same nesting territory year after year. One Red-shouldered Hawk occupied a territory in southern California for 16 consecutive years. By the time they are five days old, nestling Red-shouldered Hawks can shoot their feces over the edge of their nest. Bird poop on the ground is a sign of an active nest.
The Red-shouldered Hawk is divided into five subspecies. The four eastern forms contact each other, but the West Coast form is separated from the eastern forms by 1600 km (1000 mi). The northern form is the largest. The form in very southern Florida is the palest, having a gray head and very faint barring on the chest.
The oldest-known Red-shouldered hawk was a female, and at least 25 years, 10 months old when she was recaptured and rereleased during banding operations in California in 2000. She had been banded in the same state in 1974.

Have a good weekend.

Want to help?

1. Share this email to your friends and colleagues. Or have them email me so I can add them to my distribution list.
2. Subscribe to the Power Hungry Podcast.
3. Rent or buy Juice on iTunes or Amazon Prime.
4. Buy A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations and give it a positive review.
5. Follow me and Juice on Twitter.
6. Need a speaker for your conference, class, or webinar? Ping me!

Watch Juice for free on Roku!

If you haven't seen our documentary yet, here's a reminder: you can watch Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, on Roku Channel, for free. Just click this link. If your friends haven't seen it, send them a link. Or if you have a prime membership, you can watch it on Amazon Prime.