I would curious to know the number of wind and solar project rejections as a ratio to the number of wind and solar project acceptances.
In passing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a greenfield mine commissioned in much of Canada these days. This NIMBY attitude to mines will inevitably slow the pace of the 'transition'.
I can tell you about one more case you are likely going to write about and can already begin to add to your database.
The Norwegian government has decided to electrify the natural gas terminal at Melkøya (which is really far north) with power from wind turbines.
That is Sami land up there, so the government is trying to put another huge wind farm on Sami traditional territory just after getting a huge backlash for Fosen (the case you mentioned).
In addition, renewables marginal cost 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴 as they scale. Just as the most productive drilling areas & mine shafts get developed first, the most promising solar & wind wind sites & those closest to population centers go up first. The more go up, the further the distance the kilowatts must travel which means the energy lost in transmission goes up so as the solar & wind installations spread the fewer net kilowatts reach consumers per turbine & panel, all else equal. Then there is the fact that unlike shale or offshore hydrocarbon development, for which the initial investment in gathering & transport pipeline infrastructure can be leveraged, solar & wind firms scale across, not down so additional transport distance required per additional mile of solar or wind is much greater.
From what I've seen the solar (we have a 6500 acre project near me) has more to do with cost of land and access to high power transmission lines. The power from that project is being sold to Microsoft, Google, U of Richmond and another. These are all located about 70 miles away from the project.
The area of the project was farms and forest. The whole thing is ugly and has little benefit to locals other than some tax money. We fought it but to no avail.
Now they are trying to put offshore (coast of VA) turbines...when they destroy the ocean life we are in REAL trouble. 🤬🤬🤬
CA is working on putting allot of floating windmills off the Central Coast. In part so they can shut down the Diablo Nuclear Plant. Each are 800 feet tall they say. I don't think enough research has been done on how this could affect Marine life and Shipping.
I live in California, but vacation a lot in Lake Havasu, AZ. Recently while using an alternate route on Rice Road, I was appalled at the miles and miles of solar panels blanketing the desert floor. These solar farms decimate entire eco systems-just because we don’t see these desert animals doesn’t mean they’re not there. Frying birds, indigenous lands. And It’s also extremely upsetting to know of the damage the windmill monstrosities do to our marine life in the oceans and the miles of pristine land they gobble up replacing natural beauty. The energy these “renewables” create is not worth the devastation they create.
I would love to get involved in protests in my area. Is there a website listing upcoming protests? Thanks for all of your efforts keeping us informed!
It is wonderful that people are fighting back against this bullshit. Thanks for tracking it, Robert.
On another front. I have made a quick pass through FERC order 2023. Probably not article material, but might be fun to discuss. Let me know when you have a few minutes. In summary it has potential to kill the interconnection process for renewables...which it was supposed to improve. In true government fashion it wrecked the portion of the process that was working fine, without touching the actual problem.
As a devoted fan of NPR I cringe everyime they mention sources of clean energy " like solar and wind" (and sometimes geothermal or hydro) but they almost never bring themselves to say nuclear which has truly become the N word of carbon free energy.
The sooner the big fail happens with wind and solar the sooner the world will look at nuclear in a new light! We’re about out of time now so write your local and national officials regularly if you can. 🙏
David MacKay is my greatest hero. His free book (SEWTHA) got him a government job where he convinced government and the voters that the UK had to go nuclear. He was doing great stuff before he got into energy, using AI/ML to help disabled people communicate, writing free books (from which I learnt to love Bayesian stats and maximum entropy priors).
We need "The David MacKay Award for Scientifically Literate Environmental Activism". I nominate Dr Chris Keefer.
The deeper I dive into this, the more deeply convinced I become that the entire climate-cult thing-o has everything backwards. Even the high priest of the cult, Stephen Schneider, and his acolytes who write the real scientific appendices to the IPCC reports (which conclusions are suppressed by politicians in the final assessment) agree that EVERY DOUBLING of CO2 would increase atmospheric temperature by 0.8 C. Svante Arrhenius wrote about this logarithmic relationship in 1908! Read Schneider's 1971 paper, with S. Ichtiaque Rasool, in Science magazine.
In "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom," Patrick Moore made a convincing case, by a very simple observation about the trajectory of CO2 for the last 150 million years, that all land-based life on Earth would have ended in about nine million years, but for humanity having increasing CO2 from 280 ppmv to 415, postponing the end until fifteen million years. Instead of ending CO2 emissions, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can, to keep CO2 in the 800-2,000 ppmv range (which is optimum for plants). We're in a life-and-death struggle with phytoplankton and shellfish, who are sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and dumping it at the bottom of the oceans in the form of limestone!
You write, "Instead of ending CO2 emissions, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can, to keep CO2 in the 800-2,000 ppmv range (which is optimum for plants)."
Do you know what is the optimum for humans, or other mammals? Not meant to be a trick question. We can adapt to heat, but if there is insufficient oxygen or if there is too much CO2, evolution takes over and it is a far longer process.
I believe CO2 levels that high lead to sluggishness in humans. We don't have nearly enough economical fossil fuels to push CO2 levels that high. 600ppm might be achievable.
When a wind turbine blade breaks over a farmer's field, the crop cannot be harvested, and cattle can't graze. If it gets into a stream, downstream farmers can't use the water for their cattle.
In 2017 an all-star team of international engineers, physicists, and climate scientists tore to shreds the work of Stanford academic Mark Z. Jacobson, work which forms the theoretical bedrock upon which the renewables "energy transition" rests. Finding a 2015 paper spearheaded by Jacobson "used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions," authors Clack et al were sued by Jacobson for defamation (though Jacobson later withdrew the suit, a countersuit forced him to pay their legal fees).
Though he has harmed the environmental movement more than helped, Jacobson continues his quixotic crusade to promote renewables and denigrate nuclear energy. An important arrow in the quiver of anyone promoting sane energy policy is Clack et al's "Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar", published by the National Academy of Sciences. Why? Despite its thorough debunking, Jacobson's paper has become the Bible of the blooming, quasi-religious renewables movement. Its roots can't be pulled from the ground soon enough.
Jacobsen is a CIVIL engineer and an academic. We use civil engineers to take soil samples for tower foundations...period. Otherwise it should be illegal for them to think about electricity.
As an academic he wouldn’t know how to take a soil sample.
The fellowship he was granted by Stanford's Precourt Institute, funded by a 30% donation from natural gas magnate Jay Precourt and home to its Natural Gas Initiative, might have something to do with that.
A little too tinfoil-hattish for my taste. Many would lump the National Academy of Sciences in with the science wing of the "Covidian Cult / Censorship Industrial Complex / Deep State Establishment", but they published Clack's paper - and condemned Jacobson for suing another scientist with an opposing point of view. We go to far with that, and we start sinking our own boat.
Calling something tinfoil hat is a puerile smear. And you're the first person I've ever heard make that claim about PNAS. Strawman argument.
As for Stanford lots of articles backing up my claim:
Inside The Censorship Industrial Complex, Video made by Stanford Internet Observatory's Renee DiResta for the Department of Homeland Security shows how millions of Americans were secretly censored:
WANTED: Renee DiResta, Technical manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which I wrote about earlier, and Alex Stamos, its Director, for creating a US Stasi--outside of government
"Calling something tinfoil hat is a puerile smear...and you're the first person I've ever heard make that claim about PNAS."
Stanford's questionable study on spent nuclear fuel for SMRs was published in PNAS.
Now I'm confused - is NAS part of the US Stasi / Censorship Industrial Complex / Covidian Cult , or is it a reputable institution? Call me puerile, but the first possibility sounds *very* tinfoil-hattish to me.
I would curious to know the number of wind and solar project rejections as a ratio to the number of wind and solar project acceptances.
In passing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get a greenfield mine commissioned in much of Canada these days. This NIMBY attitude to mines will inevitably slow the pace of the 'transition'.
Note also the local resistance to Battery Energy Storage Systems, such as in Hampton Bays, N.Y.
I can tell you about one more case you are likely going to write about and can already begin to add to your database.
The Norwegian government has decided to electrify the natural gas terminal at Melkøya (which is really far north) with power from wind turbines.
That is Sami land up there, so the government is trying to put another huge wind farm on Sami traditional territory just after getting a huge backlash for Fosen (the case you mentioned).
In addition, renewables marginal cost 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴 as they scale. Just as the most productive drilling areas & mine shafts get developed first, the most promising solar & wind wind sites & those closest to population centers go up first. The more go up, the further the distance the kilowatts must travel which means the energy lost in transmission goes up so as the solar & wind installations spread the fewer net kilowatts reach consumers per turbine & panel, all else equal. Then there is the fact that unlike shale or offshore hydrocarbon development, for which the initial investment in gathering & transport pipeline infrastructure can be leveraged, solar & wind firms scale across, not down so additional transport distance required per additional mile of solar or wind is much greater.
Argh.
From what I've seen the solar (we have a 6500 acre project near me) has more to do with cost of land and access to high power transmission lines. The power from that project is being sold to Microsoft, Google, U of Richmond and another. These are all located about 70 miles away from the project.
The area of the project was farms and forest. The whole thing is ugly and has little benefit to locals other than some tax money. We fought it but to no avail.
Now they are trying to put offshore (coast of VA) turbines...when they destroy the ocean life we are in REAL trouble. 🤬🤬🤬
CA is working on putting allot of floating windmills off the Central Coast. In part so they can shut down the Diablo Nuclear Plant. Each are 800 feet tall they say. I don't think enough research has been done on how this could affect Marine life and Shipping.
I live in California, but vacation a lot in Lake Havasu, AZ. Recently while using an alternate route on Rice Road, I was appalled at the miles and miles of solar panels blanketing the desert floor. These solar farms decimate entire eco systems-just because we don’t see these desert animals doesn’t mean they’re not there. Frying birds, indigenous lands. And It’s also extremely upsetting to know of the damage the windmill monstrosities do to our marine life in the oceans and the miles of pristine land they gobble up replacing natural beauty. The energy these “renewables” create is not worth the devastation they create.
I would love to get involved in protests in my area. Is there a website listing upcoming protests? Thanks for all of your efforts keeping us informed!
There are MANY groups on FB, from all over the world. Robert may have a list. I thought one of the group had compiled one?
Hi Robert,
there is a solar project going on in Milam county. It's over the hill from the woods where I grew up.
Rumor has it, there was recently a forest there and now its gone.
Hard reality.
H
Thanks, Hawkeye.
It is wonderful that people are fighting back against this bullshit. Thanks for tracking it, Robert.
On another front. I have made a quick pass through FERC order 2023. Probably not article material, but might be fun to discuss. Let me know when you have a few minutes. In summary it has potential to kill the interconnection process for renewables...which it was supposed to improve. In true government fashion it wrecked the portion of the process that was working fine, without touching the actual problem.
As a devoted fan of NPR I cringe everyime they mention sources of clean energy " like solar and wind" (and sometimes geothermal or hydro) but they almost never bring themselves to say nuclear which has truly become the N word of carbon free energy.
The sooner the big fail happens with wind and solar the sooner the world will look at nuclear in a new light! We’re about out of time now so write your local and national officials regularly if you can. 🙏
David MacKay is my greatest hero. His free book (SEWTHA) got him a government job where he convinced government and the voters that the UK had to go nuclear. He was doing great stuff before he got into energy, using AI/ML to help disabled people communicate, writing free books (from which I learnt to love Bayesian stats and maximum entropy priors).
We need "The David MacKay Award for Scientifically Literate Environmental Activism". I nominate Dr Chris Keefer.
Best explanation yet on what these Just Stop Oil protests are ACTUALLY all about. Note they are funded in part by Oil Billionaires.
Stop Oil Activists & The Public: Rats In A Cage, Chris Martenson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULD-pbFNyUs
Village of "Majdal Shams" resists the Sham
As always , all of these green snafus are part of the plan . They are features not bugs, those at top know this , lower levels just follow the money.
The deeper I dive into this, the more deeply convinced I become that the entire climate-cult thing-o has everything backwards. Even the high priest of the cult, Stephen Schneider, and his acolytes who write the real scientific appendices to the IPCC reports (which conclusions are suppressed by politicians in the final assessment) agree that EVERY DOUBLING of CO2 would increase atmospheric temperature by 0.8 C. Svante Arrhenius wrote about this logarithmic relationship in 1908! Read Schneider's 1971 paper, with S. Ichtiaque Rasool, in Science magazine.
In "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom," Patrick Moore made a convincing case, by a very simple observation about the trajectory of CO2 for the last 150 million years, that all land-based life on Earth would have ended in about nine million years, but for humanity having increasing CO2 from 280 ppmv to 415, postponing the end until fifteen million years. Instead of ending CO2 emissions, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can, to keep CO2 in the 800-2,000 ppmv range (which is optimum for plants). We're in a life-and-death struggle with phytoplankton and shellfish, who are sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and dumping it at the bottom of the oceans in the form of limestone!
I summarized these subjects in https://vsnyder.substack.com/are-humans-really-causing-climate and https://vsnyder.substack.com/the-end-of-life-on-earth, both of which give clear credit to the originators of the ideas.
You write, "Instead of ending CO2 emissions, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can, to keep CO2 in the 800-2,000 ppmv range (which is optimum for plants)."
Do you know what is the optimum for humans, or other mammals? Not meant to be a trick question. We can adapt to heat, but if there is insufficient oxygen or if there is too much CO2, evolution takes over and it is a far longer process.
I believe CO2 levels that high lead to sluggishness in humans. We don't have nearly enough economical fossil fuels to push CO2 levels that high. 600ppm might be achievable.
Thanks. That is what I suspected. Essentially, no evidence that rising levels threaten humankind.
More co2, more/happier plants, more oxygen...
The irony of stopping co2...commercial greenhouses BUY machines to produce MORE co2 for maximum plant growth. 🤔
As I understand it, below 350ppm co2 is a warning level and below 250ppm, most plant life would die off and shortly after plants and animals.
We and cattle can't eat fiberglass.
When a wind turbine blade breaks over a farmer's field, the crop cannot be harvested, and cattle can't graze. If it gets into a stream, downstream farmers can't use the water for their cattle.
Cleanup takes years. Who's responsible?
Read https://stopthesethings.com/2023/06/24/wind-industrys-callous-treatment-of-rural-communities-driving-farmers-revolt/
In 2017 an all-star team of international engineers, physicists, and climate scientists tore to shreds the work of Stanford academic Mark Z. Jacobson, work which forms the theoretical bedrock upon which the renewables "energy transition" rests. Finding a 2015 paper spearheaded by Jacobson "used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions," authors Clack et al were sued by Jacobson for defamation (though Jacobson later withdrew the suit, a countersuit forced him to pay their legal fees).
Though he has harmed the environmental movement more than helped, Jacobson continues his quixotic crusade to promote renewables and denigrate nuclear energy. An important arrow in the quiver of anyone promoting sane energy policy is Clack et al's "Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar", published by the National Academy of Sciences. Why? Despite its thorough debunking, Jacobson's paper has become the Bible of the blooming, quasi-religious renewables movement. Its roots can't be pulled from the ground soon enough.
Clack et al: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1610381114
Jacobsen is a CIVIL engineer and an academic. We use civil engineers to take soil samples for tower foundations...period. Otherwise it should be illegal for them to think about electricity.
As an academic he wouldn’t know how to take a soil sample.
Here is the engineering hierarchy
1. Chemical
2. Electrical
3. Mechanical
4. Materials
5. Civil
.
.
.
.
26. Anything with Environmental in the title
Our institutions are not what they used to be and sham articles are being published in the once great publications Science and nature
Jacobson didn't learn a damn thing from Clack et al's criticism. He updated and republished in 2019.
The fellowship he was granted by Stanford's Precourt Institute, funded by a 30% donation from natural gas magnate Jay Precourt and home to its Natural Gas Initiative, might have something to do with that.
And Stanford's deep involvement in the Covidian Cult. And the Censorship Industrial Complex. About as Deep State Establishment as you can get.
A little too tinfoil-hattish for my taste. Many would lump the National Academy of Sciences in with the science wing of the "Covidian Cult / Censorship Industrial Complex / Deep State Establishment", but they published Clack's paper - and condemned Jacobson for suing another scientist with an opposing point of view. We go to far with that, and we start sinking our own boat.
Calling something tinfoil hat is a puerile smear. And you're the first person I've ever heard make that claim about PNAS. Strawman argument.
As for Stanford lots of articles backing up my claim:
Inside The Censorship Industrial Complex, Video made by Stanford Internet Observatory's Renee DiResta for the Department of Homeland Security shows how millions of Americans were secretly censored:
https://public.substack.com/p/inside-the-censorship-industrial
Why there are no debates on Stanford's vaccination policy:
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/why-there-are-no-debates-on-stanfords
WANTED: Renee DiResta, Technical manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which I wrote about earlier, and Alex Stamos, its Director, for creating a US Stasi--outside of government
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/wanted-renee-diresta-technical-manager
https://neutronbytes.com/2022/05/31/stanfords-questionable-study-on-spent-nuclear-fuel-for-smrs/
And Stanford is the home of the infamous Malthusian Prof Paul Ehrlich.
"Calling something tinfoil hat is a puerile smear...and you're the first person I've ever heard make that claim about PNAS."
Stanford's questionable study on spent nuclear fuel for SMRs was published in PNAS.
Now I'm confused - is NAS part of the US Stasi / Censorship Industrial Complex / Covidian Cult , or is it a reputable institution? Call me puerile, but the first possibility sounds *very* tinfoil-hattish to me.