Category Archives: Energy and Climate Change

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Green virtue signaling Too bad that they don't know what they are talking about

Every so often I can see the virtue signaling of the environmentalists that just makes me laugh. Former Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) may have been totally inept at actually running the city, but he sure was great at getting a ‘sugary beverage tax’ passed, to fight obesity, don’t you know, that’s none of the city’s business. And even though he was fully in support of ‘my body, my choice’ when it came to women killing their yet-to-be-born children, he was adamant and aggressive in fighting the unions to get city employees who wanted to exercise bodily autonomy when it came to taking an experimental vaccine.

Then, about six years ago, in his effort to fight global warming climate change, he pushed a project to get solar power for electricity for city-owned buildings.

Philadelphia begins powering City Hall and the airport by a solar array 100 miles away

The project, begun nearly six years ago under former Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, began producing test power a few weeks ago from an array in Adams County.

by Frank Kummer | Friday, April 26, 2024 | 10:01 AM EDT

Philadelphia has begun pulling large amounts of power for city-owned buildings from a solar array on farmland near Gettysburg.

The project, begun nearly six years ago under former Mayor Jim Kenney, started producing electricity specifically for the city a few weeks ago in Adams County. It is expected to provide up to 25% of power consumed by municipal buildings, including City Hall, Philadelphia International Airport, and the water department.

Philly is under contract to purchase 70-megawatts of power annually from the array.

“We’re feeling great about this project,” said Dominic McGraw, Philadelphia’s deputy director of energy services. “It’s been a long time coming. We’re very excited to move forward.”

If you didn’t know any better, you might thing that there’s a high-power line directly from Energix Renewables (ENGR-TA) to City Hall, but that’s not how this works.

Under the arrangement, city-owned buildings will get power from the panels, although not directly. Rather, the array — the collection of solar panels — feeds to a substation that sends power to the regional grid operated by PJM, which coordinates electricity regionally across multiple states including Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The power is then delivered to Peco territory for use by Philadelphia.

The city owns about 600 buildings. It has a contract to buy solar-generated electricity for those buildings at $44.50 per megawatt hour for 20 years from Energix Renewables, the project’s developer. The rate was established when the project was proposed in 2018. The energy produced by the solar array is not meant to power any homes or businesses in the city.

Gaza Solidarity Encampment, April 25, 2024, via Daily Pennsylvanian., photo by Ethan Young. Click to enlarge.

Simply put, the sparktricity generated by Energix is simply dumped into the grid, and, as it happens everywhere else, it becomes part of the regional electric grid delivering power to anyplace connected to the grid. It’s not as though Energix, or anyone else, can tell individual electrons where to go! Pennsylvania leads the nation with sixteen coal-burning power plants, and I’d like to think that more of the power used by the city comes from Brunner Island, or Spring Grove, both in York County. That “The energy produced by the solar array is not meant to power any homes or businesses in the city” is meaningless in any practical or engineering sense.

But, even more amusingly, as the anti-Semitic, keffiyeh–wearing Usual Suspects have their thus-far peaceful campus protests at the University of Pennsylvania in support of Hamas, it turns out that the power the city is claiming comes from solar at Energix is coming from “the US subsidiary of an Israeli publicly traded company“. 🙂

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You will pay for it, and you will like it! All of the climate activists' plans involve huge increases in spending by consumers

Global warming climate change and the idiotic government policies which stem from the activists plans are supposed to be much more William Teach‘s bailiwick than mine, but I seem to have had a few recently. On Good Friday, I noted that the Biden Administration’s plans to have 500,000 commercial charging stations for plug-in electric vehicles installed by 2030 was falling very short. Philadelphia is going to ‘crack down’ on people parking on the sidewalks, something which many row home residents in the city have to do, and which means that at home charging of electric vehicles will not work for many of them. And now, The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported, though certainly not in any way to complain about government policies, just how all of this is going to fall on the consumer. Continue reading →

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Biden Administration project to push electric vehicles is falling short

This site has previously reported on the Biden Administration’s plans to get half a million commercial electric vehicle charging stations built by 2030. But, according to The Washington Post, they aren’t getting a great start on the job!

Biden promised to install thousands of EV charging stations. Only 7 have been built.

The network of fast chargers promised by the Biden Administration has had a painfully slow rollout

by Shannon Osaka | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | 4:51 PM EDT

President Biden has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030. Those stations, the White House said, would help Americans feel confident purchasing and driving electric cars, and help the country cut carbon pollution. Continue reading →

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New car buyers are choosing hybrids over plug-in total electric cars

My older daughter has a 2018 Toyota Prius Hybrid, and it has been a pretty good car for her. I’ve driven it — we actually had it on the farm for nine months while she was deployed — and it’s pretty nice. Her car is named “Veronica,” while our younger daughter’s car is named “Betty.”

From Business Insider:

Hybrid cars now have ‘very few compromises’ says Ford executive — and sales are booming

by George Glover | Saturday, March 23, 2024 | 6:03 AM EDT

  • Sales growth for hybrid cars is outpacing growth for electric vehicles this year.

  • Ford is one automaker reaping the benefits, with demand for its Maverick truck spiking.

  • “Hybrids now have very few compromises compared to their gas alternatives,” Ford’s Andrew Frick said.

It’s shaping up to be a comeback year for hybrid cars — and that’s partly because they’re now nearly as good as their conventional vehicles, according to a Ford executive. Continue reading →

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NIMBY! Don’t you dare build windmills where we can see them from the beach!

In November of 2020, the good people of the Garden State gave 2,608,400 votes, 57.34% of the total, to Joe Biden, and only 1,883,313, or 41.40%, to President Trump. One would think, then, that New Jerseyites must approve of Mr Biden’s plans to develop alternative sources of energy to generate electricity, right?

Atlantic Shores offshore wind farm in New Jersey would have 157 turbines and be 8.4 miles from shore

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will begin an environmental review of the Atlantic Shores project on Monday.

by Wayne Perry, Associated Press | The Ides of March 2024 | 1:39 PM EDT

ATLANTIC CITY — An offshore wind power project proposed for New Jersey would have 157 turbines and be located 8.4 miles from shore at its closest point, data released by the federal government Friday shows.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said it will begin an environmental review Monday of the Atlantic Shores project. It released key details of the project in announcing the environmental review.

New Jersey energy regulators approved Atlantic Shores’ 1,510 megawatt project in 2021. It would generate enough electricity to power more than 700,000 homes.

The federal agency said the project’s operations plan proposes two potential export cable corridors that would make landfall in Sea Girt, N.J., with a second one either in Asbury Park or in the New York City area, possibly on Staten Island.

But naturally, there are plenty of people who are opposed, because, Heaven forfend!, they might be able to see the tops of some of the turbines, and the power cables running onto the shore, and sea birds might be killed, etc, etc, etc.

The groups Protect Our Coast New Jersey and Defend Brigantine Beach and Downbeach filed an appeal to the approval last week in state court, saying that power contracts granted to the project developers violate state law that mandates that any increase in rates for offshore wind must be exceeded by economic and environmental benefits to the state.

In 2020, New Jersey generated 65,060,636 MegaWatt hours of electricity, but used 74,442,735 MWh, meaning that the Garden State imported 14.42% of its total electricity consumption. With an average retail price of 14.80¢ per kWh, electricity was 19.74% higher than the national average of 12.36¢/kWh. Just as an economic calculation, one would think that the good, liberal voters of New Jersey would want this project. But no, they would prefer to import electricity from Pennsylvania, which exports 39.29% of the electricity it generates — primarily by burning natural gas — and West Virginia, which exports 41.79% of the electricity it generates, primarily by burning coal. Much better to do that than to possibly see the tops of the windmill blades from the beach!

Liberal New Jersey will need the electricity, too. As William Teach reported, the state plans to ban all fossil-fueled new car sales by 2035, the New Jersey Star-Ledger is demanding quicker action than that, and the majority of the voters in that heavily “blue” state just don’t want plug-in electric vehicles.

They will be made to comply, but they don’t want the sparktricity that they use generated anyplace where they can see it.

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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange The well-to-do sure love their gas appliances!

This article title, “How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange” is one we have used thrice previously. In the first, we noted the PBS television series This Old House and its renovation of the Seaside Victorian Cottage, in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Those wealthy New Englanders didn’t choose electric heat pumps, but warm, dependable gas heating for the cold, Rhode Island winters. Their HVAC system appears to allow the large, new exterior condensers to be used for heating as well, but the gas furnace is new and in place. The homeowners had a new, fairly sizable gas fireplace installed, an oversized Wolf gas range, and three gas-fired instant hot water heaters. More, they had a gas fireplace installed outside, on their backyard patio. The series was filmed following the panicdemic[1]This is not a typographical error, but spelled exactly as I saw the whole thing, an exercise in pure, unreasoning panic. restrictions of 2020. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 This is not a typographical error, but spelled exactly as I saw the whole thing, an exercise in pure, unreasoning panic.
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There is a two word phrase to accurately describe the electric buses sold to transit agencies, and the first of those two words is “cluster”.

The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want to force all new vehicles sold in the United States to be zero-emission come 2035, because they believe that our personal choices don’t matter, but even now they are pushing plug-in electrics, seemingly unconcerned with the possible drawbacks. From Fox Business:

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Continue reading →

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Why do you peons hate Mother Gaia? The Plebians are not doing what the Patricians have demanded!

Fresh off the stories of the demands at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the hoitiest and the toitiest get to use their private jets to take their mistresses to a very upscale Swiss ski resort and lecture us about global warming climate change, it seems that the people are just not doing what they’ve been told!

Ford cuts production of F-150 Lightning EV, adds jobs at Bronco and Ranger plant

  • Ford is increasing production of its Bronco SUV and Ranger pickup, while cutting production of its all-electric F-150 Lightning, the automaker said Friday.
  • The announced cut to Lightning production comes a month after CNBC and other media outlets reported Ford would slash planned production of the pickup roughly in half this year.
  • The automaker will be reducing production of the Lightning at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan to one production shift from two, impacting approximately 1,400 employees.

Continue reading →

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It was -4.1º Fahrenheit on the farm this morning.

When I arose, at 7:05 this morning, it was 14.1º Fahrenheit outside. No wind is showing, but there’s a possibility that the anemometer is frozen in place; I’ll tap it loose when I go outside.

I have previously noted that we have backup heat here on the farm, with a propane fireplace, something we installed during our 2018 remodeling project, because our primary heat is an electric heat pump. The thermostat for the fireplace was set at 64º F, so that it would come on if the primary heat failed overnight, but shouldn’t come on as long as the heat pump was engaged. Guess what: even though the primary heat was on and working, the fireplace still came on, which tells me that the heat pump was unable to keep up! Heat pumps work by extracting heat from the atmosphere around the outside condenser, but when there’s not a lot of heat to extract, they lose efficiency. Continue reading →