Tag Archives: #Energy

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Our Betters are so very much smarter than we are that I’m certain, certain! that they have a plan for all of this

We noted Friday evening that Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities were asking customers to reduce their electric consumption during this bitterly cold snap, and even then KU was employing “brief service interruptions” to reduce demand. I’m not sure what good that does: as people’s heat goes out for an hour, that just means they’ll have to use it more after the sparktricity is restored to get their homes back up to the desired temperature.

Now there’s this, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, on Christmas Eve:

Bitter cold prompts call for electricity conservation until Christmas morning

PJM Interconnection is asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Christmas Day to avoid the need to implement short blackout periods.

by Lynette Hazleton | Saturday, December 24, 2022

With winter storms raging and temperatures plunging to the lowest in decades, PJM Interconnection is asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Christmas Day to avoid the need to implement short blackout periods.

“If we don’t have enough supply to meet demand then sometimes, on rare occasions, we will have rotating outages,” said PJM spokesman Jeff Shields.

During a rotating outage, different regions of PJM’s service area would be intentionally taken off the grid for about an hour. “We’ve seen that consumer conservation efforts can really help, and we need it now,” Shields said.

PJM is asking consumers to hold off using their largest appliances, such as washing machines and dryers as well as taking a shower and using hair dryers.

So dirty bodies in dirty clothes, right? Nope, no lovin’ tonight, honey.

PJM Interconnection isn’t an electric generation company itself, but a regional transmission organization which manages the power distribution grid serving all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. That does not include my part of Kentucky!

I’ve asked this question before, but I’ll ask it again: if the current electric power generation and transmission system cannot handle an unusual but hardly unprecedented bitterly cold snap now, how can it handle things when the Biden Administration is pushing for all new cars to be plug in electrics just 13 years from now, and the global warming climate change emergency activists want all new homes, and older homes as well, converted over to electric heat, as well as banning gas ranges?

According to Statista, slightly over half of the homes in the keystone State use natural gas as their primary home heating fuel, with another 15.88% using home heating oil or kerosene. My previous home in Jim Thorpe had a heating oil-fired steam boiler for heat, but we also added a wood stove as both a backup for times when the electricity failed — the boiler still required electricity to operate — and it evened out the heat in the one-zone boiler.

Only 23.5% of Pennsylvania homes were heated primarily with a heat pump or electric baseboard heat.

Our heating oil boiler ran on a single 110-volt, 20-amp circuit. I also installed two baseboard units, one in the living room and another in the kitchen, which were on 220-volt, 30-amphere circuits each. Now in the Bluegrass State, our primary heating system, an electric heat pump, is on two 220-volt circuits, 30-amps for the outside condenser, and 50-amps for the crawlspace unit, which does include ’emergency heat’ circuits for use during extreme cold. Of course, we also have a propane fireplace, which is not only a great back-up for when we lose electricity, but sure is nice when it’s bitterly cold outside.

So, just how the heck do the activists think that our power-generation capabilities, expanded solely with solar, wind and non-fossil-fueled sources, can handle greatly increased demand for power by increasing electricity’s share of home heating, and most automobiles being plug-in electrics?

Of course, Our Betters are so very much smarter than we are that I’m certain, certain! that they have a plan for all of this, right? Perhaps the fairy dust and unicorn farts they expect us to use do not emit CO2?

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It’s 0º F outside, and Kentucky Utilities is employing “brief service interruptions”

We previously mentioned how the Pico household are not completely dependent upon electricity for heat, but that doesn’t include our daughter’s house in Lexington. She has a gas furnace, but it requires sparktricity to run.

LG&E and KU doing ‘brief service interruptions,’ asking for customers to conserve energy

by Audrey Fowler | Friday, December 23, 2022 | 9:06 PM EST

(LEX 18) — The winter storm has caused many outages across the state. Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities are asking for customers to reduce their energy consumption.

LG&E and KU are also performing “brief service interruptions” in intervals to “minimize extended impacts” on customers.

They say outage durations will vary but range around 30 minutes.

There’s more at the original, but it’s simple: while the Biden Administration and the global warming climate change emergency activists want everyone to switch to non-fossil fuel heating sources — meaning electricity — Kentucky Utilities, which serves Lexington, and our daughter’s house, is having to employ “brief service interruptions” to keep the power on for everyone, even though power needs are reduced by having “many outages” across the Bluegrass State.

Think about it: while most people’s gas furnaces use 110-volt, 20-amp circuits for their required electricity needs, electric heat pumps or baseboard heaters require 220-volt circuits, and, depending upon the system, more amperage.

Our daughter has sparktricity back, so the furnace is on again. But if Kentucky Utilities is unable to provide sufficient power in an area where most people have gas furnaces, how the heck does anyone think they could do so if everyone had electric heat?

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As bitterly cold weather hits the United States, we’re not totally dependent upon electricity

As what the Weather Channel has been calling Winter Storm Elliot — and has any other media outlet picked up on the Channel’s naming of ‘winter storms? — is blasting through the lower 48, there are all sorts of interesting news items.

It’s 2º F at the farm right now, but the wind chill is around -19º. Mochi, our half-chocolate lab, half-Australian shepherd, keeps wanting to go out, but she doesn’t stay long.

Our home’s primary heat source is an electric heat pump, but when the air temperature is this low, it has difficulty extracting excess heat from the outside atmosphere. Even the emergency heat cycle doesn’t provide much more warmth than the heat pump.

But, of course, after 4½ days without power our first winter here, we installed the propane fireplace, and it does not depend on electricity to run. There is a circulating fan which does use regular power, but activating the fire itself depends on four AA batteries, so if the power goes out, the stove itself still works. Though thousands of people across the Confederacy have lost power, we have not. All of our utilities, electricity, water, satellite TV and internet are still operational!

Well, if the oh-so-serious global warming climate change activists want everything to be all-electric, no fossil fuels, this article from Barrons lets us know that not everybody seems to agree:

Ford Raises Prices for Electric F-150 Lightning Trucks Again. Investors Don’t Like It.

by Al Root | Friday, December 16, 2022 | 1:47 PM EST | Updated: 2:15 PM EST

Ford Motor has again raised the price of its popular electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, and investors don’t seem to approve.

The market response to the move shows how auto makers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Price cuts have triggered selloffs of EV makers’ stocks recently. Now a price increase is doing the same.

The cost of the electric version of Ford’s most popular pickup truck has climbed 40% in roughly eight months. The base price of a F-150 Lightning now stands at about $56,000, according to the company’s website, up from a base price of $52,000 set in October. The October price was an increase from a previous price of $47,000, and when the vehicle went was first delivered in May on sale, the base model cost about $40,000.

The Ford move stands out because, generally, prices for electric vehicles have been coming down. Tesla (TSLA), and others, cut prices in China in the fall, and their shares tumbled. Tesla is also offering U.S. car buyers $3,750 off to take delivery of a Tesla by the end of 2022; its stock has declined about 29% since the China price cuts in October, though CEO Elon Musk’s new role at the helm of Twitter (TWTR) has played a part as well. Car investors have feared weaker demand for EVs could lead to lower profit margins and earnings. But they apparently don’t like price increases, either. .  .  .  .

F-150 prices have been going up for a few reasons. Raw material prices are up, and demand for the vehicle has been strong. Ford says it has about two years of reservations for the electric truck in its backlog. A Ford spokesman confirmed the price increases Friday, citing normal business planning, rising costs, as well as strong demand.

It took awhile, but here we get to the money line:

Pricing can’t go up forever, and investors are clearly worried that higher prices will dent consumer demand for the truck. Demand in the broader EV market has been a concern for a while. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, RBC analyst Joseph Spak, and Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney have warned investors that EV demand is softening.

Demand is softening. More, prices for electric vehicles have been coming down not because the automakers are generous, but because the demand for the things isn’t what they anticipated. With the federal government offering subsidies for the purchase of plug-in electric vehicles, a real, if somewhat delayed incentive, demand still isn’t there.

And that’s pretty much true of everything. Even the liberals in very blue New England seem to want fossil fuels for their own homes, and despite the attempts of the global warming climate change activists to ban gas ranges, we have previously noted that “it seems that everybody, including the cooking show stars, wants a gas range.”

But hey, when the activists get their way, we’ll just have to accept that some Americans will die when their electric only heat sources don’t work because snow and ice and bitterly cold temperatures have brought down power lines! After all, it’s for our own good!

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#Climapocracy! Pete Buttigieg wants us all to reduce our carbon emissions, but he takes a jet every 3½ days

I’m pretty sure that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg would want to reconsider his tweet, but, not to worry, I’ve got the screen capture!

The math is simple: December 14th, when he tweeted his original, is the 348th day of the year, and the Secretary told us that this was his 99th flight of the year. 348 ÷ 99 = 3.5151 repeating, 3.52 a close enough approximation. Every 3½ days the Secretary of Transportation has been flying off to somewhere!

From The Washington Post:

“Inevitably, every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge it or not,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Climate 202. “So I think that’s absolutely part of our mandate and part of our set of responsibilities as a department.”

It would seem that, in Mr Buttigieg’s 99 decisions to go leaving on a jet plane, he has taken 99 decisions to spew more CO2 into the atmosphere! Were all of those 99 trips necessary? Has he never asked himself, “Could I do this by videoconference?”

Mr Buttigieg said, at the COP26 conference:

Well, thank you very much and thanks to the U.K. for hosting us. Let me also note, with this audience, how much pleasure I take in the knowledge that the aircraft that brought me to the U.K. returned back to the States full of international travelers, and we’re delighted at that news.

We’re honored to be here with our fellow founding members of the International Aviation Climate Coalition demonstrating that we hear the voices of our citizens, especially our courageous young citizens, who are demanding similar courage on our part, knowing that their lives will be defined by our decisions. And that means not only hearing them but acting, especially on the hard things. And aviation is a sector that is famously considered hard to abate which I think in a less urgent moment, as with maritime, might have meant that it would be on down the list of priorities. But at a moment like this, it also equates to have to abate – and that’s what we’re doing.

Aviation is so central to the fabric of our global economy and our global community. And of course, it’s how so many of us got here this week. And I can tell you as a former mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S., it’s not only important for our global metro centers, but for communities in every part of every country.

And as we know it’s a significant contributor to climate change and without dramatic, urgent action, there will be substantial additional growth in emissions over the next 30 years.

So, it falls to us to find ways to limit those emissions urgently. And the question has become: will we act quickly enough to protect our countries and to seize the economic potential that sustainable aviation represents?

The reality is that the timelines are not being dictated by conferences or by congresses; they’re being set by the laws of physics. And the other timeline that is so important is the engineering that it takes to design, test, produce, and deploy lower carbon aircraft.

But we can control our response, and with that we can shape our collective future.

Yeah, I get it: Mr Buttigieg is a very high-ranking American government official, and there will be some required travel, travel to places he can’t get on his bicycle or an Elon Musk produced Tesla.

But 99 plane rides in less than a year?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we plebeians might take the Patricians more seriously when they tell us we must reduce our CO2 emissions if they showed us, by deeds, that they take their own words seriously.

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No surprise: fuel prices are beginning to rise again

We noted, on Wednesday, October 5th, that very much contrary to President Joe Biden’s wishes, Russia and Saudi Arabia pushed OPEC+ to set a reduction in petroleum production of 2,000,000 barrels per day:

Saudi Arabia and Russia, acting as leaders of the OPEC Plus energy cartel, agreed on Wednesday to their biggest production cuts in more than two years in a bid to raise prices, countering efforts by the United States and Europe to choke off the enormous revenue that Moscow reaps from the sale of crude.

President Biden and European leaders have urged more oil production to ease gasoline prices and punish Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine. Russia has been accused of using energy as a weapon against countries opposing its invasion of Ukraine, and the optics of the decision could not be missed.

“This is completely not what the White House wants, and it is exactly what Russia wants,” said Bill Farren-Price, the head of macro oil and gas analysis at Enverus, a research firm. It also puts Saudi Arabia on a diplomatic “collision course” with the United States, he said.

The cut of two million barrels a day represents about 2 percent of global oil production.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the decision was a “mistake and misguided. “It’s clear that OPEC Plus is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” she said.

The United States is hardly a nation President Vladimir Putin wants to please: the US continues to send money and war materiel to Ukraine, which is directly at war with Russia, so the US is, in effect, engaged in a proxy war with Russia. Maybe, just maybe, Vladimir Vladimirovich isn’t in any mood to do favors for Mr Biden.

And, of course, Mr Biden directly accused Saudi Crown Prince of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and called teh Crown Prince a liar for denying it. Could it possibly be that the de facto ruler of the world’s largest petroleum exporter is not really inclined to be nice to our President?

Well, now the effects of the OPEC+ decision are becoming known:

Why gas prices are going back up after nearly 100 days of declines

by Rob Wile | Monday, October 10, 2022

It was the longest losing streak for gasoline prices since the early months of the pandemic: For 98-consecutive days this summer, American drivers experienced declining gas prices thanks in part to a slower worldwide demand for oil.

Now, a cut in oil production signaled by the OPEC+ group last week has sent global crude prices higher, bringing upward pressure back to prices at the pump.

According to AAA, the national average gas price climbed to $3.92 a gallon Monday.

Prices are likely to keep going higher from here as oil prices continue to climb, according to Patrick De Haan, chief petroleum analyst at gas price tracking group GasBuddy.com.

“With OPEC+ deciding to cut oil production by two million barrels a day, we’ve seen oil prices surge 20%, which is the primary factor in the national average rising for the third straight week,” he said in a blog post Monday.

For the rest of the country, De Haan said he expects prices to rise as much as $0.30 from their September lows, which would put them at around $4 a gallon.

It’s not all peaches and cream in OPEC+: as The Wall Street Journal reported, Iraq is concerned that it cannot afford the mandated production cuts, but that’s somewhat counterbalanced by a strike among Iranian oil workers. That does mean that projections that gasoline will reach into the $4.00+ per gallon range a bit more guesswork than straight statistical modeling.

The most important point? The election is in 29 days.

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Now Our Betters want you to charge your Chevy Dolt at work, not a home. That's going to cost you more money.

A 2019 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle caught fire at a home in Cherokee County, Georgia, on Sept. 13. Source: Cherokee County Fire Department. Click to enlarge.

Perhaps I am stepping on William Teach’s toes with this one, but when this article appeared in my Google feed, it was too much of an opportunity on which to pass. I did check first to make sure Mr Teach hadn’t already written on the subject! From Stanford University:

Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go, Stanford study finds

The move to electric vehicles will result in large costs for generating, transmitting, and storing more power. Shifting current EV charging from home to work and night to day could cut costs and help the grid, according to a new Stanford study.

by Mark Golden | Thursday, September 22, 2022

The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We’re doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study.

In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region’s electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging.

To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035.

“We encourage policymakers to consider utility rates that encourage day charging and incentivize investment in charging infrastructure to shift drivers from home to work for charging,” said the study’s co-senior author, Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

There’s more at the original, and there’s no paywall to stymie you.

The authors believe that people should charge their Teslas and Chevy Dolts at work, rather than at home. Great idea, except there is no guarantee that your employer is going to add the infrastructure, and if he does, he’s going to need to recoup that cost: he’s going to charge employees for using the at-work charging stations, for both the installation costs and the sparktricity used.

One of the problems is the extreme egocentrism of the authors. It’s far too easy for people to think of their situations as the only situations. When they have an assigned parking space at a prestigious university, they might not consider that far more people work at places like Seven/Eleven, where management isn’t likely to run the power lines and install the stations for their minimum wage employees — who can’t afford a plug-in electric vehicle in the first place — to use. Perhaps they are unfamiliar with trades employees, who go to different jobsites across their area.

Once 50% of cars on the road are powered by electricity in the Western U.S. – of which about half the population lives in California – more than 5.4 gigawatts of energy storage would be needed if charging habits follow their current course. That’s the capacity equivalent of 5 large nuclear power reactors. A big shift to charging at work instead of home would reduce the storage needed for EVs to 4.2 gigawatts.

Storage capacity is a huge issue: solar plants generate exactly zero electricity at night, which means that charging your plug-in electric car after you get home from work means that most of the charging will be done after sundown. That means you will be drawing power not from the hundred-acre solar farm, but from the batteries to store the electricity the solar farm generated during the day.

More, electricity generated and going into the battery system before going to your home is less efficient than going from the solar plant directly to your home; there is increased energy loss due to the second stop.

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found.

It also means that charging your car at work means that you will be paying not the residential power rate, which normally drops after 11:00 PM, but the commercial rate your employer is paying. It will cost you more to charge at work than at home, not even counting the charges the employer will have to put in place to pay for the employee charging stations.

It seems as though the global warming climate change emergency activists all had this great idea, that everyone should drive a plug-in electric car — excluding, of course, the activists who don’t think people should have privately owned vehicles in the first place — but they never really thought through the problems.

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This morning’s rant

At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: “Then let them eat brioches.“

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

My good friend and sometimes blog pinch-hitter William Teach pointed me to this article from Nicholas Goldberg in The Los Angeles Times, which can also be found on Yahoo! News to get around the Times paywall:

Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up

by Nicholas Goldberg | Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 6:00 AM PDT

Why is the greatest threat to the planet of so little concern to most Americans?

It’s shocking, frankly, that global warming ranks 24th on a list of 29 issues that voters say they’ll think about when deciding whom to vote for in November, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Only 30% of voters say they are “very worried” about it and more than two-thirds say they “rarely” or “never” discuss the issue with family or friends.

Actually, some of us see the United States and democratic Europe so willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal, with seemingly little thought as to what could happen, as “the greatest threat to the planet”.

How can people be so blithely unconcerned when the clear consensus of scientists is that climate disruption is reaching crisis levels and will result not only in more raging storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, but very possibly in famine, mass migration, collapsing economies and war?

Uhhh, with a year-over-year 8.3% inflation rate in August of 2022, on top of August 2021’s year-over-year inflation rate of 5.3%, perhaps Americans are more worried about “collapsing economies” today than they are about such “crisis levels” in fifty or eight years?

Sure, there are some obvious reasons for the apathy: High among them is that fossil fuel companies have spent decades pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. And Republican politicians have been complicit.

Well, of course it’s all the fault of evil, reich-wing Republicans and greedy fossil fuel companies! But Mr Goldberg, an associate editor and OpEd columnist for the Los Angeles Times, as well as the formerly being the newspaper’s editorial page editor, then changes his theme, and goes strongly toward a more marketing approach to persuade people to get worried about global warming climate change emergency. After pointing out what he sees as the activists’ naïveté in ignoring marketing techniques, he tells us that the only way to sell the activists’ ideas is to consider those who are not already on their side that people are stupid:

Deliver simple messages, for one thing. In general, climate activists lean toward complexity and nuance because they don’t want to patronize or condescend or mislead by oversimplifying to their audiences.

Once you have a simple message, repeat it over and over. Did you know that consumers generally have to see an ad more than half a dozen times before they will be persuaded to buy a product?

Embed facts and data in what (David) Fenton calls “moral stories that tug at the emotions.” Anyone who has ever watched TV ads knows that strategy can make arguments far more powerful.

Talk about what people care about. There’s been too much talk about the effect of climate change on polar bears, and not enough on what it means for humans.

Use language people understand. Research shows, Fenton says, that many people don’t understand the phrases “existential threat” or “net zero” or “climate justice.” They understand what “pollution” is, but not what an “emission” is — which suggests that it might make more sense to use the former term.

That practically drips with condescension: Mr Goldberg is saying that those who aren’t already on the side of the global warming climate change emergency activists just can’t understand.

Still, at the end, he throws at least a little bit of concern that people will have to make “sacrifices”:

Is (Mr Fenton) right when he says the climate problem can be solved in a way that enhances economic prosperity? I hope so; that’d be great. But I worry — and this is just my opinion, not an expert’s analysis — that we’ve waited too long, and that to avoid the worst effects of climate change we are going to have to sacrifice, whether it sells or not. I take the gloomy approach.

Either way, we can all agree there’s an awful lot to be done. And Fenton is certainly right that you can’t mobilize people for war if they don’t know they’re under attack. Public education is obviously a missing piece of the puzzle.

Somehow we need to awaken a nation of sleeping, underinformed and insufficiently motivated citizens and persuade them to rise to the great challenge of modern times. To do that, the unmanipulation process needs to begin in earnest.

Apparently, for Mr Goldberg, those who do not support the global warming climate change emergency activists are victims of ‘manipulation’ by fossil-fuel companies and wicked conservatives, but it’s “unmanipulation” to market to people his ideas.

With a guesstimated annual salary of $88,663, and net worth of $845,000, and a wife, Amy Wilentz — who didn’t respect her husband enough to take his name — who earns a similar salary from The Nation as well as being an English Professor at the University of California at Irvine, perhaps the distinguished Mr Goldberg doesn’t truly understand that working-class Americans might be more concerned with paying the rent, keeping the electricity turned on, and food on the table now than they are in projections of doom fifty and eighty years in the future. With the high inflation rate, with which wage increases have not matched, Americans are poorer, in real terms, than they were two years ago.

Then they read what the global warming climate change emergency activists want to do, and all they can see are more expenses falling on them: a wholly rebuilt electricity grid for which they’ll have to pay, plug-in electric cars which cost more than gasoline-powered ones, power restrictions that don’t allow you to recharge your Chevy Dolt at home when it gets too hot, and government requests, along with some actual action to force you to set your thermostats higher in the summer and lower in the winter, heating costs projected to rise 17.2% this coming winter, and the last thing that they want are the programs of the global warming climate change emergency activists making them poorer.

Mr Goldberg wrote that he believes that “we are going to have to sacrifice,” but, with his wife’s and his resources, they are not going to have to sacrifice nearly as much as the average American. Whatever sacrifices they will have to make, perhaps fewer dinners at nice restaurants, or having to pay an electrician to install an at-home charging station for a Tesla, won’t be as stressful for them as the sacrifices made by the single mother with two kids left her by a deadbeat ex-boyfriend in Pittsburgh, or the family in eastern Kentucky trying to survive in a poor area in which the coal mines have all closed.

Mr Goldberg is not, like the “great princess” mention by Monsieur Rousseau, saying “Let them eat brioche,” but is suggesting that those who eat cake might occasionally have to eat bread instead. What he misses is that there are those who can only afford bread right now, and the policy proposals of the activists would take that away from them as well.

Those people are already sacrificing under the current economy, something today’s left just really don’t understand. Oh, they say that they are concerned, say that they know and understand, but they simply do not: you cannot understand people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and concomitantly propose mandatory programs which will make them even poorer.

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What a surprise! Lithium prices are increasing as countries push electric cars.

In the episode “Mudd’s Women” in the original series Star Trek, Harry Mudd and the three women he was taking to sell as wives to settlers are detoured to a planet inhabited solely by dilithium crystals miners. Captain Mudd tells the three women that they’ll now be wives to “lithium miners, rich lithium miners”. Who knew that this might actually be prescient?

As President Biden and his supervisors Administration push zero-emission automobiles, and have proposed to ban the sale of gasoline-or-diesel-powered personal vehicles by 2035, many people have said that this could only drive up the cost of such vehicles. 2035 is still a long (?) way off, but sales of electric vehicles in China are already having an effect. From The Wall Street Journal:

Electric-Car Demand Pushes Lithium Prices to Records

Driven by a surge in Chinese electric-vehicles sales, the sharp rise in a key commodity for batteries could slow adoption of EVs globally

By Joe Wallace and Hardika Singh | Wednesday, September 21, 2022 | 5:30 AM EDT

Surging prices for lithium are intensifying a race between auto makers to lock up supplies and raising concerns that a shortage of the battery metal could slow the adoption of electric vehicles.

Lithium carbonate prices in China, the benchmark in the fast-growing market, stand at about $71,000 a metric ton, according to price-assessment firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. That is almost four times as high as a year ago and just below the record set this March in yuan terms.

Lithium is an outlier in commodity markets that have broadly retreated in recent months, reflecting gloom over an economic outlook dimmed by the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases and stuttering growth in China and Europe. Brent crude oil and copper—commodities used throughout industry and transportation—have fallen about 15% and 7%, respectively, this quarter. Even European natural-gas prices, propelled higher for much of 2022 by Russia’s move to cut supplies, have dropped by 10% over the past month.

But lithium keeps rising, driven by a pickup in electric-vehicles sales in China, the world’s biggest market for EVs. Car purchases jumped after Shanghai eased Covid-19 lockdowns in June, juicing demand for lithium-ion batteries. The China Passenger Car Association forecasts six million new EVs will be sold in the country this year, double the 2021 level.

“Lithium is really following the Chinese EV market and that’s just taking off,” said Edward Meir, a metals consultant at brokerage ED&F Capital Markets. “This is a preview of what could await us in the U.S.”

Draining supplies further, power outages caused by a heat wave in central China curbed output of refined lithium carbonate and hydroxide, which go into battery cathodes. Suppliers in Sichuan province—which has a third of China’s lithium processing capacity—closed factories for several days and ran down inventories to meet their sales commitments, said Rystad Energy analyst Susan Zou.

There’s a lot more at the original.

The final quoted paragraph notes a temporary problem, though one which could always recur. But the steadily increasing demand for lithium, something the proposed policies in the United States will only exacerbate, is not going to be a temporary thing.

Plug-in electric vehicles are already expensive. In Economics 101 theory, increased demand generates increased production and supply, which should bring the costs of electric cars down, but that’s theory only. The basic theory does not account for shortages of essential materials for increasing production and supply, and the lithium shortage will not be the only one which will force the prices of electric cars higher. For example, as the demand for electricity greatly increases, and more transmission lines are needed to get the required power to homes across the nation, the price of the aluminum used in power transmission lines. The price of aluminum is already increasing, due to the increased demand for canned goods, and it can only go higher.

No one who knows the first thing about economics can be surprised at this, but it sometimes appears that the environmentalists don’t know that first thing. One thing is certain: they don’t actually care about the economics of what they want, and don’t care about how the costs of their proposals will affect Other people, especially the working-class people of this country.

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The Dummkopf from Delaware really doesn’t have a clue Enjoy paying your heating bills this winter!

We noted, on September 19th, that President Joe Biden said that we should put things in perspective, that the “inflation rate, month-to-month, was up just an inch, hardly at all”, that we’re in the position where for the last several months it hasn’t spiked, “we’re basically even.”

Well, our distinguished President doesn’t have to worry about paying his heating bills this winter, but most Americans do:

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.

Here’s how much more you’ll pay to heat your home this winter

By Kelly Hayes | Tuesday, September 20, 2022 \ 11:41 AM EDT

Americans are likely going to pay more to heat their home over the winter months.

The average cost of heating a household is set to increase by 17.2% this winter, compared to winter last year, according to a forecast by the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), an educational and policy organization for federal programs that help low-income families pay their utility bills.

The article was illustrated with a nice, stock photo of a cheerily burning wood fire in a nice, upscale home fireplace, but I figured that, using my own photo from our previous home, was wiser for copyright purposes. Alas! Mrs Pico absolutely vetoed a wood-burning stove in our current house, because she says they make too much of a mess, so, to supplement the heat, and be a backup for when the sparktricity goes out — something not that infrequent here, and can be for several days out here in the country — we installed a propane fireplace.

The group expects the average winter heating bill to increase from $1,025 to $1,202, which would be the highest figure in over a decade.

U.S. residential electric bills are also forecast to increase 7.5% from 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s latest short-term outlook.

There’s more at the original.

Gas fireplace in my computer room/den.

Mr Biden is wealthy, and even if he did have to pay his own electricity and gas bills — which, for his private homes, he does — the increased costs would be an insignificant matter to him. But an extra $177 for the average working-class family? That’s a big bite. In the past, I’d have compared that $177 to a week’s trip to the grocery store, but now that’s barely half a week!

Let’s tell the truth here: for all of their protestations that they care about ordinary Americans, the Democrats really don’t understand us. The Washington elites have plenty of money, and the increases in energy costs simply don’t matter that much to them. Their proposals to fight global warming climate change will add thousands to people’s electricity bills, because so much new infrastructure will have to be built to support the greatly increased demand for electricity as people have to charge their Chevy Dolts at home. Phasing out reliable, fossil-fuel burning power plants and replacing them with solar and wind power generating facilities will cost big bucks.

By 2050, the US will demand nearly 90% more power than it did in 2018, in a scenario in which all new passenger vehicles sold by 2030 are electric and buildings and factories also aggressively electrify, according to an analysis by Nikit Abhyankar, a senior scientist at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Different scenarios will lead to a smaller increase in demand, but any changes which require more energy not from fossil fuels are going to lead to a huge increase in demand. Yet the projected increases in home heating costs are coming without any significant global warming climate change policies additions to current costs.

Perhaps President Biden doesn’t personally understand this, but his advisors certainly do, but that doesn’t matter: they just don’t care about what you have to pay, as long as they get their way.