Month: February 2023

Oilprice.com:

For close to a decade, Great Britain’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power project has served as the go-to punching bag for anti-nuclear activists. Sure enough, the gift that keeps giving has furnished still another reason to be chary of big nuclear projects.

Background for those not in the know. The current Hinkley Point nuclear project was the brainchild of British energy planners in the early 2000s. Their goal was to build another big nuclear plant at an existing site. Several actually. French state-controlled EDF took on the task with big British energy supplier Centrica as a minority owner. But Centrica soon backed out due to the escalating costs. EDF brought in a Chinese state company as a replacement partner.

The UK government signed an agreement guaranteeing that the unit would collect a generous price for power generated (an insanely high price according to one critic at the time). In 2016, the project commenced with an estimated cost of £16-17 billion. Oilprice readers will not be surprised that these costs kept rising. In February 2023, EDF estimated that the final cost would be close to £33 billion ($40 billion), a 100% increase versus the initial estimated cost to completion. The Chinese partner may not agree to further investments beyond those initially agreed to so EDF could be exposed to even higher costs. With the completion date set for 2027, should we expect more increases? 

The news stories cite inflation as a primary reason for the cost increases. But the UK’s construction price index rose 40% between 2016 and 2023, while the estimated cost of the nuclear plant almost doubled. One distinguished economist noted that the plant would have cost far less if the government had financed it, but that is another matter. 

Hinkley Point is really a colossal miscalculation of risk management. Start with this statistic. The Hinkley Point project investment to date equals roughly one-fifth of the enterprise value of EDF. There are 56 other nuclear plants in EDF’s portfolio. One of the lessons learned by most US utilities after the Three Mile Island accident was that big nuclear plants and relatively small electric utilities are not a good match. In technical terms, the single asset concentration risk is too high. One might argue that EDF is big enough to take the chance, but that is clearly not so.  

Continue reading “UK Nuclear Project Costs Soar. It’s Kind of a Thing.”

Here is the governor of Ohio Mike DeWine (R) saying Biden immediately called him offering full support— then DeWine said “I have not called him back after that conversation. I will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem, but I’m not seeing it.” pic.twitter.com/XG8QOzixAB

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) February 23, 2023

Below, Fox News (again) admits the truth.

Continue reading “About the Palestine Derailment”

The greatest threat to farmland and open space in North America is urban sprawl, hands down.

Farmers are in the crosshairs of big developers who are anxious to see them fail, and have to sell their land, which can then be devoured by subdivisions, strip malls, and gas stations.
Clean energy offers an additional revenue source for farmers to diversify their income with drought proof, flood proof, recession proof cash – usually for 25 to 30 years.
In my experience, if you scratch the surface of any anti-clean energy group, you don’t have to look far to find someone with real estate development in mind.

Iced CHIPs?
Not like it’s never happened, but given the total picture, but it’s a nice indicator of the scale of the storm system passing over North America right now.

ABC 7 Los Angeles:

A blizzard warning by the National Weather Service is the first such alert issued for the Southern California mountains since 1989, the agency said.

The warning is scheduled to take effect at 4 a.m. Friday and will last until 4 p.m. Saturday. The National Weather Service predicts from 2 to 5 feet of snow could accumulate in the mountains above 4,000 feet, falling even as heavy winds gust up to 75 mph.

Below that, at elevations of 2,000 to 4,000 feet, about 6-12 inches of snow are expected.

Officials initially said the warning was the first one in recorded history for the area. However, a New York-based meteorologist later discovered the text of a blizzard warning that was issued by the National Weather Service Los Angeles on Feb. 4, 1989.

“Looks like it was issued after reports came in. Even if this is not our 1st, this is a dangerous storm. Do not travel in the mountains” on Friday and Saturday, the agency said on Twitter.

—

I wish everyday was like this pic.twitter.com/FqemANfQei

— Brendon 🌪️🐻❄️ (@brendonme) February 22, 2023

Just finished shoveling the driveway for the third time today and it’s snowing harder than ever here in Central Michigan – about an inch an hour it looks like to me. This is after a remarkably warm and snow free winter up till now.

Two reports from CBS News on new data tracking attacks on the US electrical grid. Above, new study shows big increase – below, former FBI official analyzes the problem.

Was “Lord” Monckton booked? Is he even alive?

The country’s most embarrassing climate denial shills are still at it, but the bench is, apparently, getting thinner.

Heartland Institute:

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a member of the House Resources Committee, will be a featured keynote speaker at the 15^th International Conference on Climate Change, being held in Orlando, FL from Feb. 23-25, 2023.

From the green energy boondoggles in the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” in the United States, to the ongoing wind-power disaster in Germany, and threats of energy cuts in the winter in the UK, the climate policy “solutions” are a real and growing problem for the people of the world. Why are we making life poorer and more miserable for most of the people on the planet when there is no climate crisis?

These issues and more will be discussed by scientists and policy experts at the only conference of its kind that takes a data-driven, realist approach to what is actually causing climate change and what (if anything) humans can do about it.
————-

God, how long ago was it I went to the Heartland Climate denial conference in Chicago? 2012?
The comedy appeal has long since played out, guys.

Here we are in late February, and we are seeing an arctic outbreak in North America, just like last year, and the year before. If I’m understanding correctly, the current one is connected with something called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. (SSW)

I’m just going to point anyone that wants to do a deeper dive to this post by Severe Weather Europe.
It’s long and deep, with a very cool animation, or 2, but key points here.

Severe Weather Europe:

A strong Stratospheric Warming event is currently active. It has brought a major disruption of the high altitude circulation and is set to impact the lower levels. Looking ahead, we can already see this event’s first major weather impacts across North America and Europe.

The Sudden Stratospheric Warming event (SSW) is now here, and it is leaving a strong mark on the Polar Vortex and the atmosphere. You will see the latest atmospheric conditions with the active SSW and the Polar Vortex breakdown.

But we will focus more on its actual weather impacts, already seen in the forecast. The most prominent effects are currently trending towards the North Atlantic and over Greenland, impacting the entire North American region and Europe

To understand what is currently happening, we must know what the Polar Vortex is. In simple terms, it is a single name that describes the broad winter circulation over the northern (and southern) hemispheres.

Below, you can see a 3-dimensional image of the Polar Vortex. The vertical axis is greatly enhanced for better visual presentation. In addition, you can see the actual structure of the Polar Vortex, connecting down to the lower levels to the pressure systems.

Posting this again, Nebraska State Climatologist Martha Shulski and MIT’s Judah Cohen on the increase in polar outbreaks during this late winter time window.

Continue reading “Sudden Stratospheric Warming Triggers Severe Arctic Outbreak”

Last week I posted the recent NPR report on the nationally organized, dark money funded, attack on clean energy.

The money quote that caught my eye was this:

“I think for years, there has been this sense that this is not all coincidence. That local groups are popping up in different places, saying the same things, using the same online campaign materials,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

No surprise here for us that have been watching for many years.
In the past month, I’ve interviewed farmers and local officials in Montcalm County, Michigan, on their experience on the receiving end of a harassment and intimidation campaign against wind, and solar, energy.
What came thru vividly are the parallels between what climate scientists were getting hit with 10 years ago, and what local rural officials are experiencing today.

A blizzard of FOIAs, efforts to glean out-of-context emails, phony investigations to get officials unfavorably named in the media, along with straight up threats, harassment, and intimidation. I’ll be posting a few of these in coming days, and I hope, have more a synthesis in an upcoming 2 part Yale Climate Connections vid.

Business Insider:

The term “climate migration” is an attempt to explain why people leave one place in favor of another; it assigns motivation to movements that may be voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent. Yet even if the primary cause for migration is clear, there are still countless other factors that influence when, where, and how someone moves in response to a disaster. It’s this messiness that is reflected in the word “displacement”: the migratory shifts caused by climate change are as chaotic as the weather events that cause them.

For some families the decision to depart the Keys was easy. The storm was a traumatic event, more than enough to convince many people that life on the islands was too dangerous to accept. They came back home, fixed up their houses, and got out. That was the case for Connie and Glenn Faast, who left the island city of Marathon for the mountains of North Carolina after spending almost 50 years in the Keys. “It was pretty much immediate,” Connie told me. “It’s just too hard to start over when you get older. We couldn’t risk it.”

The Faasts had lived the kind of life you can only live in the Keys: Connie worked on commercial fishing boats and in a local aquarium, while Glenn owned a boat maintenance company and raced Jet Skis in his spare time. They had stuck it out in the Keys through several major storms, including 2005’s Hurricane Wilma, which brought five feet of water to their little island and totaled three of their cars; Connie still shudders when she remembers the image of her husband wading through the water around their house with snakes climbing all over him, clinging to him for shelter from the flood. The Faasts had second thoughts after that storm, but the Keys were paradise, and besides, they didn’t know where else they would go.

When Irma came 12 years later, though, the choice was much easier. During the evacuation, it took the Faasts a week to find a decaying hotel in Orlando where they could wait out the storm. As the hurricane passed over the center of the state, it knocked out their power, leaving them and their pets to spend the night in 100-degree heat without air conditioning. “That was it for us,” she said. They had to get out — not just out of the Keys, but out of Florida altogether.

Continue reading “Wastin’ Away: Florida Keys’ Great Displacement Begins”