A Shockingly Inept Report From The IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy

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A Shockingly Inept Report From The IEA On Battery Storage Of Energy

  • In my self-designated role critiquing various schemes for total transformation of the world energy system, I get to review large amounts of poor, shoddy, and incompetent work. When people get into advocating for this “energy transition,” the stars regularly align to bring forth the most extreme levels of ineptitude.

  • Start with the fact that the “smartest” people are filled with arrogance and hubris, but are not actually very smart. Add that many innumerate Politics and English majors have flooded into a field that cries out for engineering calculations. Add too that groupthink and orthodoxy enforcement prevent anyone from pointing out obvious flaws. And then throw in a strong dose of religious zealotry that obstructs the intrusion of anything resembling critical thinking. All in all, it’s a prescription for catastrophe.

  • But in a field rife with bad, worse, still worse, and even dangerously incompetent work, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything as shockingly inept as the Report just out from the International Energy Agency with the title “Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions.”

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The FTC Takes Its Turn To Feel The Regulator's Exhilaration

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  • It’s hard to imagine any job more excruciatingly dull than that of the Washington regulator.

  • You beaver away for months on end generating 300 or 500 page documents justifying the latest the latest agency finaglings, all of which text needs to be cleared with scores of co-participants via endless meetings and by repeated circulation of marked-up drafts that draw hundreds of inconsistent edits from self-important functionaries. Ugh!

  • But then, into this miasma of infinite boredom, from time to time, there intrudes a frisson of great excitement. This happens when the agency decides to seize control and transform a large swath of the economy by its own edict.

  • The latest agency to make its grab for the excitement of the limelight is the FTC.

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Tracking The Demise Of The U.S. Green Energy Transition

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Tracking The Demise Of The U.S. Green Energy Transition

  • We’re coming up on three and a half years into the Biden presidency — a presidency which from the outset promised an “all of government” regulatory onslaught to force a transition away from fossil fuels and to “green” energy. And the regulatory onslaught has indeed come forth.

  • But how about the actual transition in energy use? Not so much.

  • Let’s have a round-up of some recent data points.

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Ever More Audacious Efforts To Suppress Mainstream Conservative Speech

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Ever More Audacious Efforts To Suppress Mainstream Conservative Speech

  • You are undoubtedly familiar with many efforts of the fascist left to use its control of government offices, bureaucracies, and other institutions to delegitimize and silence mainstream conservative speech:

  • things like the Censorship Industrial Complex, otherwise known as pressure by government functionaries to induce social media platforms to shut down wrongthink on topics ranging from Covid to climate change to Trump; de-monetization of perfectly reasonable sites like PJ Media or Watts Up With That; the political prosecutions of presumptive Republican nominee Trump, including locking him in a courtroom to prevent him from campaigning; and many more such.

  • This week along comes a new and quite extreme instance that you may have missed.

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New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

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New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

  • Let’s face it: Central planning of the economy hasn’t worked out so well in many places where it has been tried (e.g., Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc.).

  • But then, here in New York, we are so much smarter than the dolts who fell on their faces in those backwaters. With utter confidence in our genius, we have embarked upon the total centrally-directed transformation of the economy into “net zero” utopia, via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.

  • But that project is barely getting under way. It will be a few years before we have enough feedback to judge it a success or failure.

  • Meanwhile, is there any other significant central planning initiative here in New York that has gotten far enough so that we can judge whether it is succeeding? Yes! — It’s the “Buffalo Billion,” a massive state-subsidized industrial development project in the long-declining Great Lakes port in far Western New York. Let’s get an update.

  • The summary is, it’s hard to believe how badly wrong this has gone.

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Illustrating The Absurdity Of New York's Energy Transition

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Illustrating The Absurdity Of New York's Energy Transition

  • By its 2019 Climate Act, New York has officially embarked on a great energy transition to Net Zero by 2050, with statutorily-dictated interim mandates along the way. The first of those mandates is 70% “emissions-free” electricity by 2030, only 6 years from now.

  • This is far and away the biggest government-directed project that the State of New York has ever undertaken. However, to date, relative to this project there exists no environmental impact statement, no feasibility study, no prototype, and no demonstration project to show how this can be done, let alone any detailed cost analysis to show how much it will cost.

  • Implementing the enforced energy transition is the responsibility of an alphabet soup of state agencies that makes the federal labyrinth of bureaucracies look simple and rational by comparison.

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