The Disastrous Economics Of Trying To Power An Electrical Grid With 100% Intermittent Renewables
The effort to increase the percentage of electricity generated by intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar inevitably brings about large increases in the actual price of electricity that must be paid by consumers. The price increases grow and accelerate as the percentage of electricity generated from the intermittent renewables increases toward 100 percent. These statements may seem counterintuitive, given that the cost of fuel for wind and solar generation is zero. However, simple modeling shows the reason for the seemingly counterintuitive outcome: the need for large and increasing amounts of costly backup and storage – things that are not needed at all in conventional fossil-fuel-based systems. And it is not only from modeling that we know that such cost increases would be inevitable. We also have actual and growing experience from those few jurisdictions that have attempted to generate more and more of their electricity from these renewables. This empirical experience proves the truth of the rising consumer price proposition. . . .
Change in New York Harbor
"Whitman very explicitly seeks to evoke the timelessness of his experience -- that he is seeing and feeling the same things that those generations before him have experienced, and that generations after him will experience . . . So here we are about five generations or so after Whitman wrote the poem. How much of what he experienced is still there?"
Our Meaningless Measure of Poverty
"...by the Census Bureau definition of "poverty," the very "poorest" people are highly unlikely to be "poor" at all in terms of material deprivation, and in fact are highly likely to be quite wealthy in the sense of ownership of valuable assets (as opposed to current income)."
Defunct Agriculture Tour
"...Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" and authored the line "This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism." We see economic assets around us constantly being re-deployed into new uses, but rarely pause to look at them or consider the underlying processes."
The Looking Glass World Of "Climate Injustice"