Natural Gas Now Best Picks – June 3, 2023
Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week: neutron bombs of cash from a corporatist Congress, a foretaste of NY’s future, green madness and telling Californian and German elites to sod off.
Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!
N2N Neutron Bombed by Congressional Corporatists
Robert Bryce sums it all up in two short paragraphs:
[If] we are serious about reducing emissions, the way forward is obvious. It is N2N: natural gas to nuclear. Both technologies are low- or no-carbon, mature, affordable, and scalable. Better still, they have power densities that are measured in hundreds, or even thousands, of watts per square meter.
Alas, big business, big banks, and big law firms can’t make as much money off of natural gas and nuclear as they can from wind and solar. Indeed, Congress has dropped a neutron bomb of cash on the wind and solar industries that I have calculated will cost federal taxpayers some $240 billion between now and 2031 –– and that number is almost certainly too low.
Congress is a corrupt corporatist enterprise. That’s why the recent “debt deal” did nothing to rein in green grifting being financed our great-great-grandchildren. Congress exists only to serve the interests of other corrupt corporatists who are using “green energy” scams to milk ratepayers and taxpayers. It’s that simple.
Hat Tip: S.H.
A Foretaste of New York’s Future!
Some apparent bureaucrat from New York State DEC, whose identity we couldn’t decipher, used to troll this blog and make snarky comments, so let’s hope he or she is still reading because the following story is one Kathy Hochul’s administration should be following with fear, given their obsession with ending natural gas:
Alone among G7 advanced economies, Germany has recently slipped into recession, and hard though it may be to believe, the Government is in some danger of being toppled by, of all things, a mass revolt against heat pumps…
Boilergeddon or what Germans have labelled the “heat hammer,” is just the latest, farcical example of the destructive chaos that the unthinking and unmitigated pursuit of environmental goals has unleashed on the German economy.
To reach its climate change targets, Germany’s coalition government had been planning to bring in a new law that would ban the installation of new gas and oil fired boilers from the beginning of next year onwards.
The upshot is not just a mad dash among households to install traditional gas fired boilers while they still can, but a collapse in the Government’s poll ratings and an increasingly acrimonious standoff between two of the coalition partners – the Greens and the more enterprise friendly Free Democrats…
As a foretaste of what may be to come in the UK, which is planning a similar ban for new-build houses the year after next, and is considering a blanket prohibition on all properties from 2035 onwards, the German experience in attempting to impose heat pumps on an ever more reluctant population makes for particularly alarming reading.
Generally ineffective and often fiendishly expensive both to install and to run, heat pumps have been widely branded an unacceptable obligation among German voters, who are up in arms at the idea of being compelled to buy them.
Such has been the ferocity of public reaction to Germany’s “heat hammer” that a grovelling climbdown now looks likely.
Astute readers will know New York is pursuing precisely the same strategy as Germany and the UK as DEC, NYSERDA, the grid operator and even private utilities are all lying to themselves and the public that they can replace N2N with heat pumps. Everything that is going to happen to New York is now happening in Germany and the UK and it isn’t good at all.
Hat Tip: R.N.
Another two paragraphs that say so much about natural gas versus wind and solar:
The governments of countries with a considerable amount of wind and solar generation seem to believe that they can simply continue to build more until net zero is achieved. The reality is that many of them have kept the lights on only by using existing fossil fired stations as backup for periods of low wind and sun. This brings with it a new operating regime where stations that were designed to operate steadily and continuously have to follow unpredictable fluctuations in wind and solar power. As a result operating and maintenance costs have increased and many stations have been forced to shut down. While New Zealand does have considerable hydropower it is now virtually fully committed propping up existing wind farms.
Overseas it’s already common to see efficient base load combined-cycle gas turbines replaced by open-cycle ones because they can be throttled up and down easily to back up the rapidly changing output of wind and solar farms. But open-cycle gas turbines burn about twice as much gas as combined cycle gas turbines. Switching to high-emissions generating plant as part of an effort to reduce emissions is, frankly, madness!
Yes, indeed. Everything about the “energy transition” is a lie intended to corporatist green energy scams and green ideologues are but the useful idiots in the enterprise.
Hat Tip: I.G.
“Spare Us the Judgments, Demands and Hypocrisy on Climate Change”
Well said, Jude, even if the corporatists at Forbes didn’t like it!
How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to “get off fossil fuels” when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it. Germany and California, the world’s two greenest governments, are still overwhelming fossil fuel-based and overwhelmingly dependent on imports(dangerously so in Germany’s case). This comes despite decades of huge subsidies, scores of mandates, deploying the best engineering expertise, and having low population growth and thus low incremental energy needs, all giving them a huge advantage in “going green.” The energy stat to remember most? No U.S. state will ever “try to go green” like California has over the past 20 years, yet oil and gas still supply 70% of the state’s energy, even above the national average of 65%.
Just sod off, go away, get out of here!
Germany and California have shown us what these climate policies bring: Germany has the highest electricity prices in the world; and California’s are the highest in the continental U.S. and soaring out of control (Figure). How the heck can we push for “deep electrification” to fight climate change if we are going to follow policies that surge the price of electricity, while also lowering grid reliability? And rich Westerners, spare us the judgments, demands, and hypocrisy on climate change: Germany thrives on a GDP per capita per year of $51,200, compared to a horrifically sad $2,260 for India.
Sod off you elitists!
Hat Tip: D.S.
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