Natural Gas Now Best Picks – September 2, 2023

September 2, 2023
News

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: another dangerous Upstate solar fire, the inconvenience of whales, grid rescue again and again by natural gas and much more.

Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!

So, Covering Upstate with Solar Isn’t That Popular?

The Town of Lyme is located in Jefferson County, New York, northwest of Watertown and along the shores of Lake Ontario. Like much of Upstate, it is the target for massively subsidized, politically correct solar farms. But, there are issues:

Is there a reason to be worried about the health of first responders who put out a fire at a town of Lyme solar farm a month ago? State Senator Mark Walczyk wants to know.

He’s asking for 3 things. One is for the state to check on the health of those first responders. He also would like the results of a state investigation into the fire made public. And he wants a pause on some solar projects.

Lyme solar project: clouded over, on fire and underwater fiscally as New York embarks on a campaign to de-energize the Empire State by smothering it with solar panels.

“I’ve got concerns, especially on the volunteer firefighters. This is pretty unprecedented. When you’re talking about the gases that happen in a chemical reaction like the battery fire in Chaumont, they’re tasteless, they’re odorless, and they’re deadly,” said Walczyk (R. – 49th District.

Walczyk says his concerns for first responders who fought the fire in late July have gone unanswered in Albany.

“It would have been nice at some point if the governor, or somebody from her staff, at least reached out to the volunteer firefighters who had been on scene for days battling this battery, this meltdown, this explosion, this chemical reaction that was happening in Chaumont. They still haven’t even reached out to see what their health concerns are,” he said.

First responders were on the scene for up to 8 hours not knowing what chemicals they were up against.

After Governor Hochul called for a new inter-agency fire safety group, Walczyk wants to know what that group found out – like what air quality data said.

“We really need to know what the exposure in Chaumont was. But we also need to know what types of protocols need to be put in place in the future. I’ve got a lot of concerns about the batteries that are still being installed today in New York state,” he said.

Such is the reality of the supposed “green energy” solutions being pushed on New Yorkers by a mad hatter governor determined to spend the money of ratepayers and taxpayers on corporatist grifting schemes that are undermining Empire State energy security a little bit every time a new solar industrial smothers more farmland or what was forest. It’s fiscal and environmental foolishness combined with sabotage of energy security that could be easily secured by natural gas.

Hat Tip: E.S.

“Wind Projects Are Going Forward Despite Urgent
Warnings from Leading Conservation Groups”

While deniers in government continue to insist off-shore boondoggles proceed, the great whale wipeout continues apace.

The increase in whale, dolphin, and other cetacean deaths off the East Coast of the United States since 2016 is not due to the construction of large industrial wind turbines, U.S. government officials say.

Their scientists have done the research, they say, to prove that whatever is killing the whales is completely unrelated to the wind industry.

But now, a new documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” by director and producer Jonah Markowitz, which I executive produced, proves that the US government officials have been lying.

The film documents surprisingly loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry vessels when measured with state-of-the-art hydrophones. And it shows that the wind industry’s increased boat traffic is correlated directly with specific whale deaths…

The species in question is the North Atlantic right whale. Its population has dropped to 340 from over 400 over the last few years.

And, there have been more than 60 recorded whale deaths of all species on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022, a number that increased markedly since 2016 when the wind industry started to ramp up.

The documentary may not stop the industrial wind projects from being built. After all, the wind projects are going forward despite urgent warnings from leading conservation groups and a top scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The waters off New York and New Jersey have seen a sudden upsurge in whale deaths this year.

But our documentary has hit a nerve. Within the first 48 hours of it being online, over 20,000 people re-posted it, and over 6 million people total, across two tweets, have viewed the posts with the embedded trailer for “Thrown To The Wind.”

Yes, the inconvenience of whales has become apparent, just like the “inconvenience of us” as Naomi Wolf puts it. Once valued, we are now in the way of elites and a burden to somehow be unloaded so the accumulation of wealth and power off the labor of our backs may proceed unimpeded. Our rights (especially our speech), our values and our very lives are being ‘thrown to the wind’ just like those of the whales.

Hat Tip: R.N.

Natural Gas to the Rescue, Again, Again and Again!

This is crucial information that keeps getting ignored by the imbeciles who claim to be journalists today:

The Texas grid is much-watched because it is the nation’s leader in wind and solar power generation due to an aggressive program to attract wind and solar enacted legislation in 1999. The results have been impressive in terms of installed wind and solar generating capacity but disastrous in terms of the impact of wind and solar on the reliability of the Texas power grid.

The hot summer temperatures have highlighted an important weakness of wind power. During hot summer afternoons, wind speeds drop, causing significant reductions in wind power generation. Most summer days in Texas start with wind power contributing 10% to 20% of total power generation in the state, but by early afternoon, it drops below 10%, usually to 5% or less, and stays low until sunrise the following day. The real crunch time for the Texas grid starts at about 5 PM as solar generation begins to wane and electricity demand increases as people return home and turn on the air conditioning. By 8 PM, when the sun has set, solar power is near zero, wind power is low, and demand remains high.

An example of a typical warm Texas summer evening is shown below for August 26, 2023. The screen capture at 9:29 PM shows solar generation is at zero, wind is providing 6.6% of total generation, coal is 17.3%, nuclear is 7%, and natural gas has ramped up to 68.5% of total power generation, keeping the grid operational. Night after night this summer, natural gas generation has saved the Texas grid from collapse due to the failure of wind power generation.

The trend of natural gas coming to the rescue when wind and solar fail has been a defining characteristic of the Texas grid for years, but the importance of natural gas in stabilizing grids can be seen in all major US power grids…

Without natural gas, every major power grid in the U.S., including CAISO (California), Midcontinent, PJM, and Northwest, would have been in big trouble due to their increased reliance on wind and solar. This is not what wind and solar generation proponents want to admit, but it is the reality. The numbers don’t lie.