Questioning The Inevitable Energy Transition

Please note: this article was pulled down offline from Forbes. I will let you draw your own conclusions as to why. Factually, there was no justification for it.

This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.

1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dispatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources? ERCOT exemplifies this: the Texas grid operator has around 31,000 MW of wind capacity but goes into winter expecting only 6,000 MW (just 20%) of wind farms to be available to generate electricity...

Further, good wind and solar spots are finite, based on geography, so new builds, naturally, will be forced into areas that are less windy and less sunny, lowering their already very low 35% capacity factors...

2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, U.S. gasoline cars constitute just 3% of global CO2 emissions, so how will getting rid of them impact climate change? But this dose of real science doesn’t stop California leaders, a state responsible for just 1% of global CO2 emissions, from telling us that energy policy in the nine-county region of Northern California alone is “responsible for protecting air quality and the global climate in the nine-county Bay Area.”...

Indeed, despite the Sierra Club in 2014 promising us that “China's Thirst for Coal Is Drying Up,” the Chinese Communist Party approved two coal plants a week in 2022...

3. Back to electric vehicles. Even green-tinted but surely practical Bloomberg admits that more than 85% of Americans can’t afford an electric car, since they are well more than double the price of oil-based cars...

4. 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...

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%...