GlobalWarming.org

If this past year is any indication, wind energy may become little more than a dream remembered. That is, unless the government continues to step in to support the industry. According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), only seventy mw of wind power was added to the nation’s power supply; the slowest increase since recordkeeping began in 2005. The cause of the decrease in the rate of expansion is attributed to uncertainty building up at the end of last year over whether there would be an extension of the Federal Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) in 2013.

Tom Kiernan, the CEO of AWEA, describes last year’s uncertainty as engendering a boom-bust cycle, delaying the planning of new projects for 2013. What Kiernan says, however, is misleading.  It is not the uncertainty over the wind PTC that created this problem. The problem comes from the wind energy boom generated by the cash grant program of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or section 1603.

As Lisa Linowes explains on MasterResource.org:

 We’ve long known that Section 1603, the cash grant program enacted under The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), fueled a wind bubble that was certain to burst, and it did.

Under 1603, roughly 30,000 megawatts of new wind was installed, more than doubling the wind capacity in the country. As much as 90% of the 13,000+ MW of wind installed last year alone can be attributed to Section 1603, not the PTC.

Moreover:

In order to receive the grant, projects needed to be in-service by the end of 2012. Developers raced to meet the deadline which flushed the industry’s project pipeline.

This is a clear example of the knowledge problem; government inefficiently allocating resources (in this case, wind subsidies) when the market would provide a better solution. [click to continue…]

A study by Netherlands-based consulting firm Ecorys finds that during 2005-2012, no EU firms relocated overseas to avoid costs associated with the European emissions trading system (ETS).

Note: The study does not spin this finding as evidence that carbon regulation is good for business or poses no risks to EU economies.

Why haven’t firms moved out of Europe to avoid the higher costs imposed by the ETS?

The main reason is simply that the direct costs of the ETS have been “very limited.” According to a Greenwire article on the study, “emission allowances this year slumped to a record low of $3.36 a metric ton in April amid a record surplus of permits due to the global recession.”  For perspective, that works out to gasoline tax of 3.3 cents per gallon.

Permit prices were low because allocations were higher than required to meet projected demand – and then demand plummeted due to the recession and “lower production.”

Reducing costs even further is the fact that “most allowances were allocated to installations for free.”

A second reason the ETS did not trigger a business exodus is that relocating a company is itself costly. The ETS increased electricity prices, and this was “quite a relevant factor” to industry. However, “Most industry has heavy upfront investments (sunk costs) so they will not quickly move production. The lead-times for moving industrial production facilities are easily over 10 years.”

A third reason – strangely not mentioned in the study – is that EU governments enacted “compensation funds” to subsidize ETS-covered manufacturers and keep them from offshoring their operations. [click to continue…]

“The Bureau of Land Management is scrapping its decision to lease more than 600 acres of land to Peabody Energy Corp,” reports Manuel Quiñones in today’s Greenwire (subscription required).  The article continues:

WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group active in fighting coal leases around the country, appealed BLM’s decision to the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA) in August.

But in a surprise move, instead of standing by its decision, based on an environmental assessment (EA) and finding of no significant impact (FONSI), BLM this month agreed with the need for more study. And yesterday IBLA judges agreed with sending the case back to BLM.

So the BLM will have to redo the EA to address what WildEarth Guardians, in their petition, call the “potentially significant indirect and cumulative impacts of the proposed lease.” What happens then?

My guess is the project will be approved. Team Obama is waging a war on coal but, for obvious political reasons, continues to deny it. BLM would totally blow the administration’s cover if, after revising the EA, it rejects the lease.

Clearly, WildEarth Guardians would like nothing better than for BLM to reject the lease on climate change grounds:

“We can’t possibly begin to tackle global warming by stripping more coal from the ground,” said WildEarth Guardians climate and energy chief Jeremy Nichols in response to the latest developments.

“With New Mexico bearing the brunt of climate change in the Southwest, including diminished rivers, extreme weather and soaring fire risks, every ton of coal kept in the ground is a ton of progress made toward safeguarding the people and places of the Southwest,” he said. [click to continue…]

Following EPA’s  proposal to implement regulations forcing coal power plants to reduce emissions, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy announced that her agency would be holding eleven public listening sessions around the country to discuss EPA’s plans and to receive feedback from the public (Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL, Dallas, TX, Denver, CO, Lenexa, KS, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, DC). Coal power plant operators have repeatedly said these regulatory standards cannot be met without either adopting a technology (carbon capture ans sequestration) that doesn’t yet exist, or switching to another fuel. Notably, only one meeting is being held in a city located in a state ranked in the top ten coal producing state.

It would seem the administration has no intention of promoting legitimate debate as it excludes the very people who are affected most by these regulations.

Congress is outraged by the omission of impacted states from EPA’s listening tour destinations. Last Friday, 41 House representatives sent a letter to the EPA demanding to know why the proposed meeting sessions are not in the regions they affect.

These closed and existing power plants are not located in any of the areas you are holding these listening sessions. In all fairness, residents and businesses in rural areas deserve to be heard just as much.

There’s a simple reason EPA would prefer to not listen to people from coal-reliant regions: The agency’s regulations threaten jobs for no purpose, other than the placation of a special interest.

If the administration is sincere about addressing the concerns of the public, they should be holding these public listening sessions in cities located in states with the highest coal production such as Charleston, Cheyenne, Frankfort, Harrisburg, and Helena. These are the cities most accessible to people affected by the regulations and where people stand the greatest risk to lose their entire way of life.

As a pretext for expanding political control of the economy, redistributing wealth, and bilking consumers for the benefit of special interests, nothing beats the pseudo-science of social-cost-of-carbon estimation.

A new study by economists Laurie Johnson, Starla Yeh, and Chris Hope, The Social Cost of Carbon: Implications for Modernizing Our Electricity System, has the unintentional virtue of exposing what a menace SCC analysis has become.

Before examining the Johnson, Yeh, Hope (JYH) study, let’s review some preliminaries. [click to continue…]

The “worse than we thought” crowd has got things backwards. The state of the climate is better than they told us. In stark contrast, the state of climate modeling is worse than even many of us skeptics thought!

John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) examined 73 IPCC climate model runs available as of June 1, 2013. He found that all overshoot the warming of the tropical mid-troposphere during the previous 34 years as measured by two independent satellite datasets and four independent balloon datasets.

Christy’s colleague Roy Spencer showed the diverging linear trends between models and observations in the figure below: In a column titled “Epic Fail,” Spencer concluded by asking: “Now, in what universe do the above results not represent an epic failure for the models?”

As the above chart shows, although all models fail to replicate reality, some do much worse than others.

This week on WattsUpWithThat.Com, engineer Ken Gregory has a guest essay on the Canadian Climate model’s “epic failure.” For the 34-year satellite record (1979-2012), Gregory compares the Canadian model’s temperature projections to observations in several atmospheric layers and geographic areas. For example, in the global mid-troposphere, the model on average overshoots observed temperatures by 650%.

[click to continue…]