Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Democratic candidates stress need for solar & wind but those industries are in crisis because

- inherent unreliability & need for back-up
- 400-750x more land
- threat to endangered species

which block growth & make electricity expensive.

Please share!

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

In Germany, the world leader in renewables, just 35 wind turbines were installed this year. The country needs to install 1,400 per year to meet its climate change targets.

welt.de/wirtschaft/art…

The halting of wind deployment in Germany has resulted in the industry shedding 25,000 jobs. And it’s not clear Germany can handle more wind.

Its grid operator increasingly has to cut off electricity from industrial wind farms on windy, low-demand days, to avoid blow-outs.

The same is happening in California. The grid operator increasingly must pay neighboring states to take the state’s excess solar electricity, and cut off power coming from solar farms, on sunny, low-demand days.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Experts say the deployment of industrial wind energy in the United States is likely to stall when the key wind energy subsidy, known as the production tax credit or PTC, expires on December 31 of this year.

Renewables advocates say state mandates will play role of subsidies but some are going in the opposite direction.

In Ohio, lawmakers recently scaled back renewable energy mandates due to their high cost, choosing to instead to subsidize nuclear plants.

forbes.com/sites/michaels…

Around the world, renewables are making electricity more expensive, despite years of promises by advocates that prices would decline

“German electricity consumers have to pay higher subsidies to producers of green electricity in the next two years,” reported Die Welt last month.

In Australia, “increasing regularity with which wholesale power prices are sinking below $0 during sunny & windy days is being more than canceled out by frequent high prices, defying expectations of a softening in levels overall,” noted The Australian Financial Review on Sunday.

“While I am an advocate for renewables, my motivation is driven by economics, not by warm and fuzzy feelings,” a renewable industry leader told me.

“I’ve drawn out the long term macroeconomics & come to the conclusion that the math doesn’t pencil out for wind, solar, & water."

Thanks to the heavy deployment of renewables, electricity prices in California between 2011 and 2018 rose six times more than they did in the rest of the country, while electricity prices have risen 50% in Germany since 2006.

"Bernie Sanders & Elizabeth Warren are right that the climate crisis demands a radical break from discredited ideologies — but that includes the left's anti-nuclear absolutism"

@ericlevitz makes strong case for why the Left should go nuclear @NYMag

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

I will be on Fox News with @DanaPerino to discuss last night's CNN Townhall climate change meeting with Democratic presidential candidates at 2:10 pm eastern today — please tune-in!

“Abandoning the means to quickly reduce emissions [with nuclear] is a warning sign. If candidates don’t recognize this, we should assume that their real objective isn’t climate change at all.”

Brilliant @henryolsenEPPC

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/…