Editors’ Note: This is just another example of wild spending to force change in the energy field on Americans and how badly US corporations have been corrupted by the government by the cynically named Inflation Reduction Act.

“Wind turbines are like strippers. They stop working when you stop throwing money at them.” Author unknown

The price of climate pork has shot up 2,000 percent, thanks to the ironically-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). According to a recent projection from the U.S. Treasury, American taxpayers will fork over a stunning $425 billion for wind and solar energy subsidies over the next decade. This represents a 21-fold increase in the cost of these subsidies just since 2015, according to calculations made by energy journalist Robert Bryce.

The market capitalization of General Electric (GE) hovered just above $70 billion in the summer of 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act was signed by the president in August. By late February 2024, GE was worth $167 billion.

Is that a coincidence?

An April 2023 CNBC report was titled: “From GE to Siemens, the wind energy industry hopes billions in losses are about to end.”

It predicted a possible end to a “tough couple of years for the U.S. wind energy industry” because of an “air of optimism within the industry, driven in large part by billions of dollars in new tax credits and subsidies toward clean energy investments included in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.”

The Largest Wind Farm in the Western Hemisphere

The prophecy was coming true by January 2024, as demonstrated by this corporate communication from GE:

Recognizing that decarbonization needs to go even faster, the U.S. government has once again stepped up its policy support. For many years, solar and wind projects have benefited from the basic production and investment tax credits, which have been extended multiple times by Congress in the past. But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) not only provides the long-term certainty of those PTC and ITC, it also has other bonuses, and one job that GE Vernova takes on is helping developers hit the targets required to qualify for those bonuses. [emphasis added]

Or, if phrased as a new mission statement, “GE: Helping developers hoover up your tax dollars!”

The GE statement was promoting the work of one of those developers.

Getting renewable electricity to big population centers is a growing challenge in the United States, but in the high desert of central New Mexico a plan is coming together. There, near the tiny town of Corona, GE Vernova will deploy 674 of its new “workhorse” 3.6-154 wind turbines for the SunZia project and its developer, Pattern Energy. When completed in 2026, this colossus of a project will weigh in at a total 3,500 MW, making it the largest wind farm—and in fact the largest renewables project—in the Western Hemisphere, providing enough power for some 3 million people.

Spread out over a million acres, SunZia’s ambitious scope has been compared to the Hoover Dam. [emphasis added]

Boasting of this huge chunk of the environment that must be compromised to make room for its wind turbines is an odd way for GE to promote its power systems.

So is the Hoover Dam comparison. A January 2024 E&E News report more substantively predicted SunZia would provide “three times more power annually than the Hoover Dam.”

The million acres projected to be used to build SunZia equals 1,562 square miles.

Sitting between the “tiny town of Corona” and the Hoover Dam is the Grand Canyon, a hole in the ground so huge that astronauts can clearly see it from orbit. The canyon, plus all of the roads and land on either side of it that make up Grand Canyon National Park, add up to just over 1,904 square miles.

By way of comparison, the Hoover Dam is small enough that you need to drive to it before it becomes visible. Lake Mead, the otherwise very large reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, takes up only 247 square miles when it is full.

By GE’s own estimate, to generate three times the carbon-free electricity produced from the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead project, the largest wind power project ever put on this side of the Earth will need to devour six times more of the planet.

Hydroelectric dams take up a lot of space, arguably too much in some cases. But the Hoover Dam apparently still uses less land per kilowatt hour of power than GE’s newest wind turbines will require. (And another advantage beyond the carbon-free electricity is that Lake Mead stores enough water to irrigate 2,300 square miles of farmland and provide fresh water for 16 million people.)

GE’s engineers should check the math on the press statements being sent out by the PR department.

And compared to other carbon-free power options, the Hoover Dam comparison isn’t even remotely the worst one GE could have chosen. The “tiny town of Corona,” near where the SunZia wind facility is being built, is a 646-mile drive east from the Hoover Dam. In the same general direction, but just 575 miles away, sits the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.

From a mere 6.4 square mile plot of land 60 miles from downtown Phoenix, Palo Verde annually produces more than 31 terawatt hours (TWh) of zero-carbon electricity and is capable of more than 32 TWh each year.

In 2023 the Hoover Dam produced a combined 2.7 TWh of electricity for Arizona and Nevada. If the SunZia project really does triple the power output of the Hoover Dam, then it will annually generate 8.1 TWh of power. So GE is boasting that it needs 244 times more land than Palo Verde to produce just 25 percent of the carbon-free electricity kicked out by the nuclear station.

This means a nuclear facility opened more than 30 years ago is still nearly 1,000 times more efficient with land use (i.e., “the environment”) than GE’s latest and greatest wind machines will be.

The Old Wind Turbines

On the positive side, at least they’re using the new stuff.

Media accounts from January 2022 through January 2024 show at least 13 fires, blade breaks, tower collapses, and other serious malfunctions credited to GE wind machines. Seven were in the United States.

About 550 miles north of where SunZia will be built a GE wind turbine caught fire after its tower collapsed in Colorado on the morning of January 11, 2024. This was apparently less than two days after GE posted the statement describing SunZia. The Colorado turbine was one of 19 GE wind machines that were in motion at the Spring Canyon II wind facility in late 2014. By the dates provided in a CBS media account, the turbine had lasted just over nine years before it fell over.

Three months earlier in October 2023, two different blades snapped off the same GE turbine at a wind facility in Germany. The same wind farm had a nearly identical problem with another of its GE turbines in September 2022. Following the 2022 incident, nearby farmers complained that debris from the malfunction had polluted their fields.

In March 2023, one of 14 GE turbines at a brand-new wind facility in Lithuania fell to the ground when the tower buckled. According to the account in ReNews.biz, a “malfunctioning sensor” had caused the turbine to misbehave and topple the tower.

Also in March 2023, a GE turbine managed by NextEra energy in New York caught fire during high winds that scattered burning fiberglass and other debris all over the town. The local newspaper covered an April 2023 meeting on the incident with the headline: “Heated meeting as residents with fiberglass particles on land, trees and possibly ponds question wind turbine fire.”

And in January 2023, a GE turbine collapsed at another NextEra facility in Wisconsin. In March 2023, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported: “Nearly two months later the remains of the crumpled tower are still where they fell, it’s 86-ton turbine and blades resting partially buried in a hole created by the impact.”

In Ireland a few months earlier in October 2022 an offshore GE turbine caught fire in the Irish Sea. Media accounts raised the possibility of a lightning strike on the machine.

Then in August 2022, a GE turbine at an Oklahoma wind power facility came down in a fiery crash. “The utility company said the cause of the incident is under investigation,” reported Fox Weather, “but the scene looked similar to the destruction of a wind turbine in Texas after a direct lightning strike in late July.”

That July 2022 incident in Texas also involved a GE turbine. According ReNews.biz, the wind machine had been in operation since 2019 and the developer of the project believed a lighting strike had been the cause of the “catastrophic fire.” Fox Weather reported that “videos from witnesses and firefighters showed the wind turbine generator ablaze and disintegrate in the sky over Crowell, Texas.”

(Note for further investigation: Could it be that weather-dependent wind power systems are peculiarly vulnerable to . . . the weather?)

Also in July 2022, a blade broke off of a GE turbine in Sweden. ReCharge News reported that a family with children had been picking berries nearby the malfunction. The headline of the ReCharge News report led with this quote: “Lucky family wasn’t hurt.”

In June 2022, according to Bloomberg, another GE wind turbine that had “been in operation for less than a year” crashed down in Oklahoma. Unlike the August 2023 incident involving a supposedly lightning-afflicted GE turbine in Oklahoma, this one happened on a calm, clear day.

The January 2023 Bloomberg report was titled: “Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over.” The same report covered yet another incident from June 2022:

Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.

Similarly in January 2022 a blade from a GE wind machine in Germany broke into multiple pieces and fell off the turbine.

IRA to the Rescue?

The Bloomberg report in January 2023 showed General Electric wasn’t the only turbine maker in trouble by that point:

The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit; and they could result in more expensive insurance policies . . .

The race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the newer turbines, and that’s quite concerning,” says Fraser McLachlan, chief executive officer of London-based GCube Underwriting Ltd., which insures about $3.5 billion in wind assets in 38 countries. If the failure rate keeps climbing, he says, insurance premiums could increase or new coverage limits could be imposed.

But this was just as hundreds of billions of dollars in goodies from the federal government were set to begin raining down on the weather-dependent wind industry by way of the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.

Is it reasonable to conclude that your tax dollars are the only thing keeping the wind turbine grift alive?

Sometimes even the experts are honest about it.

“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate,” said billionaire investor Warren Buffett, way back in May 2014. “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Thanks to the IRA, they now make 21 times more “sense” than they did when Buffett said this.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot KCCI News

A questionable study by a Cornell University climate scientist gave climate activists and the media ammunition to wage a pressure campaign against the Biden administration to take action against liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.

Cornell’s Robert Howarth authored the October 2023 study, which purported to find that lifecycle emissions associated with LNG exports are far greater than those attributable to domestically-mined coal. Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, amplified the study, and climate activists lobbying the Biden administration to kill LNG exports cited it as evidence to substantiate their position before the White House announced the moratorium on LNG export terminal approvals on Jan. 26.

The study, titled “The Greenhouse Gas Footprint of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Exported from the United States,” found that “greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are also larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 44% to more than 2-fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.” Howarth, who openly opposes the use of fossil fuels, admitted to releasing his study before it was peer-reviewed in order to influence the LNG export debate.

“According to the ethical guidelines from several of the professional societies to which I belong, scientists have a duty to provide information to the public and to decision-makers on important public issues when they have access to such information,” Howarth told the DCNF.

Howarth said environmental activist Bill McKibben was the one who convinced him to release the study before it underwent the months-long peer review process. McKibben himself wrote about the study in The New Yorker in October 2023, touting it as evidence that the Biden administration should not expand LNG export capacity.

After McKibben published his piece for The New Yorker and Howarth released the study to the public, the duo joined a November 2023 press call alongside several climate activists and Democratic lawmakers — including Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley — to talk about the issue of LNG exports, according to E&E News.

“From what I am told by reporters and what I read in the press, yes, my paper has had some impact,” Howarth said.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported Howarth’s work influenced the Biden administration’s decision to pause approvals for new LNG export hubs.

Howarth’s study “clearly was a factor in the Biden administration’s decision to pause making the required determinations required for approval of new LNG export projects and launching a U.S. Department of Energy study of the climate impact of LNG exports,” Steven Hamburg, the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist, told Bloomberg News.

The White House invariably felt pressure from left-wing lawmakers and environmental activists who regularly cited the study in their push to choke off U.S. natural gas exports.

Merkley cited the Howarth study as “the latest climate science” in a November 2023 letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Sixty-four other lawmakers signed that letter, which called on Granholm to update her agency’s review process for LNG export facilities to include climate impacts.

Likewise, the Sierra Club promoted a story that cited the study and referred to one of the affected LNG export hubs as a “carbon bomb.” A disruptive outfit called Climate Defiance promoted the study on social media before meeting in December 2023 with Senior Advisor to the President John Podesta to lobby against the planned expansion of LNG export capacity. (RELATED: Biden Admin Leaned On Questionable And Misleading Science To Justify Halting Natural Gas Hub Approvals)

Scores of environmental groups cited Howarth’s study in a letter sent to President Joe Biden applauding his Jan. 26 decision to pause new LNG export terminals. In their letter, eco-activists also demanded Biden “[stop] all LNG and related fossil fuel infrastructure permits across all U.S. federal agencies.”

‘Widely Panned And Largely Dismissed’

Howarth‘s findings contradict plenty of existing research on the subject, including two Department of Energy (DOE) studies from 2014 and 2019, which concluded that American LNG exports to Asia and Europe do not create more lifecycle emissions than regionally-mined coal when used to generate power. The Cornell professor’s study has drawn the ire of the oil and gas industry, which has pointed out that Howarth‘s most recent findings are detached from a robust body of research on the subject.

“Dr. Robert Howarth openly admitted he prematurely released his not-yet-peer-reviewed study in order to influence politics and advance activist agendas against responsible oil and gas development,” Jeff Eshelman, the president and CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, told the DCNF. “His research – which has been widely panned and largely dismissed by the scientific community – ignores the environmental benefits of U.S. natural gas and LNG, including data by the Department of Energy.”

Howarth — described by Politico as a “longtime sparring partner with the gas industry” — has come under fire for peddling shaky science about natural gas in the past. Back in 2012, he told a columnist for the New York Post that he was trying to make the anti-fracking movement more mainstream and trendy.

Howarth himself is closely tied to environmental activism. He is a board member for Food and Water Watch (FWW), a green nonprofit that has campaigned against natural gas development and exploration in New York state, though he denies this unpaid position influences his work.

His new paper was funded in part by the Park Foundation, a left-wing nonprofit with a stated goal of “[challenging] continued shale gas extraction and infrastructure expansion” and a strong presence in New York state, where Howarth’s university is located. Howarth told the DCNF the Park Foundation’s “modest” financial support of the study did not constitute a conflict of interest, and that the organization has no influence over his work.

The Park Foundation’s environment committee “recognizes that a firm stance against further oil and gas development is a necessary component to future funding decisions” and is resolved to support initiatives that “commit to the ‘keep it in the ground’ philosophy” or otherwise resist oil and gas drilling and infrastructure expansion, according to the organization’s website.

The Park Foundation gave Cornell University more than $530,000 to support natural gas-related academic work between 2010 and 2021, according to a DCNF review of tax filings.

Howarth’s study cites seven of his own previous papers, of which at least five were funded in part by the Park Foundation, a DCNF review of those studies found.

Howarth routinely slams Republicans on social media, castigating the “party of disinformation and misinformation” as a “cult” whose members “simply do not care about truth.” He’s also vocal in his opposition to the continued use of fossil fuels.

“I definitely consider myself to be an objective scientist,” Howarth said. “I also am a citizen, and as such have an ethical obligation to participate in our society. So no, I am not apolitical. But I am confident that my political views do not affect my scientific research.”

‘Not A Guarantee Of Quality Or Accuracy’

Howarth arrived at his topline finding by calculating the emissions caused by natural gas exports at every stage — from initial extraction to processing to final destination and end use — and comparing those emissions to the amount generated by every step of domestic coal extraction and use.

But Howarth has revised his study several times since releasing his study to the public. The initial version asserted that the lifecycle emissions of LNG exports are greater than those of domestically-produced coal, with the difference ranging between 24% and 274%. The study was updated on Jan. 13 to reflect that “total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 27% to 2‐fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.”

Howarth announced on March 13 that he had again revised his study “using this new estimate, 4.6% emissions (not including urban/surburban (sic) distribution systems) for the best studied major U.S. shale gas fields.”

After the March update, the study now asserts that LNG exports can have lifecycle emissions that are greater than those of domestic coal by between 44% and 200% or more.

These updates have come under considerable criticism from the oil and gas industry and scholars.

William Jordan — general counsel for EQT, a natural gas company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — suggested to the WSJ that Howarth cherry-picked data and leaned on flawed assumptions to pursue influence rather than understanding.

“I received two anonymous reviews from the journal just before Christmas, as well as input from people who had read the original version online. I revised the manuscript based on these comments, and submitted it back to the journal on January 13,” Howarth told the DCNF in defense of his updates.

“The version posted online now is the latest version,” Howarth told the DCNF. “It is very much standard to revise in response to peer review comments. That is precisely what peer review is about!” (RELATED: Could Joe Biden’s Natural Gas Pause Cost Dems The Senate In November?)

Roger Pielke Jr., a former academic who has written extensively about politicized science, told the DCNF that while such practices are common, they’re less than ideal.

“The posting of pre-prints is now standard practice in many fields, and they are exactly that — pre-prints,” Pielke said. “That said, passive peer-review is not a guarantee of quality or accuracy, but in many cases a minimal check for quality. No one paper offers the last word, and these days, studies are often conducted with an outcome in mind.”

“That imposes a challenge on all of us, journalists especially, to be careful and critical consumers of the latest and greatest science,” Pielke said. “Too often published research is used to support favored and previously-held positions rather than considered on its merits.”

Howarth’s study also heavily relies on a 20-year timeframe to assess the impacts of emissions from LNG exports. Typically, researchers adopt a 100-year outlook, a number which Howarth describes as “arbitrary” in his work.

“Using [the twenty-year timeframe], LNG always has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than coal,” Howarth writes in the study.

“What we see here is the standard climate activist and Biden administration formula at play,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “First, you allege a problem exists without any scientific basis. Then, you identify a ‘study’ with findings you like that can be used to form a basis for policy advocacy, which you pass onto your former fellow activists who are now in the administration, and let them run with it.”

*****

This article was published by Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot