184 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

I'm beginning to see the light!
This guy was doing better than Al!

Apr 3, 4:56 AM EDT
Italy seizes record 1.7 billion euro from the "King of alternative energy"

ROME (AP) -- Italian police have seized a record (EURO)1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) in cash and property from a single person, a Sicilian alternative energy entrepreneur alleged to have close ties to the Mafia.

Italy's anti-Mafia investigators said in a statement Wednesday that Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old native of Alcamo, near Trapani, was placed under surveillance and must remain in Alcamo for three years. He is accused of declaring for tax purposes a fraction of the value of his businesses.

Italian media have dubbed Nicastri the "king of alternative energy" for his vast holdings in wind farms and photovoltaic cell companies.

Police said the seizures include 43 companies; 98 pieces of real estate including buildings, homes, stores and land; 66 bank accounts, credit cards and investment funds.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 03 April 2013 - 10:02 AM.

[stocks]

Shale Gas

American government got out of the way of innovative drilling companies and allowed the shale boom to take off. Europe took the opposite tack, choosing to stick to its green policies and snub shale. As a result, natural gas prices in the US are a quarter of what they are in Europe. And as industry departs, unemployment in the Euro zone is hitting a record high. That’s yet another failure that can be laid at the feet of Europe’s greens.

The sweet scent of cheap gas is luring manufacturing back to the United States. The German chemicals company BASF is one of many energy-intensive firms looking to open plants stateside. The Washington Post reports:

Here in Ludwigshafen[, Germany], many people view the United States as the land of the future. Since 2009, BASF has channeled more than $5.7 billion into new investments in North America, including a formic acid plant under construction in Louisiana, where the company will manufacture a chemical used to de-ice runways, tan leather and preserve animal feed.

Top BASF officials say that unless Europe allows a more aggressive approach to energy production, including broader use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, even more manufacturing will move to the United States


http://blogs.the-ame...with-shale-gas/

[Rogerdodger]

It's funny how free markets work while government controlled markets destroy.
I think we could have extracted more energy by just burning the $20,000,000.

$10 Million Stimulus Solar Company Can't Take The Heat, Closes...

Flabeg Solar U.S. Corp., a $30 million solar plant located near the Pittsburgh International Airport, opened its doors in 2009 and was said to provide 300 jobs. Now, just four years later, the plant has shut down and laid off more than 60 workers. In addition to this, 10 of its former employees have petitioned a federal judge for severance pay after they lost their jobs last month, according to PA Independent.
In addition to the $10 million received in stimulus funds, the state and Allegheny County added an additional $9 million in job creation grants, loans, and other financial aid to help launch the plant, bringing the total to $20 million in assistance to the company.
Over the past several years, multiple solar companies have gone bankrupt - the most notable being Solyndra, the California solar firm, which received a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy before going bankrupt in 2011.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 08 April 2013 - 11:03 PM.

[stocks]

North Dakota Builds A Refinery, First In The U.S. Since '76

Energy: The U.S. has not opened a new oil refinery since Gerald Ford was in the White House. But that will change next year. So where will the next facility be? In North Dakota, where the locals aren't afraid to drill.

When the Dakota Prairie refinery west of Bismarck, N.D., starts turning crude into usable — and essential — products in 2014, it will be the first to open in America since 1976. This probably isn't what the green-energy president wants to have happen on his watch.



Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investor...m#ixzz2Ql49Tvn9
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook

[stocks]

Oil and gas drillers make technological leaps, while renewable energy industry struggles

Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected.

At the tip of every oil or gas drill is a rotating mouth of sharp teeth that chews through rock. In the past, these drill bits could only dig straight down. Now they are agile enough to find and follow narrow horizontal seams of rock.

And behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors that collect data about the rock and underground fluids. The data, which is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables, is run through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface.

"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.

the outlook for wind, batteries and biofuels is as dim as it's been in a decade. Global greenhouse gas agreements have fizzled. Dazzling discoveries have been made in laboratories, and some of these may yet develop into transformative products, but alternative energy technologies haven't become cheaper or more useful than fossil fuels.


http://www.startribu...11.html?refer=y

[voltaire]

[quote name='stocks' date='May 6 2013, 03:30 PM' post='656565']
Oil and gas drillers make technological leaps, while renewable energy industry struggles

Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected.

At the tip of every oil or gas drill is a rotating mouth of sharp teeth that chews through rock. In the past, these drill bits could only dig straight down. Now they are agile enough to find and follow narrow horizontal seams of rock.

And behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors that collect data about the rock and underground fluids. The data, which is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables, is run through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface.

"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.

the outlook for wind, batteries and biofuels is as dim as it's been in a decade. Global greenhouse gas agreements have fizzled. Dazzling discoveries have been made in laboratories, and some of these may yet develop into transformative products, but alternative energy technologies haven't become cheaper or more useful than fossil fuels.


http://www.startribu...11.html?refer=y
[/quot

Coal seam gas will prove to be one of the greatest sources of pollution ever.

We see methane escaping everywhere and it is multiples worse than CO2.

Can't wait to see the law suits.

Satellite measurements confirm the disaster.

Expect climate change to accelerate because of it.

Your grandchildren will call you reprehensible.

[stocks]

Germany's Green Energy Fiasco

Germany came perilously close to a network breakdown in a February cold snap due to errors in the forecasts for
balancing power made by suppliers

In Germany, 75 percent of electricity goes to industry, for which a secure supply -- that is, at every second, and with constant voltage -- is indispensable. Neither solar nor wind power are suitable for that purpose today. Both fluctuate and provide either no secure supply or only a small fraction of a secure supply

Grid fluctuations lead to very unpleasant systemic effects. We have voltage fluctuations within the grid that create problems for industry. Or we overload the grids in neighboring countries. Poland is in the process of installing technical equipment to protect its grids by keeping out surplus German electricity.

Modern industrial power grids cannot tolerate the huge moment-to-moment energy fluctuations of intermittent unreliable energy sources such as big wind and big solar. Whenever attempting a large scale conversion to "green power," initial economic costs are exorbitant. The cost of the power plants themselves, the cost of new power grid infrastructure, and the huge cost of maintaining spinning backup power sources. And then there is the cost to society as lower and middle income customers strain to pay skyrocketing power bills.

But the real costs of such an ideologically driven, top-down attempt to transform a national power grid and power supply, begin to emerge as the unreliables approach 20% or more of total power capacity to the grid. The violent and unpredictable intermittency of big wind power in particular, leads to power failures -- blackouts, brownouts, selective shutdowns of power customers, etc.



http://alfin2300.blo...re-problem.html

German Solar Insanity, Wind Insanity

In 2012, solar had a capacity factor of just 11 percent. The capacity factor of German wind was 17 percent. By comparison, fossil-fueled plants can achieve capacity factors of 80 percent or more. And electricity production from Germany’s 12 GW of nuclear capacity in 2012 was 99 TWh, a capacity factor of 94 percent.

Wind and solar can never fully replace nuclear power, because they can’t equal the reliability of nuclear reactors. The main job of the new fossil-fueled plants is not to retire grungy old coal boilers, but to replace nukes with grungy new coal boilers. To see why, we have to consider the distinction between dispatchable and intermittent generators.

“Dispatchable” generators—nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, and biomass— can ramp up and down on command to match their power output with current electricity demand. Unfortunately, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels can’t do that. They generate power when the wind and sun decree, often going dead when electricity is needed and then overproducing when it isn’t. These “intermittent” generators result in “common-mode failure”: night, winter, summer, and passing weather fronts cause swathes of generators to fizzle all at once, for weeks on end, on a continental and even hemispheric scale.

How will a Germany run largely on wind and solar generators survive the long periods when they shut down completely in the dead of winter?

To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now.



http://thebreakthrou...en-energy-bust/

[stocks]

Globally, renewables have been *declining* for the last two centuries, and have remained stuck at about 13% for the past 40 years.

People expect them to rise dramatically to 30% by 2035 — the honest answer is that they’re likely to rise a meagre 1.5 percentage points to 14.5%

As Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly:

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”




http://wattsupwithth...es-keep-rising/

[diogenes227]

Globally, renewables have been *declining* for the last two centuries, and have remained stuck at about 13% for the past 40 years.

People expect them to rise dramatically to 30% by 2035 — the honest answer is that they’re likely to rise a meagre 1.5 percentage points to 14.5%

As Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, put it bluntly:

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and [the] Tooth Fairy.”




http://wattsupwithth...es-keep-rising/

What a funny chart! What is that renewable energy in 1800, candles and campfires? Now that's a telling comparison!

Reminds me of the last grueling round of Presidential debates when one candidate complained we didn't have as many ships as we had before the First World War and the smart candidate replied we don't have as many horses either.

But what's up with that? Horses, and such, may yet again have their day: Saudi proverb. "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel."

So it will eventually inevitably go with non-renewable fuels.

[stocks]

Green Sweden

Sweden gets 40 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy, second in Europe only to France and tiny Lithuania.

In a country the size of California with the population of North Carolina, the Swedes have 10 operating reactors and two held in reserve. Combined with its ample hydro, this gives Sweden 90 percent “clean energy” with almost no fossil fuels. As for solar panels and windmills, there aren’t any in sight. Of course no one in the press is mentioning this.


http://www.realclear...ear_107229.html