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via JoNova
August 9, 2025 at 09:27AM
Category: Daily News
Gary Abernathy reports on progress securing the U.S. grid from the load of entanglements from adding wind and solar power supplies. His Empowering America article is Climate Science is Not the Law in the U.S. Exerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
While not everyone is on board with President Trump’s “America First” philosophy, its importance when it comes to energy is brought into sharp focus when considering where the U.S. would be if it capitulated to the whims of global organizations like the United Nations or obeyed the verdicts of world courts.
The frightening attitudes of believers in global rule were recently on display courtesy of a New York Times opinion piece headlined “Climate Science is Now the Law,” penned by three writers who are all part of something called the Center for International Environmental Law. In their article, the authors claim, “The science on climate change has long been settled. Now the law is, too.” [See post: ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change]
At about the same time that the International Court of Overstep was issuing its decree for nations to kneel at the feet of the wind and solar gods, the Trump administration took another giant leap in its race to reverse Biden’s disastrous energy policies. On July 7, the Energy Department unveiled its “Report on Evaluating U.S. Grid Reliability and Security,” as required under President Trump’s April executive order to examine the topic. DOE reported:
“This methodology equips DOE and its partners with a powerful tool to identify at-risk regions and guide federal interventions to prevent power outages, accelerate data center deployment, and ensure the grid keeps pace with explosive load growth driven by artificial intelligence and reindustrialization.”
Rather than follow international directives and judgments to rid itself of energy sources like natural gas, which is necessary to power technology, manufacturing and the coming AI data centers, the DOE is, fortunately, doing the exact opposite. Among the biggest DOE findings:
-
- If current plant retirement schedules and incremental additions remain unchanged “most regions will face unacceptable reliability risks within five years.”
- Radical change is necessary because otherwise, the magnitude of projected demand from AI data centers and other manufacturing “cannot be met with existing approaches to load addition and grid management.
- The coal and gas plant retirements previously planned by 2030 “could lead to significant outages when weather conditions do not accommodate wind and solar generation.”
- Even with plans to replace 104 gigawatts of plant retirements with 209 gigawatts of new generation by 2030, “only 22 (gigawatts) come from firm baseload generation sources,” meaning that “the model found outage risk in several regions rises more than 30-fold.” (A gigawatt is equal to 1 billion watts.)
In other words, replacing firm baseload sources like natural gas with alternative sources like wind or solar is not an apples-for-apples proposition, since “renewables” put the grid at greater risk. Establishing arbitrary end dates for our most affordable and reliable energy sources is both illogical and reckless.
On the heels of the international court’s irresponsible and (thankfully) unenforceable decree, and the DOE’s astute recommendation to do the opposite of what the court prescribed, came a story from Reuters declaring that the Trump administration’s actions to end or curtail Biden-era subsidies and credits for “renewables” are, fortunately, having an impact. Boom fades for US clean energy as Trump guts subsidies
“Singapore-based solar panel manufacturer Bila Solar is suspending plans to double capacity at its new factory in Indianapolis. Canadian rival Heliene’s plans for a solar cell facility in Minnesota are under review. Norwegian solar wafer maker NorSun is evaluating whether to move forward with a planned factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And two fully permitted offshore wind farms in the U.S. Northeast may never get built,” the news agency reported.
These are among the major clean energy investments now in question after Republicans agreed earlier this month to quickly end U.S. subsidies for solar and wind power as part of their budget megabill, and as the White House directed agencies to tighten the rules on who can claim the incentives that remain.
The key provision in the new law is the accelerated phase-out of 30% tax credits for wind and solar projects: it requires projects to begin construction within a year or enter service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the credits. Previously the credits were available through 2032.
The policy changes have also injected fresh doubt about the fate of the nation’s pipeline of offshore wind projects, which depend heavily on tax credits to bring down costs. According to Wood Mackenzie, projects that have yet to start construction or make final investment decisions are unlikely to proceed.
Two such projects, which are fully permitted, include a 300-megawatt project by developer US Wind off the coast of Maryland and Iberdrola’s 791 MW New England Wind off the coast of Massachusetts.
Neither company responded to requests for comment.
President Trump is putting America first and leading an energy renaissance that should be in full bloom on our nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. It’s difficult to imagine a greater Independence Day gift to the American people than freedom from the cold, dark landscape that would result from following the directives of global agencies and the rulings of international courts.
Postscript: Saving U.S. Farmland from Transmission Lines
Robert Bryce adds the canceling of transmission lines dedicated to wind and solar power in his blog article Transmission Unplugged.
From Missouri and Colorado to Germany and Spain,
high-voltage transmission projects are being stopped by
fierce local opposition, soaring costs, and permitting delays.
The Grain Belt Express project aimed to carry wind-generated electricity from Kansas to the Indiana-Illinois border. Map credit: grainbeltexpress.com
Invenergy neglected to mention that if the project gets built, it will saddle ratepayers with about $500 million in costs to integrate the power it will be delivering into grids on the eastern end of the line. In other words, Invenergy wants to build a merchant high-voltage transmission line and force its way onto the US electric grid. But it doesn’t want to pay any of the costs that its project will impose on the system. Furthermore, Grain Belt Express has faced fierce opposition in Missouri for more than a decade. Earlier this month, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced a civil investigation into Invenergy for its “misleading claims and a track record of dishonesty” about the project.
Last week, the Department of Energy gave Polsky some high-amperage clarity from the Trump administration when it canceled a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express that the agency’s Loan Programs Office made last November in the waning days of the Biden administration.
The DOE said it killed the loan deal “to ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources.”
via Science Matters
August 9, 2025 at 09:10AM
By David Wojick
Three environmental groups have formally petitioned NOAA to revoke its prior marine mammal harassment authorizations citing new science that harassment can be deadly. The specific target of the petition is the Empire Wind project, but the grounds given clearly apply to all offshore wind development.
The Petition includes a number of recent studies as attachments and links to these are included in the press release (PR) here.
Central to this action is the pioneering work of Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis that I reported on a year ago here.
Gerasoulis is now president of Save the East Coast Inc. which is one of the three petitioning groups. Here is his succinct summary from the PR:
“Our petition provides robust scientific evidence demonstrating that offshore wind activities —notably seismic sonar surveys and pile-driving — pose significant and immediate threats to endangered marine mammals, especially the endangered North Atlantic right whale and protected humpback whales.”
For each offshore wind project, NOAA authorizes the harassment of thousands of protected marine mammals, harassment that is otherwise illegal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The big Dominion project off Virginia is authorized to harass almost 60,000 critters.
NOAA takes the position that all this harassment is harmless, but the new science says otherwise. Gerasoulis presented his findings to NOAA last December, but they chose to ignore him. Now the confrontation is official.
In cases of willful neglect like this, a petition is required before the agency can be sued for ignoring the issue, if that is what happens. In colorful lawyer speak it is called “exhausting your administrative remedies.” This gives petitions great weight, so time will tell.
The other two groups are Protect Our Coast–Long Island and Green Oceans. The Petition calls for the immediate revocation of NOAA’s Empire Wind Letter of Authorization (LOA), which currently permits harm to a long list of marine mammals during the construction of the Empire Wind industrial offshore wind facility in the NY/NJ Bight.
Here is how the three groups put it:
“This Petition calls on NOAA to abrogate Empire Wind’s LOA due to substantial evidence that the permitted taking will have more than a ‘negligible’ impact on marine mammals, especially the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. In fact, the contemporaneous pile driving of multiple projects from Virginia to New England is placing the NARW at imminent risk of devolving closer toward extinction. These takes are not merely behavioral disruption; the impact includes injury and death.”
Thanks to the new science, they are able to cite specific numbers that help quantify the threat to whales and other marine mammals. Here are three examples:
“Six concurrent offshore wind projects within critical whale migration routes threaten approximately 43% of the critically endangered NARW population annually. Over five years of construction, the cumulative impact could potentially affect up to 76% of the population, clearly violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).”
“NOAA continues to utilize an outdated acoustic harassment threshold of 160 dB, ignoring modern research advocating a significantly lower and safer threshold of 120 dB. Independent acoustic studies by Rand Acoustics recorded sonar noise levels up to 226 dB near OSW survey vessels, substantially exceeding safe limits, thus posing severe risks of permanent auditory and physiological harm.”
“Research indicates pile-driving noise is approximately 3.2 times more harmful to whales than sonar surveys, dramatically increasing risks of permanent auditory injuries and fatalities.”
With this Petition, the issue of NOAA ignoring the threat to whales from offshore wind takes on a new level of scientific seriousness. How will NOAA respond? Stay tuned to CFACT to see how this deadly issue plays out. Save the whales from offshore wind.
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via Watts Up With That?
August 9, 2025 at 08:01AM
In 2016 Barack Obama warned about sea level rise in Massachusetts and Hawaii, right before he bought $20 million worth of mansions on the beach in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Remarks by the President at Our Ocean Conference | whitehouse.gov
via Real Climate Science
August 9, 2025 at 07:47AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 