Original reporting by eugyppius

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your popcorn because the green energy saga out of Schleswig-Holstein has everything: incompetence, mindless virtue-signaling, and an eco-friendly ferry that apparently doubles as a wind sail. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well.

Here’s the tragicomedy: Once upon a time in the quiet German countryside, there was a diesel-powered ferry, the Missunde II. For two decades, this workhorse reliably transported over 120,000 automobiles and 50,000 bicycles annually across the Schlei inlet—a body of water barely 100 meters wide. Not exactly the English Channel. But alas, the Missunde II had a fatal flaw in the eyes of the virtue-signaling bureaucrats: it was powered by diesel. And we all know that diesel is the villain in our modern-day environmental morality play.

There was nothing wrong with the Missunde II, except that she ran on diesel, which as we know is an evil fuel destined to destroy the world; and that her diesel engines made noise, as diesel engines do. Thus the bureaucrats of the State Office for Coastal Protection decided some years ago to replace the old and reliable Missunde II with a newer, silent and much more environmentally friendly solar-powered ferry, to be named Missunde III. Their decision was entirely typical. The Office for Coastal Protection is subordinate to the Environmental Ministry of Schleswig-Holstein, and the Environmental Ministry is in the hands of an extremely bald man named Tobias Goldschmidt, who likes to talk about how he will make Schleswig-Holstein carbon-neutral – one ferry at a time.

The carbon-neutral Missunde III cost 3.3 million Euro, and she was finally delivered after various delays in January 2024. Unlike her filthy, noisy predecessor, the Missunde III has a glorious roof, to carry her precious solar panels aloft:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/how-schleswig-holstein-sold-their

Enter the Green Bureaucrats

The geniuses at Schleswig-Holstein’s Office for Coastal Protection—subordinate to the grand Environmental Ministry—decided to replace the “dirty” diesel ferry with a solar-powered marvel of modern eco-engineering, the Missunde III. After all, who could resist a shiny new boat with solar panels on its roof, especially when it promises to save the planet, one ferry ride at a time? The cost? A mere 3.3 million euros. No big deal when you’re spending other people’s money.

The Missunde III, according to the planners, was going to usher in a new era of clean transportation across the inlet. No more diesel fumes or engine noise polluting the idyllic coastal landscape. Just the gentle hum of solar-powered motors quietly ferrying cars and bikes from one side to the other.

Or so they thought.

Reality Strikes: Solar Panels Don’t Like Wind

Reality has a funny way of upending even the best-laid plans, especially when those plans are designed more for PR than practicality. Turns out, the solar panels on the Missunde III were about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. The ferry’s fancy solar roof acted like a giant sail in the face of Schleswig-Holstein’s famously stiff coastal winds. Instead of gliding effortlessly across the Schlei, the Missunde III struggled. Its motors couldn’t handle the drag from the wind, and it took twice as long to make the crossing compared to its diesel-powered predecessor. Not only that, but the increased weight of the solar ferry put too much strain on its guidance cables, and it couldn’t even dock properly. It turns out when you let ideology steer your projects, you often end up in a ditch—or in this case, adrift in a river.

Thus the sun-powered Missunde III languished in harbour while people argued about how much environmental harm they should be allowed to inflict on the inlet to make her steerable. All the while, the automobiles that normally would’ve ridden the ferry across the Schlei had to take lengthy detours to the nearest bridge 30 kilometres away. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, and sometimes you have to increase carbon emissions while you wait for somebody to make your emissions-free ferry work.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/how-schleswig-holstein-sold-their

Environmentalists Stuck in an Environmental Jam

Now, here’s the part where the absurdity really ramps up. In order to fix the Missunde III’s docking problems, authorities decided they needed to drive extra dolphins (marine piling structures, not the mammals) into the bed of the Schlei. But the Schlei is a protected nature preserve, which meant that installing the dolphins required soil assessments and permits, and all that bureaucratic rigamarole takes time. So instead of reducing carbon emissions, the environmentalist brain trust behind the Missunde III managed to increase them, as cars were forced to take a 30-kilometer detour while the ferry languished in the harbor, out of service.

The Return of the Outlaw Diesel

After months of costly detours, exasperated local officials demanded that the old, faithful Missunde II be brought back into service. But there was a hitch: The ferry had already been sold for the grand sum of 17,000 euros—a pittance for a vessel that had reliably served the community for decades. And wouldn’t you know it, making the Missunde II seaworthy again would require extensive renovations costing 1.8 million euros.

Authorities quietly sold the outmoded and embarrassing Missunde II for 17,000 Euro to some dim person who failed to grasp that diesel ferries are not the way of the future. The buyer perhaps regretted his purchase, because he left the poor boat moored in Maasholm, near the head of the Schlei, where she began to decay in the elements. Such is the necessary if cruel fate of technologically unadvanced and environmentally unfriendly watercraft.

But wait, it gets better. After realizing their solar-powered dream boat was a lemon, the same environmental bureaucrats who sold the Missunde II in the first place came crawling back to the buyer and bought it back for 100,000 euros—almost six times what they sold it for. Let that sink in. In the name of environmentalism, they wasted millions on a solar-powered ferry that doesn’t work, then had to spend a fortune to get the reliable old diesel ferry back into service.

Lessons Not Learned

As of September 2024, the Missunde III still isn’t operational. Engineers are trying to outfit it with additional bow thrusters to help it cope with the winds, but it’s anyone’s guess if or when it will ever see regular service. Meanwhile, the old Missunde II is back on the water, ferrying cars and bikes across the Schlei just like it did before this farcical green energy experiment began.

The Missunde II has been given a new permit to sail until 2028, because nobody believes that the hyper-advanced super-silent Missunde III will be up to the simple task of ferrying automobiles across 100 metres of water anytime soon.

And what has Schleswig-Holstein gained for its 3.3 million euros (plus another hundred thousand, plus a almost 2 million for repair, to buy back the diesel ferry)? A nice rooftop of solar panels that would be better suited to a garden shed, a wind-sail masquerading as a ferry, and a reminder that virtue-signaling environmentalism often leads to nothing but wasted money and time.

The Moral of the Story

This fiasco is a perfect example of what happens when ideology trumps common sense. The green energy fanatics in government are so blinded by their obsession with cutting carbon emissions that they can’t see the forest for the trees—or in this case, the ferry for the sail. It’s not about actually solving problems or making things work better; it’s about feeling good about themselves and showing off their “green” credentials to the world, no matter how many millions of euros they flush down the toilet in the process.

Now it is September, and Missunde III is no closer to ferrying automobiles across the Schlei than she was in March. Among other things, engineers have decided she’ll have to be outfitted with additional bow thrusters to deal with the stiff currents. Thus the Office for Coastal Protection finally went limping back to the not-so-dim buyer who purchased the Missunde II for 17,000 Euros, and struck a deal to buy it back from him for 100,000 Euros. The Missunde II has been given a new permit to sail until 2028, because nobody believes that the hyper-advanced super-silent Missunde III will be up to the simple task of ferrying automobiles across 100 metres of water anytime soon.

The Missunde III debacle should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks the Green New Deal or Net Zero policies will usher in some kind of environmental utopia. More often than not, these projects are little more than expensive virtue-signaling exercises that do more harm than good. If this is the future of green energy, then God help us all.

HT/Fabius Maximus

A September 26^th article on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) website, titled “Sea level rise inevitable for Pacific Islands despite future greenhouse gas emissions reduction, NASA finds,” suggests that small island nations are doomed to disappear beneath the waves regardless of any actions to prevent climate change. The claim is both erroneous and irrelevant. Erroneous because actual data show sea level rise (SLR) on Kiribati and other island nations to be far lower than the projections from NASA. Irrelevant because it has been documented that many Pacific Islands have actually been growing in size and adding land mass over time.

“Pacific Island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Fiji will experience at least 20 centimeters of sea level rise in the next 30 years regardless of whether greenhouse gas emissions change in the short term, according to new research from NASA,” says ABC.

A quick inspection of Kiribati’s tide gauge data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows this to be false.

Simple math shows what the value will be in 30 years: 2.34mm/year X 30 years = 70.2mm or 7.02 centimeters, about a third of the NASA projection of 20 centimeters in 30 years. Based on tide gauge data for Tuvalu and for Fiji, estimated SLR for 30 years is also far lower than what NASA predicts, a prediction uncritically parroted by ABC.

The reason for the disparity is that the scientific tool NASA used to make its projection is the Pacific Flood Analysis Tool, using model projections instead of actual data. The website says this:

The latest generation of global climate models are used to account for the global-mean thermosteric and ocean dynamic regional sea level rise and similar methods are used for assessing vertical land motion contributions as in past reports. The IPCC AR6 incorporates multiple methods of projecting future ice-sheet changes, which are the major sources of future sea level rise and pose the biggest source of uncertainty in projecting the timing and magnitude of future possible rise amounts. (emphasis mine)

Clearly, NASA used the climate models from the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). However, it is telling that when you first visit the Pacific Flood Analysis Tool website, there’s a pop-up message with this disclaimer:

Disclaimer: The NASA Pacific Flooding Analysis Tool provides a scientific assessment of potential flooding frequency and extent due to sea-level rise based on peer-reviewed techniques. The results are provided without warranty of any kind.

Of course, the fact that NASA must put such a broad caveat of “no warranty” on the highly uncertain SLR projections was lost on ABC, who wrote about it as if it were fact.

Climate Realism has written multiple times about the fact that the sixth generation of climate models (CMIP6) used in AR6 are erroneous because they run too hot, creating future projections that have no reasonable basis when compared to actual data.

These climate models produce “implausibly hot forecasts of future warming,” resulting in SLR projections that are wildly erroneous.

But all of that is irrelevant, because Climate Realism has regularly exposed false claims about Pacific islands sinking due to SLR. As far back as October 2020, articles such as New Climate Summary: Islands Not Losing Land or People to Sea Level Rise clearly show such claims to be wrong.

For example, climate activists often claim the island nation of Tuvalu is shrinking due to rising seas. However, a recent peer-reviewed study found eight out of Tuvalu’s nine coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 3/4ths of Tuvalu’s 101 reef islands have similarly grown in size.

Additional peer-reviewed studies (see here, here, and here) confirm the same processes are allowing – and will continue to allow – other Pacific islands to keep up with rising seas. A full summary of this island growth in the face of rising seas is posted at climateataglance.com in: Islands and Sea Level Rise.

ABC failed miserably when it comes to doing basic journalistic research for this story. The fact that no fact check was even attempted is so egregious, one must wonder if it is purposeful, rather than just an indication of incompetence. A paragraph at the very bottom their story suggests it may be purposeful.

“While scientists say rising sea levels will bring significant impacts to Pacific Island nations, some research has shown hundreds of islands in the Pacific are growing in land size due to sediment, corals and other debris being washed ashore,” ABC grudgingly acknowledges.

There it is. ABC evidently trusts computer model outputs over real world data. It seems that ABC, just like many other media outlets, downplays any good news about climate and focuses almost exclusively on the bad news to further the climate crisis narrative.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

This post originally appeared at ClimateREALISM

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted about one of my favorite climate/energy subjects — Stanford professor Mark Z. Jacobson. Back when he dropped his lawsuit against Chris Clack and a bunch of other authors on a paper critiquing his work, I wrote a blog post profiling his legalistic mindset and concluding that he would be soldiering on. Well, he’s certainly been soldiering on and even putting his legalistic mindset to use. He testified in the Held v Montana climate lawsuit case which ruled that a bunch of Montana school children have a right to a safe and stable climate. You can read dueling expert witness PDFs between him and Judith Curry.

While Jacobson’s Clack lawsuit has set him back a bit, he still has lots of acolytes who quote his work, kind of like Michael Mann, but not to the same ridiculous extent. BTW Jacobson and Mann appear to be kindred spirits who quote and retweet each other. Back in 2021 Jacobson did a paper with Robert Howarth (Manhattan Contrarian profile) about blue hydrogen that got a lot of attention from people such as the Just Have a Think guy. Lately, if you manage to view his Twitter/X feed, you’ll see a lot of graphs that look like this:

The big yellow areas that look like gumdrops are California’s electricity demand that is supplied by solar. The left graph is percentages contained under a square red demand box. On the left side of both gumdrops are what look like little black dirt specs of a battery portion which is what they look like on most such graphs if they show up at all. But California is a rich state with determined green policies, so on the right side of the gumdrops they have grown into what might be called dust bunnies. The colored bands that blanket the gumdrops are hydro, wind and other renewable energy sources. All the fossil, nuclear and imported electricity is somehow mixed into the spacious upper white corners. I suppose with enough time, money and hieght added to the gumdrops, those dust bunnies can grow to cover that white space with, I dunno, a big moldy compost pile. All kidding aside, there is a lot of progress being made adding batteries to the grid which is probably a good thing as long as you’re not living next to a bank of them that catches fire. Apparently, one of them recently had a fire that lasted nearly two weeks.

These gumdrop graphs have been showing up at places such as the nearly dormant Rabett Run in this post by Brian Schmidt. Brian is a very civic minded Californian and some time ago he and I were contemplating making a bet over what proportion of California’s electricity would be generated by gas at some predetermined point in the future. Twitter/X advanced search doesn’t seem to go back that far and I don’t recall the exact details. I’m not a rich Californian so I chickened out. I offered to bet a case of his favorite craft beer, but he insisted on a more substantial sum. The bar graph on the bottom shows a significant drop in California’s gas share from 222.1 GWH/D in 2023 to 161.3 GWH/D in 2924 (March 7 to September 28) and I very likely would have lost. It’s not clear how much impact batteries will have on the grid. There will certainly be advances. Right now China is making EVs with sodium ion batteries that don’t offer very good energy per weight but may offer a significant cost advantage for the grid. Batteries, of course, still have to be charged and I would think that nuclear energy would be a more reliable and constant source than wind or solar.

In other Jacobson news, he recently wrote a letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal claiming that states with high proportions of renewable electricity have lower rates. Francis Menton of the Manhattan Contrarian noticed it and wrote a post on it. He came up with quite different numbers than Jacobson. As the main example, Jacobson found South Dakota getting 95% of its electricity from renewables and having the 9th lowest rates. Menton found it getting 77% and having the 22cnd lowest rate. He found the “publicly-available data for South Dakota are quite inconsistent and contradictory, but however you look at it they don’t come close to backing up Jacobson’s claim.” In a comment, I suggested that Jacobson might be counting only residential and not industrial users.

There’s one more thing I have to get in. Jacobson made a tweet where he said Florida should think twice about banning offshore wind. He quotes one of his studies about “taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines”. It’s from 2014 and I’ve taken a brief look at it before and been suspicious of it. I just looked it over again and found the money shot! He has a table where he has various scenarios for several hurricanes where he blankets the Gulf of Mexico with about half a million 7 and a half MW offshore wind turbines:

I wrote Making The News almost three years ago in order to draw attention to what I consider to be the way in which news is now routinely reported by the mainstream media – that is to say, news websites regularly do little more than cut and paste press releases, without bothering to check the accuracy and validity of their contents. Increasingly the press releases in question refer to a “study” or an opinion poll, usually commissioned by the organisation issuing the press release, all with a view to generating some favourable publicity regarding their pet subject. These days the “climate crisis” (sic) and net zero seem to be the subjects that bulk large in this way, and much of the media, especially the BBC, are happy to oblige.

Given that I consider Great British Energy to be an empty shell, I find it surprising to note how little it has to say about anything. In fairness, it might be said that this is because the Great British Energy Bill is currently going through the committee stage and is not yet an Act of Parliament, so it is simply avoiding jumping the gun. Perhaps that is the case. And yet, that hasn’t stopped it dabbling with social media. It has an account with “X” (which I can’t see, because I don’t have an “X” account); it has a You Tube channel (with a single video, five minutes and forty one seconds long, showing a Channel 4 interview with Ed Miliband parroting what I consider to be his usual nonsense); it has a LinkedIn account (which again I can’t see); and it has a Facebook account. They seem to be experimenting, as there is also this Facebook account (described as a Government organisation, with no posts, no likes and no followers) and this one described as an energy company, with two posts from January 2020, one like and five members.

What appears to be the “real” Facebook page has a short but interesting history. It made a brief attempt to appear, for some unknown reason, at the Scotland Against Spin (SAS) Facebook page a few days ago, but as that page is closed to comments other than from members, it failed to be visible to anyone other than SAS admins. When they drew the attention of its members to this, a number of them posted comments at the Great British Energy Facebook page. They were unprepared for this, it seems, and shortly afterwards the page disappeared. Now it’s back, but so far all that is visible is a post updating the profile picture, which makes it clear that its headquarters are (will be?) in Aberdeen. At the time of writing it has no likes and no followers. Again, it is described as an energy company.

Why so coy? It certainly is coy. The news section of its website says virtually nothing, and the rest of its website contains very little at all. I suppose, in fairness, it is all (as it claims) set up on a pro bono basis, and Great British Energy is not yet formally established.

Still, there is some big news that has largely passed without much mention in the media. Yes, the government issued a press release, but it seems to have generated very little interest, and the government doesn’t seem to be much inclined to talk about it. The news in question is that with effect from tomorrow (or so the press release tells us) the government is to acquire the Electricity System Operator (ESO) from National Grid.

This, we are informed, “will support the UK’s energy security, help to keep bills down in the long term, and accelerate the government’s clean power mission.” I note that the talk is now of keeping bills down in the long term, though even that seems unlikely with the government’s accelerated targets for “decarbonising” the national grid. The ESO was formed in 2011 and (as National Grid Electricity System Operator Limited) has until now been a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Grid Holdings One PLC, which in turn is ultimately owned and controlled by National Grid PLC.

Subject to “customary closing adjustments” National Grid is to receive £630 million for the transfer of ESO into government ownership. The government’s press release assures us this is OK because “[t]he majority of taxpayer costs will be recouped via existing charges on energy bills, which previously would have gone to National Grid.” [my emphasis]. Going forward, ESO is to be known as the National Energy System Operator (NESO). Its new Chairman is to be Dr Paul Golby (former CEO of E.ON) and its Chief Executive is to be Fintan Slye. Having worked in the industry for some time, and having been with ESO since 2018, Mr Slye might well be the right man for the job, which is just as well, as he has his work cut out. For on 23^rd August 2024 a letter was sent to him jointly by Mr Miliband and by Chris Stark, the new Head of Mission Control for Clean Power 2030. It:

…provides a formal commission to the ESO, in advance of becoming the National Energy System Operator (NESO), to provide practical advice on achieving clean power by 2030 for Great Britain. This advice should consist of a range of pathways that enable a decarbonised power system for Great Britain by 2030 and an enduring contribution to economy-wide decarbonisation beyond 2030….

Rather him than me, especially given this:

…We would ask you to work with Mission Control at DESNZ to ensure that the plan is based on a shared set of assumptions about what is technically required and feasible to deliver clean power by 2030….

David Turver has been unimpressed with the response to date:

In other words, Fintan has slyly moved the goalposts. The work of NESO will not inform the Government or the public about the costs and risks of delivering the as yet undefined net zero grid by 2030. This is now the blind leading the blind to an unknown destination without knowing the price of the ticket. Fintan Slye is ducking his responsibility and we are going to be short-changed again.

I suspect that he may be correct. However, as most days see me solidly sceptical rather than cynical, we shall have to wait and see what develops. I hope Mr Slye has rather more idea than those who wrote the press release, which breathlessly tells us:

Currently, there is no single body responsible for overseeing the strategic planning and design of the country’s electricity and gas networks.

NESO will fill this gap – breaking down the siloes which currently exist between the planning of electricity and gas systems, with independent oversight for the design of all Great Britain’s energy networks.

The move will enable investors to build out new energy infrastructure with confidence in how their project will fit into the country’s wider clean energy plan.

Perhaps this will all come true, more likely it won’t. At least Mr Slye isn’t Mr Miliband, who continues to write things like this:

We need to move Britain off expensive, insecure fossil fuel markets, and onto clean, cheap homegrown power that we control. This is how we reduce bills in the long term, strengthen our energy independence and support skilled jobs across the country.

In any event, tomorrow is the big day. Perhaps by then ENSO will have a website. If you search for it right now you will simply be told “We’re making some changes” along with the promise that they’ll be back up and running tomorrow and that they can’t wait for us to see what’s next.

Maybe by then there’ll be some media interest. There ought to be. This stuff is absolutely critical to the UK’s energy security and pricing. Indifference really isn’t good enough.