Among rent-seeking wind and solar subsidy grifters and their spin masters, desperation is the new black. Donald Trump’s moves the throttle their so-called ‘industries’ on American soil has rattled investors and seen plans for dozens of large-scale wind and solar factories scrapped, around the globe. Which brings us to this week’s roundup.

Paul Brown gives a clear economic breakdown of the delusion of attempting to run on sunshine and breezes,  focusing on physics, engineering and economics.

The Green Energy Delusion
Quillette
Paul Brown
4 March 2025

Pierre Gosselin lays out an obituary for one of Germany’s offshore disasters, a mere 15 years after it started sucking up massive taxpayer subsidies. Proof positive that these things have a lifespan closer to a snowflake in summer.

Germany’s First Offshore Wind Farm To Be Dismantled After Just 15 Years Of Operation
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
16 March 2025

Alex Epstein present his common sense pitch to the House Oversight Committee dealing with Trump’s efforts to make energy affordable again – “Leading the Charge: Opportunities to Strengthen America’s Energy Reliability.”

How to Solve America’s Electricity Crisis
Substack
Alex Epstein
4 March 2025

Ronald Stein, Robert Jeffrey and Olivia Vaughan make the, rather obvious, case for Small Modular Reactors, focusing on lifting countless millions out of poverty by providing access to reliable and affordable power.

Small Modular Reactors will benefit developing Countries
America Out Loud
Ronald Stein, Robert Jeffrey and Olivia Vaughan
3 March 2025

Meanwhile, in Texas a stiff breeze made short work of thousands of solar panels, shredded as a gale cut across the prairies of Lamar County. Pundits claim Trump, naturally enough.

Severe weather destroys solar panels in Lamar County
YouTube
Rachel Davis
12 March 2025

In a wind turbine noise nuisance case run by an Irish couple in its High Court, the monsters behind the wind power outfit were forced to admit that the noise from their turbines had entirely destroyed the plaintiffs’ ability to live in, use and enjoy their very own home. About time, too.

Wind farm owners admit liability to nuisance claims made by Wexford couple
Wind Watch
14 March 2025

In our last piece this week, the Australian’s Peta Credlin trashes the myths being peddled by the Federal Labor Government about the reasons for Australia’s out-of-control retail power prices.

Labor’s energy panacea shot down by reality
The Australian
Peta Credlin
20 March 2025

Before the 2010 election, Julia Gillard only had to say just once, “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, for her broken promise to haunt her out of office. Yet not only did senior Labor ministers make the $275 per household a year cut to power prices their one big commitment, repeated nearly 100 times, but when challenged over whether he thought it could be delivered Anthony Albanese declared: “I don’t think, I know.”

And Albanese went on to justify his complete and absolute assurance by reference to RepuTex modelling that he claimed was the most complete modelling ever done by an opposition. Yet he’s not willing to explain why this very same modelling has been mysteriously airbrushed from Labor’s official website.

Even now, despite the fact household power prices have risen by about $1000 a year, and the benchmark electricity price is set to rise by another 9 per cent in the next 12 months, Labor is in denial about its culpability for a clear broken promise; with the Treasurer this week trying to muddy the waters with an obscure reference to a short-term dip in wholesale power prices last year, even though, at $88 a megawatt hour in the December quarter, they were 72 per cent higher than Labor’s modelled forecast.

Indeed, after refusing to concede the government’s bad faith, the Treasurer continued to insist, in defiance of the incontrovertible evidence of our power bills, that “the only way over the longer term that you get … downward pressure on prices” is introducing “cheaper, cleaner, more reliable” renewable energy into the system.

This is wilful reality denial. It’s invincible ignorance. And it’s only going to get worse if Labor remains in office; and much, much worse if it becomes a minority government dependent on the Greens and the teals.

If renewable power is our energy panacea, why are Labor governments doing secret deals to keep open coal-fired power stations? That the most climate fanatical government in the country, the Victorian Labor government – which wants to make coal use illegal within a decade – is now in urgent talks to extend the life of yet another coal-fired power station shows the utter folly and intellectual bankruptcy of Labor’s energy policy.

As this paper reported on Wednesday, the Yallourn power station, which supplies 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity, may need to be extended well beyond its current planned shutdown in 2028. This is on top of an earlier secret deal to keep the Loy Yang coal-fired power station open, at an undisclosed cost thought to run to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to avoid the closure of large industrial power users such as the Portland aluminium smelter. Plus the NSW Labor government’s deal, costed at about $200m a year, to extend the life of the country’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, over similar fears of grid destabilisation and the closure of the Tomago aluminium smelter.

So here’s the madness of Labor’s energy policy: consumers are forced to subsidise intermittent wind and solar power to reduce emissions; the consequent price rises due to the high costs of “firming” plus the required extra transmission lines mean the government is forced subsidise consumers’ power bills (subsidies that will inevitably have to be extended in next week’s budget); meaning that the government then has to subsidise the coal-fired plants that government policy has rendered uneconomic in order to keep the lights on when the wind won’t blow and the sun can’t shine.

It’s a giant money-go-round made necessary by Labor’s ideological obsession with running our power system to reduce emissions rather than to keep electricity affordable and reliable.

Electricity, of course, is at the heart of our modern way of life, essential to everything from cooking our food to heating and cooling our houses, making a transaction at the shops and even charging our ubiquitous smartphones – and if Labor has its way, it will soon also be essential for running our cars, too, even though its EV policy will make the electricity supply steadily more precarious and expensive.

More and more, electricity will be needed in ever vaster quantities to power the AI behemoth that will soon be central to an advanced economy, as shown by Microsoft’s bid to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the US, something that would be inconceivable here because of Labor’s obscurantist set against the only form of reliable, emissions-free baseload power.

Energy policy is the folly that’s behind the nearly 9 per cent decline in household living standards over the past two years (the world’s worst economic performance, by the way) and the cost-of-living crisis that’s the number one, two, three and four voter concern as we go into the election. Along with Labor’s addiction to spending and taxing that’s keeping mortgage costs high.

Quite apart from all the other problems that the Albanese government has created or exacerbated – the record migration-driven pressures on housing costs and supply, wage suppression and infrastructure overload; the productivity-crushing advances to union power; the green veto on almost all new resources projects; the explosion of Jew-hatred on our streets; and the reinforcement of indoctrination over education in our schools – this energy insanity alone should be enough to hound the Albanese government from office in disgrace.

That this promise was always utterly implausible gives Labor no “get out of jail” card. Rather, it only compounds the elemental idiocy of a government that made a no “ifs” and no “buts” commitment to cutting power prices that it must have known was false.

After all, shortly after becoming minister, the government’s chief climate evangelist Chris Bowen proudly likened the energy transition to a second industrial revolution: requiring the installation of 22,000 solar panels every single day and the erection of 40 large wind turbines every single month for eight years – plus the construction of at least 10,000km of new transmission lines – to meet the 2030 target of 82 per cent renewable energy.

The notion that this gargantuan commitment could be funded while power prices fell rather than skyrocketed was always an absurdity (as absurd is giving such a critical portfolio to Bowen after his manifest failures as border protection minister in the Rudd-Gillard era).

Yet such was the government’s brazen insistence on a green jobs bonanza, the chorus of rent-seeking crony capitalists in support, and a media that elevated every weather event into proof of climate catastrophe that this modern version of the emperor’s new clothes has hardly been called out, even by the opposition. And that’s before we even get to the madness of most of our wind and solar assets being imported from China and over 70 per cent of wind farms being foreign owned.

The only one way to end this doom spiral into energy poverty and economic stagnation is to change the government to one that will not need the Greens or teals to survive and to bring nuclear power into Australia’s grid. Because if it doesn’t happen this time, it won’t happen.
The Australian

Stay tuned, STT will be back next week with more.

[editor’s note: Here is some helpful background information useful for reading the guest post below.

A federal judge has dismissed most of a lawsuit filed by North Fork Wind against Knox County, Nebraska, after the county changed its zoning regulations, effectively halting development of a proposed 600-megawatt wind farm. U.S. District Court Judge John Gerrard ruled that North Fork Wind had not proven that Knox County’s new setback requirements and other regulations had interfered with its contracts or violated its constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. However, the judge did allow the company to proceed with a Fifth Amendment claim, arguing that the county’s actions amounted to an unlawful taking of property.

https://www.knlvradio.com/2025/03/19/judge-rejects-majority-of-wind-farm-developers-lawsuit-against-knox-county/

The entire news article can be read here.

[\editor’s note]

By David D. Begley

I’m a solo practitioner in Omaha. I was hired as the Special Knox County Attorney to represent it in a federal court lawsuit. Knox County borders South Dakota in the northeast corner of the state. The beautiful Niobrara River runs through it. It borders a lake. (Come visit!) It is home to 8,000 people. The county seat of Center has a population of 73.

The lead plaintiff in the federal court lawsuit is North Fork Wind, LLC; a wholly owned subsidiary of National Grid Renewables. The UK’s National Grid just sold National Grid Renewables to a Canadian company named Brookfield Asset Management for $1.7 billion. North Fork Wind is represented by the Omaha law firm of Baird Holm. Baird Holm employs 100 very fine lawyers. My opponent is Brian Barmettler and he is an outstanding advocate.

Mostly by luck, I was hired the day before a pleading was due. The Board wasn’t happy with the lawyer its insurance company had assigned to the case. He’s a Democrat and had run for Mayor of Lincoln. He had drafted an Answer and I thought a Motion to Dismiss was the right thing to do as there were good defenses that could only be asserted through a 12(b)(6) motion.

The Complaint raised constitutional law issues that I hadn’t thought about since 1980 at Creighton Law School. I remembered enough to know where to start and studied up as best as I could. I raised and briefed all the defenses that I thought applied.

The Knox County industrial wind farm is the flagship project for National Grid Renewables. The projected cost is $1.3 billion. North Fork Wind intends to build 150 plus wind turbines over 600 feet in height. North Fork Wind spent – exclusive of attorneys’ fees – $19.3 million developing this project. Local landowners are projected to be paid $5.8 million per year. Knox County political subdivisions are to receive $2.8 million per year. These are big numbers.

On March 14, 2025, Senior United States District Court Judge John M. Gerrard mostly granted my motion. After his ruling, I doubt that the industrial wind project will be built. The full 40-page memorandum and order can be found on PACER at 4:24-cv-3150.

In footnote 6, the judge wrote, “there’s no mechanism under Nebraska or federal law that prevents Knox County from banning commercial wind farms, so long as there is a conceivably or hypothetically rational reason to do so.”

I write this post to inform the wider public of this statement of the law. I know some states have banned wind farms, but I don’t think many counties have. I think it would be very difficult to pass a wind and solar farm ban in Nebraska, but many counties would do so. My sense is that counties didn’t think they had such authority. Many counties enacted moratoriums and different regulations have been passed, but there are no outright bans in Nebraska counties.

Judge Gerrard is only the second person to serve on both the Nebraska Supreme Court and the federal district court. When he was on the Nebraska Supreme Court, he wrote many opinions about land use and zoning. And I read them all. He’s really an expert in this area. The Knox County case deals mostly with federal constitutional law and there are interesting statements about due process, equal protection, the Contracts Clause, the Takings Clause and special legislation. Other lawyers around the nation might find this opinion to be useful in opposing Big Wind and Big Solar.

The other point I want to call readers’ attention to is that, more likely than not, the federal government will not be handing out at least $390 million in taxpayer money to North Fork Wind, LLC. I, David D. Begley, personally stopped the federal government from spending $390 million that it doesn’t have and would have to borrow and add to our $37 trillion debt. I’m no Elon Musk, but I did what I could. You are all welcome. Glad to help.

Over the years I learned how inefficient solar and wind energy are and how it raises prices for consumers. People like the fantasy of “free” power. I think most people are poorly informed about the economics of Green energy. Wall Street, however, knows the numbers and Goldman Sachs projected $1.3 trillion in free federal money for Green projects through 2032.

After my mother passed, I found in her drawer a letter from her mother-in-law. It was brutal. She chastised my mom for not naming her first born “Michael.” My paternal grandfather was Michael J. Begley and he died at the age of 63 of a heart attack while working in the pickle department of a local packinghouse. He was one of the oldest packinghouse workers in all of South Omaha.

So, it turns out that 67 years later that my parents were on to something with my first name. I finally lived up to it.

Jonathan Cohler, David Legates, Franklin Soon, and Willie Soon, have guided xAI’s Grok 3 beta to produce what they call. FIRST-EVER [AI produced] peer-reviewed climate science paper,

Read it here.

You can read the paper here.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Nick Pope
Contributor

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is in possession of a key study on natural gas as of Wednesday that the Biden administration withheld in order to move forward with its 2024 crackdown on liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The Biden Department of Energy (DOE) “intentionally buried” a final draft version of a study assessing impacts of LNG export growth in 2023 over worries that it would not support the rationale for the Biden administration’s January 2024 decision to unilaterally freeze LNG export approvals, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported Tuesday. Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee had previously demanded that the Biden DOE provide the buried 2023 study — only alleged to exist until this week — for review, but Biden administration officials indicated that there was not a complete LNG study in 2023.

“Biden Administration officials, who religiously claimed to ‘follow the science,’ abandoned it to undermine American-made energy production, appease climate activists, and achieve their predetermined outcomes. As Secretary Granholm sought to weaken America’s LNG industry, the Biden Department of Energy withheld key data from both the American people and Congress in order to push forward their radical environmental agenda,” Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement. “President Biden and his administration will go down as the least transparent in history. I am grateful to President Trump and Secretary Wright for providing the transparency the American people deserve and for taking action to restore America’s energy dominance.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Biden Admin ‘Intentionally Buried’ Inconvenient Study To Justify Major Energy Crackdown, Sources Say)

NEW + EXCLUSIVE:

The Biden White House and Energy Department buried a study that would have impeded its ability to impose the liquefied natural gas export approvals pause in January 2024, four agency sources told the @DailyCaller News Foundation.

The Biden administration… pic.twitter.com/UKYTBtL5Al

— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) March 18, 2025

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee also published a timeline on Wednesday highlighting that its members sought — but were not granted — access to the study in question by the Biden administration, as well as former Assistant Energy Secretary Brad Crabtree’s December 2024 testimony that “a complete study did not exist in 2023.”

The Biden DOE effectively completed a final draft version of the LNG impacts study around the end of September 2023, and that iteration was ready to be shown to top Biden officials, Trump DOE sources previously told the DCNF. That version of the study concluded that increasing U.S. LNG exports would actually decrease global emissions relative to other scenarios, Trump DOE sources previously told the DCNF.

That conclusion does not align with former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s take of the final version of the study disseminated to the public in December 2024, as she argued that any growth in LNG exports would lead to higher global greenhouse gas emissions.

At the end of September 2023, a Biden administration official commented on the final draft version to tell others to stop working on it until further notice, even though other language in the document said that the final version would be published sometime around the end of September 2023, Trump DOE sources previously told the DCNF. That version of the study was never released publicly.

“The Energy Department has learned that former Secretary Granholm and the Biden White House intentionally buried a lot of data and released a skewed study to discredit the benefits of American LNG,” one DOE source previously told the DCNF. “They were prioritizing their own political ambitions over the interests of the American people, and the administration intentionally deceived the American public to advance an agenda that harmed American energy security, the environment and American lives.”

On Wednesday, other news organizations — including Bloomberg News and Fox News Digital — confirmed the DCNF’s initial reporting on the existence of the buried study.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.