A Reader Provides Stunning Observation Regarding US Wind Energy Going Forward -- March 11, 2019

Earlier I posted an update regarding US electricity sector. In that note, I forgot to mention the necessity of tax credits, subsidies, and government mandates if the renewable energy sector is to survive.

A reader caught that oversight and provided this note:

This past Friday's (March 8, 2019) "Today In Energy" piece from the EIA presented one of the more stunning - albeit not unexpected to serious observers - factoids regarding new additions to the US energy supply.

Specifically, the first graph shows- with green bars - the new capacity emanating from onshore wind. Starting in 2022, it drops to zero and stays near zero for decades. This is the clear impact of the ending of the tax credits as construction needs to start on projects before the end of 2019 in order to qualify.

No tax credits (production tax credits, PTCs and/or investment tax credits, ITCs) equals no more wind projects.

That's a very, very interesting observation.

Here's the graph (see if you can spot "onshore wind energy" -- yes, you will need a magnifying glass:

In 2050, for example, it looks like 21 gigawatts of new electricity generating capacity will be added. Of that 21 gigawatts, onshore wind might account for one-half gigawatt, or 2%.

I.N.C.O.N.S.E.Q.U.E.N.T.I.A.L. And even worse than inconsequential considering all the attention this sector gets in the mainstream media.  I bet if the Occasional-Cortex-Bernie-Sanders-crowd was asked, they would think 100% of new electricity generating capacity would come from renewable energy. By the way, it's interesting that solar has such a huge footprint: I assume that is based on residential-rooftop-solar panels mandated by California. Other states will follow. Further killing the housing industry.

As long as we're on the subject, this item was buried at the very end of the linked article at CNBC with the IEA forecast for EVs sales going forward in the earlier post (I did not want to gild the lily, as they say):

Norway remains the leader when it comes to market share. Electric vehicles accounted for 39 percent of Norway’s new car sales last year, and 6.4 percent of the country’s cars are powered by electricity.

That makes Norway the leader in both categories.

But in another sign of the importance of policy, Norway is the only member of the IEA’s Electric Vehicles Initiative that saw annual sales volume and market share fall between 2013 and 2017. The IEA chalks up those declines to a change in the way the tax system treats private use of company cars and the end of tax incentives last year for plug-in hybrids.

LOL: "... another sign of the importance of policy." -- subsidies, grants, tax credits, government mandates, central planning (a key feature of socialism).

By the way, my hunch is that the US could very easily go back to adding coal plants in the out years if nuclear plants continue to be de-commissioned, and the demand for electricity grows as suggested in an earlier post.

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The Book Page

L.E.L., Lucasta Miller, c. 2019:

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published under her initials, L.E.L., was feted as the female Byron during the 1820s. But after she was found dead in 1838, in West Africa of all places and in suspicious circumstances, the early Victorian publishing industry closed ranks to erase what they had come to see as her shameful history. Her literary reputation declines. She was left on the margins, surrounded by an aura of mystery and occlusion, her wore routinely misunderstood. -- p. xi.

Although she remains little heard of today outside specialist circles, L. E. L. was a "legendary figure" in her own time. According to a critic writing in 1841, her name was "so identified with the literature of the day, that not to know anything of it is scarcely possible."

Elizabeth Barrett (who later added Browning to her name following her marriage) believed [L.E.L.] unrivaled among women poets for her "raw bare powers."

In America, Edgar Allan Poe thought her "genius" so self-evident...

L.E.L. was, however, the voice of a lost literary generation. Her career, which spanned the 1820s and 1830s, coincided exactly with the "strange pause," as the historian G. M. Young called it, between the Romantics and the Victorians.

Modern scholars are still unsure exactly what happened during this troublesome transition phase between the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron and the rise of Dickens.

Referred to as "an embarrassment to the historian of English literature" and an "indeterminate borderland," it resists periodization, and has never been dignified with a name. However, it should probably be called the "post-Byronic" era, since the fallout from Byron's celebrity cult had such a profound impact on the writing of the day. Following his death in 1824, every hack wanted his -- or her -- own cult of personality. Yet the labile, often ironized voices writers created in response remain hard to interpret, their tone difficult for the modern reader to pin down. None is harder to read than that of the inscrutable L. E. L.

No one knew who she was when she first began to publish under her mysterious initials in the early 1820s. But in 1824 she emerged in public as the star author of a new best seller. The Improvisatrice. A skillful improviser of her own image, she soon became a celebrity, her portrait exhibited at the Royal Academy, her presence a fixture on the London social scene.

If she was the female Byron, "female" was the operative word. She was the "poetess" par excellence in a period in which, unusually in literary history, women dominated the genre. The eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, regarded by some modern cultural historians as the fons et origo of English Romanticism, had already produced some notable female poets, including Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, Letitia Landon's literary foremothers.

Following the untimely deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Bryon, the "poetess" became culturally supreme. Not just in England, but in France, Germany, Russia, and America, a new generation of women Romantics staked their careers on the supposition that their gender made them more sensitive and intuitive than men, and thus more poetical. -- pp. 4 -5.