Some good news for a change

Most days, following the energy news flow is a bit like swimming in a huge septic tank and doing it willingly for reasons of a highly selective kind of insanity. But there are some days when the tank stops stinking so much because Mistress Hard Reality has paid it a visit with a strong disinfectant.

This week’s had a lot of these days so let’s have a bit of a gloat and “I told you so” for a change from the usual doom and gloom.

To begin with, I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to learn that the troubles of the EV revolution aren’t over. Now, they are coming from Detroit, whose Big Auto industry is complaining again about the Biden admin’s plans to force an EV sales boom.

The administration’s weapon is the new fuel efficiency standard, which could be passed as soon as next month. But automakers don’t seem too keen on that standard, claiming it will saddle them with exorbitant compliance costs and risk them billions in fines for non-compliance — because it is impossible to comply with.

Because there is no way of raising the share of EVs in total car sales from last year’s less than 8% to 67% by 2032. And the carmakers have finally admitted it after they went above and beyond to convince themselves and everyone else that those tens of thousands of dollars they’re losing on every EV they make are something temporary and the EV revolution is totally happening and don’t mind our price war, we’re not trying to push an unsellable product at all.

Leaving EV hopefuls to their misery, let’s take a look at green finance, where things, I am heartbroken to say, are not going well. Remember the Just Energy Transition Partnerships scheme? The one that was supposed to help developing economies with the transition by pooling money from developed economies, which is indeed very just?

Yeah, so that’s not happening because there’s no money to pool. It must have been a truly shocking discovery in London, Brussels, and Washington.

Here we have these wonderful people, these responsible and concerned politicians promising $20 billion to Indonesia alone to help it shut down its coal plants and switch to green wind and solar.

Here they are, confident that the money will come pouring into their Just Energy Transition pool, and suddenly the Rockefeller Foundation goes and stabs them in the back by reporting that the whole idea ““may not be scalable” in its current form, blaming a lack of consistent support from multilateral development banks and the premature announcement of deals by political leaders before funding had been secured.”

The concerned politicians should’ve learned a lesson from Musk. They should’ve tweeted “Funding secured” and watch the billions pour in. But did they? No, they didn’t. And now there’s no money for their noble cause, so Indonesia and the rest of the developing world continue to spew emissions from their coal plants. The Rockefeller Foundation’s advice? Find a new approach for delivering new money to the table. Watch out everyone for that new approach.

We now pop in at the New York governor’s office where an electricity bill support scheme was just announced by the governor herself. The support scheme is worth $200 million and will be managed by the state’s power utilities on behalf of their customers.

Those would be the same utilities that the state authorities essentially obliged to buy offshore wind power output at higher prices — if and when the capacity for that output gets built. In the meantime, because New York is very firm in its net-zero goals, it is paying utilities $200 million in credit for the more than 8 million New Yorkers who pay through the nose for their electricity.

"Energy affordability continues to be a top priority ... and this utility bill credit is just one of many actions New York is taking to reduce costs," Governor Kathy Hochul lied in a news release on the support package. Or perhaps she didn’t lie. Perhaps she doesn’t know that handouts do not reduce costs, they only provide temporary relief.

From New York we fly straight down to Texas where a horror story is unfolding. Wind power output in January was 22% lower this year than last year. Because the wind wasn’t blowing enough. Probably because of climate change.

Because of that seriously lower wind power output, Texas utilities were forced — no doubt amid much frustration and guilt — to crank up those stinky evil coal and gas power plants that, in a perfect transition world, should have already been on their way out but here we are still stuck with them and their dirty electricity. Electricity generation from coal and gas power plants in Texas surged by 50% on the year in January.

That’s not all, either, because it turns out wind in Texas had a pretty bad 2023. Total wind power output for the year came in at 4,500 GW, which was a measly 2.4% increase on 2022, according to Reuters data. But to add insult to injury, that number was also lower than the wind power capacity expansion in Texas last year, which was 3%. A cruel streak is no alien to our Mistress Reality.

Let’s now cross the Atlantic on an LNG carrier and see what’s brewing in Brussels. Which is not much, except the EU now has zero problem with the end of gas transit from Russia to Europe via the Ukraine.

We know that Europeans in high places are very proud of their success in swapping Russian gas for American gas but those happen to be the same Europeans in high places who were gravely concerned about the Ukraine’s gas transit fee income when it was threatened by Nord Stream 2.

This concern appears to have vanished for some odd and completely unfathomable reason that has the European political elite eagerly anticipate the end of those transit fees. European taxpayers, not so eagerly.

Stepping off the beaten energy path for a moment, Google will be launching a disinformation screening campaign in five EU countries ahead of the European Parliament elections, joining Brussels’ efforts to fight “Russian propaganda” because of course there is no way Europeans might have got sick of their current leaders in an all-organic way. It had to be an outside job.

So, to minimise the risk of more damage to the reputations of current leaders, Google and the leaders themselves will, and I quote because it’s too funny, “run a series of animated ads across platforms such as TikTok and YouTube in five EU countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland.”

The ads will be educational, aiming to help viewers “identify manipulative content before encountering it.” And that’s not all, either. “Viewers watching the ads on YouTube will be asked to fill in a short multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to gauge what they have learned about misinformation.”

I have no doubt in my heart the campaign will have a resounding success. I mean, I love having ads run for three minutes before the content I actually want to watch appears. I’m sure everyone else loves ads, too. People keep telling me about it.

I think we all especially love political ads that treat us like imbeciles who are clearly beyond help but our leaders are trying to gently point us in the only right direction in our miserable lives that might make said lives a little less miserable, by naming The Enemy whose fault that misery is.

It’s all very altruistic and not at all a consequence of those same leaders pissing themselves with fear they’ve gone a step too far this time in making our lives miserable.

With such a brilliant strategy I have no doubt that everyone in Europe will vote for the current urine-flavoured leaders come June armed with the lessons learned from Google’s and the EU’s “prebunking” campaign. Yes, they are really calling it that.

Elsewhere, we’ve got “IEA 3.0” that is “helping to guide our responses to the energy crisis, sustaining the global transition towards clean energy, supporting international processes” of unidentified nature.

Also elsewhere, we learn that lithium prices are unsustainably low and this needs to change if lithium miners are to start mining more lithium for all those EV batteries that everyone, including IEA 3.0 keeps talking about. Per Albemarle, the king of lithium, “the economics for new greenfield projects, particularly in the West, are not supported.” I hate it when this sort of thing happens, completely out of the blue, don’t you?

We end our exhilarating journey in Australia, where the government has reportedly decided to join the subsidy race with a view to becoming a renewable energy superpower. Because things are working so well for current superpowers such as Germany and the UK that both are now in a recession.

This is my mic. This is me dropping it.