Weekly clippings #27 - Underwater diligence, Antarctic cooling, EVs, solar, and wind companies plunge, massive EV losses

This week I published a special focus piece The problems with "These haunting underwater photos portray climate change in a new way" to illustrate the gullibility of some artists and how no due diligence is done on apocalyptic climate claims.

Significant West Antarctic Cooling in the Past Two Decades Driven by Tropical Pacific Forcing. Most Of Antarctica Has Cooled By Over 1°C Since 1999, W. Antarctica Cooled 1.8°C. Of 28 CMIP6 models, none captured a cooling trend – especially of this amplitude – for this region. This modeling failure “implies substantial uncertainties in future temperature projections of CMIP6 models.” The 1999-2018 mean annual surface temperature cooling of the Antarctic continent and nearly half of the Southern Hemisphere’s SSTs do not support the claims that surface warming is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

An Assessment of ERA5 Reanalysis for Antarctic Near-Surface Air Temperature  Scientists Find ‘Statistically Significant’ Cooling Trend Over Entire Antarctic Continent. "Over the whole of Antarctica, ERA5 presents a cold bias with the exception of JJA, while ERA-Interim shows a cold bias in all annual and seasonal means."

Terence Corcoran: Climate policies are collapsing around the world  In the G7 alone, the political climate in four member nations — Canada, the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom — is uncertain and filled with conflict over climate policy.

Reality Bites - The German Greens begin to face the consequences of their utopian deceptions. "The Greens have exhibited an exceptionally disciplined approach to spending their limited political capital, focusing the vast majority of their efforts on destroying Germany's energy sector. In the process, they have brought one of the mightiest economies in the world to its knees." "For decades, the country was a net exporter of electricity, routinely providing excess power to its neighbors in Europe. Now, Germany needs to balance its demand with supply from other nations. " "No matter how much intermittent renewable energy the country installs, it can't ever shut down its coal plants. There will always be times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, and without nuclear power, an entire fossil-fuel powered backup grid will be necessary to plug the hole."

Overcharged expectations  "No one has attempted to calculate the full financial benefit of the wide array of direct subsidies, regulatory credits, and subsidized infrastructure that contribute to the economic viability of EVs." "Our conservative estimate is that the average EV accrues $48,698 in subsidies and $4,569 in extra charging and electricity costs over a 10-year period, for a total cost of $53,267, or $16.12 per equivalent gallon of gasoline.

 Auto execs are coming clean: EVs aren't working  "People are finally seeing reality," Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda said at the Japan Mobility Show.

SolarEdge shares sink after company offers weak Q4 guidance  The solar sector has faced headwinds over the past year as rising interest rates weigh on the demand for solar energy. Last December, California voted to cut the compensation rate for a solar incentive program for homeowners. That lower incentive went into effect in April, causing a spike in demand for solar installation as homeowners tried to squeeze in the work before the deadline. A further cut to California’s solar incentive programs for multifamily apartment buildings, schools and farms could soon be coming and has the potential to further deepen the demand decline.

BP’s renewables boss calls U.S. offshore wind industry ‘fundamentally broken’  

Siemens Energy shares slide 39% after company seeks state guarantees Company shares slide to all-time lows, market value plummets.

 As Wind Industry Struggles, Investors Brace for Orsted Losses  These firms, on the front line of the green revolution, have contended with cost increases of about 40% in the past 12-18 months.

Orsted Leaves Democrats' Offshore Dreams Blowin' in the Wind  In its Interim Report for the first 9 months of 2023, Orsted said it was pulling out of both the Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2 projects off the Jersey Shore, which has served as the landing spot for dozens of dead whale carcasses in recent months, leading to speculation that all the offshore wind development could be the proximate cause of a significant increase in such killings. It was an inevitability that Big Wind would eventually face a day when the government subsidies would peak out and they would be forced to find market-based ways to become profitable. That day seems to have arrived ahead of schedule, and Big Wind companies like Orsted and Siemens have been caught with their proverbial pants down.

The miraculous technology that could solve our energy problems and works now  The answer is nuclear power. Not fusion, but regular fission power. Nuclear has a number of key advantages, not found all at once in any other source of energy. Nuclear produces no carbon dioxide emissions in operation, it has a very high energy density in that a lot of energy is produced from a small geographic footprint, and it is not intermittent. Less well-known is the fact that nuclear power stations actually can “load-follow” – this means they can vary their output in response to changes in demand.

Ford Losing $63k on Every EV Sold? Lucid Sez, Hold my Beer. Just when you think no carmaker could possibly do worse than Ford Motor Company, whose Model-e EV/Hybrid division reported losses amounting to more than $60,000 per vehicle sold during the 3rd quarter, another EV maker comes along to prove you wrong. Lucid, the California-based electric vehicle company that makes the Air Sedan, lost over $430,000 for every car it sold in the third quarter of this year, according to the firm's latest financial report.