Crap

Slate Auto promises to put out a low cost, bare bones, and spyware free electric pickup truck, which sounds good, but then I discovered that Jeff Bezos is a major backer of the firm.

My eldest had expressed an interest in something like this, so I need to tell them not to buy this.

Ahead of its launch late this year, Jeff Bezos-backed Slate Auto is figuring out how it’s going to sell its all-electric small pickup truck, and it’s reportedly getting on board with online automotive retailer Carvana.

According to TechCrunch, Carvana was given a warrant for shares in Slate Auto last year, based on documents from the State of Delaware Division of Corporations. The move comes as the startup automaker prepares to release details such as official prices later this month, as well as the end of reservations and the beginning of preordering. Since last year, Slate Auto has offered a $50 reservation fee to be among the first in line and reported 100,000 reservations in two weeks.

(emphasis mine)

So both Bezos and Carvana.  That is a truly toxic mixture.

………

The Slate Truck was announced in April 2025 as a back-to-basics EV that won’t come standard with features such as power windows or an infotainment system. Buyers, however, will be able to customize the vehicle with vinyl wraps and even an enclosed SUV body with a rear seat. By doing this, the company targets a sub-$30,000 starting price.

Yeah, pretty bare bones.

Would You Like Some Brain Damage With Your Stove?

A new study has shown that increased levels of wood burning have resulted in increased lead emissions.

Wood heating is reintroducing lead into the air of local communities and homes, a systematic investigation by academics has found.

Overwhelming evidence of lead’s neurotoxicity meant the metal was banned as an additive in petrol more than 25 years ago. The research by academics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst began by analysing samples of particle pollution from five suburban and rural towns in the north-east US. They looked for tiny particles of potassium that are given off when wood is burned and also particles containing lead.

Samples from seven winters revealed associations between potassium and lead. When there were more wood burning particles in a daily sample, there was more lead in the air, with clear straight-line relationships in four of the five towns.

Prof Richard Peltier, the senior author of the research, said: “For the most part, wood burning produces significant amounts of particle air pollution, and a small but measurable fraction of this is a powerful neurotoxicant.”

The association with potassium means that the issue is NOT people burning painted lumber, it is coming from the wood itself.

Glad I Own a Hybrid

Oil reserves are falling off a cliff.

Assuming no change to the current state of affairs, it looks like we could move from higher prices to actual shortages and gas lines by year's end. 

An underappreciated surplus of crude oil, sloshing around storage tanks and aboard ships, cushioned the global economy when the Persian Gulf closed 2½ months ago.

That excess supply is now dwindling at a record pace, with oil executives and analysts predicting that a harsh reckoning is set to upend the relative calm in energy markets. Acute shortages of key fuels and soaring prices could emerge within weeks if the Strait of Hormuz remains shut.

This ain't gonna end well.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (On Friday)

So, initial unemployment claims are up slightly but remain low, and continuing claims fell: 

Applications for US unemployment benefits rebounded slightly after falling in the previous week to near the lowest levels in decades, signaling layoffs remain muted despite recent job-cut announcements.

Initial claims rose by 10,000 to 200,000 in the week ended May 2, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 205,000 applications.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, fell to 1.77 million in the previous week, a new two-year low.

Also, the monthly jobs numbers came out. And notwithstanding claims that it is exceptional, the number is actually rather anemic, with about 115,000 jobs added to the work force.

The U.S. job market blew past expectations again in April, buoyed by gains across industries including retail, transportation and warehousing, and healthcare. The results were a sign that the labor market remained resilient so far in the face of the Iran war.

The numbers

The American economy added 115,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday, far exceeding expectations.

That was down from a net gain of 185,000 in March. But it was much better than the 55,000 jobs that analysts polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see for April.

The unemployment rate stayed unchanged at 4.3%, as economists had expected.

Not a bloody clue as to that the f%$# is going on here. 

What I do know is that we are about 2-4 weeks into when ships stopped at the Strait of Hormuz should have arrived at their destinations and that oil reserves fell off of a cliff in April  

Global oil reserves plunged at a record pace in April, as the conflict in the Middle East strains supplies and raises the risk of a further sharp jump in prices ahead of the summer travel season.

Stockpiles of crude fell by nearly 200mn barrels, or 6.6mn barrels a day, estimated S&P Global Energy, even as higher prices triggered a collapse in demand of about 5mn b/d, the sharpest ever fall outside of the Covid-19 pandemic.

That fall in economic demand is driven by a fall in economic activity.

Things are going to get a lot worse. 

 

Bad Policy and Worse Politics

Maine Governor, and f(l)ailing candidate for the US Senate Janet Mills just vetoed a bill which would pause the construction of large data centers in the state for 18 months.

Notwithstanding her claims that she did it because one project would be canceled in an economically disadvantaged area, it's really about sucking up to the developer types.

The Androscoggin Mill Data Center will produce less than 150 jobs, probably well less than that.

Gov. Janet Mills on Friday vetoed a bill that would have made Maine the first state in the country to enact a temporary ban on new data center development.

The bill, LD 307, would have prevented the state, local governments and quasi-governmental agencies from issuing permits or other approvals for new data centers until November 2027, while a new Data Center Coordination Council studied the projects’ potential impacts in Maine.

Mills’ veto comes after lawmakers shot down an amendment that would have allowed for a data center proposed at the former Androscoggin Mill in Jay. The governor had pushed for that amendment, arguing that the project could bring significant economic benefits to the town. The developer behind the Jay site said the moratorium brought about by the bill would effectively kill his plan.

………

“While a veto might protect the proposed data center project in Jay, it poses significant potential consequences for all ratepayers, our electric grid, our environment, and our shared energy future,” Sachs said in an emailed statement. “This decision is simply wrong.”

The bill could still become law if approved by a two-thirds majority of both the House and the Senate. But when the bill was passed this month, it fell short of that threshold in both chambers: the House voted 79-62 to enact, and the Senate 21-13.

This sort of crap is why people who are inclined to vote for Democrats hate their leadership with a white-hot burning passion. 

$100/BBL

Is anyone surprised that oil is now over $100.00 a barrel?

It is foreseeable by anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together that bombing Iran and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would have this effect.

The chairman of oil producer DNO was flying from New York to Oslo early on Feb. 28 when he told staff to turn off the company’s oil wells in Iraq.

America and Israel had just attacked neighboring Iran. Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani wasn’t taking any chances, having weathered a drone strike on the company’s oil fields in Iraqi Kurdistan last summer. By the time he landed, the pumps had stopped—the first oil shutdown of the war.

To the south, another problem was brewing. An apparent recording of an Iranian naval captain telling ships not to enter the Strait of Hormuz spread through industry WhatsApp groups. 

Tanker traffic slowed to a trickle. The doomsday some oil analysts believed could never happen was coming to pass. Unable to ship crude to world markets, much bigger producers in Iraq began to run out of places to put it. The country cut output by more than two-thirds. Tanks in Kuwait were next to fill up. U.S. oil prices vaulted above $100 a barrel Sunday for the first time since the fallout of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

………

On Saturday, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. signaled it too was slowing production so tanks didn’t overflow. If the strait is still closed this Friday, daily output in the region could fall by more than four million barrels, Kaneva estimates. The decline could reach around nine million by the end of March, representing almost a 10th of global demand. 

Also note that Trump has done nothing to replenish the US Strategic Oil Reserve.

I am so glad that my Sharon* and I are driving hybrid vehicles with fuel economy in the 50 mpg range.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Wagging the Dog

First, I would note that anyone relying on US mainstream media for their information is a moron. 

Between the Epstein files, persistent concerns about his health, and plummeting poll numbers it's pretty clear why Donald Trump authorized the abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife and strikes on Venezuela.

It had nothing to do with drugs, particularly not Fentanyl.

The fact that Trump has also explicitly stated his goal was to steal Venezuelan oil is part of that as well.

Maduro is now in custody in the US (Update: MDC Brooklyn.)

Trump is claiming that the United States is, "Now running Venezuela," though I would think that the Vice President of Venezuela and their Defense Minister differ on this matter,

The US attacked Venezuela and captured its long-serving president Nicolás Maduro on Saturday, with Donald Trump promising to put the country under American control for now, even as Venezuelan officials vowed defiance.

As part of a dramatic overnight operation that knocked out electricity in parts of Caracas, US Special Forces captured Maduro in or near one of his safe houses, Trump said.


With Maduro in US custody, “we will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”, the US president said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“We can’t take a chance that someone else takes over Venezuela who doesn’t have the interests of Venezuelans in mind.”

………

But a few hours later, the president’s claim was undermined by Rodríguez, who, in a televised address, maintained the critical tone adopted by all members of Maduro’s cabinet since the first reports of the US bombardment.

She described the US attack as an “unprecedented military aggression”, and demanded the “immediate release” of Maduro and his wife. The Venezuelan people “are outraged by the illegal and illegitimate kidnapping of the president and the first lady”, Rodríguez said.

The Venezuelan vice-president insisted that the country “will never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline”.

She also echoed an argument repeatedly made by Maduro before his capture: that the real objective of the four-month-long US military pressure had never been a supposed “war on drugs”, but rather “regime change” and the “seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources”.

With little in the way of US ground troops in the area, I'm not sure how this is going to play out.

I'm with what Atrios said, "Look forward to Venezuela defense and retaliation being portrayed as criminal aggression."  (His hed, "Mommy, he shot me back," is prize).

Even if the current regime in Caracas capitulates, there is a very good case that it all goes pear shaped, with insurgencies and a possible civil war.

The Democratic Party House Minority Leader, part 1


The Democratic Party House Minority Leader, part 2


And the always simping to the Cuban diaspora in Florida Debbie Wasserman Schultz While Maduro is not a popular figure in Venezuela, the former eletes are even less so, so their return, accompanied by US companies seizing control of their oiil and other natural resources, will not result in any US occupying force being, "greeted as liberators,"if just because the first thing that any leader installed by trump will do is roll back public healthcare and social safety net provisions that were put in place by Chavez.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is doing what they always do, and basically caving, and soft pedaling the whole thing.

Guys, you don't have to spend 60% of your talk saying how bad Maduro was.

This act, a war of choice, is against the war powers act and against the Constitution of the United States of America.

Presenting this is just some concerns about some Congressional prerogatives being stepped on is weak, stupid, and bad politics. 

In related corruption news, it appears that someone close to the Trump administration created an account on the Polymarket betting site and netted a quick  $½ million.

Econoimists can blather all they want about the value of predictive markets, but this is just corrupt as hell.

In the best of circumstances, betting on world events for fun and profit on marketplaces like Kalshi and Polymarket is an innocent way to make reading the news a little more interesting. Unfortunately, some suspect there are rascals out there who want to ruin it for everyone else by placing unfair, insider bets with the potential to corrupt the motives of powerful figures and their advisors. So with that in mind, when I say this next thing, I don’t want you to be suspicious:


On Friday, something that very much looks like a brand new account on Polymarket plowed $30,000 into bets on the toppling of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. By the very next morning, when Maduro was suddenly no longer able to act as president of Venezuela anymore due to having been dragged out of his bed by the U.S. military and spirited out of his country, that account had apparently bagged $436,759.61 according to Axios’s Herb Scribner. It’s not spelled out where that number is coming from, but an archive.ph snapshot being circulated on social media places the amount at $407,920.12, so either way, this lucky person made a lot of money off their totally wild guess.

About the only thing clear in this entire thing is that, to paraphrase Mitchell and Web, the USA is the baddie here,

One thing that is certain though, we are going to see a wave of migrants heading toward the United States to get away from this developing mess.

I wonder how that will play to Trump's MAGAt supporters. 

Huh, I Had This Idea a While Back

Source of picture here.The idea, and I do not think that it is particularly original or merits a patent is floating solar panels above reservoirs and hydroelectric lakes to minimize evaporation losses.

It's a neat idea, though I would use translucent photovoltaic cells to only allow light light in the 400-700 nm range to pass through.

If you block all light, you end up with dead lakes because there is no photosynthesis, though it's unlikely that one would be able to cover the whole surface, as fluctuations in depth would damage some of the panels.

Still, this does two good things, increases water supplies and reduces carbon footprint:

Sun-baked Morocco, grappling with its worst drought in decades, has launched a pilot project aimed at slowing water evaporation while simultaneously generating green energy using floating solar panels.

At a major reservoir near the northern city of Tangier, thousands of so-called “floatovoltaic” panels protect the water’s surface from the blazing sun and absorb its light to generate electricity.

………

Water ministry official Yassine Wahbi said the Tangier reservoir loses around 3,000 cubic metres (106,000 cubic feet) a day to evaporation, but that figure more than doubles in the hot summer months.

The floating photovoltaic panels can help cut evaporation by about 30 per cent, he said. 

It's a win-win, unless, of course, you are Dick Cheney.

This is Why You Don't Do Bailouts

Gavin Newsom's bailout of PG&E following the Camp Fire in 2018, which created the California Wildfire Fund.

The alternative would have been bankruptcy and the likely public takeover of what is arguably one of the worst utilities in the nation.

Now, it looks like the damage from the Los Angeles fires could exhaust this fund.

This is what happens when you bail out a bad actor because they are, "Too big to fail." 

Insurance claims from the Eaton wildfire could “fully exhaust” a state fund that was set up to protect customers when a wildfire is caused by a utility company.

The devastating wildfire in Los Angeles killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,000 structures in January. One leading theory is that ageing equipment belonging to Southern California Edison, the primary electricity provider in the region, ignited the fire.

If the utility company is found to have been responsible for igniting the devastating January blaze, then the “financial health of the fund could be strained”, according to documents published by California’s Catastrophe Response Council, a group of lawmakers and members of the public who oversee the state’s wildfire fund.

California lawmakers established the state’s $21bn wildfire fund in 2019 in an effort to prevent the state’s largest utility companies from declaring bankruptcy if their equipment caused a fire. The fund is made up of money the utility companies contribute and a surcharge on customers’ utility bills.

Power lines and other utility equipment are a top cause of wildfires in drought-ridden California – and have sparked some of the state’s most devastating blazes, including the 2018 Camp fire that killed more than 80 people. Although investigators are still determining the cause of the Eaton fire, the utility company has been under scrutiny since the blaze broke out.

(emphasis mine)

PG&E should have been liquidated, and its assets taken over by the state of California, or it should have been reconstituted as a customer owned utility.

It was bad politics and bad policy. 

Vibes? F%$#ing Vibes?????

According to Rolling Stone, there was no intelligence indicating that Iran was attempting a nuclear weapons break-out, nor that such an activity was authorized in any way, and so, "Trump’s Attacks on Iran Were Based on Vibes. 

Given that Trump is now calling for regime change in Iran, despite earlier claiming that there was no intent to cause regime change and that they wanted to resume negotiations:

President Donald Trump on Sunday called into question the future of Iran’s ruling theocracy after a surprise attack on three of the country’s nuclear sites, seemingly contradicting his administration’s earlier calls to resume negotiations and avoid an escalation in fighting.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted on social media. “MIGA!!!”

The posting on Truth Social marked something of a reversal from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Sunday morning news conference that detailed the aerial bombing.

“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth said.

I can think of no better reason for Iran to feel a need for nuclear weapons than the above.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway through about ⅕ of the world's oil passes.  

While that vote has no force, the actual decision would be made by the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, it is a significant step, and one which does not bode well for energy prices or the world economy.

It really is amazing just f%$#ing incompetent these guys are. 

Hurray!

The power was restored at about 1:20 this morning, about 22 hours ahead of forecast.

By that point, the temperature in the house was 49 degrees.

And there was much rejoicing.

Good Move from ……… Georgia?

I am referring to the, "Peach State," and not the former Soviet Republic on the Black Sea.

Their PUC just issued a rule allowing Georgia Power to charge data centers higher rates for electricity.

Considering the negative externalities of data centers, this is a very good idea:

Metro Atlanta is one of the hottest destinations in the country for tech companies to build data centers, hulking warehouses filled with servers that power web services, cryptocurrency transactions and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

But the facilities themselves use huge amounts of electricity, and concern has been growing that their demands could strain the grid and drive up costs for residential customers and other businesses.

On Thursday, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved changes to Georgia Power’s rules and contract provisions commissioners say will make sure data centers pay their fair share and keep other customers from being saddled with their costs.

………

The changes were proposed by Georgia Power in December and apply to new customers that use more than 100 megawatts of electricity.

………

Already, Georgia Power has been approved to build new oil- and gas-burning units, add massive battery storage systems and buy power from coal and gas plants in other states, largely to meet a wave of data-center demand the company contends is coming.

Those projects, along with building new transmission lines to deliver the power, carry enormous costs, which some fear could be passed on to the company’s other customers, whose rates have shot up dramatically in recent years. Since late 2022, the PSC has approved a series of rate increases that have pushed the average Georgia Power customer’s bill up by about $43, according to data from the company.

Nice to see the big players being made to paid some of the costs that they inflict on the rest of us.  (That's the definition of, "Negative Externalities.)

Of Course They Did

As I have noted a few times before, the whole carbon credit economy is an exercise in regulatory arbitrage and fraud.  This time it's Shell Oil that sold millions of dollars worth of fraudulent carbon credits:

Shell sold millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place to Canada’s largest oil sands companies, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

As part of a subsidy scheme to boost the industry, the Alberta provincial government allowed Shell to register and sell carbon credits equivalent to twice the volume of emissions avoided by its Quest carbon capture facility between 2015 and 2021, the province’s registry shows. The subsidy was reduced and then ended in 2022.

As a result of the scheme, Shell was able to register 5.7mn credits that had no equivalent CO₂ reductions, selling these to top oil sands producers and some of its own subsidiaries. Credits are typically equivalent to one tonne of CO₂.

I am not surprised that the snollygosters in the Alberta government has gone all in on fraudulent carbon credits.

They have staked their economic future on tar sands, which are arguably more polluting than coal, so they are desperate to produce the illusion that those activities are eco-friendly.

They are not.

……… Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Out to Get You

US oil companies colluded with Saudi Arabia to keep oil prices high.

How about some arrests, regulators?

I’m at the Google antitrust closing arguments, and I’ll have some thoughts on that soon. But today’s piece is about some bombshell evidence that just came out on a giant post-Covid conspiracy in the oil industry. And I do mean giant, because there’s now evidence that price-fixing in the oil industry alone may single-handedly be responsible for a little over a quarter of the total inflationary increase in 2021.

………

Last Sunday, I wrote a piece alleging that U.S. shale oil producers colluded with the Saudi government from 2021-2023 to drive up gas prices. That essay was based on some reporting I had done, as well as a complaint from a savvy Kansas City class action law firm, Sharp Law, with special expertise in oil. The theory was that American producers, after a bitter price war from 2014-2016, got tired of competing on price with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or the OPEC oil cartel, and at some point from 2017-2021, decided to join the cartel and cut supply to the market. This action had the affect of raising oil prices, costing oil consumers something on the order of $200 billion a year.

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released evidence confirming that collusion played a serious role in hiking oil prices at that time. Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield, a leader in the fracking field, “exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output.” Sheffield was explicit about his goal, saying that “if Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,” he said, adding: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.” He talked to shareholders, publicly threatened rivals, and ultimately achieved output cuts across the industry regardless of price. “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel,” he said, “the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”

The independent producers should be disciplined.  Jail time would be nice, but flogging would be even better.

Apart from That Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play?

New York State has passed a bill mandating the construction of publicly owned renewable power generation.

This sounds good, because what's not to love about renewable energy or publicly owned utilities?

They both just work.  Ask the people who get their power from the TVA.

But there is a fly in the ointment, the New York Power Authority, which is charged with developing this generation capacity, was NOT a fan of the idea, at least this was the case when the bill was making its way through the legislature.

This attitude has changed, and appears that this is at least in part because of the consultant that they are bringing in,  McKinsey & Company.

Well, we now know why they changed their tune.  Now senior officials see the opportunity for corruption, fraud, waste, and inefficiency to be introduced in the program, which will both enrich their political allies, and kill public power in New York for a generation.

In 2022, Justin Driscoll, the then-interim head of the New York Power Authority, was no fan of the Build Public Renewables Act, which would empower the organization to build renewable energy projects to help the state to meet its climate goals. At a hearing, Driscoll told lawmakers that New York state was unable to undertake its own renewable power buildout, calling it "simply unworkable." Which is why it was surprising when, this past March, Driscoll was seemingly ebullient about the new "expanded authority" that the passage of the BPRA in last year's budget had given NYPA.

At a New York Power Authority board meeting last month, he talked about the "excitement we're seeing around the organization to be involved in this." He discussed how well-positioned the authority was to begin delivering clean, cheap energy to New Yorkers: "It's an opportunity for NYPA to make a big impact on the state's energy infrastructure and footprint."

What changed his mind in the intervening 18 months? For one, Governor Kathy Hochul, his boss, got on board with the BPRA. But a second clue came during that board meeting, when he shared who exactly would be helping to plan the buildout of NYPA's ability to once again build, own, and possibly operate new renewable energy infrastructure—the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Investor owned utilities provide for both bribery and campaign donations (but I repeat myself), and Mr. Driscoll, as well as his ally the honorable (I joke) Kathy Hochul, Governor of the State of New York, see the appointment of McKinsey as an opportunity to turn this into yet another source for patronage and campaign donations.

"[We're] closely with McKinsey, as I previously discussed with you," Driscoll said. "They're helping us ensure our operating model internally and our internal governance around the buildout of renewables for the state, and with that support, we're finalizing a target operating model that leverages our strength and development, ownership, and commercialization to quickly deploy renewable projects for the benefit of the state and its residents."

Buried within that consultant-speak was insight into what exactly McKinsey was going to be working on with NYPA—essentially, forming the operating model for a buildout of public renewables that Driscoll had spent years fighting, but is now implementing at the behest of the governor.

In a statement, NYPA spokesperson Paul DeMichele told Hell Gate that McKinsey would be helping NYPA identify how they could better help the private sector develop renewable energy projects.

So, we won't see publicly owned power, we will see public private partnerships (PPP's) where the energy will be expensive, and profits accrue to the private side of the PPP, while the public bears the cost of cost overruns and the occasional disaster brought on by penny pinching.

………

The contract with McKinsey immediately rang alarm bells for environmental advocates, who had pushed for NYPA to begin building publicly owned renewable energy infrastructure as it became clear that the state would miss hitting its clean energy targets, which relied almost entirely on the private sector. They pointed to Driscoll's opposition to the BPRA, NYPA's own backtracking on climate goals, and the secretive nature of the rollout of NYPA's "expanded authority" as reasons to be worried that just a year after its passage, the BPRA is already in peril.

The BPRA was meant to fast-track a cleaner, publicly owned power grid—and passed after a concerted push by environmental groups and the Democratic Socialists of America, when New York included the first-in-the-nation climate measure as part of the state budget in 2023. The BPRA gives NYPA the ability to build out renewable energy infrastructure—wind, solar, battery storage, and more—if it found the private sector was unable to meet the state's legislated goal of 70 percent clean energy in its grid by 2030, and 100 percent clean energy by 2040.

McKinsey, known for aggressively advocating for privatization and market-oriented solutions, most recently made headlines in New York for its botched report on the danger posed to nursing homes by COVID-19. When it comes to its work in the energy industry, McKinsey has been implicated in everything from the Enron scandal, to rolling blackouts in South Africa, to undermining United Nations climate talks on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.

………

Driscoll told the board that while NYPA was ramping up staffing to fulfill its new mission, it would take years to get the right kind of expertise in-house to help run a renewable energy buildout.

This is, of course, a lie.  The NYPA could get up to speed quickly and hire trained and experienced people in a few months, but then all the records regarding how the decisions wold be made would be a matter of public record, whereas McKinsey's process is proprietary "Secret Sauce" and not open for public scrutiny.

"Horrified" is how Eleanor Stein, a long-time former member of the New York Public Service Commission, which regulates and oversees the electric power industry in New York, described her reaction when she found out that McKinsey would be helping to shape New York's renewable buildout. "To me, it signaled they're not actually serious about building anything—they're more interested in partnerships, in contracting out the work," she said.

Stein worries that by once again offloading the work to private actors, much of the spirit of the BPRA would be gutted, and that the BPRA's goal of providing cheap, clean energy to communities that need it the most won't be achieved.

That is the goal.  This is why Hochul used a loophole to appoint investor owned utility shill Justin Driscoll to head the NYPA.

They are both opposed to publicly owned power and publicly owned utilities.

Win

Renewable energy production in California exceeded total demand for 30 of 38 days, a significant milestone.

Admittedly, this is arguably the time of the year with the lowest electrical demand in the Golden State, but this is a heartening development:

In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California’s main grid for 30 of the past 38 days.

Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California’s renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Yesterday he posted:

This is not an anomaly.

It is the new reality.

The percentages will only increase each year

Once again, California exceeds 100% of demand on its main grid with #WindWaterSolar

This is the 30TH OF THE PAST 38 DAYS that #WWS supply has exceeded demand for 0.25-6 h per day. https://t.co/Wo44TgD8Sl pic.twitter.com/78DNHZn5pg

— Mark Z. Jacobson (@mzjacobson) April 14, 2024

Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for “0.25-6 h per day,” and that’s an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it’s happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

Hopefully, we will see more of this.

This will not save the world on its own, but it's a start.

What Happens When You Turn an Industry into a Financial Product

It used to be that residential solar power installation was an industry primarily geared toward selling and installing solar power installations.

These days, it is primarily a way to create complex financial instruments which either generate profit directly or through the resale of those pecuniary instruments.

It turns out that, like every financialized industry this has created an unsustainable petri dish for fraud, and now the "Unsustainable" part is coming to the fore:

A decade ago, someone knocking on your door to sell you solar panels would have been selling you solar panels. Now, they are probably selling you a financial product—likely a lease or a loan.

Mary Ann Jones, 83, didn’t realize this had happened to her until she received a call last year from GoodLeap, a financial technology company, saying she owed $52,564.28 for a solar panel loan that expires when she’s 106, and costs more than she originally paid for her house.

In 2022, she says, a door-to-door salesman from the company Solgen Construction showed up at her house on the outskirts of Fresno, Calif., pushing what he claimed was a government program affiliated with her utility to get her free solar panels. At one point, he had her touch his tablet device, she says, but he never said she was signing a contract with Solgen or a loan document with GoodLeap. Unbeknownst to Jones, the salesman used "yoursolarguyujosh@gmail.com" as her purported email address—that of course, was not her email address. She’s on a fixed income of $960 a month, and cannot afford the loan she says she was tricked into signing up for; she’s now fighting both Solgen and Goodleap in court.

Her case is not uncommon. Solar customers across the country say that salespeople obscure the specific terms of the financial agreements and cloud the value of the products they peddle. Related court cases are starting to pile up. “I have been practicing consumer law for over a decade, and I’ve never seen anything like what we are seeing in the solar industry right now,” says Kristin Kemnitzer, who represents Jones and says her firm gets “multiple” calls every week from potential clients with similar stories.

This is why it does not make sense to incentivize private actors to address public goods.

The goal of the private actors is NEVER to provide those public goods, it is to maximize the profit from the incentives provided.

………

Still, the residential solar industry is floundering. In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners—six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021. (This isn’t because of an economy-wide trend; the S&P 500 has grown 26% over the same time period.) Sunnova is also under the microscope for having received a $3 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy while facing numerous complaints about troubling sales practices that targeted low-income and elderly homeowners. Another solar giant, SunPower, saw shares plunge 41% on Dec. 18 after it said that it may not be able to continue to operate because of debt issues. Sunlight Financial, a big player in the solar finance space, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October; it also faces a lawsuit alleging that the company made false and misleading statements about its financial well-being.  

Lending long and borrowing short stops working when interest rates rise, and you end up paying more in interests than you get from borrowers.

Whatever the Fed raising interest rates have done, it has pulled the rug out from all sorts of irresponsible, and frequently criminal, actors in our economy.

At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies—or at least exaggerations.

Enough with the, "Or at least exaggerations," bullsh%$.  This is flat out lying.

Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in. 

………

Residential solar has always faced a big impediment to growth: installing and maintaining solar panels is expensive, and few consumers wanted to spend tens of thousands of dollars in cash to pay upfront for what was a relatively untested product. To get around this problem, a company called SolarCity came up with a new model in the early 2010s—leasing solar panels to customers, allowing them to pay little to no upfront cost. Companies like SunRun quickly followed; by 2014, this “third-party owned” kind of leased solar accounted for around 70% of total residential installations.

You remember SolarCity, run by Kimball Musk, and bailed out by his brother Elon, who was also a major investor, using Tesla shareholder money.

Funny, innit?

Besides enabling sales, there were other, even bigger, financial benefits of this practice for SolarCity. Since the company, not the consumer, owned the solar panels, SolarCity could claim the hefty 30% tax credit for solar panels the government approved in 2005. It then took those tax credits and sold them to companies like Google or Goldman Sachs who, unlike SolarCity, were making a profit and so owed money on their taxes. Those sales helped fund SolarCity’s further growth.

So even with SolarCity ripping off the taxpayers, they still flamed out.

The problem is with the whole model, which always fails like this.

By contrast, the Rural Electrification Program, begun in 1936, gave loans to cooperatively owned rural electric utilities, actually got the infrastructure built quickly and fraud free.

………

SolarCity ran out of money in 2016 and was acquired by Tesla, but the problems created by its expensive model have persisted. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.) Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with BloombergNEF. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. “The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high,” says Lezcano, making residential solar not “scalable.”

That was never the goal.  The goal was to allow Wall Street to get their vigorish.

………

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not—or would not—pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans—and in solar’s case, also leases—were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn’t deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar ABS [Asset Based Security] market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova’s asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar ABS had been around 1%. 

Tell me that this does not sound a lot like what led up to the implosion of Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Financial.

Whenever you try to subsidize a government priority, you get fraud and corruption, because the goal of the for-profit actors involved is to maximize profit.  (Econ 101)

They maximize profit by gaming the subsidies, which mitigates against their actually doing productive work.

Part of Teddy Kennedy's Legacy Just Fell

And it is a good thing.

While many of the things that Edward M. Kennedy championed in his decades in the Senate were good, there were a number of times he got it wrong.

One of his worst decisions was to use all levers of power at his disposal to shut doen any attempt to construct an offshore wind farm in Massachusetts.

It turns out that the turbines, which would have been so small when viewed from the shore that they would be obscured by a pinky at arm's length would have been barely visible from Hyannisport and Martha's Vineyard.

This bit of egregious NIMBYism has finally fallen with the Vinyard Wind project's first turbine coming online and feeding electricity into the grid.

The first large offshore wind farm in New England has started producing electricity, a milestone for an industry that has struggled to get off the ground over the past year.

The power started flowing late on Tuesday. For now, the Vineyard Wind project, located off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., can send only five megawatts of power to the grid from a single towering wind turbine. But the companies behind the project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, plan to install a total of 62 turbines with 800 megawatts of capacity, or roughly enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, by the end of this year.

“We’ve arrived at a watershed moment for climate action in the U.S., and a dawn for the American offshore wind industry,” said Pedro Azagra Blázquez, the chief executive of Avangrid, an American subsidiary of Iberdrola, the Spanish utility.

The only thing that would make this better would be if the turbines were state owned and operated.

Can We Give Them Back to Mexico?

It's Texas again, where their free-market Mousketeers have created a Petri dish for price gouging in electricity.

As a result of the anthropogenic climate change which the powers-that-be in Texas have denied, we are seeing an 800% surge in power prices:

Texas power prices for Sunday surged more than 800% as searing heat pushes demand toward record levels and strains supplies on the state grid.

Electricity prices for the grid rose to more than $2,500 a megawatt-hour for Sunday evening, up from Saturday’s high of about $275, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator. The surplus of available power capacity on the grid versus power consumption will narrow to 1.6 gigawatts in the hour ending at 6 p.m. Sunday, a level that can trigger emergency responses, though Ercot has additional reserves it can tap to meet demand.

This is at least the 3rd time in recent memory that Texas' criminogenic approach to its power grid has resulted in this situation.

It is clear that the people of Texas need a more functional and less corrupt government, and returning the Lone Star State to Mexico would do this.

This is Called a Death Rattle

Billions over budget, and over a decade late, the first nuclear power plant built in the US since the last century has come on line.

The customers of Georgia Power are going to be paying through the nose for this for years.

I worked briefly in nuclear power, on the back end of the fuel cycle, and it will never be viable for commercial use.

Even if everything is done right, and frequently it is not done right, it is ridiculously expensive even with the heavy subsidies:

It's more than half a decade late coming online and has cost billions more than estimated, but Georgia Power's Vogtle Unit 3, the first US nuclear reactor built from scratch this century, has finally come online.

Located near Waynesboro, Georgia, the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant's third reactor will supply an estimated 500,000 homes and businesses in the region with power. Utility companies in Georgia, Florida and Alabama all receive electricity generated by Vogtle's existing reactors, the first two of which came online in the late 1980s, and a fourth power facility is due to come online within the next year.

"Today's achievement … marks the first day of the next 60 to 80 years that Vogtle Unit 3 will serve our customers with clean, reliable energy." said Georgia Power CEO, chairman and president Kim Greene. Georgia Power said its overall energy mixture is now approximately 25 percent nuclear.

Construction on Vogtle 3, and its sister reactor Vogtle 4, began in 2009, making it the first nuclear reactor built from the ground up this century, but not the first new reactor in the last 23 years.

That honor belongs to Tennessee-based Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, which brought its second reactor online in 2016. Watts Bar Unit 2 began construction in 1972, but was paused in 1985. Construction wasn't resumed until 2007, and took another nine years to finish.

With Vogtle 3 online, Georgia Power is now turning to the completion of Vogtle 4, which it believes will be ready late in the fourth quarter of 2023 or early 2024. Once Unit 4 is online, Vogtle's total output will make it the "largest generator of clean energy" in the US, Georgia Power said.

"Largest generator," of nuclear power in the US?  Here's an investment tip:  If you can bet on their bankruptcy, it's a pretty good bet.

After all, one of the causes for the delay was the bankruptcy of the plant manufacturer, Westinghouse.