What's Missing From Consumers Energy's Announcement?

The Detroit News: Consumers Energy plan calls for more than doubling capacity by 2040

Consumers Energy says it will more than double its system capacity by 2040 by using an “all-of-the-above” mix of natural gas, solar, wind, pumped and battery storage as part of a long-term supply proposal.  

Energy matters.  America's economy, businesses, and consumers all depend on available, reliable, and (relatively) inexpensive energy.

And we as a country have been deliberately negligent in maintaining that available, reliable, and (relatively) inexpensive energy - whether going for the Greenies with their no building of power plants whether coal or nuclear at all, to the Green New Deal with its demand of having unreliable solar and wind to replace reliable baseline power.

That Consumers is announcing they will double production capacity is welcome news, especially as all coal plants in Michigan have been set to close by 2032 and we're down to two nuclear plants from five and energy demand has not decreased.

In short, there's not going to be much in the way of reliable baseline production aside from some natural gas plants.  

Certainly that will be badly needed, as there's been scant increase in reliable production capacity. But notice that nuclear is missing from the  “all-of-the-above” mix.

Nuclear provides excellent baseline power and is reliable and yes, safe, and verily non-polluting and not even making those greenhouse gases the Greenies fret about, so long as you don't put communists in charge of it. 

A pity Consumers isn't leading the way with the new SMR reactors or even the large safe reactor designs. 

The Answer To This Question Is No

The Detroit Free Press: Michigan wants AI jobs and 100% clean energy. But can it do both?

At the same time Michigan's Democrats have required that power generation be from 100%clean  renewable sources by  2040, they now want to add a demand of gigawatts of power form their latest shiny fetish - Data Centers.

The power demand from data centers are daunting:

DTE also plans to provide power for the Stargate campus, OpenAI announced. In an Oct. 30 earnings call, DTE officials said they secured an agreement to power a 1.4-gigawatt data center. For reference, DTE’s Fermi 2 nuclear plant in Newport produces about 1.2 gigawatts of power, enough energy to power a city of a million people, according to the company. OpenAI said the power used for its Stargate campus will come from existing energy supply, and DTE said the data center will absorb electric costs, not local ratepayers.  

Not likely. Especially as the Democrats don't want increase reliable baseline production most especially not with nuclear power.

That one data center will take all of Fermi 2's generation just by itself, forget adding another data center.  They want even more. We're already susceptible to brown outs due to a lack of generation capability here,  and they want to add data centers to add to the load without increasing generation capability.

Unicorns and rainbows aren't going to power the Michigan Democrat's data center dreams. Until Dems get serious about power generation, this demand fir shiny hip data centers need to be stopped as it is unplugged from reality.

Spring Cleaning With TSP

As part of the results of hair-shirt environmentalism and enshittfication of everything you likely have noticed that your clothes are not as clean as they used to be some years ago, even as you've had to buy high-efficiency washing machines and detergent.

 This is because environmentalists and progressives worked to remove phosphates from laundry detergents. Clothes haven't been properly clean since.

This has not gone unnoticed: Why Everything Is Dirtier

Strangely enough, one can find trisodium phosphate,  TSP on Amazon. 

Now I'm certainly not suggesting that one should theoretically take 1/4 cup of TSP, dissolve it in hot water (beign careful not to splash it one yourself), and then add it to your laundry washing water, add detergent and then add your dirty clothes and run the laundry.

But, if you theoretically did, and again certainly not advocating doing such a thing, you might very well notice they come out one heckuva lot cleaner than without the added TSP.  

Happy Compost Your Girlfriend Day

It should not need to be said, but to be clear, this blog does not condone nor advocate composting your romantic interest. 

If it's reached the point where it is clearly absolutely not working out, don't try to bury your problems, just say goodbye, get on with your life, and handle it like a rational adult.

The co-founder of Earth Day didn't quite figure that part out. 

NBC News: Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend - NBC News

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

That's taking recycling way too far, and one would think in this day and age having that on your record would have you disowned by the Left rather than being celebrated.

However, his tactic of extorting corporations to pay his organization and in return be free from harassment has been copied and adopted as a model shakedown tactic by multiple leftist groups over time.

Ira Einhorn died in a US prison in April 2020, after having fled the country after the murder to Sweden and then France before being extradited back to the USA in 2001.  

There's no word on whether his remains were composted after his demise, but it would have been appropriate.

Just Stop Oil Goes After Aircraft And Taylor Swift Too

Flying:  Climate Activists Vandalize Jets at Airport Where Taylor Swift’s Plane Is Parked

Apparently the security at Stansted airport in England is less than ideal. 

The JSO jerks cut a hole in the airport fence, entered and spray painted jets with orange paint.  Because nothing really helps the environment like vandalism that requires chemicals to clean up.

Now, Just Stop Oil is really playing with fire here.  Going after Taylor Swift may unleash the demonic forces of millions of outraged T-Swizzle fans on their patchouli-stinking butts.

One might almost feel sorry for the JSO jerks in such case.  Almost. But not quite. The buggers deserve what they get, and they should be getting a lot more of it.

Just Stop Oil Needs To Be Stopped

Nihilism often cannot be reasoned with, unless you call smacking the nihilists with a 2x4 to be reasoning. This is especially the case when it comes to environmentalist nihilists.

 The Detroit News: Climate protesters arrested after painting Stonehenge monument orange

One should note that the clean up and the damage to the environment from the spray paint, and the chemicals needed to remove them having to clean up after these tantrums by these "environmentalists" are harming the environment, not to mention a monument made of natural materials that has stood there for thousands of years, the very thing they claim to be all about protecting.

It's a sad commentary that these "protesters" are most likely rather privileged and wealthy ideologues.  Privileged and wealthy ideologues who have become so wealthy and privileged due to the very surplus and profits created by the same civilization and scientific advances they now despise and wish to destroy.

At some point Just Stop Oil and the other proggy enviro whackos need to be declared hostis humani generis and dealt with accordingly.

Michigan Greenies Begin To Realize They Need Nuclear Power

The Pallisades Nuclear Plant should never have been shut down to begin with, but Michigan's Democrats wanted it shut down as "nukes bad".

The Democrats then realized that if they're going to go to an electric car heavy transportation grid and cut out coal power generation at the same time, their renewable project was not going to be able to cut it and provide reliable power in the face of increasing demand. Do recall that Governor Whitmer was all for shutting it down until she claimed to be against doing so at the last minute when it was too late to prevent the shutdown so she could be on both sides of the fence.

So we get:

The Detroit News: Palisades nuclear plant gets $1.5B federal loan in bid to reopen, a national first

It should never have been shut down in the first place, and Michigan is going  to need more nuclear power generation, not less, if the Democrats persist on getting rid of reliable baseline power and replacing it with  unreliable solar and wind that can't meet the demand.

We ReGreta To Inform You

News of your impending demise has yet again been overstated:

Yet another prediction of doom has failed to come to pass yet again. The enviros and those pushing for control of the economy and our lives under the guise of "Climate Change" really need to push their time-frames farther out and make less easily falsifiable predictions of doom.

So, congrats on yet again not being wiped out.

But if they didn't push immediate predictions of doom, it wouldn't be as scary would it?

After all impending doom is better and more scary when it is impending:

A physicist is giving a lecture and explaining that he has calculated that in 4 and 1/2 billion years the sun will exhaust itself of fuel and burn out, and all life at we know it in the solar system will end.

Upset, a man in the audience yells out, "Is there anything we can do professor? Can we form any congressional committees, or donate money for research?"

The physicist responds, "Sir, why are you so upset? This won't happen for 4 and a half billion years?"

"Oh, thank goodness," says the man. "I thought you said it would happen in 4 and a half million years, so there's still time!"

About Those Wildfires In Alberta And The Rest Of Canada

As usual, the left, is blaming it on climate change.

It's more likely however that the scale of this fire is based on both poorly-thought our leftist (greenie) environmentalist forestry management polices and budget cuts to wildlife fire-fighting capabilities by the socialist NDP party while they were in charger of Alberta.

Under the NDP in 2016, they cut the firefighting budget by $15, most of it to the air tanker program. They sure could have used those funds for this set of wildfires couldn't they?

A further problem is Alberta's and Canada's lack of appropriate forest management and thinning of brush and other combustibles in forests.

It's a little trite and too easy to blame the wildfires on climate change.  Instead, their extent is more due to a deliberate policy to not properly manage the forests to reduce the chances of a massive wildfires, combined with deliberate budget cuts to spending for firefighters to contain the wildfire.

The Hair Shirt / Plastic Mat School of Environmentalism

The kids' school, in addition to the standard curriculum, which is demanding in and of itself, requires them to take extra enrichment classes as they do their studies.

Some are excellent - for example a trip to Alabama to learn about segregation and the civil rights movement which Abby enjoyed, and learned a lot while seeing actual historic places and talking to people who were there. 

An enrichment on photography was pretty good, as was a class on learning how to make reasoned arguments.

Some of these enrichments though are not so good.

The current enrichment they both signed up for was on the environment.  It was available to fit their schedules, they needed an enrichment this term, and so they signed up.

So their required assignment for the enrichment was for each of them to create a sleeping mat to be donated to the homeless.

The environmental catch - it had to be made by them via crochet with them using plastic bags to create the mat following instructions.  Apparently this is to teach the kids to reuse evil environmentally-unfriendly plastic bags in new ways rather than as actual useful and reusable bags.

Well, it's in fact actually more an example of environmental stupidity than anything else.

To make the mats, you first have to cut plastic bags into strips and then crochet them into ropes and then into the mat design.

It does come out ok, eventually, but there's a catch.

We ran out of plastic bags to use at home.  Our bag of bags rapidly became empty. We also need those bags as Piper accident waste bags.   This caused issues.  Every bag we had and more got turned into crochet pieces.

It also makes the mats not look particularly good with the many varieties of plastic shopping bags being used.

We then started giving them new kitchen garbage bags to use for the project which are a lot easier to work with than the thin plastic shopping bags.  The second mat was made with 100% new kitchen garbage bags.

 Certainly looks nicer and the thicker material actually makes it kinda comfy.

Add to this material issue is the fact that it takes hours and hours and hours and hours for kids to crochet a 6-foot-long sleeping mat.  Hours they could be using studying or doing other useful rather than busy-work. It's literally taken them  months and lots of hours of time to get this done.

In the simplest terms this enrichment class is more about environmentalists' stupidity, feel-good-ism, and wasting time and resources while not effectively solving a problem, than it is about environmentalism. 

Not what they were trying to teach, but I sure hope the kids picked up on it.

In short, for the amount of time and materials the kids put in, mats could instead be purchased from Amazon, in a quantity sufficient enough for an entire Platoon to sleep on, providing nice, high-quality, sleeping mats for 50 homeless people rather than two ersatz ones.  Likely even more could be bought at a discount in a bulk purchase.

There's a lesson to be learned here, but it's certainly not the one the environmental enrichment class was trying to teach.

Decline Is A Choice

An awful lot of the convenience and benefits of living in modern western civilization is predicated on having cheap, reliable, energy.

A lack of cheap energy can result in a loss of jobs, as factories decided to go where electricity is available at better rates, as is the case with Ford's decision not to build its new plants in Michigan:

 The Detroit News: Whitmer: Michigan lacked 'real opportunity' to compete for Ford plants

Perhaps if our energy policy at the state level wasn't hell bent on reliance on unreliable renewables and shutting down reliable energy sources, we might have had that opportunity dear governor.  The demonstrated inability of our state power grid to weather storms this summer likely didn't help either.  That's 11,000 jobs going elsewhere. 

Among the reasons stated for this decision: 

Michigan's electricity prices are one factor that puts the state at a disadvantage for such projects. In July, the average industrial price of electricity per kilowatt-hour in Michigan was 8 cents compared with the national average of 7.53 cents, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Tennessee's price was 5.85 cents, Kentucky's was 6.06 cents and nearby Ohio's was 6.63 cents.

Those rates are caused by deliberate choices made at the state level to make energy more expensive here than elsewhere. such as shutting down our state's coal and nuclear plants and not building more, while overly subsidizing wind and solar in our cloudy state

The environmental movement along with its fellow travelers is hell-bent on  reducing the West's competitive advantages and standard of living, purportedly in the name of stopping climate change.  A lot of Europeans may either pay sky-high energy prices if available or may well freeze to death this winter in pursuit of that quixotic goal.

Forbes: Winter Is Coming: Can Energy Catastrophe Be Averted?

Why a catastrophe?  The switch away from reliable baseline power from coal and nuclear to unreliable wind and solar has put them in quite a pickle, with supply unable to meet the demand, and the Biden Administration and fellow Democrats at the national and state level wish to follow suit with a similar policy which will lead to the same results.

The energy crisis in Western Europe this summer has been brought on by premature retirements of hundreds of coal and natural gas power plants in favor of massive over-reliance on wind power and, to a lesser extent, solar. Ironically, this crisis is taking place just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats attempt to ram through their massive $3.5 “budget reconciliation” bill that is in large part designed to recreate the European model in the United States.

Decline in our quality of life and economies is a choice being deliberately made by our "leaders" today.  Of course, they wont take responsibility for the consequences of these choice.  They also won't suffer from such shortages and can afford increased costs - the average American or European, not so much.

Michigan Democrats Demand Vehicle Electrification While Demanding Electricity Generation Reduction At The Same Time

On the one hand, we have Democrats pushing for the total electrification of vehicles which means a much higher demand for electricity.

NPR: Whitmer signs orders to help automakers in shift to “mobility” business

The Detroit News: Biden makes electric pitch at Ford plant: 'There's no turning back'

On the other hand, we have Democrats pushing for the closure of power plants that produce electricity without building sufficient replacement reliable baseline power.

Fox 2: DTE officially closing River Rouge Power Plant Friday

That's 840 megawatts of reliable power to Michigan being dropped without a reliable replacement at the behest of the Michigan Public Service Commission and advocacy groups.

So, where's the additional electricity to power all these electric vehicles going to come from, not to mention to satisfy the existing demand for power?

After all, we're now being told electricity will increase 50% in peak hours this summer, meaning during from 2pm to 7pm due to increased demand in the summer months - without all these new electric vehicles demanding power at that time.

The Detroit News: Consumers Energy electricity rate increases 50% during peak hours

Note the reason for the increase:

The higher cost during certain times of the day is a part of a greater trend in the energy industry seeking to reduce power generation as it pivots to relying on greener and renewable resources by providing a financial incentive to ratepayers to not use the dishwasher, do laundry or vacuum when energy demand is at its highest.

So there's a goal of reduced generation of power being sought  (with the goal to totally eliminate reliable coal powered plants that create rather inexpensive electricity by both  Consumers Energy and DTE) and replace it with far less reliable wind and solar.  Then, at the very same time mandate a highly increased demand for power for the electrification of vehicles at the same time by the same people.

What could possibly go wrong? 

Cause And Effect: Michigan Government Creates A Propane Shortage, Declares Emergency To Address It

Nothing like government causing a problem to have the same government step in and announce an emergency 

It's not like Governor Half-Whit can't say she wasn't warned what would happen with her enviro greenie regulations.

The Detroit Free Press: Whitmer to revoke Enbridge oil pipeline easement in Straits of Mackinac

The Detroit News: What a Line 5 shutdown would mean for Michigan's energy

Sure enough, she closed the line and -

Today:  Whitmer signs executive order to ensure adequate propane distribution

Well, when you shut down a pipeline delivering 756,000-gallons-a-day, 65% of the UP's propane and 55% of the state's propane supply, and you certainly don't have the trucks to replace that, you get a propane shortage.  This of course comes as a complete surprise to our governor who doesn't seem to get the concept of cause and effect.

  You also of course get a lot more road traffic and pollution from all those trucks now driving with lots of overtime and risks of road accidents and spillage,  trying to do what a pipeline was doing in a very environmentally friendly fashion.  So higher energy prices and shortages result, along with more actual environmental damage.

 But that's ok, because pipelines are bad now, right?

While California Is Undergoing An Electric Power Shortage With No Expected Relief In Sight

Governor Newsom announces that by 2035 only electric cars may be sold as new vehicles in California.

The Detroit News: California moves to end sales of new gas-powered cars

California will halt sales of new gasoline-powered passenger cars and trucks by 2035, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday, a move he says will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 35% in the nation’s most populous state.

 As there's no simultaneous push to increase reliable electric power generation in the state of California to meet the demand of all these new electric cars, and they can't even keep up with electrical demand as it stands now.

  I think we can have a pretty good idea as to how this is going to end up.

Of Mussels And Men

So, it's starting to look like the State of Michigan required the operators of the Edenville Dam (The one that just failed in Midland in a rather horrific and spectacular fashion) to keep water levels higher than was safe due to the risk to freshwater mussels.

The state actually took the Dam operators to court on May 1, and was fining them for failing to keep the water levels high, rendering it susceptible to the collapse - long after the Feds had pulled its power operating license in 2018 due to its inability to handle flood-level waters.

Let's repeat that: The state pressured the operators to keep the lake levels high this April and sued them to make them do so this month.

Yep, the safety of the populace and an increase risk of the damn collapsing was traded in favor of preserving the population of freshwater mussels in Wixom Lake.

The Detroit News: Dangers of Edenville dam failure evaded state scrutiny

Is there any decision our current state government can't mess up?

The Dem's Soylent Green New Deal

Ocassional-Cortex released her Green New Deal position paper and it's a doozy.

About the only thing its missing preventing it from becoming a path to a perfect utopia is a demand that the population of the cities be driven into the fields to work on communal farms.

I figure that'll be phase 2.

Reading the overview, from her office quite a few things stand out (Note they have since taken this down, but the Internet is kinda forever):

Ending air travel and replacing it with rail. Shows a complete lack of comprehension about economics, efficiency and the fiscal and engineering impossibility of running high speed rail track to every community in the United States. Its a monorail sales pitch all the way down.

Banning nuclear power - if they were actual environmentalists they'd know that nuclear is pretty darn clean and about the only reasonable and reliable alternative to fossil fuels.

Banning all fossil fuels and going to all "clean renewables" so under this plan prepare for power outages and brownouts in your area soon, comrade.

Even better is the communist approach to the Green New Deal, less environment and more about total state, union and Democrat control of the economy:

Build on FDR’s second bill of rights by guaranteeing:
Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work

Read that one again.

Funding for it is blithely suggested to be done by the Fed simply printing money and incurring trillions and trillions of debt, not to mention all Green New Deal Jobs are to be union jobs under this scheme.

Hilariously, the position paper even admits that even if all the vilified billionaires and all companies in the US kicked in, it still wouldn't be enough money, only running the printing presses in overdrive might produce enough. Economics and reality really doesn't work that way. Basically this is impossible crony socialism at its worst.

Yep, its a watermelon plan all right. Green on the outside, red on the inside.

Anyone who believes in this nonsense is gullible at best to be charitable.

Fragile Systems Are, By Definition, Fragile

During the height of the cold yesterday there was an emergency gas shortage caused by a fire at a Consumers Gas processing plant.

With just one facility knocked out of service, Consumers lost access to about 64% of their supply of gas available for heating and power generation. This caused emergency alerts throughout the state, complete with appeals for people to turn their thermostats down to use less gas, and the closure of factories to also conserve gas.

When a problem at a single facility can imperil 64% of your product at a time its most needed, that suggests you've got a less than reliable system with insufficient resiliency and emergency capacity in place for then the unexpected happens.

Combine this with Michigan Enviro's desire to get rid of coal and nuclear and use natural gas more heavily for power generation in the state as reported in detail by Right Michigan, and expect more of these unnecessary crises in the future.

That Puritan Strain Of Enviromentalism....

The fear that someone, somewhere might be having fun in our natural environment and therefore must be stopped.

The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a name that in and of itself is practically an oxymoron, is filing a lawsuit to stop people swimming with Manatees in Crystal River, Florida.

Fox News: Lawsuit aims to ban swimming with manatees in Florida

There are already plenty of protections for Manatees in the Crystal River, including a roped-off no-entry area reserved just for them.

There's also a lack of any real data concerning problems with swimmer-manatee interactions as currently held. If anything, such interactions help the manatees by making people want to save and conserve them.

Manatees are in far greater danger from boat propellers than human swimmers and this lawsuit seems more to generate headlines and increase federal bureaucratic overreach than anything else.

The current rules seem to have worked as in 2007 it was recommended that the manatees be no longer considered endangered as their population is doing quite well there. Also a fair chunk of money from the tours go to manatee conservation, so cutting that off would reduce funding for their protection, which would likely lead to a demand for more federal funding and federal bureaucrats to administer that funding (hmmm....).

Having actually snorkeled in Crystal River with Manatees I can attest to the care of the tour operators to comply with the rules concerning swimming with Manatees.

The Name Changes But The Game Remains The Same

The term "Global Warming" isn't working out to well, considering for years the trend has been towards global cooling, with no sign of warming for over 17 years.

The replacement term "Climate Change" apparently wasn't scary nor descriptive enough.

Now the new favored term is "Climate Disruption".

Disruption is scarier sounding and a harder hypothesis to prove or disprove, and after all how could a Progressive be for disrupting the established climate order?

The goal, previously hidden and denied is now openly stated by many environmental groups is to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism using "Climate Disruption" as the driver.

The Daily Caller: 130 Environmental Groups Call For An End To Capitalism

Environmentalists have declared that global warming can’t be stopped without ending the “hegemonic capitalist system,” saying that cap-and-trade systems and conservation efforts are “false solutions.” “The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” reads the final draft of the Margarita Declaration, presented at a conference including about 130 environmental groups. “To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system,” the declaration adds.

To add some irony, guess where they met:

Environmental activists met in the oil producing, socialist country of Venezuela as part of a United Nations-backed event to increase civil engagement in the lead up to a major climate conference.

Oil producing, carbon-exhaling Venezuela. Given the established track record of self-declared socialist countries Venezuela is probably not just an evil carbon producing country but probably an environmental nightmare as well. But declare yourself socialist and it covers all faults.

The global green watermelon movement - the green on the outside is peeling off revealing the solid red underneath.

FIAT Losing Money On Every 500e Electric Car

It seems that Chrysler's Italian savior has adopted the Big 3 policy of losing money on cars they sell but making it up in volume.

The Detroit News: Marchionne: Fiat loses $14K on every electric 500

So why are they selling the 500e when every car is a $14k hit to the bottom line?

Basically it's due to perverse environmental incentives and regulations with which the company must comply.

Marchionne last year had estimated the company would lose about $10,000 on each subcompact 500e, which went on sale last summer and was created to comply with California’s zero-emissions vehicle rule. Fiat will expand sales to Oregon this summer.

Without the regulation, it's unlikely FIAT would willingly produce a loss-leader car like the 500e.

The Fiat 500e, has a starting price of $32,300, but can be purchased for as little as $19,300 when accounting for tax credits and incentives.

In other words, the rest of the US via the electric vehicle income tax credit is subsidizing California car buyers picking up electric vehicles for below cost. The vehicle is only environmentally (and that's only if you don't look to where the electricity in the electric car comes from) but not economically viable.

On top of losing on the 500e, FIAT must also buy emissions credits:

FCA — which has had to buy emissions credits to comply with U.S. guidelines

FIAT has found itself fouled by government fiat.