Utopia, you are standing in it!

If wind and solar power are so cheap, then why is it that Germany now suffers Europe’s highest power prices? And equally wind power obsessed, Denmark is right behind it?

On the one hand, the wind and solar cult point to Germany as the shining example of our inevitable transition to an all wind and sun powered future and wax lyrical about what’s been achieved. However, the same characters tend to quietly crab walk away from the hard facts about the effect of subsidised and unreliable wind and solar on power prices, a connection that is pretty obvious in Germany and Denmark. Inconvenient truths, and all that.

The same crowd of zealots also assert that nuclear power is so expensive as to be unaffordable.

The French obtain around 75% of their electricity from nuclear power plants.

So, why is it that the French enjoy power prices half those suffered in…

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance hit the weekend current affairs shows to make the case for the government’s housing/tax package.

I watched both the Newshub Nation interview – the one in which the Minister of Finance refused to rule out bringing in rent controls (a move which would, among other things, simply accelerate a trend towards the government itself being the main provider of rental housing) – and the one on Q&A. Perhaps because the latter is fresh in my mind – I only watched it this morning – but also because it was a better interview, I want to focus here only on the Q&A interview. For those who haven’t seen it, the whole thing seems to be available here. Incidentally, it was interesting that the government chose not to send out its Minister of Housing for these interviews.

What I found most striking was…

Sweden’s role in World War II has evoked little interest outside of that country. Although we now know this nation would never enter the war, Hitler and Dönitz could not count on this. For Hitler Sweden represented a valuable source of raw materials and manufactured goods, as well as a possible threat to Germany’s position in Norway. To Dönitz this politically unreliable nation’s location potentially endangered the navy’s U-boat training areas in the Baltic. Particularly in the final stage of the war, both Hitler and Dönitz endeavored to ensure at all costs that Sweden remained neutral.

On several occasions Hitler claimed a political motive for retaining a foothold in the Baltic States. He feared that withdrawing from Estonia, and later from Courland, would adversely affect Sweden’s attitude. Hitler believed that the presence of German troops in the Baltic States deterred Sweden from cutting off ore imports. On 5 September 1944…

During the recent Big Freeze, thousands of Texan wind turbines were frozen solid, incapacitated by burst of frigid winter conditions. Dead calm weather meant that those that weren’t frozen stiff, added practically nothing to the grid.

While the internal workings of wind turbines (gearboxes, generators, yaw and blade pitch controls) can be kept operable with on-board heating systems (chewing up electricity from the grid all the while), the 50-60m long blades are a different story.

This recent study from the Iowa State University shows that the phenomenon will knock – an already ephemeral energy source – completely out of action. As it did in Texas, last month.

Field study shows icing can cost wind turbines up to 80% of power production
Iowa State University
Hui Ha and Mike Krapil
4 March 2021

AMES, Iowa – Wind turbine blades spinning through cold, wet conditions can collect ice nearly a foot…

The Constitutional Balance, a new work by the former judge John Laws, was published posthumously in January. Here, David Feldman discusses the key themes of the book, and pays tribute to the author, a long-serving judge, who served as a Lord Justice of Appeal and was one of the most well-respected public law judges of the last 50 years.

The late Sir John Laws stood out as one of the greatest English public law judges of the last 50 years. Throughout his distinguished and creative career as Treasury Devil – First Junior Treasury Counsel (Common Law), responsible for advising and representing the government in a large range of public law matters – and judge, he was uniquely willing to argue publicly for and apply in his judgments a systematic philosophy of the liberal, democratic state and of the respective roles within it of the people, their representatives, the government and the…

Boosters assert that the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar will soon be remedied by the addition of giant lithium batteries. Well, that’s the marketing pitch tossed up by renewable energy rent seekers, anyway.

The volume of electricity stored by these so-called ‘giant’ batteries is risible, and their cost astronomical, such that the grid-scale storage of electrical power is simply a fantastic pipe dream.

Which, given the article below, may be no bad thing.

How do you Extinguish a Lithium Battery Fire?
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worall
4 March 2021

A few weeks ago I asked a fire fighter friend how they extinguish electric vehicle battery fires.

He said “Oh you mean like a Tesla or something? The answer is you can’t. You cordon off the area, and spray a fine mist of water on the fire to try to keep the temperature down until it finishes…

I’ve been warning that the United States should not copy Europe’s fiscal policy, largely because living standards are significantly lower in nations with large welfare states.

That’s true if you look at average levels of consumption in different nations, but the most compelling data is the fact that lower-income people in the United States generally enjoy living standards that are equal to or even higher than those for middle-class people in most European countries.

A bigger burden of government is not just a theoretical concern. President Biden has already pushed through a $1.9 trillion spending bill that includes some temporary provisions – such as per-child handouts – that, if made permanent, could add several trillion dollars to the burden of government spending.

And the White House has signaled support for $3 trillion of additional spending for items such as infrastructure, green energy, and other boondoggles.

This doesn’t even count the…

In a recent comment to the earlier thread on Canada’s dysfunctional electoral system, Wilf Day notes that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised that reforms to the Senate will be in place before the next general election. Included in Harper’s plans is a move to an elected Senate.

In many comparative politics texts, Canada is listed among the countries with a weak upper house, but as Wilf notes, technically the Senate is almost as powerful as the lower house. The Senate has not frequently challenged the authority of the lower house and the government that emenates from it, in part because it is an unelected body. I would add that simply being appointed is not enough to render an upper house weak, as the British House of Lords is actually far more influential than is often assumed in many of those same standard comparative politics texts. However, the…

In presidential systems, it is clear who is a candidate for the position of heading government–anyone who enters the election as a formal candidate for president. What about in a parliamentary system? This seems like a trick question. I assume it is straightforward: A person who is the leader of a party can be assumed to be a candidate for prime minister.

We might qualify that definition of candidacy for prime minister by saying it only applies to the leaders of parties expected to be among the largest in the election. Perhaps leaders of clearly minor or sectarian parties can be dismissed as candidates for the post as they are deemed as highly unlikely to claim the post. However, in presidential systems, we would define someone on the ballot as “not a candidate” just because he or she was considered unlikely to win the job. Is the standard different in…

In March 2021, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, gave one of the most extraordinary interviews ever held with a member of the Royal Family. It may have a profound and long-lasting effect on the monarchy, an institution that remains central to the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Already, there are calls for reform. This blog focuses on the section of the interview that discussed the lack of princely status for Archie, the Sussexes’ eldest child.

The aim is not to address the Duchess’s specific points, as the media have scrutinised them in great detail. Instead, the issue of Archie’s status is the key that opens the door to a range of issues that the monarchy faces as a political institution. The fallout from the interview creates the opportunity to reflect on how the titles of prince and princess should be distributed in the future while considering the changing role of the Royal Family…

March 22, 2021: On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It’s known as “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using his newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could only be seen during a total eclipse. More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The original picture was taken in May 1919 by astronomers Andrew Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson, who traveled from the Greenwich Observatory in London to the path of totality in Sobral, Brazil. They were part of a global expedition organized by Sir Arthur Eddington, who wanted to test Einstein’s strange ideas. Glass photographic plates from the expedition were typical of early 20th century astrophotography, colorless…

To mark Women’s History Month, Dr Paul Hunneyball, assistant editor of our Lords 1558-1603 section, recalls the first public statement by the ‘Virgin Queen’ that she had no plans to marry, and the incomprehension with which her (male) subjects reacted…

The first Parliament summoned by Elizabeth I opened on 25 January 1559 with a packed agenda. Urgent business in the opening days included a new settlement for the Church of England, and a bill recognising the Queen’s right to the throne, a sensitive topic given her periodic removal from the royal line of succession and her supposed illegitimacy – the fruits of her tumultuous early life. However, once the formalities of the state opening were completed, it took just four sittings before another issue entirely was raised in the House of Commons, one which Elizabeth herself did not wish to be discussed. As the Journal records on 4 February…

Israel’s general election is 23 March. To give away the punch line, I will note the subject line calls this the “2021a” election. That’s because the final polls point to continuing deadlock, and a high chance that there will be a 2021b later this year.

Of course, such a result is not inevitable. Maybe the polls will be off just enough to give one of the blocs a majority of seats. Or maybe there will be surprises after the election, with some party or parties willing to join a bloc that they seemed to have ruled out up to now. But we probably should take a second election this year as the most likely outcome, based on current information.

Jeremy’s Knesset Insider offers the summaries of all public polls. I took the average of all the polls released on either the 18th or 19th of March. The average of these…

Jonathan Pie: