Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

Anti-wind groups are oil-funded? Surprised Pikachu.

Why tho? Oil money should be funding renewables so they continue making money.

> Oil money should be funding renewables

not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.

Only the ones not funded by Russia.

You can argue both sides right? It makes business sense for oil money to do that.

However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.

I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.

Well, Russia itself is oil founded (huge part of the budget)

The demand for oil as hydrogen base, plastic and other derivatives will keep those platforms profitable for a long time. Maybe not as massively profitable as now but more than a reasonable ROI. Oh wait, more profits above everything no matter what because the plebs are the only ones affected by it so they don't care.

You can actually do both. This way you have full control - invest where you control the market and sabotage where you don't.

Shell at one point started doing that in the UK, they installed a number of offshore wind turbines. Then they sold them and doubled down on oil.

What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.

The whole point for them is ownership and while you can in effect own oil fields and these companies do, you don't own the wind -- the oil companies weren't smart enough/ early enough to persuade major governments to say oh, actually the wind belongs to BP and Exon.

So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.

This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.

  What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power.

They do. It's just not as lucrative as oil so they sell the business and go back to oil. Say an oil company has $100 to spend on new energy. A new oil field nets them back $500 over 5 years. Wind nets them $200 over 5 years. Why would they invest in wind other than for PR?

China has to import 70% of its oil so it needs to focus on renewables. If the US doesn't produce enough oil for its own needs, it too would be building solar and wind at scale I presume. But the US is a net oil exporter.

Which is weird, because there's precedent for companies owning water rights. The step to owning wind rigths doesn't feel that far.

I'm wondering if the current governmental backlash to wind is just a prelude to getting "wind rights" of vast geographical areas sold to some properly bribing oil corporation.

Then the company can totally control the transition from oil to wind in such a fashion as to extract maximum revenue without having to care about any external competition.

For oil companies, smooth transition to renewables == lost profits.

They'd rather see world go through an energy crisis which will make their profits skyrocket, before we eventually de-fossilize.

Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.

My very limited understanding is that many of those assets require a certain timeline and rate of oil consumption for the investment to make sense financially. If global oil consumption goes down by say 50%, lots of assets just become worthless (even if someday we use them.)

Even when going full renewable and nuclear, demand for existing infrastructure is unlikely to make these rigs unprofitable over the long term. Moving all the economy will take time.

It's because renewables aren't what customers naturally want, that's why grids have to be forced to take their output using preference schemes and subsidies.

The financial modeling also relies heavily on the assumption of government preference (hard if there is a huge lobby who hates your guts) and wind speeds holding constant (wind speeds are falling and this is blowing holes in wind farm finances).

I agree although I think the value of the piece is in literally mapping out the relationships, and in explaining the extent of the problems, such as in ties to defunding an entire university's research budget over it.

Because short-term profits outweigh everything probably.

Also most of the value capture in solar and batteries like literally 70%+ is happening in China, while this could've been a win-win situation it has disturbed a lot of existing equations of the system.

As an example I feel even Gas electricity LCOE equivalent is calculated as Capex + Opex where Capex amortisation over lifetime depends on capacity factor of Gas turbine plant. With more renewable penetration even in a competitive market like ERCOT the LCOE equivalent costs for Gas increases although technically this should drive overall electricity lower and should work for everyone.

This completely creates a significant issue for Natural Gas future too which I think was unthinkable for US Gas producers as it was the safest bet decades into the future.

Not too talk about what even a 3-4% Oil demand destruction in Oil for transportation due to EVs can do to the oil markets.

All this seemed theoretical before but now the tides are finally changing led by China and most of the world has a vested interest in reducing Oil and Gas dependency as most of the world are net importers too.

So all these plays are essentially trying to maximise the cash producing life of the current assets whether it can be achieved by FUD or whatever other means necessary.

oil is a huge mistake at this point, as any country that is investing in a solar/wind/renewables GRID, is watching there costs go into freefall, not just freefall, but costs that are disconected from energy markets built on consumable fuels and therefor stable and predictable. many countrys are figuring out that energy stability = societal/cultural stability and are slowly backing away from the chaos and ongoing disaster of oil/carbon

And renewables are quick money. We need all sort of generation, it's not like renewables are going to replace all oil in near future. Every generation is being swollen up.

It’s not a coincidence that the weird red carpet summit in Alaska for Putin apparently focused on joint energy projects with this shambolic administration.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-russian-officials...

electricity customers want one thing - cheap, reliable power. Where it comes from does not matter unless there is a price on carbon emissions.

The electricity grid is not "forced" to accept anything. Places like Texas show that economic incentives work for renewable energy. In fact, economic incentives are stronger than disinformation.