What Is The Cost Of Getting To A 100% "Renewable" Electric Grid?

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What Is The Cost Of Getting To A 100% "Renewable" Electric Grid?

If you are a politician in a blue area, the big thing these days is to make the pledge that you will put your state or city on the fast track to getting 100% of its electricity from the "renewables."    Here in New York, trendy progressive Cynthia Nixon (challenging Governor Cuomo in a primary for Governor) has issued the call for getting 100% of electricity from renewables by 2050.  Even trendier Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants the same 100% from renewables without specifying a date.  Out in California, a bill advancing through the legislature calls for 100% of electricity from "renewables" by 2045.

But has anyone stopped for a moment to ask how this would work or how much it would cost?  Of course there is the Manhattan Contrarian -- for example in "How Much Do Climate Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Price Of Electricity?" in August 2016; or "How Self-Delusional Can We Be On The Cost Of Electricity From 'Renewables'?" in February 2018.  Yes, mine are basically back-of-the-envelope calculations.  Not that there's anything inherently wrong with a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this subject.  The truth is that you can get pretty good rough estimates from easily available sources of how much back-up you need to fill in for the intermittent "renewables," and you can multiply that by cost-per-kWh figures for batteries, and thus, using no more than pencil and paper, get useful estimates of impact on electricity costs.  Those impacts, by the way, are not small.  

But how about looking for a study that's a little fancier and more sophisticated, maybe from some certified academic source?

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Good Riddance To Obama's CAFE Standards

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On Thursday the U.S. EPA and DOT announced a new proposed rule on automobile fuel efficiency standards.  The proposed rule would halt after 2020 the ongoing increases in required "Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency," or "CAFE" standards applicable to new vehicles sold.  Previously, under a rule promulgated by the Obama administration in 2012, automobile companies were supposedly going to achieve a "corporate average" fuel efficiency of their new vehicles of 54.5 mpg by 2025.  Does anything bigger than a moped actually get 54.5 mpg?

Call me crazy, but I struggle to understand why the American people are not capable of figuring out on their own how fuel-efficient of a vehicle they should buy.  This is called "freedom."  Obviously, a less-fuel-efficient vehicle costs more per mile to operate.  People are always looking to save a buck, so then obviously wouldn't they buy the most fuel-efficient vehicles available?  It turns out that sometimes they do, but mostly they don't.  Undoubtedly, although they value fuel efficiency, they also value other things in a vehicle.  In recent years the most popular vehicles for consumers have been pickup trucks -- the Ford F series and Chevy Silverado -- which are relatively large and fuel-inefficient compared to sedans and compacts.  Car and Driver rates the Ford F-150 at 16 mpg city, and 22 mpg highway, which is nowhere near the 54.5 mpg average that the Obama administration was trying to impose on Americans.  Maybe the people value the ability to carry large amounts of "stuff" around from place to place.  Maybe they also think that larger and heavier vehicles are safer in a crash.  Are these advantages worth the extra fuel cost?  I'd say that's up to the people to determine on their own.  

Let's calculate the difference in fuel cost between a vehicle that gets an average of 20 mpg and one that gets an average of 30 mpg. . . .

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Thank Heavens For The New Campaign Against Plastic Straws

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Thank Heavens For The New Campaign Against Plastic Straws

Without doubt, a good classic tale of sin and redemption makes a powerful appeal to human emotions.  Do you find yourself with an overwhelming sense of guilt, and a yearning for atonement and salvation?  A very large number of humans do.  Plenty of others will listen seriously when accused of sinning.  And in this era when traditional religion is fading fast among the trendy set, the favored sin and redemption narratives tend to revolve around the environment and the "planet."  For decades, the number one such narrative has been the global warming story:  By our use of fossil fuels to power a modern industrial society and to develop great wealth, we have sinned against the planet, leading to a future of irreversible catastrophic warming!  Redemption lies in the collective commitment to give up our use of energy and our modern ways and to cede control of our lives to our environmental priests and priestesses!

Unfortunately, after a good run of several decades, this narrative has recently run into a serious problem, namely the failure of global temperatures to increase in accordance with official predictions of catastrophe and doom.  Just a couple of weeks ago, in a post titled "Why 'Climate Change' Seems To Have Faded From The News," I noted that world temperatures had declined by more than half a degree C over the past couple of years, thus giving back about half of all of the twentieth century "global warming."  The frequency of press stories banging the global warming drum has inevitably declined dramatically, with the few remaining stories relegated to trying to keep up the alarm by cherry-picking a handful of record high temperatures from somewhere around the world, while omitting any mention of corresponding record lows or the decline in the overall average.  The main piece of reporting that I criticized in that post came from the Washington Post.

So what is the New York Times to do? . . .

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Some Fun With Paul Krugman Quotations

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Now that Trump-era U.S. GDP growth has reached the 4.1% level according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, shouldn't we go back and review a few choice quotes from Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman?

It's been a long time since I've done any Krugman-bashing.  And why should we waste much of our valuable time on a guy who is so overcome with anger and invective that he has become a self-parody?  The answer is, occasionally you need to compare his prognostications to the real world to see just how wrong it is possible to be.  The operative word here is "occasionally."  I promise not to do it again for a while.

But anyway, if it's been a long time since you have read anything by Krugman (and I hope it has), it may be fading into the recesses of your memory that he devoted considerable energy during the Obama presidency to excusing sluggish economic performance as having nothing to do with Obama or his policies.  Slow economic growth had nothing to do with Obama's overall hostility to successful businesses; nothing to do with expensive increases in unproductive regulations; nothing to do with the war on fossil fuel energy and coal; nothing to do with corporate tax rates that were uncompetitive in the international arena; nothing to do with dozens of phony prosecutions and shakedowns of financial institutions; nothing to do with wasteful spending and debt accumulation; nothing to do, in short, with what I described all the way back in 2013 as Obama's "War Against The Economy."   No, instead, slow economic growth was just the "new normal," a natural state of late-stage capitalism that was completely inevitable and just had to be endured -- or perhaps ameliorated a little by the preferred prescription of a blow-out round of entirely wasteful government spending.

You don't believe me that his predictions could have been so bad?  Then I'll give you a few choice quotes. . . .

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Is Portugal Experiencing A Surge Of Growth Caused By "Casting Aside Austerity"?

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Is Portugal Experiencing A Surge Of Growth Caused By "Casting Aside Austerity"?

I'm getting to this one a little late, but last weekend the New York Times had one of those big economic stories that just cried out for checking into the real data.  Here are the headline and sub-headline:  "Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity.  It’s Having a Major Revival.  At a time of mounting uncertainty in Europe, the country has defied critics who insisted on austerity as the answer to the Continent’s economic and financial crisis."  Do real data actually back up this narrative?

Before getting too far, we should have a review of the defined term.  What is "austerity"?  From my post of August 18, 2013 ("The Horrors Of 'Austerity,' Singapore Edition"):  "[T]he term "austerity" is a befuddled Keynesian mixture of low government spending and taxes sufficient to cover all spending."  I've never understood why, in the progressive press, the alternatives for economic policy get divided between lower spending/higher taxes ("austerity") on the one hand, and higher spending/lower taxes ("stimulus") on the other.  What about lower spending/lower taxes?  You never hear about that one.  As my 2013 post noted, Singapore has long been the world champion of the combination of both low taxes and low spending, which have been accompanied by decades of world-beating economic growth, prosperity, and low unemployment.  (Singapore's GDP per capita is approximately equal to that of the U.S.)

So what does the Times have to say about Portugal?  

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The Remaining Obstacle To President Trump's Plan For U.S. Energy Dominance

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President Trump came into office last year promising a prompt rollback of destructive regulation of carbon dioxide and a new era of "energy dominance" for America.  Just two months into his presidency, in March 2017, Trump issued an Executive Order directing all executive agencies to  "review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources. . . ."   On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.  And in October 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced, in a notice of proposed rule making, that the so-called Clean Power Plan -- an Obama-era regulatory initiative seeking to wipe out the generation of electricity by coal in the U.S. -- would be revised or scrapped.

Meanwhile, you can tell from the recent substantial lack of news on the climate front from the mainstream media that climate hysteria, both in the U.S. and internationally, is unraveling with remarkable rapidity.  Just since early 2016, world temperatures are down by about two-thirds of a degree C -- which is well more than half of the 20th century warming.  Canadian and Australian voters are resoundingly repudiating carbon taxes.  In the UK, after years of delay, the first horizontally-drilled wells using fracking technology are finally moving forward.  Germany has conceded that it will come nowhere near its previous carbon-reduction goals, and has stopped making any serious attempt to reach same.  The third world, led by China and India, proceeds with plans to build and deploy some 1600 new coal-fired power plants.  

Obviously, whatever pieties may continue to be uttered, no one with a brain cares about the bogeyman of "carbon emissions" any more.  The U.S., as the leader in fracking technology and with vast reserves of coal, oil and gas, seems poised for the energy dominance promised by the President.  Can anything stop us now?  Unfortunately, there is a significant remaining obstacle.  It is a landmine of the legal variety, planted by the Obama administration with the intent to have it blow up any efforts to revert from fantasy schemes of non-functional intermittent energy back to a system of inexpensive energy that actually works.  

I'm referring, of course, to the so-called Endangerment Finding (EF) of the EPA. . . .

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