Returning from Washington after the court hearing on Friday, I took the Amtrak train to Penn Station, and then the subway a few stops down to my home in Greenwich Village. It being the tail end of the rush hour, the subway was relatively crowded.
A few moments after getting on the subway train, something struck me: every single person in my field of vision was staring at a smartphone screen.
This morning the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington held oral argument in the case of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA.
That’s the case where a hardy band of citizen petitioners (CHECC) challenges the 2009 finding of EPA that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a “danger” to human health and welfare by reason of their potential to warm the atmosphere.
That finding, known as the Endangerment Finding or EF, is the underlying basis for the all-of-government regulatory assault on the fossil fuel industry and the energy economy currently being conducted by the Biden Administration.
Slightly less than all of the argument was devoted to an issue that we lawyers call “standing.”
My previous post discussed a few aspects of the just-issued Tesla Report with the title “Sustainable Energy for All of Earth.” Today, I’ll poke around at a couple more.
If you were to try to read this Report (not recommended) you will quickly find your head spinning in a sea of numbers the significance of which is completely unclear.
Was that last number expressed in kilowatts, megawatts, gigawatts, terawatts or petawatts? Is it big or small? Reasonable or completely absurd? It’s quite difficult to tell without some context.
So let me try to provide some of that.
One of the core subjects of this site for several years has been doing reality checks on the schemes of Net Zero central planners. Is there any chance that these zero carbon economy schemes might work? Or are they just dreams that ignore obvious physical obstacles in a religious zeal to reach an imagined future utopia?
My prior writings on this subject are summarized in my December 2022 Report “The Energy Storage Conundrum,” and in my recent posts (here and here) on the work of Bill Ponton regarding the UK.
On April 5 Tesla dropped into the debate a big Report of their own, with the title “Sustainable Energy for All of Earth.” Tesla reaches the exact opposite conclusion from me and the people I have cited in my writings on this subject.
Could that be?
Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?
After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.
So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.
Bill Ponton’s new Report, “The Cost of Increasing Wind Power: A Reality Check,” contains a short but pithy section addressing the question of energy storage.
Here’s the question to be addressed: If after the first round of overbuilding, adding new wind generation resources adds little useful energy and most of the added generation ends up getting “curtailed,” then why not just add some batteries or other energy storage to the system? Wind energy advocates suggest that some form of batteries can store the excess electricity production until it is needed, and everything will then just balance out in perfect equilibrium.
Is there any problem here?
Ponton does the simple calculations with his UK 2022 spreadsheet to derive how much storage in GWh will be needed, and what its functional characteristics must be.
