The Green Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think -- Or Not

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The Green Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think -- Or Not

  • Among the media sources serving as propagandists and cheerleaders for the “green energy transition,” two of the most prominent are the New York Times and Bloomberg News. To get an idea how the “transition” is going, let’s take a look at the latest from those two.

  • From the Times, in this morning’s print edition, we have a feature article that apparently first appeared online a couple of days ago, August 17. The headline is: “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” The sub-head continues the excitement: “The United States is pivoting away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other renewable energy, even in areas dominated by the oil and gas industries.”

  • But then Bloomberg News comes out yesterday with an editorial that seems to reach the exact opposite conclusion. Headline: “Net Zero Is Stalling Out. What Now?”

  • So which is it? Is the green energy future arriving “faster than you think,” or “stalling out”? Both can’t be right. Who has the better side of this?

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Annals Of Crazy Climate Litigation: Held v. Montana

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  • Out in the real world, use of fossil fuels continues to grow, and will with 100% certainty continue to do so. In places like India and Africa, people are just getting their first taste of things like cars, computers, and air conditioning. They are not going to turn back.

  • Meanwhile in the fantasy world of the climate cult, it’s only a matter of enough government decrees, subsidies, and maybe a few court orders, and the whole functioning and inexpensive fossil-fuel-based energy system will suddenly be replaced by something yet to be invented.

  • In the court order department, various pie-in-the-sky lawsuits seek to find a judge willing to take the big leap and order the end to fossil fuels. Hey, why not? In 2015 a group of adolescents in Oregon (orchestrated by an environmental zealot group called Our Children’s Trust) brought a case called Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States, seeking to get a federal judge to decree the end to all use of fossil fuels. In 2017 that case earned a Manhattan Contrarian nomination as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” After two trips to the Ninth Circuit and one to the Supreme Court, that case now finds itself back in the Oregon District Court, where the Biden/Garland Justice Department is once again trying to block it on grounds of justiciability. Even Biden and Garland aren’t this crazy.

  • Yet even as the Juliana case continues to languish, another very similar case has leapt ahead of it, and has gotten the coveted first sweeping anti-fossil-fuels court order. The case is Held, et al. v. Montana.

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Comments From Supporters Of EPA's New Power Plant Rule

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  • My last post highlighted two lengthy comments submitted to EPA by groups of states critical of the agency’s recently-proposed “Power Plant Rule.” (EPA’s official title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” ).

  • The Rule seeks to eliminate, or nearly so, all greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants, by some time in the 2030s. The comments that I highlighted delve into substantial technical detail, giving serious reasons why EPA’s proposed transformation of the country’s electricity generation system is unlikely to work and poses severe risks to the people’s electricity supply.

  • What about on the other side? Are there any comments on the proposed Rule that are supportive of the Rule, and that even contend that its restrictions on use of fossil fuels to generate electricity should be made more stringent, and/or advanced in time? The answer is that there are many such comments.

  • But how do these supportive comments deal with the problems identified in the critical comments?

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Comments On The Insanity Of EPA's New Power Plant Rule

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  • On May 23, EPA put out its long-expected proposed Rule designed to eliminate, or nearly so, all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions from the electricity-generation sector of the economy.  The proposal came with the very long title: “New Source Performance Standards for GHG Emissions from New and Reconstructed EGUs; Emission Guidelines for GHG Emissions from Existing EGUs; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.”  The full document is 672 pages long.   

  • Various not-very-far-off deadlines are set, ranging from as early as 2030 for some changes to coal plants, to at the latest 2038 for the last changes to natural gas plants. 

  • But how exactly is this emissions elimination thing to be accomplished?  Today a substantial majority of U.S. electricity (about 60%) comes from one or the other of those fuels; and it is inherent in the burning of hydrocarbons that you get CO2 as a product.  In all those 672 pages, EPA has only two ideas for how to eliminate the carbon emissions from combustion power plants: carbon capture and storage (CCS), and “green” hydrogen.  Either you must implement one of those two ideas to meet EPA’s standards by the deadline, or you must close your power plant. 

  • But here’s the problem: both of those ideas are, frankly, absurd. 

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The Real World Costs Of Backing Up Weather-Dependent Electricity Generation With Battery Storage

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The Real World Costs Of Backing Up Weather-Dependent Electricity Generation With Battery Storage

  • A recurring question at this blog has been, how do the world’s politicians plan to provide reliable electricity without fossil fuels? Country after country, and state after state, have announced grand plans for what they call “Net Zero” electricity generation, universally accompanied by schemes for massive build-outs of wind and solar generation facilities. But what is the strategy for the calm nights, or for the sometimes long periods at the coldest times of the winter when both wind and sun produce near zero electricity for days or even weeks on end?

  • When pressed, the answer given is generally “batteries” or “storage.” That answer might appear plausible before you start to think about it quantitatively. To introduce some quantitative thinking into the situation, last December I had a Report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”

  • That Report discussed several calculations of how much energy storage would be required to get various jurisdictions through a year with only wind and/or solar generation and only batteries for back-up, with fossil fuels excluded from the mix. The number are truly breathtaking: for California and Germany, approximately 25,000 GWh of storage to make it through a year; for the continental U.S., approximately 233,000 GWh of storage to make it through a year. At a wildly optimistic assumption of $100/kWh for storage, this would price out at $2.5 trillion for California or Germany, $23.3 trillion for the U.S. — equal or greater than the entire GDP of the jurisdiction. At more realistic assumptions of $300 - 500/kWh for battery storage, you would be looking at 3 to 5 times GDP for one round of batteries, which would then need replacement every few years.

  • But even these numbers wildly understate the real world costs of storage that would be needed. Here’s why.

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Costs Beginning To Change The Net Zero Debate In The UK

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  • I have long said that when the costs of fossil fuel suppression policies start to hit home to average consumers, the whole climate alarm movement will become politically toxic, and will fade away.

  • So far in the U.S. we haven’t seen much movement in this direction.

  • The red states are mostly alert to the issue of the costs of Net Zero, and want no part of fossil fuel suppression. The blue states have inflicted some substantial early costs on themselves (up to about doubling the cost of electricity in the case of California) without the voters having yet gotten too upset. At the federal level, the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” passes out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of handouts and subsidies to hide the cost of fossil fuel suppression from the public. It could be several more years before blue state voters figure out how they are getting fleeced.

  • But in Europe, and particularly in the UK, there are serious signs of shifting political winds.

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