On El Hierro Island, At Least They Kept The Diesel Backup

On El Hierro Island in Spain, they set out to build an electricity system powered only by wind, with backup from a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant. The relevant statistics for El Hierro are: average electricity demand: 5 MW; nameplate capacity of the wind turbines: 11.5 MW (i.e., 2.3x “overbuild” compared to average usage); storage capacity of the pumped storage system: 70 MWh (i.e., 14 hours of average usage). The operator of the facility has provided eight years of operating data for the system. I reported on the results in my last post on October 23. In summary, the wind/storage system provided 56% of the island’s electricity use in the best year, and only 35% in the worst year.

During these years, the remainder of the island’s electricity — ranging from 44% in the “best” year for the wind system to 65% in the worst year — has been provided by a diesel generator. The wind/storage system has fallen far short of its stated goal of supplying all the electricity for the island. But at least they have kept the diesel generator around. The diesel generator has sufficient capacity to meet the full electricity demand of the island, even when the wind is calm and the storage reservoir is empty. As a result, the system operators have been able to continue to provide electricity to the residents despite the total failure of the wind/storage system to meet its promises.

But here’s some important information you may not be aware of. Here in the U.S., during the Obama and Biden administrations, the regulators took the opposite approach. Rather than proceeding like El Hierro, and building out a wind/storage (or a wind/solar/storage) system first, and only then reducing fossil-fuel backup capacity as that became feasible, they instead ordered that the fossil-fuel capacity must be shut on a fixed schedule without any knowledge or assurance that there would be sufficient wind, solar, storage, or anything else to replace it.

And this was for the whole country, not just for a small island of 11,000 people. All 340+ million Americans were to be enlisted as involuntary guinea pigs in this wild adventure.

Nor is this ancient history. After the Supreme Court’s 2022 West Virginia v. EPA decision struck down a prior Obama administration effort to force the closure of fossil fuel power plants, the Biden administration came back with a new version in April 2024. This Biden EPA Rule was finalized on April 24, 2024 with the incredibly verbose title “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” I covered the issuance of this Rule in a post on May 1, 2024 titled “The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional On Energy.”

A commenter on that post suggested that because the title of the Rule was so long I should shorten it into an acronym using just the initials, NSPSFGGEFNMARFFFEGUEGFGGFEFFFEGUAROTACER.

From the Executive Summary of the NSPSFGGEFN. . . (you can fill in the rest):

In 2009, the EPA concluded that GHG emissions endanger our nation’s public health and welfare. Since that time, the evidence of the harms posed by GHG emissions has only grown, and Americans experience the destructive and worsening effects of climate change every day. Fossil fuel-fired EGUs are the nation’s largest stationary source of GHG emissions, representing 25 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions in 2021. At the same time, a range of cost-effective technologies and approaches to reduce GHG emissions from these sources is available to the power sector—including carbon capture and sequestration/storage (CCS), co-firing with less GHG-intensive fuels, and more efficient generation. Congress has also acted to provide funding and other incentives to encourage the deployment of various technologies, including CCS, to achieve reductions in GHG emissions from the power sector.

The full Rule is over 1000 pages long, so it impossible to describe all its details in a short blog post. But the gist of the Rule was to set standards for power plants for maximum emissions of “greenhouse gases” in units of pounds of CO2 per MWh of energy output. The standards were such that over time no fossil fuel power plant could comply, except perhaps if it could somehow capture most of its CO2 emissions in a process called “Carbon Capture and Storage,” or CCS. You can see the Rule’s introduction there describing CCS as a “cost-effective technology.” But was it then? Or is it now?

The problem with CCS is that after many, many attempts there has never been a fully successful demonstration that it is cost-effective and functional at scale. Multiple well-informed commenters on the 2024 Rule provided detailed information on that subject, all of which the Biden EPA chose to ignore when it adopted the Rule. For example, here is a quote from the comment submitted by the Attorney General of Ohio in August 2023:

A study of 263 carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects undertaken between 1995 and 2018 found that the majority failed and 78% of the largest projects were cancelled or put on hold.  After the study was published in May 2021, the only other coal plant with a carbon-capture-and-sequestration attachment in the world, Petra Nova, shuttered after facing 367 outages in its three years of operation. . . . [T]his [SaskPower] facility is the world’s only [remaining] operating commercial carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant.   And it has never achieved its maximum capacity.  It also battled significant technical issues throughout 2021—to the point that the plant idled the equipment for weeks at a time.  As a result, the plant achieved less than 37% carbon capture that year despite having an official target of 90% . . . . 

The SaskPower facility discussed in that comment is a small plant (115 MW) and has continued to face significant technical challenges since the time of the comment in 2023. Here is a report on that facility from December 2025 at something called the International CCS Knowledge Center. Excerpt:

The BD3 CCS Facility began operation in the fall of 2014 and, in its early days, focused on addressing design deficiencies. Many of the most valuable lessons came from unforeseen operational challenges that surfaced over time, which were addressed through hands-on experience. As the first facility of its kind to implement CCS technologies to significantly reduce emissions from a coal-fired power plant, it faced numerous engineering challenges that needed to be resolved to achieve the operational success it enjoys today.

The report is all about the “design deficiencies” and alleged “solutions” that have supposedly been implemented in the 13 years of operation. Missing from the report is any information on the wholesale cost of power from the facility, and how that might compare to the cost of wholesale power from the plant if they just disconnected the CCS part and let it run that way.

Meanwhile, I asked Google Gemini if any new CCS facilities at large power plants have gone into operation in the three years (2024-2026) since the comments on the Biden-era Rule were submitted. The answer:

No large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems attached to major fossil-fuel power plants have gone into commercial operation and successfully started up between 2024 and 2026.

I invite any reader to come up with an example of such a facility that has started up and operated successfully. From my research, I don’t think that it exists.

In the absence of a commercially reasonable CCS technology that can be attached to essentially all fossil fuel power plants, the Biden era NSPSFGG. . . Rule functionally amounted to an order to shut down the existing mostly-fossil-fuel based electricity system in this country, without any proven system capable of replacing it in the time period required. We would put up huge numbers of wind and solar generators (with massive taxpayer subsidies to support them), and no idea whether the system would work when the fossil fuel plants shut down. If that didn’t work, we could all just freeze.

Actually, as time goes on it is becoming more and more clear what the limits are for intermittent wind and solar electricity generation for powering a big electrical grid. Germany is the poster child for the wind/solar buildout. Germany’s total consumption of electricity for 2023 (latest year I can find) was 476 TWh, which would make its average usage about 54 GW. According to Germany’s Federal Network Agency, the country’s nameplate capacity of wind and solar generation facilities as of early 2026 was 210 GW. That’s an “overbuild” of almost 4x. Meanwhile, Germany has almost zero meaningful amount of energy storage to back up the wind and solar generation and compensate for intermittency. And the percent of electricity consumption from wind and solar that Germany was able to achieve in 2025 with that 4x capacity overbuild was (drumroll!!!!!) about 44%, according to a Report from Yale Environment 360.

You can buy more and more of these things, but they just produce more and more electricity that you don’t need (and must discard) on a breezy summer day, and nothing on a cold winter night when you need it the most. This is not really very complicated. When are they finally going to figure it out?