From CLIMATE DEPOT

The EPA release claimed that the new regulations would produce “climate and public health benefits” worth $85 billion over the next two decades, as well as prevent premature deaths and hospital visits as a result of decreased particulate matter emissions. …

EPA Administrator Michael Regan: “Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people, cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin: “This administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” the lawmaker said.

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Marc Morano comment: “The Biden administration is not content to collapse our transportation system with gas, powered car bans, and EV mandates or to collapse our agricultural system with restrictions on meat-eating and high-yield agriculture. Biden continues his efforts to collapse American energy with his relentless war on reliable power with this EPA plan. This will only result in higher prices and shortages and do nothing for the alleged climate threat. The Biden administration is on a roll to crush Americans: Shortages, skyrocketing prices, destroying U.S. appliances with more water and power restrictions, stifling our air conditioning, and now even more restrictions on U.S. domestic energy production. Will they apply these same ‘climate pollution’ standards to windmills, solar panels, and EV batteries made in China?!”

By: Admin – Climate Depot

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-epa-unveils-new-crackdown-on-power-plants

By  Ben Zeisloft

The Environmental Protection Agency released new carbon emissions standards for power plants that burn coal and natural gas, a move which some energy experts and lawmakers caution will decrease power reliability and artificially increase electricity costs for households.

The new regulations unveiled on Thursday morning would seek to avoid 617 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide emissions through 2042, equal to the emissions produced by half of the nation’s cars, as well as reduce the amount of particulate matter released into the atmosphere. The proposed limits would “require ambitious reductions in carbon pollution based on proven and cost-effective control technologies” at coal and natural gas plants, which account for 60% of power generation in the nation, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

“By proposing new standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants, EPA is delivering on its mission to reduce harmful pollution that threatens people’s health and wellbeing,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a press release. “EPA’s proposal relies on proven, readily available technologies to limit carbon pollution and seizes the momentum already underway in the power sector to move toward a cleaner future. Alongside historic investment taking place across America in clean energy manufacturing and deployment, these proposals will help deliver tremendous benefits to the American people, cutting climate pollution and other harmful pollutants, protecting people’s health, and driving American innovation.”

The release claimed that the new regulations would produce “climate and public health benefits” worth $85 billion over the next two decades, as well as prevent premature deaths and hospital visits as a result of decreased particulate matter emissions. The new rules had been widely expected for weeks before their public release.

Jason Isaac, a director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Daily Wire that the new regulations are “far-reaching” and will inevitably raise power costs for households.

“Carbon capture technologies are so expensive that the result will be the sudden retirement of reliable generation, and there will be nothing to replace it,” Isaac said. “This is a prime example of an unelected executive agency run amok, with a single-minded agenda of eliminating fossil fuels and controlling how we produce and consume energy regardless of the costs or consequences, all while doing nothing to mitigate a changing climate.”

The new emissions standards come months after the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that federal agencies cannot assert “highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, told The Daily Wire that the regulations have “no chance of withstanding” scrutiny from the Supreme Court but noted that a ruling might not come for many years, thereby allowing “much damage” to the power grid.

The Biden administration has established a “whole-of-government effort” to reduce carbon emissions in the public and private sectors. Beyond the introduction of additional EPA rules that would aim to increase nationwide adoption of electric cars, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently voiced support for a policy that would transition the military to rely exclusively upon electric vehicles by 2030.

West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, a frequent skeptic of Biden administration energy policies, announced on Wednesday that he would oppose every EPA nominee from the White House until the power plant rules are reversed.

“This administration is determined to advance its radical climate agenda and has made it clear they are hellbent on doing everything in their power to regulate coal and gas-fueled power plants out of existence, no matter the cost to energy security and reliability,” the lawmaker said.

An issue that we hear about increasingly is energy security. The oxymorons in government broke off a bit of DBEIS (they liked to call it “Bays” rather than “debase” for some reason) to form DESNZ, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, whose titular motives are firmly at cross purposes. The mooted successor is supposedly DUNCE, the Department for Unicorns and No-Carbon Energy. (Whenever I see DESNZ written down, my brain makes a connection to the word “denazify,” but that’s just me I guess.) My advice to our government is that renaming things generally does not help. It just confuses everyone. MAFF survived for a long time (50 years?) before there was DEFRA. After that, departments have split and merged and been renamed at an accelerating rate, almost as if making acronyms was their ultimate purpose. From DEFRA was born DECC, which gave rise to BEIS, and now Denazify, I mean DESNZ. But I digress. What about the actual stats? These are as the previous edition in this series taken from Energy Trends tables available here.

1. Energy security; import dependency

Since 2010, DECC and its successors have reported statistics on the UK’s import dependency. How much of our energy are we reliant on other countries for, and how has this changed over time? Well, we flipped from a net exporter to a net importer in 2003:

After 2013, the worst year (so far) when we depended on imports for 48% of our energy, things have settled down to a stubborn mid to high 30s percent.

Another way to look at this is to have exports and imports on the same figure. The net is closely similar to the import dependency percentage in the form of the graph.

Energy demand has not gone up; in fact it has gone down. Our increasing demand for imported energy came not from a rapacious hunger for more, but from a withering of home-grown production – coupled with an overall decline in energy use. From 2001, the consumption of energy in the UK has gone down quite markedly (-25% ish). Some might call this a success story based on improved efficiency. I think it is more likely a tragedy of deindustrialisation.

In fact if you look at the energy consumption by sector over the past half century, it’s clear that energy use in industry has gone down quite markedly. It is now at about a third of the level it was in 1970. Domestic consumption meanwhile has stubbornly resisted attempts to cut it. Perhaps those attempts are bearing fruit for individual dwellings, but there are now more dwellings, so the net decrease is small.

2. Fossil fuel dependency

The other critical indicator of our energy system’s performance is supposedly our dependence on fossil fuels. Two statistics are presented in Energy Trends: the “low carbon” share of energy, and the “fossil fuel dependency” of energy.

The two proportions do not add up to 1, because net imports of leccy and the contribution of “non biodegradable waste” are not included in either.

Those with an eagle eye might be thinking that there is something missing even so. That certainly seems to be the case: here, burning woodchips and waste for electricity counts as low carbon. Together they make up about 10% of overall energy consumption in the UK. So depending on whether you believe they are low carbon sources of energy, the low carbon share is either 20.1% (DESNZ’s preferred figure), or 11.0% (excluding energy from waste and bioenergy).

It is possible to argue the toss on whether burning rubbish and/or woodchips is “low carbon.” I don’t think it is, since it emits carbon dioxide at the point of generation – that’s fairly obvious. The other low carbon generators like wind turbines might have plenty of carbon dioxide emissions along the way, but when they actually turn wind into leccy, they don’t produce any.

So to my way of thinking at least, the UK’s energy system is 11% of the way to Net Zero.

There is of course another minor issue, which is that the embodied carbon dioxide in imported goods is not counted as energy. However, it used energy in its creation, and that energy was unlikely to be “low carbon.”

3. Dispatchable vs. Non-Dispatchable Electricity

One factor that the stats bods at DESNZ do not find time to dwell on in their time series is how our electricity generating mix has evolved towards weather-dependent sources. The following figure shows that we are increasingly dependent on the whims of Aeolus for our juice. Non-dispatchable is wind and solar; hydropower is counted as dispatchable.

Conclusion

As the North Sea gas fields have begun to deflate, our dependence on imports of energy has risen to worrying levels. We have also made little progress towards “decarbonisation”, unless you count burning trees as a low carbon enterprise. I find myself wondering, if so little has been achieved after so much pain: will we ever see the farthest shore?

Featured image

Dall.E: A pylon being struck by lightning