From THE DAILY CALLER

Nick Pope
Contributor

The Biden-Harris administration says that its stringent power plant rules won’t harm long-term power reliability, but four grid operators stated the exact opposite in a legal brief filed Friday.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its aggressive emissions rules for America’s power plants in April, saying at the time that the regulations would “improve public health without disrupting the delivery of reliable electricity.” However, four major regional grid operators argued the exact opposite in an amicus brief filed in support of red states’ legal challenge against the rule, stating explicitly that the rules will jeopardize Americans’ ability to reliably secure sufficient amounts of power if they are enforced as is.

“Their proffered brief outlines in detail that without additional modification, the compliance timelines and related provisions of the Rule are not workable and are destined to trigger an acceleration in the pace of premature retirements of electric generation units that possess critical reliability attributes at the very time when such generation is needed to support ever-increasing electricity demand because of the growth of the digital economy and the need to ensure adequate back-up generation to support an increasing amount of intermittent renewable generation,” the grid operators wrote in their amicus brief. “Such inevitable and foreseeable premature retirement decisions resulting from the Rule’s timelines will substantially strain each of the Joint [independent system operators’] / [regional transmission organizations’] ability to maintain the reliability of the electric power grid to meet the needs of the citizenry and the country’s economy.” (RELATED: Grid Operator Warns Dems’ Climate Agenda Is Pushing Populous Blue State Toward Blackouts)

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), PJM, Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) teamed up to file the brief. The four operators serve a combined 156 million customers, according to the brief’s text.

Specifically, the EPA’s rules will mandate existing coal plants to harness 90% of their emissions by 2032 if they want to stay open past 2039, and they will also require new natural gas-fired plants to do the same in order to stay open past 2039, according to the agency. The EPA is essentially requiring power plants to meet those emissions cuts using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, which the four grid operators contend is too expensive and unproven to be mandated on such a tight timeline.

The EPA’s finding that CCS is the “best system of emissions reduction” is also questionable, and that the compliance deadlines that come from that determination “are based on overly ambitious and inadequately supported assumptions as to target dates for commercialization of CCS,” the grid operators argued in their brief. “Those [best system of emissions reduction] determinations then drive both the rate and timing of compliance which, in turn, will drive the premature retirements of generation sources that will threaten the reliability of the electric grid even before the compliance date in the Rule.”

The claims made by the grid operators in their brief are completely at odds with what EPA has said about its rules.

“Today, April 25, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a suite of final rules to reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants in order to protect all communities from pollution and improve public health without disrupting the delivery of reliable electricity,” the EPA said on the day it unveiled the final regulations. “These rules, finalized under separate authorities including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, will significantly reduce climate, air, water, and land pollution from the power sector, delivering on the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to protect public health, advance environmental justice, and confront the climate crisis.”

Grid experts have similarly cautioned that the EPA’s rules will undermine power reliability at a time when electricity demand is expected to substantially increase due to de facto electric vehicle (EV) mandates and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie has also raised the alarm about the possibility of an acute power crisis hitting the country in the near future as demand is driven up and reliable supply is retired without enough adequate, reliable capacity coming online to offset those subtractions.

The EPA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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Think your power bill is crushing now; the worst is yet to come. The grand wind and solar ‘transition’ is – according to the 5 year planners – in its infancy, but already the effects of heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar are being spelt out in record retail power bills.

To reach our utopian energy Nirvana, we are told, requires trillions more in taxpayer subsidies for mythical mega lithium-ion batteries, and extending transmission grids to bring the power generated by wind and solar (only occasionally, of course) from far-flung places to market.

America’s socialist call it the Green New Deal.

David Wojick calls it a costly recipe for disaster.

The Green New Deal could make electricity 28 times more expensive
CFACT
David Wojick
3 September 2024

Below, I show how the Green New Deal can cause the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500. The reason is simple. Wind and solar require a lot of battery backup, and we use a tremendous amount of electricity, so the cost of all these batteries is many trillions of dollars.

Here is the basic derivation. It is kept simple, and the numbers are all rounded off so they can be remembered. (The U.S. Energy Department should have done a detailed analysis long ago.)

— The electricity storage capacity required to replace today’s fossil-fueled electricity generation nationwide with intermittent wind and solar is 250,000,000 MWh.

— Assume grid-scale battery facilities cost $300,000 per MWh of storage capacity. (Today’s cost is higher.)

— Thus, the capital cost of this storage is 75 trillion dollars.

— Spreading this cost over 20 years gives an annual cost of 3.75 trillion dollars.

— U.S. household electricity usage is 1.5 trillion KWh per year.

— Thus, the household cost is $2.50 per KWh.

— Average household usage is 10,500 KWh/yr.

— Thus, the annual household cost of this storage capacity is $26,250.

— Today’s average annual electric bill is $1,800.

— Thus, the electricity cost increase is over 14 times as much.

In short, everyone’s electricity bill will be 14 times greater than today if wind and solar replace today’s fossil fuel-powered generation under the Green New Deal.

This will be true of industrial and commercial consumers as well, which will drive up the cost of virtually all goods and services. This impact is truly inflationary.

But this does not include the electrification of transportation and gas heat, which are also part of the Green New Deal. Electrification is often estimated to roughly double the amount of electricity generated.

— Given electrification, the cost of electricity might jump a whopping 28 times today’s cost. The Green New Deal causes the average household electricity bill to go up a crushing $52,500.

Of course, the economy would likely collapse before this happened, but this simple analysis is the necessary starting point for thinking about the incredible cost impact of the Green New Deal.

There are lots of technical refinements to be added to this analysis to make it a good engineering cost estimate. Some make the numbers go down; others make them go up. I would love to see this done and would happily help.

For example, the cost of batteries might go down a lot, and there are studies that project this. Given that the material requirements for this vast number of batteries greatly exceed our present mining and manufacturing capacity, this may be unlikely, but it is not impossible.

On the other hand, this simple analysis assumes batteries charge and discharge from zero to 100% of capacity. If it is actually 10-90 or 20-80, then a great deal more storage capacity will be needed.

Then, too the storage requirement can be reduced by overbuilding the wind and solar generating capacity. However, this reduction is limited; I have been told to 180 million MWh because there is still no solar at night and no wind when it does not blow hard enough.

But it is unlikely that these giant batteries have an average full performance life of 20 years.

Note, too, that this analysis does not include the cost of the enormous amount of wind and solar generating facilities. Nor does it include the cost of borrowing trillions of dollars.

The basic point is that the Green New Deal is impossibly expensive. There is no cure for intermittency.
CFACT