From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

I have had many posts on the soaring consumer electricity costs suffered by the residents of those jurisdictions that have proceeded furthest down the road to all-renewable power. These are places like Germany, the UK, and California, where consumer electricity prices are double to triple the U.S. average. But is that difference the result of their race to convert to wind and solar electricity generation, or does it stem instead from “bad luck,” or something else? Even as electricity prices in many of these places soar, advocates of wind and solar generation continue to claim that those resources are cheaper than the hydrocarbon alternatives. Do they have a point?

The latest back-and-forth has played out on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. On August 20, Republican candidate for Vice President J.D. Vance had an op-ed with the online headline “Harris Wages War on U.S. Energy.” He argued:

“The net-zero project is already stifling investment in the coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants that Americans rely on for reliable, affordable ‘base load’ electricity.”

On August 28, the Journal ran a responsive letter to the editor from a guy named Mark Z. Jacobson. Jacobson is a professor at Stanford University, and is perhaps the most prominent advocate of transition to electricity generation from entirely renewable sources, what he calls “WWS” (wind, water, solar), with some sort of energy storage thrown in as back-up. Jacobson broke onto the scene back in 2011 with a paper in an Elsevier publication called Science Direct, and followed that up with a major opus in PNAS in 2015 titled “Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.”The subsequent accumulation of evidence has not at all slowed Jacobson down. For example we have this piece in the Guardian from January 2023, key quote: “The influential academic says renewables alone can halt climate crisis. . . . Wind, water and solar can provide plentiful and cheap power, he argues, ending the carbon emissions driving the climate crisis.” And if I haven’t yet mentioned it, Jacobson is the driving force behind New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, via his acolyte Robert Howarth of Cornell.

So let’s consider Jacobson’s August 28 WSJ letter. Here is the core of it:

South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and North Dakota missed that problem [of expensive renewable power]. They are, aside from Montana, powered primarily by wind and are among the 12 states with the highest percentage of their electricity demand produced by clean, renewable sources. How do the 12 highly renewable states rank in terms of electricity prices? Ten of them are among the 19 states with the lowest electricity prices. Seven are among the 10 states with the lowest prices. South Dakota, with renewables supplying 95% of demand, has the ninth-lowest electricity price. North Dakota (52% renewables) has the lowest. More renewables mean lower prices.

Is there something to that? Well, let’s look at a few states, one at a time.

Jacobson lists South Dakota as his number one example. He says that renewables “supply[] 95% of demand,” yet the state has the “ninth-lowest electricity price.” Do publicly-available data back that up?

The answer is that publicly-available data for South Dakota are quite inconsistent and contradictory, but however you look at it they don’t come close to backing up Jacobson’s claim. Here is a page on South Dakota from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, with an update date of August 15, 2024. The data:

In 2023, wind provided 55% of South Dakota’s total electricity net generation. Wind surpassed the state’s previous leading electricity source, hydroelectric power, for the first time in 2021. Hydropower accounted for 21% of the state’s generation in 2023. . . . Renewable resources generated 77% of South Dakota’s total in-state electricity in 2023, almost all of it from wind and hydroelectric power.

So according to that, “renewables” provided 77% of SD’s generation, not the 95% claimed by Jacobson; and of the 77%, 21% came from hydro from dams on the Missouri River. Sorry if you don’t have a Missouri River running through your state to replicate that. Wind generated just 55%. Yes, that is better than El Hierro does in most years, but a long, long way from zero-emissions generation.

And now let’s take a look at the very different 2023 data from the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. These data are for electricity “consumed” in South Dakota, rather than electricity “generated” in South Dakota, which may or may not explain the gigantic discrepancy. Here is the PUC’s pie graph:

Suddenly coal is by far the largest source, at 36.13%, which puts it at more than the “renewables” wind, solar, and hydro combined (32.35%). Maybe all the rest of that wind generation gets given away to neighboring states at times of excess generation when SD can’t use it. I have no way of figuring that out.

Now, where did our friend Jacobson come up with the statistic that South Dakota supplies “95% of [electricity] demand] from renewables”? I have no idea. Most likely he is relying on the principle that leftists and climate activists don’t get fact-checked.

For what it’s worth, here is EIA’s chart of “average price of electricity to utility customers” for June 2024 (most recent month available). The states are not ranked in price order, but if I’m counting correctly South Dakota has the 16th lowest residential electricity rates among the states, and the 22nd lowest rates for “all sectors” combined. Not bad, but also not close to the “ninth lowest” that Jacobson claims.

Shall we try another state? Next in Jacobson’s list is Montana. Jacobson concedes that Montana is not “powered primarily by wind,” but then he says it is “among the 12 states with the highest percentage of their electricity demand produced by clean, renewable sources.” Take a closer look, and once again it turns out that Montana’s secret is dams on the Missouri River. The EIA (cheerleaders for “renewables” without telling you which one they are talking about) has this to say:

In 2023, Montana ranked among the top 10 states with the largest share of electricity generated from renewables, about 50%. Coal-fired power plants provided the largest share of Montana’s electricity generation in 2023, accounting for 45% of in-state generation.

But how much of that 50% from “renewables” is hydropower from the Missouri River dams, how much is wind, and how much is something else? The best source for that that I can find is this Report from the Montana legislature with an issue date of 2023, but data going only through 2021. A chart on page 24 going to 2021 shows about 40% of electricity generation from coal, another 40% from hydro, and about 10% from wind. There is a substantial unspecified “other” category.

Again, for what it’s worth, on EIA’s June 2024 chart, Montana’s electricity rates appear to be 12th lowest among the states for residential, and 11th lowest for “all sectors.”

So Jacobson’s first two examples don’t come close to supporting his case. Looking at the other states he cites, I think the one that best supports his case is Iowa. So let’s look there.

Iowa, for better or worse, has gone farther than any other state in building wind turbines to supply its electricity. According to the EIA here, wind turbines generated 62% of Iowa’s electricity in 2022, which was the highest percentage of any state. From another EIA page here, Iowans purchased 54,203,955 MWh of electricity in 2022, which would make for average demand of 6188 MW (dividing by 8760). The Iowa Utilities Commission here tells us the generating resources that Iowa has deployed to meet this demand: 12,543 MW of wind capacity, 5543 of coal, 4148 of natural gas, 5253 of petroleum, and small amounts of others. What this tells us is that Iowa had plenty of generation resources to meet demand before it started building any wind turbines. It has more than a two-times overbuild of wind turbines alone as against average demand, and it has more than a four times overbuild if you count everything. Clearly, Iowa has a lot of generation resources sitting idle most of the time. And, whatever its average rates may be, they could be a lot lower if they stopped supporting large amounts of mostly-idle capital.

So where do Iowa’s rates rank nationally? According to that same EIA chart, they are 22nd lowest for residential rates, and 10th lowest for “all sectors.”

Two comments:

(1) At a 2x overbuild of wind turbine capacity and 62% of generation from wind, Iowa has pushed up against the limit of what it can get by just building more wind turbines. As of now, it has barely dipped its toe into the world of energy storage. Going forward, it will quickly find that more wind turbines can only marginally increase the percent of its electricity from wind, and buying batteries is completely uneconomic and not a viable solution.

(2) The prices of electricity from wind are wildly distorted by the myriad of tax benefits and subsidies available to wind turbine developers. Just for starters, there is the federal investment tax credit (30% of the capital value of the investment in wind turbines) and the federal production tax credit (2.75 cents per kWh of electricity produced). Then there is the complete exemption from property taxes for five years from the state of Iowa. There are multiple federal guaranteed loan programs providing subsidized interest rates. There are handouts of every sort from the likes of the Agriculture Department and the Rural Electrification Administration.

Now, how much are all these subsidies and handouts worth in consumer electricity rates? It’s all completely opaque. There’s no way for an informed citizen to figure it out. The subsidies are easily worth 5 cents per kWh, and probably more like 10 or even 15 cents per kWh. Add in the value of the subsidies, and Iowa would not be in the lower ranks for electricity prices, but rather well toward the top.

So when Jacobson recommends building wind turbines to lower electricity prices, he’s not really saying that they are economically cheaper; he’s just saying that sufficient subsidies are available to make the consumer prices appear cheaper. He’s using gkam accounting.

Anyway, we’ll see if Iowa and its co-enthusiasts for wind power can keep marching forward to the 100% zero-emissions future. I will be the first to congratulate them if they can pull it off. But let’s face it — they can’t. And as they start adding storage, their prices are set to go through the roof.

Reposted from Legal Insurrection

by Leslie Eastman

The last time we checked on the nation’s energy industry, the Biden-Harris administration banned drilling for gas and oil on 28 million acres of Alaska (rescinding the order signed by President Donald Trump).

However, there is better news on the nuclear energy front. This is good news given tht nuclear energy is the only rival to fossil fuels in efficiency and cost-effectiveness and is worthy of supplying power on a civilization-level.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved construction of the first fourth-generation nuclear reactor in the country.

According to Interesting Engineering, the new Hermes reactor will be the first one built in the United States in 50 years that won’t be cooled by light water. Instead, it will use a system of molten fluoride salt, and a TRISO (tri-structural isotropic particle) fuel pebble bed design will power the generator.

Molten fluoride salts have “excellent chemical stability and tremendous capacity for transferring heat,” per the report, meaning it stays cooler and dissipates heat much faster than the light water that has been used for so long in American reactors.

The fuel bed consists of hundreds of millimeter-sized particles of uranium encased in multiple layers of special ceramic, which allows each individual piece of fuel to have its own containment and pressure vessel, per Ultra Safe Nuclear. The ceramic casing is stronger and more resilient than the typical zirconium alloy, meaning it can withstand higher temperatures and neutron bombardment past the failure point of other types of fuel.

On top of that, because each individual piece of fuel is so small, in the event that one fails, the ensuing burst of radiation would be significantly lessened — and less likely to cause further damage, thanks to the coolant system.

Generation IV nuclear power utilizes a system of fuel fabrication plants and reprocessing facilities that together overcome some of the shortcomings of the previous generations of nuclear power plants.

To be classified as Generation IV, a system must meet, or at least have the ability to meet, the following criteria:

(1) it is much more fuel-efficient than current plants;

(2) it is designed in such a way that severe accidents are not possible, that is, plant failure or an external event (such as an earthquake) should not result in radioactive material release to the outside world;

[3] the fuel cycle is designed in such a way that uranium and plutonium are never separated (“diverged”) but only present in a mix and with other elements. This makes it more difficult to create nuclear weapons.

Construction is underway on the new nuclear power plant in Tennessee, in the iconic city of Oak Ridge (famous for its importance in World War Two’s Manhattan Project).

Kairos Power has begun building the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, the first Gen IV reactor approved for construction by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Hermes reactor utilizes a fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor design, differing from conventional light-water reactors.

“Generation IV nuclear power plant designs are revolutionary, in that they are planned to use a very different set of technologies than the reactors we use today,” Ross Peel, a professor with King’s College London’s Centre for Science and Security Studies told Newsweek.

Unfortunately, we are behind China when it comes to the construction. It launched its construction of a Generation IV reactor late last year.

The Shidaowan nuclear power plant, which features the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, started commercial operations on December 6, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the project’s developers, said.

“China’s independently developed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor demonstrator commenced commercial operation,” CNNC said in a statement.

“It signifies that China has completed the world’s first commercially operational modular nuclear power plant with fourth-generation nuclear technology, marking the transition of fourth-generation nuclear technology from experiments to the commercial market.”

Interestingly, more and more countries are rethinking their ban on nuclear energy, likely in light of the realities of “green energy” as well as the improvements being made in the Generation IV systems. Switzerland, for example, has reversed its outright ban of nuclear.

The Swiss government said on Wednesday it plans to overturn a ban on building new power plants to strengthen local energy supply at a time of increased geopolitical tension.

Energy Minister Albert Roesti said the government would submit a proposal to amend nuclear legislation by the end of 2024 so it can be debated in parliament next year.

“Over the long term, new nuclear power plants are one possible way of making our supply more secure in a geopolitically uncertain time,” Roesti told a press conference.

Failure to retain the option could be seen as a betrayal by future generations, Roesti argued.

All of these are positive developments for those of us who enjoy the perks of civilization, such a light at night and heat during the winter.