The Problem With the Power Plant Rule
Earlier this year, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) issued a proposed rulemaking on New Source Performance Standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions from New and Reconstructed Electric Utility Generating Units (EGUs). It is colloquially known as the “Power Plant Rule.”
This rulemaking suffers from a host of flaws, but one issue—which I focused on in the Institute for Energy Research public comment on the rulemaking—is the issue of grid reliability and the failure to account for a concurrent rulemaking that will have a significant impact on the purview of this rule.
The other proposed rule in question is the Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles Rule, colloquially known as the “Tailpipe Rule.” This rule would require a very low fleetwide average for vehicle emissions for model years 2027 and later. In practice, this would make the manufacture and sale of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles difficult, if not impossible. The Biden administration has made clear that the intention of the rule is to accelerate the transition to Electric Vehicles.
A rule that would cause a significant portion of the car fleet to transition from gasoline to reliance on the electricity grid would definitionally have an impact on grid requirements and, by extension, on both the volume and variety of generation that the grid requires. Grid reliability might sound like a nebulous and distant concept that will be dealt with far from home, but the impacts of even short blackouts can be both deadly and inconvenient. Power grids mostly fail when it’s very hot or very cold, when people are least equipped to cope without electricity’s ability to insulate them from the weather.
Grid reliability issues are also incredibly costly, and the costs of their disruption are not born only at the utility level. They cause food in people’s refrigerators and freezers to spoil and need to be replaced. Think about how much it would cost you to replace everything in your refrigerator and freezer right now. What if that were happening several times a year? What about a few times a month? These costs would add up quickly and would be most difficult to bear for those who are already struggling to pay for everyday necessities.
Now consider that many employers would be forced to close without electricity. Some people are salaried and might get a free day off of work, but what about unsalaried hourly workers? For many people, this would mean periodic unexpected days without work (and without pay). The economy wide impacts of this are massive, and the personal impacts are daunting. Grid reliability is essential to the functioning of our economy and everyday lives.
Not all electricity sources are equally reliable. In order to adequately meet peak demand, baseload sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear are needed. The Power Plant Rule would have a serious impact on natural gas generation in addition to phasing out coal generation. The EPA study accompanying the Power Plant Rule didn’t take into account the increased volume of electric vehicles on the grid that the Tailpipe Rule would create. This concurrent rulemaking would clearly have an impact on the ability of the grid to meet demand. One rule will raise the demand for electricity, while the other will decrease supply, but we’re to believe that these rulemakings are not substantively related to one another enough to necessitate an analysis from EPA on their compounded impacts.
On the issue of reliability, more broadly, a number of analyses have been performed that demonstrate the flaws in the proposed rulemaking.
The Center of the American Experiment has an excellent analysis of what the rule would do, particularly to the portion of the grid operated by MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator). In their analysis, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling found that the rule would impose blackouts in MISO, as well as costing $246 billion through 2055 when the economic costs of blackouts and other impacts were taken into account. Their analysis accounted only for the impacts on the portion of the Grid operated by MISO, which covers 15 states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.
From this, it’s reasonable to conclude that grid impacts would be far outside of the scope of the supposed benefits of the rulemaking, given that the EPA’s estimated annual net benefit of the rule is $5.9 billion and $246 billion over the period from now to 2055 is $7.7 billion, again in the MISO jurisdiction alone.
The costs of this rule to grid reliability would outweigh the benefits of the rule, and studying the extent of those costs is made more difficult by the lack of public availability of the model and data used by EPA.
A rulemaking with impacts this broad should have taken grid reliability concerns more seriously and acknowledged the impacts of the concurrent Tailpipe Rule. Could it be that the Biden administration’s abstract commitment to the vision of an all-electric future is preventing a candid assessment of the cost, in dollars and dysfunction, of getting there?
https://blog.independent.org/2023/10/12/the-problem-with-the-power-plant-rule/
******************************************************Crazy trucking regulations
Pennsylvania's Peter Brothers Trucking delivers goods all across America. Owner Brian Wanner says Pennsylvania bureaucrats now are driving him out of his home state.
"We have no say," complains Wanner in my new video. "We can't do anything about it."
"No say" because Pennsylvania's new rules don't come from Pennsylvania. They come from California.
"I don't want to be anything like California!" complains Wanner.
Too bad for him and other Pennsylvania truck owners, because Pennsylvania's Environmental Quality Board decided their state will automatically copy California regulations.
California's rules will raise the price of a new truck by about one-third. Trucks that once cost $190,000 will now cost about $260,000.
California regulators said this new air-pollution regulation is needed because the trucks Wanner drives "contribute greatly to ... serious health and welfare problems."
That's ridiculous, says Wanner. "We have come so far in the last 40 years. In 1980, one truck produced as much (pollution) as 60 trucks today."
"So to reduce pollution, we want people to buy new trucks," I point out.
"But if you put these costs on us that we cannot afford, we're going to just run the older trucks!" responds Wanner.
"The regulators don't think about that?" I ask.
"They do not!" Wanner replies. "They do not see the consequences of what they're doing."
Now truckers like Wanner will just buy trucks in neighboring states.
"We can go to Ohio and get cheaper trucks," he says.
So there won't be any pollution reduction. The new rule will just hurt Pennsylvanians who sell trucks.
Who are these regulators? Pennsylvania's Environmental Quality Air Board is mostly made up of people from unrelated departments, like the Fish and Boat Commission, the Game Commission, the Historical & Museum Commission. I doubt that many know much about air pollution.
"The whole idea of having a regulatory board like this is, 'Oh, these people are experts,'" says attorney Caleb Kruckenberg of the Pacific Legal Foundation, "'They know what they're talking about. They're smarter than the lawmakers.' But if you look at the board, that's not true. These are just random bureaucrats who work in the government, and they say, 'I don't know. Let's follow California.'"
Kruckenberg is suing Pennsylvania on behalf of truckers like Wanner, arguing that what Pennsylvania does violates the Constitution.
"Nobody in Pennsylvania has ever voted for the standards that now control Pennsylvania."
I push back. "So what? California seems to have a lot of money. I could see a state saying, 'Yeah, let their regulators figure out how we reduce pollution, and we'll save money doing what they do.'"
"If people want something," Kruckenberg replies, "their legislature is supposed to pass it."
California's rules will soon get still more expensive because Gov. Gavin Newsom has decreed that soon, all new vehicles must be electric.
"But electricity comes from fossil fuels!" Kruckenberg points out. In Pennsylvania, some comes from coal, and most comes from natural gas.
So to power all-electric trucks, Pennsylvania will burn more fossil fuels.
Still another problem: electric trucks are heavier.
"That's harder on the roads," says Wanner. Also, "electric trucks have a very low mileage radius, so you can't work all day. It's nothing that you can take across the United States."
Pennsylvania's regulators don't seem to care. They just want to do what California does.
"Why would we allow our state to give away their lawmaking procedures to California?" asks Wanner. "That's not the American way. If we want to follow California, we can move there! I don't want to be anything like California."
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/10/18/california-crushes-pennsylvania-n2629984
**************************************************The climate war on travel
Marc Morano has been all over the Left’s war on travel and reports on Climate Depot that a poll shows 41% of the French population thinks travelers should be restricted to only four flights in their entire lifetimes!
Marc has been appearing on radio and television sounding the alarm before our freedom to move freely is lost forever.
“The French government mandated flights of two and a half hours or less be canceled to save the climate, “Marc explained on Fox.”So this is what the French public has been getting indoctrinated in, that flying is evil. They believe we’re in a climate emergency…
The EU is looking at flight bans and instead riding a train ride that takes under six hours. Bloomberg News said cheap airline flights are now a thing of the past due to ‘climate compliance’ costs. This is truly, ‘You will go nowhere and be happy’. The public is being severely indoctrinated in this, and they’re told that the earth can’t handle it unless we radically change our lives. And most of these decisions are being imposed on us: the ban on gas-powered cars, the agricultural restrictions, the meat restrictions, flight bans. This is our world if we allow it.”
Radicals at Extinction Rebellion are (literally, not figuratively) blocking and gluing themselves to roads to block travel!
Economist Milton Friedman said that, “underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
We would be wise to take these warnings to heart.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/10/16/the-climate-war-on-travel/
**************************************************Fossil folly in Australia
Whitehaven – unapologetically – Coal has scored a $500m-$1bn coup, courtesy of a BHP board of directors determined on its bizarre journey into a fantasy future.
BHP wants to get out of fossil fuels. It sold its oil and gas assets to Woodside, and has now sold a big chunk of its coal operations to Whitehaven.
The rest, and especially, the really wicked – in the very woke eyes of a BHP board and senior management – energy coal are on the market, even if BHP might vociferously deny it.
After all, if you believe oil and gas and coal and most especially energy coal are killing the planet, how could a board of directors of good individual and merged conscience continue to draw some portion of their incomes from it.
Beyond of course, the most reasonable of period of transition. Lord make me pure, but just not too quickly; and all that.
The timing of BHP’s decidedly ‘the final die is cast’ exit from coal could not have been more exquisite.
Just as even Europe, even Dark-Green Germany, have finally woken up to the brutal reality of TINA, as the great Maggie Thatcher used to put it.
Simply, that, There Is No Alternative to fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Not that is, if you want to have a functioning economy and indeed society.
For all the trillions of dollars – nay, correction, tens of trillions of dollars – that have been poured into subsidising the, surprisingly expensive, for want of a better word, generation of ‘free’ energy from wind (when it is blowing) and sun (when it’s shining), the world still relies almost totally on, cough, cough, fossil fuels.
In 2019, according to the IEA, over 80 percent of global energy still came from, cough, cough, oil, gas and coal.
Well, gee, so-called renewables must therefore have leapt into double digits?
Well, actually, no.
The next biggest chunk, nearly 10 per cent, came from biofuels.
This is, bluntly, the burning of wood and waste and pumping out even more CO2 than coal.
That’s the burning of wood and waste in developing countries because they have no choice. And the burning of it in developed countries in a mindless charge towards an 18th century future.
After that came nuclear at 5 per cent and hydro – the ‘original’ renewable, now hated by Greens- around 2.5 per cent.
Bottom line: tens, tens of trillions of dollars got the world up to all of around 2-3 per cent from wind and solar.
And now, indirectly the shareholders of Whitehaven are the beneficiaries.
It’s paying $US3.2bn ($5bn) – and a possible further $US900m, depending on profits generated by the mines - to BHP, for two of its major metallurgical mines in Queensland’s coal regions.
Investors quickly pinged who got the better side of the deal, adding more than 10 per cent to Whitehaven’s share price and depositing nearly $600m into shareholder pockets.
One can only conclude by saying that one day a future BHP board will wake up to reality.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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